postcards

Postcard printing is popular among many businesses because of its high return on investment (ROI). You pay a little to get postcards printed and mailed, and you get more money back in sales than you spent to get the postcards out. Pretty easy, right?

Yes and no. You can?t just slap a design on a postcard and send it out. You need to put some thought into it. Here are some ideas to think about before you do any postcard marketing.

More equals bore
The more information you put on your postcard, the less likely it is that it?s going to get read. Postcards are small for a reason ? they?re only meant to contain limited amounts of information! When people are going through their mail, they won?t want to take 5 minutes out of their day to read about your product, especially if they?ve never heard of it. Use your postcard as a lead-generator and just include enough information to get people?s interest.

Track how well your postcards work
The great thing about postcards is that you can track the success of your offer or coupon. You?ll need to make your offer redeemable only by having the buyer bring the card to the store and submitting it at checkout. You can print postcards with special codes that correlate with a certain demographic area so you can tell where your customers live. Or you can color code your postcards by some other characteristic, like age or income level, so you know which types of customers are more likely to respond to future offers. You can also figure out your ROI easier by tracking the postcards.

Postcards can be a stealthy way to announce a sale to your customers
Instead of taking an ad out in the newspaper, where your competitors will see it, you can somewhat secretly send out postcards announcing a sale to your customers. This way only your customers know when you?ll be having a sale. Your competitors can?t compete against something they know nothing about!

You don?t always have to mail postcards
You can hand out postcards at trade shows or hang them on bulletin boards around your community. You don?t always have to mail them.

Consider using minicards
Minicards (www.minicards.com) are another option for postcards. These are business-card???sized postcards that you can hand out or keep by your register. These are even cheaper to create than regular-sized postcards and they?re more likely to be kept because they easily fit into a wallet or purse. As for now, Minicards have a standardized layout so it?s easy to give them a try without spending a lot of time on the design.