• Postcard Marketing Ideas for Your Small Business

    Brandon Cornett

    By Brandon Cornett
    © 2011. All rights reserved

    In this article, you'll find a list of postcard marketing ideas you can put to use today. I call them "starters." You can start with these ideas and shape them as needed to suit your business goals.

    Pop quiz. How many times have you received a marketing postcard in the mail, from some kind of small business? You probably can't even count the number of times. If you're like most people, you get at least two postcards a week (and maybe a lot more). There's a good reason for this. Postcard marketing works. It is one of the most direct forms of advertising, and it's ideally suited for small businesses in particular.

    I'll leave the benefits of postcard mailers to another article. In this lesson, I want to give you a list of ways you can use this marketing strategy in your own business.

    3 Postcard Marketing Ideas You Can Use Today

    In my previous life as a marketing consultant, I've used postcards to promote everything from landscaping companies to financial-services providers. And it always paid off in the long run. It's truly one of the most versatile forms of promotion. Here are some postcard marketing ideas that have worked well for me (and clients) in the past.

    1. Announcing Your Business

    Postcards are an excellent way to announce your small business to a targeted audience. The companies that provide mailing lists have become incredibly sophisticated over the years. As a result, you can purchase a list based on your exact audience.

    Looking for new homeowners in a particular part of town? Need a list of decision makers within a certain industry? List providers can do it for you.

    Combine the right list with the right offer, and your announcement could have your phone ringing within days. Sometimes it's enough for people just to know you exist. Of course, it helps to add a strong offer to your marketing message. But people have to know you're out there before they can realize they need you.

    Here's how to get the most from this postcard marketing idea:

    • Use a mailing-list company (like InfoUSA or USAData) to create a list of prospective customers. Nobody knows your customers better than you do. So take that knowledge and build a postcard-marketing database from it.
    • Create a compelling offer for your audience. The offer should relate to your products or services in some way. But it doesn't actually have to be a product or service. For example, the offer might be a free trial or a free booklet of some kind (for lead-generation purposes).
    • Create a landing page on your website that ties into the postcard mailer. You should never send people to the home page of your website, where they have to search for the information they seek. You should send them to a specific page where they get what the postcard promised. Don't make people think about navigation. Send them straight to the destination.
    • Conduct your mailing and track the results. Some postcard marketing ideas work marvelously. Others fail miserably. You won't know which kind you have unless you track the responses and compare them to other campaigns.

    Direct-mail postcards are the perfect tools for attracting new customers. They are fairly cheap, when compared to other forms of advertising. They are easy to track. And they can be used to support any type of business.

    2. Getting More Business from Past Customers

    This is another postcard marketing idea I've had luck with in the past. And I'm not the only one. It's one of the most widely used direct-mail strategies among small business owners. You can use postcards to elicit new business from previous customers. You do keep a mailing list of people who use your business, don't you?

    The concept here is simple. You send a postcard to a list of people who have used your business before. You tell them about the exciting new products or services you have, and how they can get their hands on them. Easy enough, right?

    But don't let the simplicity of this postcard marketing idea fool you. Small business owners can generate a lot of revenue from previous customers. In fact, some companies get more than half of their revenue from repeat customers. You would be a fool not to promote your products and services to someone who has purchased them in the past.

    If you've never maintained a mailing list of customers, now is the time to start! It can be as simple or as sophisticated as you like. At a minimum, I recommend that you create an Excel spreadsheet with names and addresses. Later on, when you're ready to conduct a postcard marketing campaign, you can upload your Excel database to the printing company's website (most of them accept this format).

    So what do you say to a previous customer? Well, you look at what they've purchased from you before (if you have this information), and then you present other products or services they might like. If applicable, you could also offer them the same product at a discounted rate. Statistically speaking, it's much easier to get repeat business from old customers than it is to find new customers. That's what makes this postcard marketing idea so effective.

    3. Generating Leads and Inquiries

    It's hard to sell a product or service with a postcard. Let me restate that. It's hard to sell some products or services by using postcards. If you're selling something that (A) costs less than $50 or (B) doesn't require a lot of customer research, then your marketing postcards might be able to drive direct sales.

    But if you're selling something that's relatively expensive or complicated, the postcard won't be able to deliver the sale. There's just not enough room on an 8" x 5" postcard to convey all of the information needed to make that kind of sale. But there's plenty of room to generate interest and action from the recipient.

    This brings up the all-important topic of lead generation. You can use direct mail to generate leads and inquiries from prospective customers. This is one of my favorite postcard marketing ideas. Why? Because it's the easiest one to accomplish! Whenever clients would tell me they wanted to do a lead-generation campaign, I'd breathe a huge sigh of relief. "Oh, well that's pretty easy. I thought you were going to say you wanted to make direct sales off your postcards."

    If you take nothing else away from this article, make sure you absorb the following point:

    Direct mail postcards are ideally suited for lead-generation campaigns. They can't always carry the burden of a complete sales pitch (not like a 5-page letter kit could do). But they can always be used to move people one step forward in the sales process. It's your job to define the steps in the sales process. It's the postcard's job to move people from step 1 to step 2.

    Here's a simplified example of the lead-generation process:

    • Purchase a targeted mailing list, or use your own.
    • Create a website landing page where people can grab the offer.
    • Mail your postcards.
    • Use the landing page to capture the recipients' contact information.
    • Deliver the incentive item or "freebie" as promised.
    • Use the contact information to follow up with prospective customers.
    • Move them forward into the sales process...

    This is one of my favorite postcard marketing ideas, because it has the highest chance of success. In my experience, anyway. So if you're new to the world of direct mail, this might be a good way to get your feet wet. Create a lead-generation campaign and see where you can take it. Of course, you need to devise a way to convert those leads into actual customers. But that's the subject of another article.