Marketing with Postcards

published in The Communicator, Summer 1999

There are many ways to promote your appraisal firm (or other small business) but they all seem to cost too much time and money. Have you ever thought about postcards? Postcards are easy to produce and relatively inexpensive to design and print. Best yet, when you want to announce something to your clients at the last minute, postcards can be printed and mailed quickly.

One Idea at a Time

Among the various forms of direct mail formats, postcards are probably most appropriate for short messages. There really isn't enough room on a postcard to sell more than one idea at a time. If you plan a whole mailing campaign, each postcard will have its own message that reinforces the main theme of your campaign. For instance, you may want to convince your clients to use your firm because of your use of the latest technology. You could have a series of cards with a unique message, each of which ties into the technology theme of your campaign. One card could tell about your ability to transmit via EDI, another about your effective use of bar coding and tracking. You get the idea. If you try to put all of these ideas on one postcard you'll only be watering down your sales message.

Name Recognition

Postcards are absolutely great for name recognition. Their format allows the recipient to view your message without having to open up an envelope. Unlike a conventional mailing package in an envelope your postcard will, at least, usually attract a glance from the recipient even if they toss it in the trash. If your name and logo are prominent on the postcard you've achieved some of your objective. My business name is Appraisal Services, Inc. Unfortunately there are a lot of companies with similar sounding names. One good way to distinguish my company from the others is with the recognition of our logo, which is a predominant part of our identity. Just getting a postcard in front of our clients on a regular basis keeps our firm's identity in their minds, even if they don't read the sales message itself.

Postcards do have some limitations, such as having only a small area on which to print. A single postcard really isn't the way to introduce all aspects of your firm to a prospective client. There isn't enough space on the postcard for the amount of information that should, more appropriately, be part of a larger mailing package. Postcards are also best when used as a two-part sales strategy. That is, you'll rarely get an appraisal order from your postcard mailing directly but it can elicit interest in your appraisal firm, which can result in an order at a later time. Your postcards will be most effective if you design your sales message to entice the recipient to call or write for more information. You can do additional selling and provide the prospect with a full packet of materials once they've responded to the postcard.

Let's say you want to promote your firm's ability to provide appraisals for PMI removal. You wouldn't want to design a postcard explaining the whole program and asking for an order. It's unrealistic to expect that sort of response from a prospect because there isn't enough room on the postcard to explain the program in enough detail. But if your sales message offers a free report about PMI removal you will likely get a higher response. Then, included with the free report, you can provide a full-blown sales message with a packet of materials, and then follow up by telephone. Think of the postcard as an introduction or the front end of a a two-part solicitation. It's also great for what I call back-end promotion. In this capacity, the postcard is used as part of a series and sent to someone you've already established a relationship with; it keeps your name in front of them on a regular basis. Remember that you use front-end postcards to solicit inquiries from new prospects and back-end to keep your name in front of prospects with whom you already have a relationship. These two tasks are where postcards can be most effective. Each group of prospects require a different sales message so you'll want to set up your contact management software to distinguish between the two: those you are prospecting (front end) and your existing clients with whom you want to stay in touch (back end).

Producing the Postcards

There are two ways to produce postcards. The first is by running blank postcard stock through your laser or inkjet printer. Avery Products has a blank postcard stock product that works well for this purpose. They provide two postcards on a page with the appropriate perforations. You simply print your sales message on both sides and break the cards apart. This works especially well when you have to get a message out to your clients at the last minute. For example, let's say interest rates suddenly take a drop. Your clients will probably see an increase in lending volume and your card is a reminder that you are available for additional work. You wouldn't want to wait a few weeks to get that sort of card out.

The disadvantage to using blank postcard stock is that the postcards may end up costing you more per piece than if you had them professionally printed. You'll have to run the numbers yourself figuring your local printing costs, but in my area it generally doesn't pay to print more than about 500 cards on blank stock. The other disadvantage is that the blank postcard stock is thinner than the card stock you will usually get from a printer. The blank stock has to be thin enough to run through your printer but it often ends up feeling a little flimsy. You'll have to weigh your need for urgency against the type of image you want to convey. I prefer the professionally printed cards but occasionally use the Avery stock for special purposes when I absolutely have to get a mailing out within a day or so.

The other method of producing your cards is having them designed and printed with a conventional printer. You'll end up with a more professional looking card, but it will generally cost more if you don't need that many printed. If you plan on having an extensive postcard campaign where you will need thousands of cards, conventional printing can be very reasonable. One of the commercial printers I use is out of state and has a minimum order of 1,000 postcards. I usually don't need that many so I'll order the minimum but without the backsides printed. I'll then print the backsides, with an appropriate message as needed, with a local quick printer. This allows me to reuse the front graphic on the postcard for more than one mailing. You wouldn't want to keep reusing the same graphic over and over but a little repetition is all right and it is a great way to save money. Incidentally, you probably won't be able to run these professionally printed cards through your laser or inkjet printer. Not only are they usually too thick, but the heat generated from a laser printer will usually smear the printed image itself.

Design

Designing postcards is beyond the scope of this article. By all means if you have the ability to design your own cards using a graphics program, go for it. Otherwise, you can easily get your ideas expressed by using a graphic artist. The proliferation of ready-to-go photo images on CD has made it easier than ever for a graphic artist to provide you with a wide selection of images at a reasonable cost. Find yourself a graphic artist and ask to see what photo images or clip art they own. Try to choose all of your images from one series so that they have a similar "look" to them. It's actually much easier to add a bit of text to a photo that already tells a story visually. It takes much longer and is much more expensive to design a postcard from scratch including graphics and custom photographs.

When getting quotes don't forget that many national printers specialize in this sort of work. Check some of the computer or design magazines and you'll find a few dozen companies that specialize in short run (small quantity) printing. These firms specialize in printing directly from a floppy disk or CD, which eliminates a lot of manual labor. Your designer will be using a graphics program and by simply supplying your job on a disk or CD you'll save a lot of money over the old-fashioned production methods. Local commercial printers may not be interested in printing small batches of postcards and usually don't have the equipment to print directly from disk. Consequently, these local printers are typically more expensive than the larger national firms. But this depends totally on where you live. If you live in a large metropolitan area you will be able to get all of your services done locally.

Mailing

You'll want to make sure your designer is familiar with postal regulations. I can tell you most certainly that the regulations, as they pertain to postcards, are subject to quite a bit of interpretation. Make sure you get your formatting questions answered directly from the post office where you will be mailing your postcards. One important design consideration is that you must leave at least five-eighths of an inch at the bottom of the card. That's where the post office often attaches a label if they are unable to find enough room to print a bar code on your postcard. If you include important information at the bottom of your postcard in this five-eighths of an inch area, it has a good chance of being covered up.

Getting a System

I keep a stack of postcards handy in a plastic storage rack next to my desk. It's a ten-pocket plastic storage container that is the type commonly available at most of the major office supply chains. Each pocket contains one card in the series. I use Act as my contact manager. Every day when I run Act it tells me which contacts need a new postcard mailed to them. I simply go to each contact record in Act and print a label out on my personal label printer. I would strongly recommend one of the personal label printers that are currently available on the market. They allow you to print one label at a time and that sure beats running a whole sheet of labels through your printer when you only need to print a few. Using a whole sheet of labels can be a hassle and it gets in the way of mailing your postcards each day with a minimum of fuss. With a personal label printer it takes me about ten minutes a day to get about 20-30 postcards mailed.

Follow up with Telephone Calls

It's important to follow up your mailings with telephone calls. This will dramatically increase your response rate. It's probably impractical to call everyone who is part of a large mailing. You can, however, call those prospects who are part of your front-end and back-end promotions. These are the prospects we talked about earlier: new prospects you are trying to turn into clients as well as your current clients Your telephone solicitation script needn't be extremely lengthy but you should have some sort of introduction memorized. For example, when calling your current clients you can start out with something like, "Hi, it's Pat at Appraisal Services. I was wondering if you received our most recent postcard? I wanted to make sure because we just started a great new program that allows us to cut a few days off our turn around times..." You get the idea.

With new prospects you are trying to turn into clients, you may say something like this, "Hi, my name is Pat Butler at Appraisal Services. We're a residential appraisal firm that can service your area. Would you mind if I took just a few minutes of your time to explain our services? Do you remember getting any of our postcards?" While you can come up with all sorts of elaborate telemarketing scripts you'll find that you probably need just a few sentences to introduce yourself. After that, you'll probably enter into a dialogue with your prospect and no longer need a memorized script. I have my staff make most of my follow up calls. If they have a prospect who needs more detailed information than they can provide, I follow up later. It's a better use of my time to be out appraising, rather than making cold calls. Once a prospect expresses interest in our firm, it makes sense for me to follow up. You'll have to decide for yourself what works best financially but if you are going to implement a postcard campaign that is an ongoing endeavor you probably won't have enough time to do everything yourself.

Postcards are a great form of promotion. Once the initial work of designing a series of cards is done it's very easy to keep your mailing plan on schedule. Try to develop a postcard campaign when your business is slower, perhaps during the winter season. When springs rolls around and you have very little time, you'll be glad you've chosen an easy form of promotion that can be labeled and mailed without a lot of effort.