Direct Marketing News

Business to business correspondence doesn’t have to be as boring as it sounds, especially when you have an appetizing offer. Turn your standard sales letters and initial project proposals to be as palatable as your offer with attractive postcard designs. It can win your customers attention and deliver the right message.

Design the postcard like a mini-billboard and use a simple catchy caption against a well designed back. Or if your strength is copy writing, turn it into a mini-newsletter complete with a press release. Use it as a product catalog or a brochure. Postcards are a flexible media you can adjust to fit its form according to your desired contents.

When designing the postcard, here are a few things to remember.

1. Grab Attention

   Postcards are designed to be mailed without an envelope. This way, its full colored face can stand out against the pile of other correspondence that usually comprise of bills, sales letters, bills, and even more sales letters.

   And unlike a typical sales letter that needs an introduction, the postcard gets straight to the point. It eliminates envelopes as an unnecessary barrier to readability and can say its message at a glance.

2. Hold the interest

   With the load of correspondence landing on their desk every day, businessmen tend to simply scan a letter than read it word for word (if they read it at all).

   Short sales letters tend to look awkward, while lengthy sales letters can lose your customer’s interest even before they get to the punch line. The best solution is to change the format.

   Postcards let you say more with less. It uses a small media that forces you to be succinct with the message without looking awkward. You can cut your paragraphs into short bullet point phrases your customers can finish reading even before they realize they are being sold to.

   • Give a short one or two sentence introduction.

   • Enumerate the product benefits.
   • Specify the most important points.
   • State your offer.

3. Build desire.

   You can include a short anecdote, testimonial or statistics to make your claims more interesting. This is no longer part of the main offer, but it can help build up the desire of the customers.

   When you talk about benefits, or product features, it comes across as theoretical. When you quantify the benefits, or contextualize them in stories, it makes the benefits more real and relatable to the customer.

4. Invite customers to take the first step.

   Don’t sell with your postcard.

   Sales letters ask customers to part with their money with a purchase. Postcards are friendly and give your customers a free product sample, an invitation to a seminar, a chance to learn more from the company’s website, etc. When you remove the pressure to buy, the customer becomes less defensive and more comfortable to take your offer.

   When other company’s sales letters bribe and threaten, use your postcard design to tease, coax, and cajole. It’s easier to ask your customers to take thats one small bite.

Postcard Design tips and articles can be found at My Postcard Printing