Nowadays, with everyone doing a lot of personal business online like paying bills and shopping, it's a good time to amp up your postcard marketing campaign. You might think that people ignore postcard mailings anymore, but actually that trend seems to be turning. Now people are ignoring spam emails rather than postcard mailing and other direct mail pieces because they aren't getting as many of those types of mail.

Direct mail is an effective marketing technique because it's personal – you get people at their home address and you can address them by name. You can also target who you want to reach. Plus, it's flexible – you can use brochures, postcards or letters. Direct mail can motivate people to act – 77 percent of non-customers reported that a direct mail piece was what motivated them to complete credit card applications online, according to the United States Postal Service.

That's a pretty high number! You may not get that much of a response considering the standard response rate to direct mail is 1 percent, but that's probably because people don't employ the tips listed here.

Use the following guidelines to create direct mail pieces that will garner big responses:

Don't just mail one piece out once. It generally takes three to five pieces of direct mail to generate a response. People remember things by repetition, so don't be afraid to send your postcard printing piece, your brochure and perhaps a letter multiple times.

Rent or buy a targeted mailing list. You can rent or buy mailing lists from list brokers and some magazine publishers. If you obtain a list from a list broker, you get to pick what characteristics you want the list to represent. If you want married women, they can give you a list of names and addresses of married women. If you want to use postcard marketing to target a certain income level, you can get that too. By renting a magazine's mailing list (not all magazines do this, but many do), you can get a more intimate picture of who's on that list by the content of the magazine. For instance, you can pretty much guarantee that subscribers to Parenting magazine are parents, or are about to become parents. People who receive Kiplinger's Personal Finance are probably interested in financial issues and will be open to postcard printing pieces touting retirement plans or stocks.

Write an attention-grabbing headline. No matter which kind of direct mail piece you use, you need great headlines that will hook readers in to reading the rest of the piece. Keep in mind that people generally scan their mail, so headlines are that much more important. Use the headline(s) to tell the customer about your benefits – what you can do for them. Leave the features of your product for the body of the piece.

Make your materials time sensitive. Creating a sense of urgency, such as “Call by Saturday” or some other kind of deadline motivates people to take action. This helps eliminate procrastination and your phone will be ringing in no time!