What Really Makes Your Postcard Mailing Successful?

The biggest single factor in the success of your postcard mailings is who you send your postcards to. You need a list of people or businesses to send your postcard offer to. This can be a list of existing customers or prospects who have inquired as a result of any of your marketing efforts or a list which you purchase. The list must contain the names of people who are likely to be interested in the benefits of your products or services.

If you send a postcard offering a free 6 pack of beer with the purchase of 2 large pizzas to a list of purchasers of a “pay-per-view” boxing match (a list which you purchased from your local cable TV company), you are more likely to get a big response than if you sent the same offer to a list of the ladies auxiliary bridge club.

This concept is known as targeting. You either have a list (existing from your own records or the records of a person or business willing to cooperate with you by letting you use the list), buy a list (of people who are likely to be interested in your product or service because they have purchased a related product or service, such as a magazine subscription on a topic related to your product or service), or a list can be compiled using characteristics about your target market.

When you don’t pay enough attention to the list you select to mail to, you get a list which is poorly “targeted”. This means the people on it are not likely to be interested in your products and services.

• A “good list” is a list which is a good match for interest in your products and services.
• A “bad list” is a list which is a bad match for interest in your products and services.
• House List, Response List, Compiled List

The 3 basic kinds of lists that you can use in order of their effectiveness are:

1. Your own list of prospects and customers. This is a list that you collected with your own personal marketing efforts. This is known as a house list. These people are most likely to respond to your offers because they have responded in the past. You own this list.

2. A response list is a list of people that have actually done something. They have either purchased something from the people who put together the list that their name came from or inquired in response tosome offer. The last way they could have arrived on the list is to have asked to be on the list. Presumably if they are on a response list the people on the list have some level of interest in the topic or purpose of the list. This type of list is less effective than your house list is likely to be. They have not previously responded to you, but have responded to someone in a related area (if you have purchased a correctly targeted list). This is a list you can purchase from the owner of the list or a list broker.

3. A compiled list is a list of people who were selected to be on the list because they possess the characteristics that you asked the list broker to screen for. Examples of characteristics used to target correctly may include age, sex, geographic location, income level etc. The characteristics are more fixed characteristics than response list characteristics, which are behavioral characteristics. This type of list is likely to be the least effective of the 3 list types. This list you can purchase from a list broker.

TIP: PostcardMania SM is expert in helping you to determine which list you should use to maximize the response to your postcard mailings.

I’m still learning the strengths of the different social media sites, and how they can be used to build the Association of Home Professionals … so I found the following statistics interesting. According to IDC research analyst Caroline Dangson:

• 73% consumers want content to be free and ad supported
• 51% of people on social media sites find advertising “annoying and irrelevant.” She recommends sponsorship models which is the most liked and least intrusive model for social media.

So when I read Amber’s post differentiating advertising from marketing, it really caught my attention. Amber Noble-Garland is a member of Active Rain, the best social media network for anyone involved in real estate.

Amber shared the Top 5 things I took away from the “Millionaire Maker Potato Chip Marketing” seminar. Here is the number 1 tip (you should read them all). I’ve modified the format to help emphasize what I believe is important: “The #1 mistake most real estate professionals make is they confuse advertising with marketing.

• Advertising is to generate attention and create awareness.
• Marketing is to position something to actually compel someone to buy it.

“Personally, I assumed that every real estate professional knew the difference, but looking around the room I got the sense that wasn’t the case. It was an eye-opening revelation for many to learn that while the two are related, they also have very distinctly different functions.”

What prompted this post was reading Mike Smith’s article, 17 Marketing Ideas You (Probably) Haven’t Been Using. Most of his recommendations deal with online tactics, but he started with the basic business card and suggested we leave them around town, at places where our target customers are likely to spot them (I’ve occasionally done this with left over postcards but I don’t do this regularly and I should).

Like many business owners today, I am trying to keep print costs down by using collateral left over from campaigns of years past. This requires creativity, to find new ways to distribute marketing pieces.

Having reached the mature age of “5 years in business,” I’m finally merging multiple marketing pieces into a few, with each one serving more functions. For years we’ve been mailing (have migrated 80% or more to email) an information package which included:

• Custom envelope
• Letterhead with hand written note
• Printed My Handyman checklist
• On request, a copy of our insurance certificate
• … and sometimes a magnet or coupon.

We recently modified our checklist, the single most effective piece we have, to serve multiple functions:

• Self-mailer which can be used in place of full info package above
• Newspaper advertising inserts as I didn’t have requisite minimums without printing
• … probably need a little more formatting so we can also use as tri-fold.