Filed under: advertising, branding, business cards, marketing, postcards, printing
Word of mouth advertising is effective because it is trustworthy. When a friend or relative recommends a product or service, you know you can trust their opinion based on the history you share with them. Word of mouth advertising fits well into any budget because it is inexpensive, but it does take a concentrated effort. Here are some tips on how to encourage word of mouth advertising among your customers.
Postcards or business cards are a great way to generate effective word-of-mouth advertising!
Give Rewards – The most obvious way to get your customers talking about your business is to offer them something in return. This should be a carefully thought out promotion or you may end up spending too much money in your promotional offers. Referral business cards or postcards are a great way to keep promotional offers within reason. Offer customers a few of your cards at checkout. For each new customer who comes in with a referral card, the existing customer named on the card could be given 10% off one item or 20% off a purchase of $100 or more. You may want to offer the same special to the new customers as well.
Start Conversations – Another obvious way to advertise your business with word of mouth is to talk about it yourself. Become knowledgeable about your business and products so that you can have interesting conversations about its place in the community, in the industry, or even in society at large. You may want to have a few of your referral cards handy during a conversation to offer friends and family. Create a sense of enthusiasm and purpose when you talk to others about your business – it’s contagious!
Involve Employees – Maintain a good relationship with your employees. Employees who are satisfied with their work environment and coworkers are far more likely to recommend your business to their friends, family, and acquaintances. Consider giving some of the referral cards to employees perhaps with a cash bonus reward instead of the discount you offer to customers.
Display Feedback – When you get positive feedback from customers, post it on your website, in your store, add it to the design of your card on the next printing. If customers give you positive verbal feedback, ask them if they would mind jotting a quick note to the same affect. You may want to offer them something if it seems appropriate, but handle such instances with the utmost appreciation and graciousness in order to maintain your integrity.
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: PrintPlace Reviews, postcards | Tags: customer, design, postcard printing, postcards, reviews, testimonials
“We received our postcard order this morning sooner than expected and everything looks excellent! We can’t wait to use your services again!
Thank you.”
Brant Hutchcraft, Art and Photography Dept.
Dexter Music Center/Dexter Barbeque
Filed under: Printing Help, marketing, postcards | Tags: direct mailing, postcard mailing, postcard marketing, postcard printing, postcards
Postcards are an extremely efficient marketing tool. Why? primarily because of the fact that they can be applied to any business. No business should leave out the postcard marketing approach. It doesn’t really matter what business you have or even what you want to market. Even in this age and time, some of the biggest companies still prefer to market with postcards than anything else as they have a record of creating more responses than personalized letters or flyers. Quick and easy to produce, postcards are a must for every marketing campaign’s success. In the following section, we will be learning why and how postcards can be beneficial for your business specifically. Some of the major reasons as to why you should be using postcards are listed below:-
1. Cost Friendly: When using something like a postcard as a marketing tool, there is fair amount of chance that you will prefer to get them printed in bulk. This is the point where you can tap in your savings. Most printing companies charge a very small amount especially if you order in large quantities. It takes no more than 2 days for them to get printed, so you can start sending them out according to your convenience. Moreover they have a standard size. So the chances are that you will pay almost the same amount as your competitor.
2. Quick and Smart: One of the best features of postcards is that they can be designed in a really short time. There are various templates available that can help you save time. Be wise and choose one that suits your business the best. Also they have a standard size, so you can design them in one day, send it to your printer and hand them out to your customers very easily after a couple of days. There is not a single marketing tool that can get to work in such a short span of time. This proves they are a smart way of promoting your business. Some companies will even send them out on your behalf.
3. Widely read: This misconception should be cleared from your mind A.S.A.P. People do actually read them because of their simplicity in design and a time efficient way of promotion. It is easy for people to pick and read them whereas letters are much tougher to get through. They CAN NOT be ignored. In fact, even if they do plan to throw it out, they will have read your company’s name or seen your logo by the end of the process. Hence, its work is done. Remember, you are not to sell a product, its enough that they know your name through it. But in most of the cases, people pay enough attention to them, so they know what you were trying to convey.
4. Bank on the popularity: One of the coolest reasons why they are handy is because postcards are generally sent by one’s kith and in. So the receiver may not throw it out instantly thinking it’s a pile of crap. This is something that other marketing tools cannot bank on. Also keep in mind their design. Try and give it a more “card” like look. It will benefit in one way or the other, forcing people to have a look at them.
5. Instant results: Unlike other forms of marketing, postcards are effective and show results very quickly. Just be consistent and keep them printing so you can send out as many as you can. They are cheap yet effective and are undoubtedly an excellent way to boost your company sales. Moreover, as we discussed earlier, it does not take a very long time to reach your customer’s mailboxes from the printing machine.
These are just some of the ways postcards can be beneficial. All great brands including Mc Donalds, still stick to this form of marketing because of its efficiency. There are a lot of other innovative things you can do to make them work. Remember, you cannot completely be involved with this and expect to become a great brand overnight. It needs to be coupled with other tools of marketing like brochures for a greater and deeper impact.
Article Written By Mark
