High Response Marketing With Low-Cost Postcards
Picture this...
Tom arrives home from work, parks his car in his
driveway, and walks to his mailbox. It’s cold out,
so he hustles. He reaches inside, pulls out the
day’s deliveries, and then hurries inside the house.
After greeting his family, he begins to sort through
the mail. Tom’s a busy guy and doesn’t like clutter,
so he doesn’t need much of a reason to throw mail in
the trash. In fact, without realizing it, Tom has
developed an effective system for doing just that:
1. Sort through the mail once.
2. Throw away anything that’s not immediately
important or worth keeping.
3. Sort through the mail again.
4. Begin opening whatever is left, in order of
importance.
Like many working Americans, Tom is "time-starved."
He can never find enough hours in the day to do the
things he wants to do. So why waste time on
something like the mail?
The Need for Stopping Power
In direct mail marketing, this scenario represents
one of your greatest challenges -- stopping power.
Your postcards have to overcome great odds to stop
people long enough that they (A) read your message,
(B) understand your message, and if all goes well,
(C) respond to your message.
But it all starts with getting the reader to stop.
Without stopping power, your message will be
ignored, your offer will be missed, and your
postcard will earn a one-way ticket to the nearest
trashcan. So in order to maximize the return on your
direct mail marketing investment, you need to crank
up the stopping power of your postcards.
Here are three ways to do just that.
Stopping Power Ingredient
#1 -- Relevance
Relevance means your offer should match your
audience. This is a two-part concept. First, you
must know exactly who your audience is and what they
want or need. Then you must communicate with them in
a way that capitalizes on that knowledge.
Direct mail marketing gives you the ability to
segment your list and tailor your message, more so
than with most marketing channels. Today’s database
technology makes it easy to create a highly targeted
mailing list for your postcard marketing campaigns.
With such specificity at your fingertips, there’s no
reason not to crank up the relevance of your
message.
Stopping Power Ingredient
#2 -- Singularity
One idea per postcard -- that should be your
messaging goal. One product, one service, one event,
one idea, one objective. The further you go beyond
that, the more you dilute your message.
The best marketing postcards are the ones that
readers "get" right away. This comes from having a
singular focus, a singular idea, and a singular
objective. (It also helps when the postcard is well
written, but that’s another article.)
There’s not much room on a marketing postcard, so
you can’t fill it with multiple topics. That’s the
job of a website, brochure or booklet -- not a
postcard. Put too much information into such a
confined space, and it will seem intimidating and
unapproachable to many readers.
Remember Tom and his ruthless screening process?
Give him too much to think about at one time, and
out you go!
Stopping Power Ingredient
#3 -- Simplicity
Here’s a good formula for keeping postcards simple
and clean, while at the same time delivering a
strong enough message to evoke a response:
Create a billboard side and a message side. The
billboard side is the purest form of stopping power.
It’s light on copy but heavy on message. It includes
a killer headline; relevant, eye-popping graphics;
and something that gives the postcard immediate
value.
The message side picks up where the billboard side
leaves off. It delivers on the promise and tells the
reader what to do next. It also offers some kind of
reward for the reader to take that action.
Conclusion
Tom has finished screening his mail. In the
trashcan, you’ll find a handful of marketing pieces
that lacked relevance, singularity and simplicity.
Held onto the refrigerator with magnets, you’ll find
the marketing pieces that had all of these
ingredients -- and these are the champions of
stopping power.