Postcard Marketing Model #11: Generate Leads
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Postcard Marketing Model #11: Generate Leads
by Marcia Yudkin
Whether you sell leadership training courses or ping-pong tables, health care plans or lawn mower gizmos, you need a constant flow of potential customers - likely ones - to turn into actual clients. Postcards are an inexpensive, easily managed, highly controllable means of generating leads. They're as suitable for high-tech offerings as for low-tech wares. Here's an overview to help you understand the power of postcards to generate leads for your company.
Mailing list vendors allow you to zero in on very specific characteristics of your ideal customer. For example, you can mail to brand managers at companies with annual sales between $5 and $20 million within 25 miles of your headquarters. You can send to Nebraska-based owners of hair salons that have been in business more than 20 years. You can target unmarried women under 30 who make more than $80,000 a year and rent rather than own a home. You can get your postcards to married men who hunt or fish and live within 250 miles of your remote resort.
Postcards also have the advantage of getting looked at. No one throws them out unopened, and during the initial five-second lookover time, you have a powerful opportunity to get your message across. Where there is a gatekeeper who goes through the mail first, creative postcards often make it through, especially if they are amusing, interesting, tantalizing or unusual.
If you imagine lead generation to be an expensive process, think again. With postcards, sending 5,000 at a time can cost less than $2,000. However, you may be better off zeroing in on a smaller number of prospects that you contact repeatedly - say, once a month for five months. Sending monthly cards five times to 1,000 top prospects costs less than $3,000 for the entire campaign. Yes, these prices include design, printing and mailing! List costs range from 9 cents a name for consumers to 35 cents a name for businesspeople.
Be sure you don't send what I call "Hello, I exist" postcards but rather ones with a definite action you are asking the recipient to take. This might be going to your web site to download a white paper or report, calling to request a free, no-obligation assessment or purchasing a low-risk starter service that serves as a gateway to a long-term client relationship. If you're sending a series of cards, the call to action can be the same each time or different.
Once you learn the logistics, postcard campaigns are so easy and quick to manage that you can turn them on and off as needed. For example, if you've just lost a major contract, you can send out twice as many postcards as usual. When you're at capacity, you can stop sending postcards until you're ready for additional customers again. And once you discover your average response rate, you can send out the exact number of postcards at a certain interval to reliably bring in the optimal number of leads month in and month out.
Have I convinced you yet to try postcard marketing? It's not the most glamorous or technologically advanced marketing method, but those who use it intelligently generate respectable profits from the leads it brings them - time after time after time.
Veteran postcard marketer, consultant and author Marcia Yudkin is the creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download a free one-hour audio interview in which she and the co-owner of a postcard printing and mailing firm reveal the basics of marketing with postcards: www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm
by Marcia Yudkin
Whether you sell leadership training courses or ping-pong tables, health care plans or lawn mower gizmos, you need a constant flow of potential customers - likely ones - to turn into actual clients. Postcards are an inexpensive, easily managed, highly controllable means of generating leads. They're as suitable for high-tech offerings as for low-tech wares. Here's an overview to help you understand the power of postcards to generate leads for your company.
Mailing list vendors allow you to zero in on very specific characteristics of your ideal customer. For example, you can mail to brand managers at companies with annual sales between $5 and $20 million within 25 miles of your headquarters. You can send to Nebraska-based owners of hair salons that have been in business more than 20 years. You can target unmarried women under 30 who make more than $80,000 a year and rent rather than own a home. You can get your postcards to married men who hunt or fish and live within 250 miles of your remote resort.
Postcards also have the advantage of getting looked at. No one throws them out unopened, and during the initial five-second lookover time, you have a powerful opportunity to get your message across. Where there is a gatekeeper who goes through the mail first, creative postcards often make it through, especially if they are amusing, interesting, tantalizing or unusual.
If you imagine lead generation to be an expensive process, think again. With postcards, sending 5,000 at a time can cost less than $2,000. However, you may be better off zeroing in on a smaller number of prospects that you contact repeatedly - say, once a month for five months. Sending monthly cards five times to 1,000 top prospects costs less than $3,000 for the entire campaign. Yes, these prices include design, printing and mailing! List costs range from 9 cents a name for consumers to 35 cents a name for businesspeople.
Be sure you don't send what I call "Hello, I exist" postcards but rather ones with a definite action you are asking the recipient to take. This might be going to your web site to download a white paper or report, calling to request a free, no-obligation assessment or purchasing a low-risk starter service that serves as a gateway to a long-term client relationship. If you're sending a series of cards, the call to action can be the same each time or different.
Once you learn the logistics, postcard campaigns are so easy and quick to manage that you can turn them on and off as needed. For example, if you've just lost a major contract, you can send out twice as many postcards as usual. When you're at capacity, you can stop sending postcards until you're ready for additional customers again. And once you discover your average response rate, you can send out the exact number of postcards at a certain interval to reliably bring in the optimal number of leads month in and month out.
Have I convinced you yet to try postcard marketing? It's not the most glamorous or technologically advanced marketing method, but those who use it intelligently generate respectable profits from the leads it brings them - time after time after time.
Veteran postcard marketer, consultant and author Marcia Yudkin is the creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download a free one-hour audio interview in which she and the co-owner of a postcard printing and mailing firm reveal the basics of marketing with postcards: www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm