When it Comes to Your Marketing, Postcards Pack a Powerful Punch

If you haven't considered doing a postcard campaign for your business, what's stopping you? Postcards are relatively inexpensive to create, and their effect has a far greater reach than an email marketing campaign.

Of course, you want to be sure that you've got contact information on file and that it's up to date. If you don't yet have the addresses of your customers, you can start collecting them by putting HTML forms up on your site that ask for these details when they sign up for your mailing list.

Postcard Marketing: Key Ingredients for a Successful and Creative Campaign

You may have a good idea of what theme you'd like to run with your postcard campaign, but doing it yourself might just be the worst move you ever made. There are image sizes and print resolution to worry about, paper quality and blackplate changes that happen during the print process. A graphic designer who is experienced with creating postcards can guide you through the process and give you much more creative leverage than you would have if you struggled through this alone.

The Copywriter's Role in Postcard Design

At the start of the postcard creation process, your copywriter will ask you questions about the audience you're trying to reach, the mission of this particular campaign, the product or service you're pitching and the number of postcards you plan to mail out. He or she will also ask you to share any creative input you may have, such as headlines and coordinating images for the front of the postcard. This can really be a lot of fun, especially when the three of you (copywriter, designer, and you) come together and start batting around different ideas. Let the creativity flow in the beginning; you'd be surprised at some of the cool things your copywriter and designer can come up with for you at prices that won't drain your bank account.

Round One is the Headline Brainstorm

During this phase of postcard campaign creation, your copywriter will come up with a list of headlines and an "explanation" of what the coordinating graphic should be. She'll work with your designer putting design comps together for you to review. If you're having your copywriter do several postcards in a series, then this is the time to make sure that the headlines and images are consistent. (A great example of this is the "Got Milk?" and "Absolut" campaigns, where the headlines all matched each other and the image kept the joke going).

If you plan to send out a few different mailings, then you want your copywriter to first create a message that you're happy with, and then tailor that message to match the theme of each postcard in the series. So it's a good idea to have a copy review on the FIRST postcard she writes for you before moving on to the rest. This copy should be a balance of institutional (branding message), and an enticing, time-sensitive offer that readers will not want to miss out on. If you're running a sale or doing a giveaway, then the headline should convey that... but don't worry, you can still have a little fun with it if you tweak the message in just the right way.

In round three, the copywriter incorporates any changes you'd like made to your postcard campaign, and then makes sure that these changes are carried through across each mailing. You also want to do a fact check, like make sure that all dates are conveyed correctly. Be sure that if you edit something over here, you also edit it over there.