April 2015

As discussed in our last blog post, it’s important to understand your businesses competition and create offers that keep your customers engaged and loyal to your business.

From incentives and rewards to special offers and sales, customized postcards are a wonderful way to keep your clients and customers interested and coming back for more.

There’s another advantage to sending postcards that many people do not consider. When planning how to position your business against your competitors, direct mail can be your best bet. Learn how to counter your competition with an irresistible offer using direct mail postcards.

How does your business stand out from the crowd and keep its customers coming back for more?

Unless you offer a completely unique product or service, it’s unlikely that you have no competitors. Offering a customer loyalty program allows you to retain customers by creating incentives to stay with your business instead of choosing a competitor.

Learn how you can retain and reach out to customers via direct mail using a customer loyalty and rewards program. We’ll also share simple tips to make your direct mail customer loyalty program as effective as possible.

Along with a great offer, great copy is often the key to an effective, profitable direct mail campaign. Two seemingly similar headlines can lead to vastly different results based on the words that you do, or don’t, choose to include.

While some words are fantastic for creating results and getting your target audience in the right state of mind for your offer, other words can have a negative effect on the results of your postcard campaign.

In some cases, a single word can be all it takes to break someone’s interest in your direct mail postcard. Because of the power words can have, it’s important that you choose the words you include in your postcard campaign carefully.

The five words below range from direct marketing clichés to words that just don’t work all that well. Avoid all five – and use more effective alternatives instead – to avoid reducing your direct mail campaign’s return on investment.

Mailing custom postcards is an excellent way to drive traffic to your store and get people interested in your products or services. After all, direct mail has a longer shelf life than other forms of marketing and is one of the most trusted methods for acquiring new business.

New customers are great, but loyal, returning customers and their purchases are what makes up the majority of your company’s revenue. Converting your one-time customers into repeat ones is pertinent to a successful and long-lasting business, but how do you do that?

There are many ways to encourage first-time customers to return, but one of the most effective options is to utilize up-sell and cross selling techniques with direct mail. There are many benefits to cross and up-selling aside from helping to convert one-time customers into returning patrons.

Discover how you can use custom postcards to cross sell and up-sell your businesses products or services and convert first-time customers into repeat customers.

If you are considering ways to increase your profit and get more customers in the door, you ought to consider tapping into your nearby or surrounding neighborhoods for new business.

Many consumers choose to visit and support businesses that are in close proximity to their home or work, so sending custom postcards to your neighbors who have yet to visit your store can help to accelerate the growth of your profit and business.

There are many ways to use your close proximity to a neighborhood to acquire new customers, as well as reach out to lapsed ones. Discover three ways you can create a neighborhood or local offer using custom postcards to draw in potential new customers and re engage existing ones.

When most marketers hear the words “direct mail,” they think of campaigns aimed at acquiring more customers. While direct mail marketing is an excellent way to find new customers for your business, it’s just as powerful for retaining customers.

Customer retention is one of the most important and frequently overlooked aspects of marketing. By doubling your company’s customer retention rate, you also double its long-term revenue with few, if any, additional marketing costs.

There are several ways to improve your company’s customer retention. Some work because they’re personal, like phone calls and personal letters. Few, however, are as effective as targeted direct mail postcards.

Think of the last time you tried a new restaurant, salon, or lawn care service. Did you choose the company at random? Or did you decide after hearing about it through a friend, coworker, or family member? Word of mouth is a powerful way to acquire new customers through referrals from existing patrons of your business. Implementing a referral program for your small business using custom postcards can help to accelerate the word of mouth, or buzz, about your service or product and get new customers in the door. Learn why referral programs are so effective and how you can start one for your business using custom postcards.

Your headline is the first element of your postcard, poster, or brochure that people will read, so it’s important to make it count. There are hundreds of ways to write a headline, but not all are equally effective for every marketing campaign.

If you’re struggling to come up with a headline for your direct mail campaign or any other marketing material, don’t worry. Even the world’s best copywriters run into a bout of writer’s block every now and then, especially when it comes to headlines.

From thought-provoking questions to authoritative statements, effective headlines can take many forms. Learn four valuable techniques that you can use to write the perfect headline for your direct mail postcard, poster, brochure or flyer.

Has your business recently sent out a direct mail campaign? While direct mail can be an incredibly powerful and effective marketing channel on its own, it becomes even more effective when it’s paired with matching in-store signage.

Promotional posters, brochures, and other accessories that match your direct mail campaign form what’s known as an integrated marketing campaign, which has its own consistent message and identity.

By designing in-store posters that match your direct mail campaign, both in look and in message, you connect with customers as soon as they step into your store, leading to an improved response rate and a higher ROI from every campaign.

Thankfully, you don’t need to be a professional designer to create an effective, eye-catching poster for your retail store. Learn how you can create a poster using the online design tool Canva to perfectly match your direct mail campaign: