Direct Mail Best Practices

Whether you’re selling a product or a service, a luxury product or a competitively priced commodity, the way you present your offer to your audience has a massive effect on the response rate and profitability of your direct marketing campaign.

In this blog post, we’ll look at one of the most important parts of any direct mail campaign: crafting an effective offer. From wording to value, read on to learn the basics of designing an offer that your target audience responds to en masse.

Over the last century, advertising has evolved from formulaic newspaper ads into all sorts of shapes, styles and designs. Yet despite the great amount of freedom today’s marketers and designer have, most advertisements follow a simple six-part design:

• Heading
• Subheading
• Copy
• Image
• Caption
• Call to action

In this blog post, we’ll look at the anatomy of an effective direct mail postcard and discuss what makes each element – from the heading to the call to action – such an essential part of a profitable direct marketing campaign.

Your direct mail postcards are generating leads and sales for your business, but are they as good as they could be? Unless you test your postcards using A/B testing, you may never know which headline, image or copy converts the best.

In this guide, we’ll cover one of the most important topics for getting the most from your postcard marketing company: split testing your direct mail postcards to learn which offers the best return on investment for your business.

Do you need help designing direct mail postcards to promote your business? From white space to color, the most effective direct mail postcards use timeless elements of design to create the right impression with their target audience.

In this guide, we’ll share five tactics that you can use to incorporate design elements like spacing, size and color into your direct mail postcards to encourage your target audience to read, understand and respond to your promotional message.

Running a small business means that you wear quite a few hats - employee, manager, and all-in-one marketing department are just a few examples. So, when you want to set up a fast postcard direct mailing to announce a new product or service, all the work will fall on your own shoulders, from the idea stage to the design to dropping the direct mail advertising postcards in the mailbox. While the first and last may be easy, the design stage will often be the most difficult.

A printing mistake is almost never going to be the end of the world, but it could cause some serious embarrassment or a significant chunk of money. That's why learning about the most common design errors is a good thing to do - the more you know, the less likely you are to end up with a pile of custom postcards that can't be sent to your clients or prospects.

I’m an integrated marketing guy, so when I’m working with clients to address aggressive customer acquisition and retention and ROI objectives, I start by considering that all forms of communication hold value toward a potential solution. Everything starts on an equal footing. Planned and executed properly and professionally, all communications channels work together toward establishing brand image, awareness, trust, credibility, preference -- and cost efficient leads and sales.

“Look at me!”—is what your postcard needs to scream. The primary objective of the postcard is to deliver your business-promoting message. But, if you can’t first get your viewer’s attention, they aren’t going to read your postcard and it’s away to the trash without so much as a second glance. Don’t overwhelm your audience with visual noise, though. Catch their eye with a clean, uncluttered layout that is perfectly simple.

Let’s just lay it all out there right up front—nothing is free. There is a cost to using all marketing mediums. You will either pay for your marketing with your pocketbook or pay for it with your time. And If you are doing it right, you are paying with both time and money. They all require an investment, but each is a valuable component of an entire marketing strategy. The trick is spending your time wisely and getting the most bang for your buck.

‘Tis the season to be jolly and host holiday events! The holiday season is a great opportunity to get better acquainted with your clients or to meet potential ones—what better way than to host an event? Events, if done well, are a great way for businesses to increase their likeability. Here are 10 ways to make your event successful.