Postcards: Marketing with Postcards

Why Send Postcards?

As a marketer and business builder, postcards are a great tool because...

• They're inexpensive
• They're eye-catching and nearly always read - no envelope to (not) open
• They're not email (which we're all overwhelmed with)
• You can reach a wider audience
• Via a different media that your competition may be overlooking
• There's no such thing as postcard spam filters!
• Results are easily measurable
• They are REAL, physical and tangible... too rare in the world of bits and bytes

Postcards are an ideal media in several situations, but in the past have been difficult to use for anything but mass-mailing lead generation.  That's because, in the past, you had to pay your printer to make up 100s or thousands at a time which is fine if you're mailing to a rented list of thousands... but not ideal at all if you want to just mail a few.

SendPepper and OfficeAutopilot open up all kinds of new possibilities for communicating with your prospects and customers because you can send them one at a time and because you can automate the whole thing.

Some Ways Clients are Using Postcards

Consider automated, personalized postcards for...

• Free birthday offers
• Anniversary reminders
• Referral requests (automatically right after they've gotten the most benefit from using your service?)
• Welcome to the business
• Lead Generation
• Holiday promotions
• Contract expiration reminders
• Cross- and up-sell offers
• Update contact info requests
• Party invitations
• Appointment reminders
• Thank you cards
• Bid/proposal follow up
• Demo or presentation follow up
• New product announcements
• Recurring service reminder (e.g., oil change, haircut)
• Pre-tradeshow appointment setting
• and much, MUCH more!

Getting Addresses

Don't have physical addresses? That's a bummer.  Being in touch both online and off is proven to increase the lifetime value of a client.  Really, if you don't have 'em, you should get 'em.

If you only have email addresses for your clients, then you'll need to come up with a campaign that gives your contacts a good reason to cough up their mailing addy.  While you're at it, get their birthday, too.

Some ideas:

• Ask for their birthday and mailing address (because you want to send them something!)
• Offer to mail them something (coupons, gift certificates, etc.)
• Ask for it on your web sign-up form
• Ask them for it during the new client setup process
• Call and get it (have a reason!)

Measuring Results

Postcards results are pretty easy to measure, and measuring is always a good thing... especially when you're doing lead generation.

There are two levels of details that you can get, depending on how tricky you want to (or can) get.

Most simply, you can easily get raw response numbers simply by directing recipients to a web page that only is advertised on your postcard.  Then, just take a look at the traffic to your page to get a sense of how many people were curious enough to take a look.  (Get page traffic by using google analytics.  It's a great tool and it's free.)

MUCH better, though, is to get a little slicker and use PURLs on your postcards.  (How to use PURLs is described on this page.)

The benefit to using PURLs, beyond the increase in response you'll get from the curiosity factor alone, is that our system can show you not only exactly how many people responded to your call to action, but also specifically who responded.

Consider the implications: if someone was interested enough to pull your card out of their stack of mail, carry it over to their computer and type in a link to see what you've got... well, even if they didn't buy today or fill out your form you know they're a heck of a lot hotter than the folks on your list who didn't take the trouble.

This is a list of people that you'll want to continue to aggressively follow up with. With OfficeAutopilot, you can set up rules to automatically follow up with folks who visit their PURL links... send them an email, another postcard, give them a call... whatever makes sense.

Split Testing Postcards

[Note: SendPepper Habanero and above only]

Even subtle changes can have a profound impact on the response your marketing pieces get. So, in all your marketing, it’s a good idea to test and measure what you’re doing. The idea is to optimize your message and your systems over time to produce the best possible results. THIS is the true discipline of marketing. Habanero users can Split test their emails, postcards, and landing pages.

Just changing a subject line or the background color can make a difference in your results.

For instance, say you had created a postcard as part of a sequence. You had two discount offers you thought were good, but wanted to really KNOW which was the most effective at getting people to respond.

I’m going to take you step by step through the process of how you’d split test these two postcards.

You first need to create the landing pages to which you’re sending the postcard respondents. Since you’ll be making two different versions of the postcard, you’ll also need two versions of the landing page, although it's not necessary to alter the second version of the landing page in order to test the effectiveness of the postcard. You do this simply by creating a landing page, then ‘copying’ it using the ‘copy’ icon. Once you’ve renamed the copy of the landing page, change the hosting settings so that each landing page has a different URL, and be sure to save it. Note that this is different than creating a ‘B’ version of the Landing Page.

Next, you would create alternate versions of the original postcard by using the “copy” postcard button.

Then, you’d change the name of the ‘copy,’ to distinguish it from the original.

The next thing you'll do is change whatever you wanted to test, and save it. Note that I’ve used the PURL for the original landing page on my original postcard, and the PURL for the copy of my landing page on an alternate of my postcard.  By doing this, you are then able to decipher, based on which of the two landing pages gets more traffic, which postcard was most effective at drawing visitors to your site.  Remember to save each one.

Now, when you place the postcard into your sequence as a step, you’d use the original postcard as split test A and the alternate as split test B.  Be sure as you add new ones that you “Add it to the rotation” up at the top of the step creation window for a given step. Then, the various versions of that step will be distributed on a “Round Robin” basis to each of the contacts the step is going out to. If there are 1,000 people slated to get that step, and there are four different versions of the email you’re sending out (an a,b,c, and a d), then 250 contacts would get each.

Sequence Statistics:

If you click on any of the Sequences (that is, the name of the sequence, not on the magnifying glass to the left of it), you can see the Sequence Statistics.

FAQs

Some questions we've heard...

"Why are your postcards so expensive/cheap?"

"I purchased a list of addresses from InfoUSA, and I'm blasting out a bunch of postcards to them, but some of them came back because the person no longer lives there, can I have a "or current resident" field on the address?"

"How do I split test my postcards?"

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