Marketing Manner

When you’re first starting out in your business, it’s easy to jump at whatever advertising opportunities come your way. Discount magazine ad? Sign me up! Free month of radio ads when you buy one month? Where do I sign?

But you have to research all advertising opportunities. If the medium doesn’t have your target audience or doesn’t have the reach you need and want for the money you’re shelling out, then it’s just a waste of money. Not all advertising is good advertising.

Guidelines When Considering Advertising Opportunities
1. Don’t advertise in a newspaper, magazine or other medium that you haven’t read with your own two eyes. No one knows your product like you do, not even your well-intentioned family member.

2. Ask the advertiser for a complete media kit. If they don’t have a media kit, that’s a huge red flag that you do not want to do business with this advertiser. Ask for a sample copy of the publication and circulation numbers. The media kit should also include articles about the company, published elsewhere than their internal newsletter; a fact sheet on the company; and ideally, testimonials from others who have advertised with the company.

3. Don’t buy radio time in the form of ads or as a special guest unless you listen to the radio station yourself and you know it and its audience. Some people pay for radio time, thinking that they can become a radio talk show expert or add that title to their resume. The cost for all that radio time to become an “expert” is not worth it.

4. When you order a mailing list from a list broker, be sure to stipulate that you require 95 percent accuracy of addresses that are deliverable. Some addresses are naturally going to be old or incorrect, but the majority should be deliverable. Make it a condition of your contract that you’ll get your money back if only 94 percent or less of your direct mail pieces are deliverable. Be sure to get this in writing beforehand so you have a leg to stand on if it happens. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book – a list broker claims to have thousands of names in your target audience, but then only a hundred people actually get your ad. Don’t fall for it!

5. If a product review site asks for your ad, and then promises a review, run away. Your review and ad shouldn’t appear in the same issue, no matter what the salesperson says. People can see right through this and will think that your product was only reviewed because you bought ad space (and essentially, it’s true in this scam).

And finally, make sure to get everything in writing. It’s easy to let a salesperson sweep your thoughts away to a magical land of your product flying off the shelf once people see your new ad, but be sure you read all the fine print before signing your name.

The concept of a print and mail service is simple: you send a digital ad file to a company that will print and mail your ad, usually along with many others to make up a packet of ads, and the company will use their own mailing list for your ad. Bam! – thousands of new clients, just like that. You pay them one fee and they do all the work. If you use a few services at a time, you could potentially mail your ad to thousands of prospective buyers within weeks.

Sounds good, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite that smoothly.

Many print and mail companies don’t have a high level of return on the offers they churn out. I say churn because these companies often take as many advertisers as they can without care about the quality of the ad presentation. That means that you’d have to reach tens of thousands of people to get the same return on your offer that you would if you mailed out your postcard or print ad yourself. If you get a 3 percent return from mailing your offer by itself, you can expect to get about .5 percent return if you use a print and mail company, and oftentimes it’s even lower than that.

Why Such a Low Return?
The reasons for the low return rate are speculation from many differing Web sites and marketing experts. No one has done any official research into why the print and mail companies have such a low return rate. Here are a few reasons:

They have a non-targeted mailing list.  For products or services that only a chosen population needs, a print and mail company’s list won’t do just because it’s not targeted. The list might be geographically targeted, but that’s about it. The mailing list is one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial, part of a successful direct mail campaign. Your ad can’t do any good if you don’t get it into the hands of the people who are likely to be interested in it.

Poor quality materials. Many print and mail companies use the thinnest paper they can and don’t use quality inks or quality printers. Many of the ads come out looking amateurish or even worse, smudged from the printer.

Double-sided printing. To cut costs and make a bigger profit, many print and mail companies will use double-sided printing, with two ads on one piece of paper. This makes the consumer have to choose between the two ads if there are coupons on each side: which one will the consumer give up? There’s a good chance it’ll be yours unless your product or service appeals to everyone, which is pretty hard to do.

Dishonesty in number delivered. There is no way of knowing if the company actually sends out as many ad packets as they say they do. If the company says it’ll charge only $3 per 100 ads sent out, how do you know that they are actually sending out 100 ads? Many companies cut costs and pocket profit by sending out a smaller number of ads than promised. 

With all of these negatives associated with print and mail services, it’s smart to research the company before you hand over any of your hard earned money. Your best bet is to look for complaints on forums and Web sites and to compare the price of the print and mail service with the separate prices of using an online printing company (which is generally cheaper than an offline printing company) and mailing the ads yourself. It might take some time, but time is money and you don’t want to waste either element.

One of the most common direct mail pieces is a postcard because of the low-cost and ease of design.  Often, a company will not send a postcard only once but rather several times in waves because many know that reaching an audience requires persistence.  With this in mind, it is important that your postcards consistently convey your brand no matter the design or layout.

Your brand is what tells faithful consumers that they can trust your product.  Being consistent with your brand design will help when creating loyal customers.  Your brand should always have the same feel and look so that it sends the same message whether on a product label, brochure, or postcard.

A logo, colors, tagline, fonts, or images that always portray a certain message are all a part of branding. Depending on your company brand, each should be considered when designing your postcards:

• Your logo should remain basically the same on all of your postcards, except for changing the size when necessary.

• You may not want to use the same color scheme for every postcard, unless color is a large part of your brand, such as with Coca Cola. You will want to use colors that create the same feelings, though.

• A tagline will need to convey the same idea but can vary in wording every so often.

• Using the same font type each time can also help consumers to easily recognize that a postcard is from you. Be sure that the font is easy to read in most sizes.

• You do not need to use the same picture for every postcard. Change your photographs but use those that have a similar idea. If you want to be seen as a family-friendly company, use pictures that accurately portray this image.

Consumers want brands they recognize and can trust. So, always tailor your design to your brand so that when your clients receive your postcard in the mail, they want to know what you have to offer.

Postcard marketing campaigns can give you a great return on investment (ROI). Postcards don’t cost much to print or mail, so your biggest expense will probably be the time it takes you to design and write the copy for it. To help you along with these tasks and others that go along with postcard marketing, here are some ways to optimize your postcards to get the highest response rates.

Craft an outstanding offer
A good offer is the key element that will get people up off their couches and into your store or on your Web site. When you are thinking about how to word your offer, remember that you only have a few seconds to catch a prospect’s attention. Keep your offer short and sweet and treat your copy as if it were on a billboard. That means you should have no more than eight words in your headline that can be read in a single glance.

Focus your mailing list
You don’t want to mail your postcards to everybody in a certain area. That’s just a waste of money and most of those people won’t respond. You don’t get any points for the most postcards you can mail, so make sure your mailing list is focused and is made up of your target market. Mail your postcard to people who are most likely to respond. You should know who your ideal customer is and you can use list brokers to come up with a mailing list if you don’t have an in-house list yet. A data company like InfoUSA is a good start. You can expect to pay a few hundred dollars for a good quality list.

Choose the right photo or graphic for the front of your postcard
The front of your postcard is the non-address side. You should have an eye-catching graphic here that isn’t just pretty or cool, it should support your headline or offer and it should be relevant to the reader in some way.

Focus on your postcard’s message
Each postcard should have one message on it. Don’t try to talk about your entire product line on one postcard. There simply is not enough room and if you try, it’s not going to be pretty. Include a photo of the product or of a solution that the product provided, some benefits, an offer and perhaps a testimonial or two if you can fit it in.

Don’t assume anything about your prospects
Your message should be clear as a newly-washed window: totally transparent and easy to see. People will only read your postcard once, if that, so if your message is muddled, no one is going to understand it and take the time to read it again.

Postcards are an easy way to get consumers’ attention. Postcard mailing is a great way to produce sales leads, introduce new products or services, keep in touch with current customers, drive traffic to a Web site and to promote special offers.

Other direct mail pieces, like brochure printing, flyers and letters are effective, but they generally have to be unfolded first, or taken out of an envelope. But postcards are already “opened” and the message will more likely be read, even if it’s read on the way to the trash can.

It’s important to avoid the most common mistakes marketers and small business owners make when embarking on a postcard marketing campaign. Here are the mistakes to watch out for.

1. Not targeting your best prospects
How well do you think a cookie company would do sending postcards to a mailing list they bought from Weight Watcher’s magazine? Granted, it would probably garner a few replies, but most people that read Weight Watcher’s magazine would just throw the postcard away.

Using a mailing list that is targeted to your best prospects is one of the most important factors of a successful postcard marketing campaign. If you aren’t sending your postcards to the people you want to get business from, then what’s the point? You can get targeted lists according to your demographics or whatever characteristics you want to target from a list broker.

2. Mailing out one postcard, once
It is the consistent, repetitive mailings that are effective, not one-time mailings. When someone sees your name and logo over and over again, that builds familiarity and people remember you easier. It usually takes a high number of contact, at least 3 per month, before you generate any kind of action from your contacts. Luckily, the cheapness of sending postcards offsets these repeated mailings.

3. Not personalizing your postcard
By creating a personal postcard for each niche in your target market, you’re more likely to get a higher response. Postcards that hold a personal message generate more replies than those that are written like business proposals. Scan the business owner’s or president’s signature and add that to the bottom of the postcard to make it more personable.

4. Avoid using imprinted postage
Whenever you can, use stamps to mail out postcards. The machine-generated postage stamps make pieces of mail seem more business-like and not as friendly. People associate that stamp with junk mail. A first class stamp that is related to the season or holiday seems friendlier and produces more replies.

5. Sending out postcards to arrive on Monday, Friday, Saturday or a holiday
Pay attention to when you send out your postcards. Monday, weekends and holidays are the worst time for your postcard to arrive in people’s mailboxes. Mail on these days tends to get pushed aside and read later. Tuesday through Thursday are the best days to have your postcard received because those are the days when mail volume is lightest. You can check with your post office on estimations of when your postcard will arrive by going to their Web site: www.usps.com and using the Postage Price Calculator. This will tell you the price of your mailing depending on the date you want it to arrive.

6. Using a postcard to close your sales
You should use postcard marketing as a way to generate leads, not to close sales. Postcards don’t allow for enough space to do your product or service justice. But, postcards are great for grabbing a consumer’s attention and leading them to take a call to action – like calling you or visiting your Web site to place an order.

7. Not proofreading
A spelling or punctuation error will reflect poorly on you and your brand will suffer from a negative image – all from just a misplaced period or comma. Everyone proofreads their work – especially editors and writers, so you are not immune because you’re not a pro or because you aren’t a pro. It’s a good idea to have someone else proofread your work, because oftentimes you can’t see your own mistakes because you know the text so well.

A well-executed postcard campaign can work wonders for your business – you can increase traffic to your Web site and your store, and sales will increase. You can do all that for a small price – all in all a pretty good deal that you should at least try.