Chicken Eggs and Postcards.

   In this post I am going to share some great thoughts and ideas for mailings, and return on investment (R.O.I.).   As you may know by now, I spent a fair bit of time reading a whole bunch of boring articles to find out what is going on in the marketing world.   Since I have been studying what is the best way to reach peoples eyeballs, I have found some amazing things.

     In many recent studies, by a variety of companies, what is looking like the best R.O.I. now is the lowly postcard.   I have had my email account hi-jacked recently, and can tell you, it takes a lot of time to contact all your contacts, and let them know that you sell printing and not Viagra!   Last week, one of our customers had their company email hi-jacked as well.   A free bit of advice here...change your password every few weeks.  The result of email overload and spam etc. is, that postcards are moving to the forefront of advertising.   There are many advantages to mailing postcards and here are a few I feel are worth while.

     One of the best is, even if the reciever throws it away, their eyes still register some of the content.  Most people don't even tear open an envelope if they are not interested in the company it came from.

  Postcards are cheaper to design, cheaper to mail, reach the eyeballs of the customer and anyone else that may see them lying around. 

   Another element to keep in mind is that for mailings to prove successful, they need to be repeated over and over again.  It is a game of gradual increase, think marathon, not a sprint.                                                 
  Postcards also can be used like big business cards to share web addresses or phone numbers with potential customers.   If you can come up with a clever, colorful front side, many cards are passed along to others, or even stuck up on bulletin boards.  There are other things to think about, like planning your mailings to arrive on a Tuesday (lowest mail volume day), and full color front with black and white back side, odd size cards to stick out from normal sizes, and other things like this that a good printing company should be able to help you with from start to finish.

    The most important thing to remember when doing advertising is to determine how much it will cost NOT to advertise.

   As dear old Mrs Anonymous once wrote...

         The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
          the homely hen lays one.
         The codfish never cackles,
         to tell you what she's done.
         And so we scorn the codfish,
         While the humble hen we prize,
        which only goes to show you
        That it pays to advertise!

Thanks for all the comments everybody.   Even suggestions are welcome.   I am keeping tabs on the newest idea for paper making in Canada using wheat stubble, and will post about it when able.