Postcards: Awareness Tool or Selling Tool?

By Martha Retallick
Posted Friday, January 28, 2005

Are postcards better for building awareness or for selling?

In my opinion, the answer to the above question is, "They can do both jobs. It depends on what type of business you're in."

My own perspective is that of the Web and graphic designer who must distinguish herself from the hordes of other designers out there. I do this by keeping my name in front of my clients and prospects with postcards.

Over the years, this approach has brought me quite a bit of repeat business from my longtime clientele, and new business from the prospects on my list.

Since many businesses do nothing to stay in touch with their market, and spend their precious time and resources chasing after new customers, I think that the awareness approach has merit. After all, it costs six times less to sell to an existing customer than it does to sell to a new customer. This has been proven through numerous studies.

Now, let's move on to the selling approach. Let's say you're new in town, and, by golly, you need some clients pronto-pronto. Which means that you're not going to send out postcards to build awareness.

Rather, you're going to send something that gets new clients ringing your phone and setting up appointments where you sell your design services.

In short, different strokes for different folks. And postcards are versatile enough to serve 'em all.

About the Author
Martha Retallick, "The Passionate Postcarder," hails from Tucson, Arizona, USA. She is the author of Postcard Marketing Secrets, a downloadable PDF manual that will show you how to put postcards to work for your business?profitably. Learn more about it at:

(http://www.PostcardMarketingSecrets.com)