Filed under: advertising, folded postcards, marketing, postcards, printing | Tags: postcard marketing, postcards
Printing and mailing postcards is one of the least expensive but most effective ways of advertising. There are a number of important methods to make sure you get the most out of your postcard printing campaign. Three areas where many companies make mistakes are in budgeting, sampling, and persistence.
Additionally, many companies do not work with professional printing firms who can handle direct mail postcard campaigns on their behalf. When a printing firm can produce the postcards and also mail them, you’ll find that this relationship can create a number of efficiencies for you. Some printing firms can supply a mailing list for you, but other web sites such as Info USA (www.infousa.com) can provide you with quality mailing lists that can reach targeted customers.
Budgeting
One of the easiest ways to wreak havoc on profitable advertising campaigns is by failing to set a budget or failing to stick to the budget. Once you have your budget, you can decide whether or not to spend more money on features of your postcards, or to cut back on printing features so that you can actually produce more postcards. In either case, you are making a decision based on a pre-determined budget.
Sampling
Once you have found the ideal balance between printing quality and quantity, send your postcards out to a small sample of customers. Watch carefully and record any responses that you get. This will help you make sure that your design is effective. If nobody responds, or the response is much lower than expected, you can adjust before spending your entire budget on a faulty design.
Persistence
Postcard printing campaigns should be sent at a regular basis. This is especially true when sales are low. Persistence is the key. While it may be easy to try to cut costs, one of the best things you can do is to continue to advertise. Using inexpensive direct mailing tools, like postcards, can help your company maintain an advertising presence with your customers.
New Product: Folded Postcards
PrintPlace is always excited to stay ahead of the online printing pack, and with that in mind, will be offering a new folded postcard product, which will save our customers money. Instead of printing an oversized postcard to get all marketing info out to customers, companies can now use our folded postcard, which offers two to three times the space of a flat postcard. And, the best part is that the folded postcards mail at the same postage rate as the flat, standard size postcards. Customers have the option to perforate one side to create a business reply card, return form or coupon.
New Printing Press
PrintPlace is increasing its production capacity with the purchase of a Komori LS540 offset printing press. The new printing press reduces ink waste and paper waste and eliminates mechanical ghosting, a common cause of color variation within a job. It also prints faster and integrates with our printing system to further streamline operations, which are some of the most advanced and automated in the nation. This allows us to offer same-day printing with offset quality – a benefit previously only possible with digital printing.
Upgraded Templates
We’re also planning to revise our template library to include more landscape and portrait layouts. PrintPlace’s template library is more extensive than any of our competitors because we offer more fold types and products than anyone else online. The template library works seamlessly with our new instant proofing system.
Faster Instant Proofing
Instant proofing is not only available 24/7/365, but we’ve invested in more servers and increased bandwidth to ensure we always get materials printed on time, every time. Our average page processing time is less than 1 minute. This ensures that our customers will be thoroughly satisfied with their print job, without having to wait days to approve it. That means an even faster turnaround time.
Automated Back-Trimming
We’ve developed a custom application with our vendor so that when we cut thicker card stocks, we can ensure crisp trim lines. With thicker card stocks, many printers allow the edge of the sheet to look slightly frayed, which detracts from the graphic design and makes brochures, calendars and the like look unprofessional. We’ve eliminated this potential for any printed product to look unprofessional.
Filed under: folded postcards, marketing, postcards | Tags: postcard marketing, printing
Direct mail is a powerful marketing tool for businesses of any size, but especially for small businesses. Direct mail can get expensive, but oftentimes you can keep the costs reasonable and still have the same effect as a more expensive direct mail campaign.
With direct mail, you can send brochures, letters, postcards, flyers – basically anything you can stuff in a mailbox! But postcard mailing is the most efficient and effective, and here’s why:
Postcards are cost effective. Your printing costs will be lower because you only have a small area to print on, and that smaller piece of paper stock will also cost you less to purchase. Your mailing costs will be lower than letters or brochures because you don’t have an envelope and extra paper weighing it down. If you send postcards that are smaller than 4” x 6”, your postage will only cost .21 cents, rather than the first class rate of .34 cents. It may not seem much if you only send out 10 postcards, but if you send out 5,000 postcards at a time, you’ll save $650 with each mailing!
Postcards are read more than the other types of direct mail pieces. People are leery of opening envelopes and boxes with the somewhat recent anthrax and bomb-in-the-mail scares. You can’t hide anything dangerous in a postcard!
Also, people have to be motivated enough to get through the envelope to the contents inside to read the message. With a postcard, there is no barrier to your message. If you have a great design and eye-catching headline, you can grab recipients’ attention from the moment they start sorting their mail.
Postcards are chameleons. You can use postcards for myriad reasons:
• To promote a new product or service
• To offer a discount or to announce a sale
• As an invitation to an event
• To announce a new Web site
• To announce a new location
• Those are juts a few reasons, you can send out a postcard for just about anything that doesn’t need an in-depth explanation.
You can measure their effectiveness. You can measure response rates by making people redeem their discount by bringing in the postcard. If you send out 5,000 postcards and you get a response rate of 125 people, you know you earned a 2.5 percent response rate, which is pretty darn good for direct mail.
You can also track which demographic region responded most to your postcards by color-coding them. Or if you’re sending out postcards for a discount on your Web site, you can vary the discount code by Zip code, so you know pretty closely where your best customers are located.
The bottom line is that postcards are an affordable way to market your business or product by drumming up new business or keeping your current customers with announcements. Postcards are flexible, which makes them an excellent choice for any size business and any type of business.
“I just received my shipment of postcards from PrintPlace.com. I am so impressed. I am very pleased with the quality – my postcards are even better than I expected and I had high expectations. The printing is clear and sharp and the colors are great. I’m going to be sending all of my print business to you. Thank you.”
-Kary Ball, May 2, 2008
Filed under: PrintPlace Reviews, folded postcards, postcards | Tags: company, customers, postcards printplace review, printer, printing, printplace, reviews, testimonials
“Just wanted to drop you a quick note to express my gratitude. I ordered postcards and have no complaints at all. There’s no way you could have provided a better service. The quality, the price, the time frame, all was perfect. Not only did I just place another order (business cards this time), but I will also definitely always use Print Place for all my printing needs. Thanks for providing such a great service at a great price!”
- Eric Olsen, themenudrawer.com, January 7, 2008
