MARKETING TIPS

Before deciding where to buy the postcards, it is very important to determine the Total Cost of the marketing campaign, as the postcard is not the most important cost. In a do it yourself approach you have to review 4 factors as it can be seen in the following pie chart.

1. Postage: cost of the postage stamp.
2. Labor cost: is the time spent on printing labels, sticking labels and sticking postage stamps.
3. Postcard: is the cost of a standard postcard (based on 500 piece price) and includes shipping.
4. Labels: is the label and printing cost.

If you analyze the same scenario and change the number of postcards to 1,000, you will notice that labor cost, labels and postage will rise in their relative importance, while postcard cost will go down proportionally. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, as your marketing campaign gets bigger, postcard cost is less significant.

With the Do-It-Yourself stamping and mailing method, the Total Cost of your campaign is approximately 60% more expensive than our Direct Mailing Postcards service.

In this analysis, we took into account that you already have the mailing addresses and the design, as they both represent additional costs that have to be considered.

How many times have you thought about improving your direct marketing response rates? Moreover, how many times have you had a great idea that you could not implement because your printing vendor told you that your request was impossible?

Following are some concepts and tips on response rates that you could apply to your marketing campaigns.

In order to get a response from a customer, your marketing piece has to go through the following stages of the communication process:

1. Get it delivered to the right address,
2. Have something interesting in order to catch your customer's eye, and
3. Communicate the right message about your product or service.

Usually most of the efforts are focused on the third step although the two preceding ones will determine if the customer is able to get there. This is where many direct mailing campaigns fail.

1. Improving your mail accuracy

As information collected from different sources is not always accurate, it is advised to run a Delivery Point Validation (DPV) process to your mailing before sending your pieces out, as there is a big change of having a significant percentage of returned mail. This process will generate savings on the quantities of mailing pieces that you print and in the postage you spend.

2. Catchy mailing piece

Depending on the customer and campaign intentions, your mail piece has very little time to catch your customer's attention. People are overwhelmed with hundreds of direct marketing pieces per month. Standing out from the herd is one of the most crucial objectives of your campaign.

Enhancing your mail visibility can be achieved by different techniques: some focus on a general piece and more advanced techniques target each individual.

In a general piece approach, the designer conceptualizes a way to communicate your idea. He works with the colors, and the meanings and effects they have on a person's emotions, representative photographs, and clear and concise text messages. General marketing pieces will generate different reactions on each customer, since every person is unique.

On a targeted approach, the designer works with the specific data of each recipient, creating unique pieces for each one. This way it is more likely that the piece will catch the customer's eye. To review case studies of this approach, you can access our One To One Marketing section.

3. The right offering for the customer

Having reached this far, it is a matter of having the right products and services that the customer is looking for. They have to be presented in a very compelling way, since the decisive moment where a recipient decides to read into the piece is very short.

Through One To One Marketing you have the possibility to offer different products to different customers based on known information. With this approach, you can boost your campaign effectiveness.

At this stage in the communication process, where the customer has received the marketing piece, they can take three different stances: he can do nothing because he is not interested in the product, we can act right away because he likes the product and he wants it now, or he can do nothing although he likes the product but it is not the right moment or he needs time to think. Through a special offering, the last stance can be converted.