The Benefits Of The Postcard Campaign

Most of us think of postcards as something we send to our friends and relatives while we are away on vacation. But this communication piece is now favored by many businesses as well.

Using postcards as a part of your overall marketing plan is the simplest and most cost effective method for communicating with new and current customers. They are the perfect tool for announcing a new store opening; offering special discounts or just enticing the reader to find out more about you or your business.

With the overload of information from both the post office, email and at our workplace, it is likely that we take the time only to skim the front of the envelopes or the email subject line in determining what gets our attention and what doesn’t. Many of us have spam filtering software on our computers to automatically delete anything that looks like junk mail. Postcards achieve almost 100% readership.

Because there is no envelope to open and hopefully an attention grabbing headline and graphic on the front, it will take less than a few seconds for the recipient to decide to continue reading or toss the card in the trash can. Either way, you have been successful in registering your company with the reader, even for only a few seconds.

Postcards are inexpensive to design, print and mail when compared to other advertising methods. Let’s say the overall cost of printing and mailing 10,000 cards is $3,200. In this example, the cost of each postcard is $.32. A 1% response rate to this campaign is 100 inquiries. If you converted 40% of these inquiries into sales (40 new customers), at an average of $500 per sale, you received $20,000 in revenue from an advertising piece that cost only $3,200. This equals nearly a 700% return on your original investment of $3,200! You would be hard pressed to achieve this type of results from other, more costly types of advertising.

Postcards allow you the advantage of getting your message in front of your targeted market more than once. As human beings, we tend to remember things when we repeat them over and over again. Because postcards are inexpensive, you can afford to mail them frequently, thus increasing the probable recognition of your company and products over time. This is a very effective technique for building your business incrementally with each mailing.

Postcards have been around for a long time and now businesses are taking advantage of their simplicity. They are quite effective when used as a part of an overall marketing plan.