Direct Mail Best Practices

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.

Postcards are inexpensive, easy to create and mail, and typically generate a high response rate. All of these factors put together make postcards a powerful marketing tool for small businesses today. To get the most out of your postcard campaigns, it is important to mail to your list more than one time. Here’s why.

Here is some valuable insight I have learned over the years from our real estate postcard marketers that is relevant for any small business. Realtors like to use postcard marketing for two reasons. The first is to drive inquiries and leads (short-term). The second is drive more business and referrals (long-term).

Before you tackle this question there is one higher-level question you might want to consider. That is, are you sending your postcard marketing to the right mailing list or audience?