January 2015

Over the last five years, “growth” has become the buzzword of choice for marketers around the world. Acquiring customers has become the top priority for many of the world’s leading companies, as well as many small businesses. 

What many marketers forget is that growth alone isn’t enough to sustain or develop your business. The cheapest, smartest and most effective way to grow your business is to focus on retaining the customers you already have.

One of the best ways to retain customers is with direct mail. Mailing direct custom postcards to top-performing customers, regular customers and inactive customers alike can be a great way to close new deals and increase retention and revenue.

In this guide, we’ll share three strategies for reaching out to inactive customers and active but underperforming customers using direct mail to increase revenue, build stronger customer relationships, and develop your business.

During the 2008 financial crisis, one industry almost completely unrelated to real estate or finance was hurt to a degree far greater than many others: advertising.

In a down economy, many businesses – particularly large companies – respond to declining spending power by lowering their advertising spend. Today, almost seven years after the financial crisis, the advertising industry is still continuing to recover.

While billboards, branding campaigns, and television ads might be written off as not worth the money during a recession, there’s one form of marketing that excels even in a bad economy: direct marketing.

During the recent recession, direct marketing methods such as direct mail and email were the shining stars of an otherwise stagnant industry, generating huge results for the businesses that employed them effectively.

When used the right way, direct mail can be a hugely effective form of marketing in any economy. In this guide, we’ll share five tips to help your direct mail marketing campaign achieve its objectives in any economy, from bearish to bullish.

Ask any successful entrepreneur for the most important source of information they found while growing their business and you’ll get a familiar answer: their customers.

Customer feedback is a hugely important aspect of business growth. It’s one of the most important elements of the Lean Startup movement and a favorite of successful entrepreneurs and marketers the world over. 

Getting customer feedback is relatively easy – that is, if your business has customers to ask for feedback. But what about if your business is small and only just starting to engage in the type of direct marketing that produces customers and income?

When you receive a marketing postcard or brochure in the mail, what questions pop into your mind? Marketing copy often raises as many questions as it answers, which makes answering your offer’s FAQs in advance a powerful marketing tactic.

This technique isn’t particularly new – in fact, it’s been a major part of sales for the last century. Salespeople for a wide range of products and services have anticipated their prospects’ questions and prepared their answers well ahead of time.

As, like advertising legend Albert Lasker used to say, “Advertising is salesmanship in print,” sales techniques like identifying frequently asked questions (FAQs) for your offer before preparing your campaign can have a huge effect on its results.

In this guide, we’ll explain how you can identify your offer’s FAQs before launching a campaign and transform them from points of ambiguity or confusion into powerful marketing advantages.

You were hit with a spark of inspiration and you’ve thought up a creative idea for a postcard marketing campaign. Now what? Before you can start your campaign, you need to be able to define its objectives, audience, and several other factors.

One of the easiest ways to define your campaign’s goals, audience, budget, and more is to ask yourself the right questions. Before you start preparing your campaign, ask yourself the nine questions below to increase its marketing efficacy.

Have you ever received work from a graphic designer that didn’t live up to what you had in mind? When you receive a creative that isn’t what you expected, the problem is often a mismatch between your expectations and your creative brief (or lack thereof).

A well-prepared creative brief is a roadmap for your graphic designer – an in-depth list of what to include in your direct mail postcard design. From your designer’s perspective, starting a project without a brief is like driving to a new destination without a map. 

This mismatch between expectations and communication can lead to designs that don’t match up with your vision. The end result may be a less effective campaign than the one you had visualized, and often a design that doesn’t match your business.

In this guide, we’ll share four techniques that you can use to write a creative brief for your next graphic design project, whether you’re creating a brochure for your business or launching a small business postcard marketing campaign.

A lot of questions can come up when you start planning a direct mail campaign for your nonprofit. Should you mail to a wide audience or a targeted one? Should you aim to increase visibility and awareness or focus on encouraging donations?

One of the biggest decisions nonprofit direct marketers face is whether to use offset printing or digital printing for their nonprofit postcard marketing campaign. In this guide, we’ll look at both options to help you make the best choice for your nonprofit.

Have you heard of augmented reality? It’s the engaging and shareable technology behind the marketing success of Starbucks’ 2011 Christmas coffee cups, Topshop virtual dressing rooms, and American Apparel’s color-changing mobile app.

Augmented reality has been used in print marketing, billboards and even in direct mail campaigns. Its use of mobile technology to bridge the gap between online and offline marketing has earned it many comparisons to QR codes.

QR codes, of course, are the two-dimensional square barcodes you’ve probably seen on billboards, in catalogs and print ads. Both QR codes and augmented reality play a powerful role in 21st century direct mail marketing.

Despite this, their roles are very different. In this guide, we’ll look at the differences between QR codes and augmented reality technology to help you decide which will be the winner for your next small business postcard marketing campaign.