What Can Postcards Do for Your Business?
What Can Postcards Do for Your Business?
Postcards are especially useful for local businesses… landscaping or construction or brick and mortar or any other business that serves a relatively specific locality.
Are postcards effective? In a word, yes. However, your business is different than every other business, and your postcard should also be unique. This makes the success of each run of postcards different, even for the same company.
Here are a few best practices that have helped the runs of postcards that we have done.
“Events like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, or even spring, for crying out loud, seem to sneak up out of nowhere… as if we had no warning. ”
Be specific. A typical lawn care company, for instance, may provide seven different services… mowing, mulching, aeration, …etc. If your postcard uses all of it’s real estate to promote everything that you do in bullet point style, it looks just like every other piece of “junk mail” that homeowners get. We have had more success when we focused in on one specific service, such as lawn mowing.
Offer something worth something. Several months ago, we did a run of postcards for our coffee shop that offered a free cookie to customers who presented the postcard in the shop. Nothing is ever a guarantee in marketing, but if a customer sees “This postcard is good for a free cookie” rather than, “get 10% off your next purchase” the value of your postcard hovering over their trash can is more tangible.
Plan Ahead. Small businesses tend to fly a bit by the seat of their pants, especially in marketing (this is the voice of experience talking). Events like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, or even spring, for crying out loud, seem to sneak up out of nowhere… as if we had no warning. If your business is seasonal in any aspect, plan ahead. A run of postcards is so much easier to do well if it has been thought through, months in advance. We are six years into this business and finally last year we planned ahead for our busy season for the first time. It’s easy to focus your energy on marketing during your slow season, and marketing can be useful during that time. However, use your down season to prepare to reach the most people, when they are the most likely to want your service/product. For example: If you wait until June to do a run of postcards advertising your lawn mowing service, most of your potential clients already have somebody taking care of their lawn. You will probably get some calls and even a few clients, but your dollars will definitely not go as far as they would have just before lawn mowing season began.
Experiment. As with any marketing strategy, the first run is almost never the best run. Experiment multiple times over multiple seasons and play for the long game. Just because you didn’t see excellent results the first time you sent out postcards, doesn’t mean they weren’t effective. Sometimes the introduction to your company that a postcard provides can get the ball rolling, even if you don’t realize the benefits of that interaction for several years.
What is the best avenue for local postcard marketing? In my opinion, it is Every Door Direct Mail, or EDDM. EDDM is a service that the post office provides at a greatly discounted rate compared to normal postcard prices on a per-card mailing cost, making every dollar you spend go further. If you want to learn more or you would like to have a postcard designed or printed? Contact us here!
