Postcards have a personal feel to them. Remember the first thing you did when you arrived at your vacation destination? Scan the gift shop for the best postcards. The message on each was a variation of “Wish you were here!” Well, marketing postcards aren't that different – you wish the prospect was there with you at your store, ready to buy your products!



Postcard mailing campaigns work in much the same way. You're trying to get the prospect to meet you face-to-face, or on your Web site. Postcards are sent out to generate leads on sales, not to close sales.

To get prospects to your door, you need to follow a few simple tips. Here are some top tips of how to run a successful postcard marketing campaign:

Don't over complicate things

Just because you have a ton of font and color options available in your postcard designing software, like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, doesn't mean you need to showcase all of them on your postcards! It's tempting to mix it up and use all your cool fonts in one postcard, but you can resist! And you should resist. If your postcard looks complicated, no one will want to read it. You should treat your postcard like a billboard – you only have a few seconds to make an impression. The easiest thing to read in a few seconds is something with a simple design and a simple font.

Use the postcard as a personal message from you to the consumer

As noted in the introduction, postcards have long been a personal form of communication. Use this to your advantage and create personal messages to a niche group of your target market. Send out postcards that say to visit your location on Tibbs Street to those who live within a five-mile radius of that location. Send a different postcard to people that live near another location. You can also personalize it by scanning a signature of the president or whoever the postcard is from and copying it onto the bottom of each postcard. Add whatever touches you can to make it look personal.

Use the postcard as a way to track its own effectiveness

If you include a coupon on your postcard, make sure that you require customers to bring the postcard back in to redeem the coupon. Make the entire postcard the coupon, not just a small cutout. Most people won't take the time to cut it anyway, and that way they have to keep your entire postcard, and therefore entire message, with them as they make their way from their house to your store. Then you can collect the postcards and compare how many you receive back from the number you sent out to gauge its effectiveness.

Use the same slogan as you do on the rest of your marketing materials

Whether you're doing some business card printing, postcard printing, or brochure printing, all your marketing pieces should have the same key slogan on it somewhere. This creates memorability by repetition. You should also hold all your marketing materials together with the same look and feel to each one to let people know they are working with a consistent company.