October 2014

A great business card can open doors, help you build your personal network, and set your company apart from its competition. A poor business card, on the other hand, could do the exact opposite, locking you out of potential sales and partnerships.

Many entrepreneurs and salespeople spend hundreds of dollars designing their business cards. They hire the best designers, give them free reign to be as creative as possible and end up with a card that may not accomplish the goal of calling attention to your contact information.

Designing a business card is surprisingly simple. The reason for this is that the most effective business cards tend to be simple. They follow the classic rules of design and ignore trends, focusing entirely on function over form and style.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to design your own business card using an online design app called Canva. By the end of this post, you’ll have a great looking business card template that you can print and use for networking, sales and more.

In direct mail, targeting is everything. No matter how hard-hitting your headline is or how persuasive your copy might be, a campaign sent to the wrong audience will never achieve good results.

There are a variety of ways to target your direct mail campaign, from zip codes and neighborhoods to custom lists of previous customers, people with a specific income or even people of a certain age or gender.

While no targeting method guarantees success, choosing the right type of targeting for your campaign can often be the difference between losing money, breaking even or producing a massive profit.

In this blog post, we’ll compare the targeting options of two direct mail companies: Vistaprint, an international company offering everything from direct mail to online marketing, and QuantumPostcards, an Austin-based direct mail company serving businesses nationwide.

Whether you’ve got inventory to sell as quickly as possible or a seasonal campaign that needs to be sent out right on time, time is often of the essence in the world of direct mail marketing.

Because of this, it’s important to choose a direct mail marketing company that can get your message printed, prepared and delivered not in months or weeks, but days.

In this blog post, we’ll compare two direct mail printing and marketing companies – Vistaprint, a worldwide company offering everything from printed media to digital; and QuantumPostcards, a direct marketing company specializing in direct mail – to see which is fastest.

When you’re choosing a postcard printing and mailing company for your next direct mail campaign, a lot of questions might enter your mind:

• Do they offer high quality printing that sets your business apart?
• Do they have a history of successful campaigns for other businesses?
• Do they offer friendly, helpful support to make the process easier?

In this post, we’ll help you answer these questions by comparing two different companies offering postcard printing and mailing: the large, publicly traded Vistaprint and the smaller, specialized, Austin, Texas-based QuantumPostcards.

Many small business owners overestimate the difficulty of designing an effective direct mail marketing postcard. They assume it involves a Mad Men-esque design process involving proposals, prototypes, endless revisions and very big expenses.

The reality, however, is that it’s surprisingly easy to design your own direct mail postcards using an online app called Canva. Even with no graphic design training, experience or expertise, you can design a great postcard for your next small business postcard marketing campaign.

In fact, there’s some evidence that ads – including direct mail postcards – designed by amateurs outperform professional-looking ads. As direct marketers have been saying for years, advertising that isn’t traditionally beautiful just works!

In this post, we’ll walk you through the process of creating your own direct mail marketing postcard using Canva. From headline to color scheme, read on to design a postcard that you can use to launch your next direct mail campaign.

John E. Kennedy, a groundbreaking copywriter considered by many to be one of the forefathers of modern advertising, once described the art of advertising very simply: “Advertising is nothing more than salesmanship in print.” Kennedy believed that far too many advertisements tried to be intelligent instead of effective, and that a great piece of marketing didn’t necessarily need to be “charming or amusing or necessarily pleasing to the eye.” Today, many marketers focus almost entirely on making their ads as pleasing to the eye or amusing as possible. At the same time, they ignore many of the most valuable lessons learned by salespeople. One of these lessons is how to work out your target customer’s objections ahead of time and overcome them. In this blog post, we’ll share five objections your prospects likely have to your offer and the techniques you can use to neutralize them.

There’s more to a persuasive postcard than just engaging copy. From smiling people to photos of your product, the right images can have a huge influence on your direct mail campaign’s response rate and profitability.

In this blog post, we’ll share five ways you can use images to increase your response rate, drive more leads and sales, and better connect with your audience in your next direct mail campaign.