Someone asked me if postcards are a good marketing tool for a recession. Yes, they are! Indeed, postcards pulled me out of the 1990-91 recession.

With a business partner, I had started a training company that presented seminars and worked with clients on writing skills. We rented an office at the prestigious Statler Office Building, adjacent to the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. As the recession deepened, companies froze their training budgets, and all of our hot training leads evaporated.

However, we had two significant assets to exploit. First, our office rent included access to a classy conference room we could reserve and use as much as we wanted, and second, we had a list of 3,000 people who’d been in one or another of our adult education classes on writing in the previous two years.

We wrote up three classes we could give in the conference room, reserved the dates and mailed postcards to my list. People called to sign up! For the next few years, until the economy recovered, postcards reliably filled our classes.

Several lessons I learned about postcard marketing during those years remain true today.

1) Responses from a “warm” list of people who know you will always be greater than responses from strangers. Our classes were $99 each, and I’m not sure the postcards would have yielded such a nice profit had they been sent to “cold” prospects.

2) For seminars, you need sizable mailings to get enough participants to fill the room. The response rate would have been the same had we sent just 1,000 postcards, but that might not have generated enough people for each class. We rarely had to cancel a class for low enrollment. If you are promoting a one-on-one service, of course, this factor does not apply.

3) Consistency and repetition help. We mailed postcards every two months for a new round of classes, always using magenta card stock from the Kinko’s copy center. From what people said when they signed up, it was clear they had come to recognize the hot pink postcards as coming from us. People paid more attention to the postcards as time went on, not less.

4) Color attracts, but images are optional. I used boldface strategically on the postcards to create a readable layout, but the cards contained no images – only words. If you look at galleries of sample postcards online, you’ll see no pure-text samples, but for certain purposes they can work extremely well. We used just about every available space on the postcard to say as much as possible about our offerings.

One thing that’s changed since postcards pulled us out of that recession is that you no longer have to mess with address labels and stamps or postal permits to send postcards.

Choose the right postcard vendor, and you can design your postcard online, order up the right list in a few minutes, if not using your own database, upload the list and place an order so the cards get sent out on whatever date you specify. The whole process of marketing with postcards is so much easier now!

Author Bio: Veteran postcard marketer/consultant Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm .

Category: Marketing
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