Postcard Marketing Strategies

Postcards are appealing to many marketers because they are efficient. The printing and postage are less costly and the copywriting and design are confined to a smaller area than a regular direct-mail package. However, just because postcards have less real estate and are less costly than their direct-mail cousins does not mean they are easier to design. To design a successful postcard marketing campaign try adopting one of these three strategies.

Make it funny One of the greatest benefits of marketing with postcards is that they do not have envelopes and therefore do not need to be opened. This sounds simple, but for direct-mail marketers, getting prospects to even open a package is half the battle. Take advantage of the fact that prospects are already looking at your postcard promotion. Get prospects interested with something hilarious on the front side of the card, such as a comical photograph, silly comic strip or illustration or even just plain hilarious copy. Try to keep the joke relevant to your industry or what your promoting. On the reverse side, include a simple offer, such as a discount or dates for a sale. You’ll be laughing all the way to the bank! For more tips on humor in marketing check out this previous post. Design one big coupon Bed Bath and Beyond is like a guru of postcard marketing. The company has mailed its 20 percent off, oversized coupon postcard for years. Bed Bath and Beyond has discovered a great postcard marketing tactic: Turn the promotion into one giant coupon. For best results, try an oversized postcard that will stand out in the mail, and use eye-catching color combinations. Design the front of the card as if it is an actual coupon with a box of broken lines around the edge of the card as if it was perforated. Include barcodes (whether you use them or not) and write the discount offer in large font. If there are any caveats about items that are exempt from the discount you can put that information in the fine print. I know it sounds too direct and salesy, but consumers have grown accustomed to coupons. It’s like second nature - when you see a coupon you cut it out and save it. Drive people online Nowadays many businesses have content-rich website where potential customers can navigate through as many layers of product information as they want, before making a purchase. E-mail marketing works well for communicating with folks who are already customers. But for prospecting, e-mail marketing has pretty low response rates. Try driving customers to your website using direct mail instead. A postcard mailing will give you just enough real estate to make a simple pitch, state your offer and feature a URL for folks to visit for more information and purchasing. If possible, set up a landing page on your website, for example, www.homepage.com/specialoffer. Make all the information on that page relevant to the postcard promotion so that when folks go online there is a sense of continuity between what they received in the mail and the webpage they're viewing. For more tips on landing pages, check out this previous post.