March 2015

You’ve identified your target audience, designed a stylish and eye-catching custom postcard and perfected your headlines and copy. Time to start sending your direct mail campaign, right?

Not so fast. While it can be tempting to start mailing your direct mail postcards as soon as you’ve worked out your targeting and finished your design, doing so could end up costing you far more in lost sales than it generates in immediate results.

One of the keys to effective direct marketing is testing. By testing every aspect of your campaign, from your targeting to the design elements used in your postcard, you can achieve a higher response rate and increase your return on investment.

Ignore testing and you’ll undoubtedly generate some results, but your total return on investment will likely be far lower than it would be if you had tested your direct mail campaign on a smaller audience before launching it.

Read on to find out how you can test your postcard elements using a small audience before scaling your campaign. We’ll also share an easy way to test postcard elements and determine the optimal design and copy before you start mailing.

Is your business just starting to use direct mail as a way to generate new leads, bring in sales and increase revenue? Direct mail postcards can be a great direct marketing choice, but designing your first postcard can often be a challenge.

Whether you’re hiring a designer to create your postcards for you or designing them yourself, it’s important that your business postcards include several essential design elements so that they’re engaging, effective and easy to respond to.

From headlines to social media profiles, we’ve put together a checklist of eight vital design and content elements that your postcard should include. Check off each item as you design your postcard to make sure your campaign is as effective as possible.

The right photos can transform your direct mail campaign from successful to outstanding. From product photos to photos of your target audience, choosing ones that suit your offer can have a huge impact on your return on investment.

For most marketers, hiring a professional photographer to capture photos is a major expense that’s not always necessary. As a result, most marketers use stock photos to illustrate their direct mail postcards and other marketing materials.

Stock photos offer a huge range of benefits. Since they’re shot using high-end photo equipment, they’re crisp and perfectly focused. With millions of stock photographs available online, it’s also easy to find a high quality photo of almost anything.

Despite these advantages, stock photos have one serious downside: more often than not, they look generic and staged. Here are three tips to help you use stock photos that enhance your offer instead of distracting from it.

Does your retail store have an exclusive sale or special event coming up? Whether you want to bring in new customers or fill your store for an opening party, using a flyer to promote your store is a great way to generate attention.

While most professional designers use software like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to design flyers, you can create a similar flyer yourself at no cost (or, if you use stock images, an extremely low cost) using online design applications like Canva.

Here we will show you how to design an eye-catching, engaging, and effective retail store flyer using Canva. We’ll use a fictional retail store – a vintage clothing store called “Vintage Den” hosting an opening party – as our example business.

Small modifications to the design, copy and mailing frequency of your direct mail postcards can have a big impact. While a different headline might not seem like a significant change, it can have a huge effect on your campaign’s response rate.

Because minor differences between postcards can produce a huge impact in terms of response rate and profitability, it’s important to test different variations of your postcards to make sure your direct mail campaign is as profitable as possible.

By testing your postcards, you’ll discover the most effective headlines and design elements to use when marketing to your target audience. You’ll also learn which mailing frequency keeps your audience optimally engaged and responsive.

There are many elements of your postcards that can be tested, some of which can have a minor impact on your response rate and profitability, and others of which have a larger effect. Read on to discover four postcard elements you should test.

Whether you’re writing copy for your business or designing a poster, being creative can often be a challenge. Creative moods can come and go, making it hard to get into a creative space if you’re not feeling up to the challenge at that particular time.

Luckily, it’s easy to inspire the creative sections of your brain into working at their best. In this guide, we’ll share five simple tips to boost your creativity and make it easier to design, write, or complete any creativity-focused task.

Look back at the iconic designs of the 20th century and you’ll notice that the majority of products, brands, and advertisements have something in common: they’re all very simple.

From Nike’s iconic logo to Apple’s clean and simple products, many of the world’s best designs aren’t cluttered with visual activity, but light and simple with only the essential design elements included.

In the world of design, less is often more. From advertisements to logos, including the bare minimum in your design often makes it more eye-catching and effective than including more than what you really need.

In this guide, we’ll share five minimalist design tips that you can apply to design simpler and more effective business cards, direct mail postcards, brochures, logos and much more.

Are you stuck on a design? Designing postcards, flyers, and other marketing pieces is like writing a book: the first page (in this case, the design element) is almost always the hardest.

If you’re a non-designer that needs some help putting your first postcard, business card, or real estate flyer together, use these 15 simple but effective tips to create an eye-catching, readable, and effective design.

Over time, every marketing campaign changes from unique and effective to tired and ineffective, making it important to refresh your campaign frequently.

Since every marketing channel has a different response rate, there’s no “rule” as to when a campaign should be freshened up and changed. You’ll be able to notice that your campaign is losing its edge by observing one key metric.