Business postcards: five factors to consider
Creating and sending business postcards is a logical choice when your small business is on a tight advertising budget.
Here are five factors to consider:
1. The customer list in your database may well have fewer than 500 names.
• You can manage this list yourself on your computer and print mailing labels. And because there are so few names, you won't have to hire a courier company to affix the labels, sort them by zip code, and deliver them to the post office.
2. Our advantage as small businesses is to cultivate a personal relationship with our customers. This is valid whether your business is completely local or if you operate in a special commercial market niche at the national or international level.
• A postcard is intimate. Emotionally, who can resist reading a colorful postcard? Especially those with a nice shiny front with a compelling message. It's like a personal message from someone you know.
3. Postcards are a private communication between you and your customer, so your competition has no idea what you are doing.
• There is no circulation of "waste" as only those are included in your mailing list. This will produce better results for your postcard, especially when compared to those you get from the "media" of newspapers, magazines, and so on.
4. We all receive flyers, circulars, and mailings that run in the millions. By default, they set creative standards that we believe we should meet or exceed in our own efforts.
• Since you have so few names to dish out the payment for high-end creative services and long-run printing, these services become cost-per-address prohibitive. But thanks to digital technology, the costs of creativity, printing and shipping have been reduced to where they are available to almost anyone.
5. Postcards are a wonderfully fast and efficient way to send specific messages in a permanent format to your own mailing list and other specific mailing lists you have purchased.
• Your postcard can generate an immediate response or can easily be put aside as a reminder for future actions.
These are just five of the many factors you'll want to consider as part of including business postcard mailings on your list of advertising tactics for your small business.
Jon Sinish
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