Aim for the refrigerator

This means you need to create something that looks so good or so interesting that people want to keep it and display it on their refrigerator. The front of your postcard should have an eye-catching photo or a simple and attractive design. You can also use brightly colored cardstock to grab people's attention. It's been found that bright colors work better than dark colors, so save your black postcards for something sullen.

Another way to help you get to the refrigerator is to make sure your image and headline(s) are easy to understand at a glance. The recipient is likely to just take a one- or two-second glance at your postcard while walking to the trashcan. One or two seconds is all the time you have to make an impression that says ?read on? or ?keep me.?

A great way to evaluate whether your postcard is glance-worthy is to study billboards on the highway. Yes, I know ? polar opposites in size, but they function in much the same way. Billboards only have a few seconds to grab attention, just like postcards. So the next time you're driving down the highway, pay attention to the billboards and ask yourself which ones are memorable and why. Which ones did nothing for you or confused you? Try to figure out what traits work well and which don't, and adopt those in your postcard design.

Don't give TMI

For those who aren't into text messaging, TMI stands for ?too much information.? Your postcard message needs to be short and to the point. If you clutter the postcard with too much information, none of it is going to be read. Especially because no one likes to read small, crowded font, which is what it would take to get lots of details on a postcard.

Think about it: the recipient just got home from a hard day at work and is looking through the mail in much the same way an HR person does ? he's looking for reasons to throw away mail, not reasons to keep it. Putting too much info on a postcard gives him a reason to throw it away.

Once you've written your postcard copy, set it aside for a day or two, and then come back to it with a goal of editing it to half of what's there. It may seem too pared down to you, but chances are, it'll be just right at that point.

Don't neglect the back

Chances are good that your recipients will look at the back of the card first. This is where the address label is placed. You might think there's not much room for anything else but the label and the stamp, but there's plenty of room to place your logo, your slogan or a small graphic that will entice people to flip over the postcard. Whatever you do, don't leave the back of the postcard blank. That's just a waste of money!