While postcards themselves are cheap to purchase, marketing with postcards will not cheapen the image of your business.  On the contrary, a well-done postcard can generate very positive results for your business.  Although postcard marketing may not currently be a hot trend like "social media marketing," here's a little secret: much of the buzz about social media marketing is nothing more than hype coming from people who want to sell their "consulting" services.  In reality, many social media marketing efforts add nothing to the bottom line of a business.  However, with postcard marketing, not only can you add to your bottom line, but you can measure how successful your efforts are.

To help you succeed with this time-proven method of marketing, here is everything you need to know about marketing with postcards:

Target Your Mailings

You want to send your postcards to prospects, instead of just random people.  Therefore, you want your mailings to be targeted.  From non-competing businesses in your market to mailing list sellers, there are a variety of ways to get a targeted list of prospects who will be receptive to your postcard.

Be Friendly

Because of their format, postcards give you the ability to be friendly towards the recipients, as opposed to simply blasting a marketing message at them.  By writing your postcard with a friendly tone, you can create goodwill with the person reading it.

Postcards are a Sales Opener, Not Closer

This ties in with the "be friendly" point.  The purpose of a postcard is to open a sale, not close one.  Therefore, there's no need to aggressively push a sale.  Instead, you want to focus on getting the recipient to take a desired action.  Depending on your business and your postcard marketing goals, this can be visiting your store, calling you, or visiting the website of your business.

Provide an Incentive

When you read the point above, you may have asked yourself, "but how do I get them to take the action I want them to take?"  There's actually a fairly simple answer to that question; provide an incentive.  This is a marketing technique that's used over and over, and the reason it's used so much is because it works.  By providing an incentive that people care about, you can get them to take the action you want them to take.

Make Your Incentive Clear

You can include a great incentive, but if people don't find out about it until the second to last sentence of your postcard, many people will never read far enough to know what you have to offer them.  Therefore, make sure your incentive is clearly presented at the beginning of your postcard.  To drive it home, you can begin and end your postcard by stating the incentive you are offering.

Time Your Delivery for Tuesday or Wednesday

Studies have shown that these two days of the week are when people receive the least amount of mail.  So, to reduce your competition with other mailings, time your postcard mailings so they will arrive on one of these two days