Direct mail marketing postcards are an excellent way for any small business to increase its revenues substantially.

When it comes to marketing a business, one of the most important criteria, at least as far as the business-owner is concerned, is cost. In practice, as long as you’re getting a good return on investment, you should be willing to spend as much money as you possibly can. After all, if you’re getting two pounds back for every pound you spend, the more pounds you spend, the better. That said, until a particular marketing channel or strategy has proved itself, keeping an eye on costs is essential, and it’s here that direct mail marketing postcards really come into their own.

Direct mail marketing postcards are a cheap, powerful and effective way to grow your business profits

Compared to sending out a full direct mail piece, with printed letter and envelope, a postcard mailing is extremely cheap. In fact, the cost to mail a postcard can be about half that needed to mail a letter in an envelope, and so the cost savings are obvious. However, it’s not only the low price to mail a postcard that makes sending direct mail marketing postcards such an attractive form of of marketing, because by using an interesting “marketing twist” it can also be a highly-effective form of promoting your business.

Direct mail marketing postcards – more than meets the eye

One of the main disadvantages of marketing postcards is that a postcard is usually too small to contain a full sales message. Postcards range in size from the 4×6 postcard template – the standard postcard size – up to the largest size of 8.5 x 11 inches. By making the text very small, perhaps 6 point or so, and using one of the larger postcard sizes, it can be possible to fit in a good amount of sales copy, but you’ll still be hampered by a lack of space in most cases.

However, by using customized postcards and setting up a system to integrate direct mail postcards with internet marketing technology – essentially by using promotional postcards to send traffic to a website – you get neatly around this problem. Direct mail marketing postcards can carry a simple lead-generation message which persuades prospects to visit a web page where they can read a full sales message. Unlike a postcard, a web page can be as big as it needs to be – and can be filled with all the elements you need to get the prospect to take action, including your full guarantee, explanation of service levels, or whatever you need.

You also need to remember a web page isn’t confined to text, and making full use of what internet technology has to offer should be your aim. In many cases, using the web page for a traditional sales letter can be enough to make sales, but in most cases the web page can be made even more effective by including links to video and audio files. You need to test what happens to your response rate when you include video, because sometimes adding video can improve things, and sometimes it can do the opposite.

But the main thing to remember is that getting your prospect into a web-based marketing system opens up a huge range of possibilities simply not available with traditional print media. Direct mail marketing postcards are a powerful and effective front end to your marketing funnel.

Another aspect of print-to-web integration that really shouldn’t be ignored is email capture. Once the prospect lands on your web page, you can offer them useful information – usually some form of free downloadable report – in return for an email address. Then a whole world of possibilities opens up. You can create a series of emails that get delivered to a schedule using a piece of technology called an autoresponder.

This gives hands-off marketing, and in most cases will increase your conversion rates and give a high return on investment. You’ll often get high conversion rates even with simple text-based emails, but once you place links in the the emails to direct prospects to video or audio files, you give yourself an even better chance of delivering information in a form your prospects respond to.

In effect, by following this procedure, you’re placing prospects in a multimedia marketing system that brings a high conversion rate, and all by simply sending out the most basic form of communication there is – the old-fashioned postcard.

A service sending direct mail marketing postcards has a lot to offer

Another advantage to using direct mail marketing postcards, apart from the low cost, is that they’re very easy to mail out.

If you go online and look for a postcard mailing service, you’ll find most of the postcard marketing companies give you a range of designs that can be chosen directly on the website, and your sales copy input directly from your computer. The best postcard printing and mailing services will give you a wide choice of postcard templates, offering various sizes, styles, and designs, although 5×7 postcard printing is one of the most popular choices, since this usually mails at cheap postcard postage rates.

Many companies will also offer custom postcard printing, enabling you to upload your own design, photos and logos, and also deal with the delivery of your direct mail marketing postcards. With an online postcard printing service you just upload the message, design your postcard, and let them do the rest. It’s even better if the company offers personalized postcards, because that means each one will have the proper name of the prospect instead of just a generic “Dear Sir” or similar.

In some cases you’ll be able to upload a mailing list database and the service will make sure each marketing postcard has the right name.

The bottom line is that postcard advertising works – and works exceedingly well when done in the right way. Everyone talks about how web marketing is the place to be in terms of bringing in more business.

And to a large extent, they’re right. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the traditional marketing channels like direct mail marketing postcards, and especially when you can integrate them with web technology to get the best of both worlds – and more revenue and profits into the bargain.

Direct mail marketing postcards work, so use them!

Online advertising can give you a serious business-promotion kickstart

When it comes to promoting your business on the internet, one of the quickest ways to get going is to use online advertising, because in many cases you can start product advertising online in just a matter of minutes, or at least within a day or so, and be making sales almost immediately.

However, you do need to take some time to consider the various online advertising strategies to make sure the one you choose is right for your business. The type of online advertising and online marketing you decide on will depend very much on the product or service you’re selling, and so you need to take a look at the online advertising statistics for each method to make sure it fits in with your particular market.

Online advertising gains its real power through the speed and simplicity of automated split testing

Online Advertising – Fast Results

One of the quickest ways of putting an internet advertising strategy to work is to use Google Adwords, since you can set up an account quickly and have your ads showing in just a few minutes. Pay per click advertising (PPC) — both Adwords and the similar system, Facebook Advertising, can be used as a national online advertising system or local ad system, providing a lot of flexibility as to who you target for your product offers. The beauty of this is that prospects see your ad only when they search for information related to your type of product or service, and you pay only when someone actually clicks on your ad. This can make it both a very economical and profitable advertising strategy.

That said, you do need to make sure you know what you’re doing, because mistakes in using PPC advertising can be expensive, and you could end up spending more money than you get back — and in some cases a great deal more money than you get back.

If you’re not sure exactly how the Adwords systems works, or if you just need general help with internet advertising, it may be worthwhile hiring one of the many pay per click agencies that will run your online campaigns for you. They’ll look after everything from planning the campaign, writing the ads, and even helping you with creating your landing pages and sales funnel. This can be a great help for the online advertising novice. A top-notch pay per click agency will charge high rates for the service, but this will usually result in a good response rate to online advertising, which is one of the most important internet advertising statistics you need to consider, along with return on investment.

You do need to bear in mind that the skill level among PPC agencies does vary greatly, and it’s essential to do as much research as possible before handing over your money. After all, these people will be charging you money and spending your money, so you need to make sure you get the right firm.

Online Advertising Response Rates

As for the response rate to online advertising, this will vary depending on the type of advertising system you use, though a good advertising online strategy will concentrate to a large part on the return on investment, since this is the thing that matters in the end. Even if you have a low response rate it’s worth paying the cost of internet advertising if the advertising brings in profitable business.

The other type of online advertising you may want to consider is banner advertising, a strategy which essentially means placing your ads on websites belonging to other companies. This type of advertising can work on a pay per click basis, or on a cost per impression (CPI) basis , which means you pay for the number of times the ad is shown rather than the number of times people actually click on it.

Of course, website advertising rates will vary enormously depending on a wide range of factors, with one of the most important being the amount of traffic (visitors) the website actually receives. It is possible to get free advertising on line, though you may find much of the traffic to these websites is of a very low quality, meaning many of the visitors are very unlikely to buy your product or service. Again, it all boils down to return on investment, and whether your advertising is bringing in more money than you spend on it. A more costly banner ad placement that brings in business is better than a cheap one (or a free one) that brings nothing.

Online Split Testing (the secret to BIG profits)

In the end the advertising effectiveness is the most important thing to consider rather than the cost, and in order to work out the effectiveness you need to learn the various methods for testing advertising concepts online. A very basic form of testing is known as the split test, where you test one ad against another, or one sales page against another, and track which one gets the best response, and makes the most profit.

Learning how to test effectively can take a lot of time and effort, which is why hiring an internet marketing advertising company to manage your campaigns can be the best idea, since these people will know how to buy online advertising effectively, and know all the various advantages of online advertising to get you the best return on your investment. Before you do hire anyone though, make sure the person or company has a decent track record, or at least has come recommended by someone you trust. There are many different online advertising and marketing services, and if you want to make money with internet advertising it’s essential you choose the right one. Any company you hire to help with your online advertising should also know about ways to generate business off-line and be able to tell you how printed media and online advertising can work together to the best effect.

A professional internet marketing consultancy should also know about trends for internet advertising, and be able to show you how associated marketing methods such as email advertising can work for your business. Another advantage to using a company to run your online advertising campaigns is that you won’t need to spend months or even years learning about the various online advertising techniques, especially some of the more esoteric types such as online audio advertising.

There’s no doubt advertising online is effective and can be a great way to grow your business. You just need to make sure you choose the right online advertising strategy for your particular business, and make sure you keep an eye on costs so you get a good return on investment.

In this short post I share with you three small business growth strategies; three powerful tips for growing a small business I’ve used myself and had my clients put to work in their own businesses, over and over again.

Small bsuiness growth strategies mean planting, tending and nurturing your small business

And they’re effective in any industry, in any town or country and in any economy.

The question of implementing small business growth strategies is a tricky one – because everyone wants to grow their business, but they don’t know how AND they understand at some level that too much business growth can be a bad thing (although small business profit growth obviously isn’t, assuming you can do this without a commensurate increase in the size and complexity of your business).

Why do I say this?

Because they are all based on what we know about human behaviour and psychology – and humans are humans wherever you go.

But before I get into them, there are a couple of things about small business growth strategies I want to make plain.

First, they won’t work for you if you don’t have a go at them. In my experience business owners have two very common reactions to these tips.

The first, and probably most common reaction is to find some imagined reason they won’t work in their business. They’ll claim their customers are more sophisticated than others’, or their town is “different”, or come up with some other invented reason for not actually giving them a try.

And the reason they go out of their way to make all these excuses is they enjoy being in their comfort zone far too much. Now one said growth in business has to be painless.

Small Business Growth Strategies = WORK

And the second reaction is agreement but a complete lack of action.

There is always something more pressing and important to be done, and he or she will get round to these “later”. Sometimes it seems all this hard work is, well, just too much like hard work.

Personally, I can’t think of anything more pressing and important than growing your business, but maybe that’s just me.

And the wonderful thing is, because your competitors don’t know about any of this – and wouldn’t trouble themselves to do it even if they did know about it, if YOU will go that extra distance and implement these small business growth strategies, you’ll leave them choking in your dust.

Tips For Growing a Small Business – The Three Tips

Tips For Growing a Small Business – No 1

First… raise your prices by 10%.

This is the very easiest to implement of all the small business growth strategies I teach, and the instant you make your first sale, you’ve increased your profits by a huge margin. I go into the maths elsewhere, but a 10% increase in prices for most businesses means something like a 37% increase in profits, assuming a margin of 35% (which is about average for most businesses in most industries).

That is a HUGE boost for small business growth because it means you’re making more money for the same amount of work (or make the same money for less work and put the time you then save into learning how to grow your business even further).

Tips For Growing a Small Business – No 2

Secondly, start following up with your prospects and customers more.

Even if you’re in a business where people tend to make an immediate purchase rather than gather information first (e.g. an emergency plumber compared to a cosmetic surgeon), you should still look upon getting a new customer as being the beginning of your relationship with them.

Lead generation and name capture isn’t always the best strategy, but follow-up definitely is: email marketing, direct mail advertising, it really doesn’t matter. Follow-up is one of the most effective yet sadly underused growth strategies in business today.

Tips For Growing a Small Business – No 3

And thirdly, stop worrying about what your competitors are saying and doing and instead focus on serving your customers’ and clients’ needs (and low price is least among them, or at least it is least among the ones you want to be dealing with).

Click here for your 52 FREE small business marketing ideas

Your competitors are all following one another, not realising they, themselves are being followed by the very ones they are following. As Dan Kennedy says, it’s a form of marketing incest, and just like real incest everyone gets slowly dumber over time.

Small Business Growth Strategies – Conclusion

So heed my warning: you are free to ignore these three simple small business growth strategies if you wish.

But your reading this suggests you’re looking for tips for growing your business. And if you want to grow your business I’d ask you… what’s the point in seeking knowledge if you’re not prepared to act on it?

Small business growth strategies are neither difficult to understand not hard to implement, but they do take work and a willingness to act.

Buying direct mail lists is at the core of many a direct mail campaign. Direct mail is a great way to makes sales or generate sales leads, and although it can take a lot of work before you see decent results, in many cases it’s well worth the effort.

There are many things you need to think about  when to creating a profitable direct mail campaign, but perhaps the most important yet most overlooked is understanding direct mail lists, since these are the backbone of the whole campaign.

Fig 1: Direct mail lists make or break a direct mail campaign. Select the wrong list, and this is where your direct mail ends up.

Without the right mailing list, the results will be mediocre at best, and…

Choosing the wrong direct mail lists can mean disaster

Usually in the form of losing money.

And sometimes a lot of it, depending on the size of the mailing itself. As you can imagine, getting the right list is paramount.

There are many important elements to consider when using direct mail and, as with any form of marketing, the product, the offer and the copy all have their part to play. The product needs to be one people are looking to buy, and the copy needs to communicate the sales message effectively. But in the end the quality of the direct mail list will have one of the biggest impacts on your return and the amount of money you make.

I mean, I don’t care how great a copywriter you are or how fabulous your product is, if you’re trying to sell a pork sausage to a list of vegetarians your direct mail marketing is going to flop.

So given buying direct mailing lists is right at the top of the agenda in terms of how well you do, what process should you follow in choosing your list to give you the best chance of a decent return?

The first question you need to answer is: “What is a mailing list?”

That may sound odd, but if you want your direct mail campaign to have any chance of success, you need to choose what’s called a “targeted list”. In other words, a list of prospects who are interested in what you have to sell.

Simply collecting names and addresses from the phone book is a way of creating direct mail lists, but since most people on the list won’t be interested in what you have to sell, the return is likely to be very low.

This is why, generally speaking, flyers delivered to every house tend to fail as a marketing method for most products and services. For the purposes of carrying out a professional mailing, the list needs to have a high percentage of prospects who are likely to buy what you’re selling.

Even better is a list compiled of prospects who have already bought what you’re selling, or have bought something similar. Hence the futility of trying to sell sausages to vegetarians.

For instance, you may sell various products through catalogs, in which case a catalog mailing list would be the ideal first choice, especially if the list consists of people who have ordered catalogs in markets related to your product.

If you’re looking to make an immediate sale from your direct mailing, buying sales leads lists can be a good move, since these should have a high percentage of “hot prospects” for your product or service.

So when you come to purchase mailing lists, one of the first things you need to think about is the ideal prospect for your particular product or service. And the best way to do this is go over your records and see what kind of people have bought from you in the past and are buying from you now.

Then, and only then, should you take a look at the various direct mail lists brokers out there.

The next choice is which direct mail lists broker to use

There are thousands of direct mailing list providers, and the quality of the lists varies hugely. Some are general brokers who deal in a wide range of markets, whereas others are specialist list brokers, perhaps dealing in small business mailing lists or broader b2b mailing lists.

Buying a list is an expensive business in most cases, and so it’s essential you choose the right one, especially when purchasing business to business mailing lists for selling high-value products and services.

In most cases, choosing a specialist direct mail lists broker is a good idea, since they’re more likely to understand your market and be able to help you get a good result. This is definitely the case when buying business mail lists, though of course it is possible to find a direct mail list broker who deals with compiling lists for the consumer market, including things like mailing lists for opportunity seekers.

Another major question you need to think about before you go ahead and compile any direct mail mailing lists is whether you want to buy direct mail lists or rent them.

When you “buy” a list, this usually means you can use the list as much as you like. In effect, the list becomes yours.

But when you “rent” a list, you only get to send to that list once, and each time you do a mailing you need to pay a fee. In most cases, direct mail list rental is the way to go, since the highest-quality lists are usually not for sale outright. Be sure to ask about a multiple-use license.

As you can see, choosing the right direct mail lists takes some thought and a bit of groundwork. The temptation is just to rush in and get on with the “real” work of sending the direct mail, but this is always a mistake. Time spent now will pay you back many times over in improved responses.

The good news is that there are many direct mail list brokers who will help you plan your campaign, giving you the best chance of getting a good result. After all, it’s in their interests to have a happy customer — one who will return and spend more money on renting more names. That said, choose wisely. Some brokers of direct mail lists are nothing short of crooks, and they’re just interested in selling you as many names as they can for whatever price they can get.

Before choosing your list broker, spend time to ask a lot of questions, and ask them for examples of successful mailings carried out using their direct mail lists, especially mailings in your particular market. Then run a small test mailing to see whether the list really does respond to your offer before going ahead and spending good money on a mailshot to the whole list. Don’t invest thousands on untested direct mail lists just because they’re offered at a substantial “one time only” discount.

Don’t let anybody fool you — creating a winning direct mail campaign isn’t easy.

But spend time finding the right broker and the right direct mail lists, and you have a much better chance of making the whole thing a success, and that means money in the bank — which is what direct mail is really all about.

Knowing how to analyse direct mail statistics is one of the most important skills you can master if you run direct mail campaigns.

Without knowing what the numbers actually mean, you could be spending money and not getting much, if anything, in return, and that means your business could be heading for the bankruptcy court and you wouldn’t even know it.

Direct mail statistics tell us maybe 1in 8 campaigns make money. The rest don't. But if you don't track them, you'll never know what works and what doesn't

In effect, you could be wasting thousands of pounds a year —or even tens of thousands of pounds a year —without the slightest clue you’re doing it, just because you don’t collect, analyse and then act on the direct mail statistics from your campaigns.

A sobering thought, and yet so many businesses which sell by direct mail don’t have any process in place to analyse direct mail response statistics. Even worse, some businesses don’t even bother to collect the stats in the first place, and so can’t analyse the numbers even if they wanted to. It makes for one of those marketing conundrums: many people say direct mail doesn’t work, but they don’t even have the numbers to prove it one way or the other.

The upshot is, if you want to plan and execute a successful direct mail campaign the crucial lesson you need to learn is the importance of getting direct mail statistics in the first place.

It’s absolutely essential to measure the effectiveness of every piece you send, and collecting your direct mail marketing statistics is the first step on that important journey.

Once you have some data on your “junk mail” (and that’s what a lot of people still call it) you can begin to analyse all those advertising facts and statistics to see exactly what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, which enables you to do more of the good stuff and cut out the bad.

Following this simple process of finding the good stuff — and improving on it — will mean you eventually have a winning piece of direct mail which can be used over and again, and that means only one thing: money in the bank.

So with a huge amount of direct mail stats staring you in the face, the big question is: “What exactly do you analyse?”

The right direct mail statistics

There’s a lot of confusion about this, and a lot of it is caused by people who should know better, and by that I mean marketing consultants and copywriters. Many of them will swear the most important direct mail statistics by a long way is the response rate, which means the number of people who respond to your letter or postcard expressed as a percentage of the total.

Many businesses look at direct mail response stats, and because they have a high response rate — or what they perceive is a high response rate — believe everything is fine. So they constantly think about what direct mail conversion rate to expect, and what should be the average statistics for response when mailing a client list in a particular market. For some marketers this becomes an obsession, and all other metrics go out the window. After all, the thinking goes, the more people respond to your offer, the better.

Well, this is true, but only to a certain extent. All things being equal, a high response rate is much better than a low response rate — and definitely better than a “no response rate”. (Incidentally, you’ll almost always find a mailing to a cold list gets a much lower response rate than a mailing to a warm list, especially if mailing to your own house list.) But in the end the response rate really is only a small part of the picture. The most important number is not the direct mail response statistics, but the return on investment (ROI). It’s very possible to do very well with a very low response rate, and do very badly indeed with a very high response rate.

In some cases, direct mail statistics for response can be deceptive

It’s best to illustrate this with an example.

Say there are two campaigns, and both come back with wildly-varying response rates (as they always do).

Campaign A, a 10,000-piece direct mail campaign to a targeted list, costs £10,000 and the direct marketing statistics analysis confirms a tiny response rate of 0.5%.

Campaign B is also a 10,000-piece campaign to a targeted list, but costs just £5,000, and the conversion rate for direct mail comes in at a very healthy 5%.

Most people would say the direct mail stats show Campaign B is the clear winner. After all, it brought in 500 customers, whereas Campaign A brought in just 50 customers. On top of this, Campaign B brought in each customer at a meagre cost-per-acquisition of just £10, whereas Campaign A’s cost-per-acquisition was a whopping £200.

Ouch!

Or so it seems… until you factor in that Campaign A is selling top-of-the-range luxury cars with a price tag of £80,000, and Campaign B is selling ugly plastic table lamps costing £8.

Campaign A makes a fortune, while Campaign B loses money

This is why the statistical response rate on direct mail can be one of the most misleading marketing statistics of all, while the ROI statistics are the most important statistics bar none.

In the end, the response rate is almost meaningless, because even a “bad” response rate is good if it earns you a great ROI.

So whenever you look at direct mail statistics, whether it’s from a particular year (such as direct mail statistics from, say, 2010) or from a particular country (such as the US postal direct mail statistics), always remember the ROI is the important factor.

A high response is usually a good thing, but a high return on investment is the thing that really matters at the end of the day, and is the thing with the most effect on that most important business metric — your profits.

Fact: direct mail design is not only one of the most important elements of direct mail templates or, indeed any direct mail piece… but it is also one of the most poorly understood.

Fig 1: Direct mail design, when done right, can easily improve responses by 60% or more

The BIG Direct Mail Design Con: Aesthetics Sell

They don’t. In fact, ugly direct mail design often works best. You’ll often hear it said by advertisement designers and other “creative” marketing types, “you need whitespace… whitespace sells“. Not only does this make no sense at all, but it’s not borne out by the evidence. In countless tests over the years it’s almost always the case the more copy there is in a piece, the more sales it makes.

It’s not always true, because good short copy will do better than bad long copy, but all things being equal it’s as close to a certainty as we ever get in marketing.

And if whitespace sells… then, surely, the ultimate ad would simply be a blank page.

“No, of course not“, the creative designer shrills… “you have to tell them what it’s about!”

Exactly. And… you do that with copy.

What’s more… the more you tell, the more you sell. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of direct response marketing here, because it’s not the place for it. You can either read this article here, or you can simply take it on faith for now and then study the detail at your leisure.

For now, I want to focus very tightly on direct mail design, and give you a simple direct mail marketing template you can use pretty much anywhere. If your catalog designers, or direct mail design and marketing agency won’t follow these guidelines, then you need to find one one that will. Because as Fig 1 shows bad direct mail design is the kiss of death to any direct mail campaign.

Because I want to caution you: I guarantee if you take these tips along to your advertisement designers, your design and marketing agency or whoever is running your print design services, they will loathe them.

They will bombard you will all sorts of fancy talk about colour choice, branding, aesthetics and other gobbledegook… but one thing they won’t talk about is specific measurement of response and ROI.

If they do this, there is a very simple answer. All you have to do is suggest they create two versions of the ad or marketing piece: one like they want to do it, and one like you want them to do it. And then tell them you’ll test both ads alongside one another in a split test. And the one whose ad performs worst in terms of measurable return on investment pays the fee for both ads. May the best direct mail design win, and all that.

My guess is you won’t find anyone willing to do that. They are full of puffery and high ideas, but they won’t put their money where it counts.They will be very free with their ideas when it’s your money on the line.

And direct mail design is just as important as the copy (not many copywriters know that, or want to admit it).

Fundamentals of Direct Mail Design

The premise we’re working from is simply this: to bring you a positive ROI, your ads and other marketing pieces have to be responded to.

To be responded to, they have to be comprehended.

And to be comprehended, they have to be read.

This sequence of events, presented in reverse above, is inescapable. Because if your ads aren’t being read, they’re not being understood, and if they’re not being understood, they cannot be responded to. None of this is theory and it’s all backed up with peer-reviewed research in Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes?, by C. Wheildon.

It’s worth getting the book if you’re into reading nerdy stuff as much as I am, but if you’re more interested in just using what we know tends to work best, then this is enough.

In short, Wheildon tested people in a rigorous scientific manner and measured the results against their comprehension after reading various texts in a number of layouts, designs, fonts and colours.

You might think comprehension is a long way from sales, but no. If comprehension increases it can do so only because the text is being read more. And higher readership must needs lead to a higher response. I strongly urge you to start with the layout, format and fonts shown below.

Once you have a baseline result from that, then you can fiddle and fart around being as creative as you like.

You’re going to get it in the neck from your website people and graphic designers, but just remember who’s working for whom, eh?

Direct Mail Design – layout

The image below, Fig 2. shows a pretty much ideal direct mail design template. If nothing else, it is a place to start with your direct mail design, and you can adapt it to a postcard design template, a direct mail brochure, images for website design, and any form of printing and design where you want a response. Postcard graphic design is especially vulnerable to bad design, because the designers seem, perhaps unwittingly, to follow the lead of the holiday and vacation postcards (picture on one side, a little text on the other). Big mistake. All the principles of direct mail design apply to postcard design templates as well as letters and more traditional pieces.

You can click on the image and open it up full-size in another tab and then print it. A barrel of laughs giving that to your design guy or gal, I can tell you.

Fig 2: Ideal direct mail design template

It’s all very straightforward and there are solid reasons for everything being where it is, and all backed up with peer-reviewed research and evidence. In brief, the reason for the image in the top right is that’s where the eye enters the page. Faces are good because they draw the eye, and a caption underneath it has very high readership.

If you simply must have a full-width image at the top of your page, have it above your headline. If you don’t, the picture draws the eye and then it sinks down under something called reading gravity. The upshot is, your headline won’t get read – and that’s the most important part of your marketing piece or ad because it tells the reader what it’s all about (just one example of how bad design can make or break a direct mail piece).

The bottom left corner is a fallow corner. Copy there is often missed, so it’s a good place for an image. And the bottom right corner, the terminal anchor is the last thing the eye sees before the reader takes the next action, whether it’s to move to the next page or follow the instructions in the call to action.

As you can see, there is science behind this.

Direct Mail Design – typography

Most creative designer design a direct mail brochure, ad or letter to be first and foremost visually appealing. And they extend this muddled thinking to the typography, and not just the layout

Your body copy should be fully justified, and set in dark ink on light background. Black on white is fine; black on ivory is perhaps best.

If you’re designing a marketing letter or ad for print, then use a serif font — in most cases I use Adobe Caslon Pro, or if I’m doing something to appear in a publication, I’ll do my best to match the font they use for their editorial.

The main part of my own paper-print newsletter is in Corona. The font size is 11pt with 13pt leading. I use this because it’s a good old-fashioned font that’s easy to read, something essential for comprehension (this isn’t just about direct mail design and advertising — I want people to read my newsletter and understand it, so they stay on as subscribers).

If you are going create something for online reading, like a web-page or a PDF, then the body copy would perhaps be better as a sans-serif font like Arial.

Indented first line of every paragraph, with the exception of the first paragraph under a headline or a body subheading.

The main headline and any subheadings can be in a sans serif font. In this case it’s Helvetica, but Arial is another option. Do not go for fancy, cursive headlines the GD tells you is “eye catching”; and whatever you do, do NOT have patterned backgrounds or, worse, have a photo behind the copy.

You don’t want people “looking at” it… you want them reading it. Paintings, photos and sexy women are for looking at; ads, direct mail and marketing postcards are for reading.

The kicker (the copy below the headline) is serif and italics, which is fine, but tests show Helvetica and other sans-serif fonts are OK, too.

The thing to watch with headlines and any background images is too many bright colours.

There’s a balance to be made between eye-catching and comprehension. A bright-red, for instance, can be overwhelming and  keep distracting the eye to the point where it becomes impossible for some people to concentrate.

Generally I tend to stick to black, Navy blue (hex colour #23238E), or dark red (hex colour #990000). There’s also no punctuation at the end of the headline. This is deliberate.

You’ll notice we’re using three columns. That gives us around 38 characters per column, which is right in the middle of the preferred range (over 20 under 60). My own newsletter has two columns, at about 46 characters per column.

In Conclusion

The principles behind effective direct mail design are well understood, simple to grasp and astonishingly powerful.

You’ll also find your creative costs are a lot less, because you’re not paying the design and marketing agency, creative designers, and print design services for expensive creative services (and full colour ads!) you simply don’t need.

Finally… don’t take my word for any of this. It’s easy to test and measure in your next direct mailing campaign. If I’m wrong you won’t have lost anything and you’ll have learned something, too. But if I’m right, which science tells me I am… then you can look forward to a substantial boost in your profits.

You might not realise this yet, but direct mail response rates are perhaps the biggest and most misleading con in the whole direct marketing biz.

Why?

Well there are several reasons…  and many myths about response rates and direct mail statistics, most of which are perpetuated by canny and sometimes dishonest and downright sneaky providers of direct mail marketing services.

Direct mail response rates don’t matter

OK, let me be more accurate: they do matter, but not as much as you think they might and certainly not as much as some people would like you to believe.

Why don’t they matter?

Because getting “a response” is not difficult. I could send you a parcel of dead frogs in a dimensional direct mail package and while I might get a response, it’s unlikely to be a response I would actually like.

Two cases from the dim and distant past come to mind here.

First, a client planned a direct mail marketing campaign around a very poorly chosen list (against my explicit recommendation, I might add).

The list was 500 names long, and she got something like 30 responses. On the face of it, that’s not bad as direct mail response rates to cold lists go: 0.6%.

But the problem was the responses ranged from “don’t ever send me this crap again”, to much, much worse. Not the kind of thing to inspire confidence and get you brimming over with creative direct mail ideas for another bash at it, eh?

The second case was a chap I new who sent something like 15,000 pieces to an untested list. His response rate was around 2.8%, which is fantastic for a cold direct mail campaign. Any direct mail copywriter would be, on the face of it, be glad to get direct mail response rates like this.

Alas, all 430 of them were “goneaways” and the unpleasant “don’t ever send me this crap again” responses, just like the lady above.

A better measure than direct mail response rates

Is… conversion rate.

Or, in other words, how many of those responses ended up with the prospect taking the action you most wanted them to take, which can be anything from buying something, joining your mailing list, asking for some more information, calling a free number to listen to a message and leaving their details, or whatever you choose.

This might sound like mere semantics, but it’s not: many “gurus” and other industry “experts” will toss around direct mail response rates as an indicator of their greatness, and as you’re now beginning to appreciate, this ain’t necessarily so.

It’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask them “never mind your direct mail response rates… what was your conversion rate?”.

Don’t be surprised to get a frosty response to that.

But wait!

There’s more!

A EVEN better measure than direct mail conversion rates

Is your Return on Investment, or ROI.

What does this mean?

Simple: it’s the difference between the amount of money the direct mail campaign cost you and the amount of money it made you when all the dust has settled.

This is where it can get a bit tricky, and you have to do a bit of work.

Because the obvious thing to assume is the initial wave of cash coming in is all you’re going to get.

And while this may be true, if you’re being smart about things you’ll realise the ROI needs to take into account the long-term customer or client value. In other words, if you have a back-end sale in the pipeline or you’re in a business where you naturally get repeat sales, then you need to take this into account when figuring out your ROI.

From this it follows if you’re using direct mail for lead-generation, or you do have a funnel and a back-end, then you can typically afford to break-even or even lose money on the direct mail campaign, because you know the long-term customer value is going to put your ROI into the black over time. This is how effective small business marketing works – it’s all about taking the long view.

Take it from me: while your direct mail response rate might not be completely irrelevant, it’s not as important or clear-cut as you might have thought.

Here are three free small business marketing tips you can get doing the ‘hard work ‘ for you in your marketing … and they won’t cost you a single penny.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips -- Fast and Easy, But They Won't Implement Themselves. In this short article, I share with you the easy way to put them to work for you.

That’s a huge promise, I know, but it’s one I stand by and mean to keep. But there is one warning: merely reading this piece and “knowing about” these tips won’t do a thing for you. You actually have to roll your sleeves up and put them to work for you.

But don’t let that put you off. Most marketing tips for the small business really are not that onerous or difficult to implement (and once you start seeing results, you’re going to be motivated to do even more of it).

These quick, easy and very, very simple tips for marketing your small business really could make the difference between success and failure for your business.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No 1: Raise your prices

Of all the free small business marketing tips I could ever give you, this is the quickest, easiest and most profitable.

There are perhaps 3 people in the whole world who always buy on price only (and you do not want them as customers anyway).

Every other person has more important things to bother with, like suitability, dependability, delivery time, excellence, value, support and all the rest. In one analysis only 14 % of participants said price was the most important factor for them; that means 86 % of them had other, more pressing concerns.

If you jack up your prices immediately, say by just 10 %, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll see no decrease in sales but you are going to see a substantial rise in revenues. Keep in mind, that extra 10 % is all profit, because the cost of your sale remains the same as it was. You might probably lose the odd client occasionally … but it’s unlikely, and even if you do, they’re the kind of customers and clients you can most likely do very well without.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No. 2: Cultivate referrals

Referred business is the most lucrative business to get, and the easiest to close the sale on — since all the hard work of cultivating trust has been done for you by whomever referred the business to you. In my own business, I don’t take on private clients from anything BUT referrals, because the business is such high quality. This is one of the very best marketing ideas for small business, and particularly for local small business marketing. It’s an essential component of our marketing mix.

Problem is, most of us don’t do anything to stimulate or encourage referrals. Like sunny days, we’re just happy when they come along.

Yet we can effortlessly turn this situation about by having a scheme of asking customers and clients one simple question: “whom do you know who requires the same kind of help I’ve just provided you?“. You could get on the phone and ask your top 20 % of customers that question today. This is one of the most powerful free small business marketing tips money can buy.

Better yet, we can even create our sales process so a customer agreeing to give us referrals is one of the conditions of doing business with us in the first place. You can say, in effect, “one of the preconditions of our doing business together is you recommend me to your people you know IF I do a fantastic job for you“.

This takes courage, but, believe me, it works.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No. 3: Position yourself as an industry guru

One of the best advertising ideas for small businesses is to get yourself firmly emplaced as the local “expert”.

Look through any tabloid, local or national, and you’ll find “specialists” holding forth with opinions varied and diverse from haircuts and horticulture, and finance and fishtanks. Just who are these people and why does anybody concern themselves anything they say? Well, they’re simply just men and women much like you and I — entrepreneurs with specialist knowledge of their area of competence.

And the only difference is… they’re in the paper and you are not.

Why is this?

This is all a hell of a lot less trouble than it sounds and a lot less scary, too. Some years ago I had a monthly column in the local monthly publication. It boiled down to approximately 30 minutes’ effort a month to write up, and yielded thousands of Euro in business. It really is one of the top small business ideas, because while it can take a bit of time and perseverance, when it comes together, the payback is fast and HUGE.

So there you have it three free small business marketing tips you can set to work for you right away, they won’t cost you a dime to have a stab at all of them, and any one of them could give a substantial bump to your bottom line.

A small business marketing plan is essential for the long-term survival of any business. But the truth is, not  many business owners actually planned to be in the business they find themselves in, and once they were in it, paid scant attention to planning the future — including me. It’s often a case of us chasing a dream, doing something we like to do, rather than a reasonable and well considered small business marketing plan.

Small Business Marketing Plan - 3 Vital Steps

A typical error seems to be they presume if they’re good at doing the “thing”, then they can operate a “thing” business, too.

Sadly, this is typically not true. And the BIG problem is few people understand whatever business they assume they’re in, they’re truly in the marketing of the business they’re in. To put it otherwise, if you sell widgets, you’re not in the “widget business”: you’re in fact in the “marketing of a widget business business”. Otherwise, you’re really just working in a “job” where you are your own boss. And you end up working harder and making less.

So in this article we ‘ll look at what I’ve found in my long experience to be the 3 most important components of any effective small business marketing plan. And if you need help starting a small business, or are wondering how to market a small business or even how to make business plan, then this is article is going to make your day.

There is a lot more, to be sure, but if you can get the knack of these 3, then this alone is going to put you head and shoulders above your competitors.

Small business marketing plan step 1. Your Raison d’Etre

Why does your business exist?

If you responded anything other than “to make money”, then you might want to think again about your career.

This is not a money-grubbing attitude to take. No matter what the eventual aim of your business, it’s got to pay its own way so it can meet salary, pay its bills and keep up with its commitments.

All of this means you’ve got to be making sales — and this does have to be your target. This is why a small business marketing plan is so vital: it gives you something to aim for and measure against.

What’s more, this is no way contradicts what I say below about fostering long-term relationships rather than focusing on immediate sales. Quite the reverse, because, by serving rather than selling, you ‘ll end up selling MORE over the long term.

What is does NOT mean, though, is fixating on each prospect or customer as if he or she was the last one you were ever going to get. That’s the quick way to the nut-house, and you don’t make any extra sales while you’re on your way there, either.

Yes, you have to make sales and you have to have customers and clients … but no single one of them is indispensable. If they are, then your business is in a very precarious position and you need to do something about, and soon.

Small business marketing plan step 2. Serve, not sell

The very first sale you make to a customer or client is often insignificant in monetary terms because the real value is always going to be in the following sales you make. The lifetime client value, in other words. Even if you’re in a tiny corner store with lots of pass-through traffic, you will still have your regulars. These are the people your small business marketing plan must focus on.

Not many business owners truly understand this, and needlessly waste a lot of time and effort chasing fresh business without properly cultivating and nurturing the relationships with the customers they currently have.

In my experience, it’s often held true I make more money in my relationship with a client in the long term by talking them out of an early and to my mind unsuitable purchase. And any small business marketing plan must be looking at the long term, not just expediency.

Small business marketing plan step 3. Follow up till they plead for mercy

The most successful entrepreneurs know the key to success in business is tenacious follow-up.

In other words, the more you tell, the more you sell.

Your prospects of selling something to someone on the first pass are commonly pretty slender, and even in my business, which is in an industry not usually noted for its long sales cycle, I frequently get first-time buyers who have been on my email list for (literally) years and have only at that moment decided to buy.

So the first part of your small business marketing plan must be to ensure you a follow-up system in place, and preferably have it comprise email, direct mail, and even faxes and voice calls.

Running a prosperous small business isn’t difficult and these 3 highly effective tips for a sensible small business marketing plan will go a long way making it happen for you.

The marketing mix was first described by Neil Borden in 1953, but what most business owners don’t realise is this idea of Borden’s was just a rehash of a previous idea by his colleague, James Culliton, some five years previously.

And then in 1960 E. Jerome McCarthy distilled the marketing mix down to the “f0ur P’s”: price, product, place, promotion. While all four of these are important, I maintain the most important of them by far is promotion.

The reason I say this is price, and product can frequently be repositioned in the buyer’s mind by effective marketing, and, similarly, the location can be made unimportant.

So in this post, when we talk about the marketing mix, we’re really focusing on the different channels of marketing our products and services to our prospects.

A rich marketing mix is essential if you want your business to be on safe ground in any marketplace

But the vast majority of business owners are not using an effective marketing mix.

Marketing Mix - Essential for a Strong Foundation for Your Business

In fact, most businesses, at best, are focusing on just one or two forms of marketing.

But is this really so bad?

I mean, if you have discovered one or two forms of marketing that are working for you, then… all is good, right?

Well yes, all is ok… at least… for now.

But… what are you going to do if the two forms of marketing that are currently working for your business all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, just stop working?

Tomorrow, the ad you are running in the daily rag may, for whatever reason, stop pulling a profitable response, your Google Adwords account may get shut down, your website may get hacked or your postal service goes on strike and your direct mail gets lost, etc.

I am not trying to be pessimistic here, but I’ve seen this happen in real life. A few years back when fax marketing was to all intents and  purposes made illegal, one fellow’s business was left dead in the water – no marketing mix, you see. Around the same time, a lady I knew, whose business revolved solely around her Facebook list was left high and dry when her account was pulled.

Bottom line: if you are keeping all your eggs in one basket, then you’re not only asking for trouble, you are leaving the majority of the market open for your competitors to quietly corner the market, right under your nose!

Use an effective marketing mix to attract people who are currently slipping under your radar

The fact is…

Not all your prospective customers and clients will be found through one or two channels – that is the method you use to make yourself visible to your market, e.g. direct mail, classified ads, TV slots, SEO and PPC, etc – in fact, I can guarantee you are targeting only a tiny fraction of the total market if you are not extending your reach over several different channels and then using multiple media within those channels. In other words, you should be using a rich and robust marketing mix.

And by media, I mean how you are communicating with your prospects through each channel…

For example; in direct mail you could be using mediums such as sales letters, advertising, CDs and DVDs and on the Internet you could be using mediums such as webinar, video, and online sales letters.

See, everybody responds differently to different types of media. Some people will respond better to one medium than another. For example; you may find some prospects will respond better to a video sales letter than a written one, whilst others find video annoying and prefer to read… and vice versa.

The Ideal Marketing Mix

For your marketing to be as effective as possible you need to be targeting your niche crowd using all the available channels available and with multiple media through each channel, then testing to see what is working, and what isn’t. Once you know what’s working, then you can tweak the good stuff to and optimise your marketing mix to supply your business with optimum results.

This may all seem complicated and sound like a lot of work, at the minute. But soon you will realise just how fun the marketing game is…

Enjoy playing the detective to find the hot buttons of your targeted audience, playing the strategist when plotting the words, colours and designs you use in your messages…

… and then, play the scientist when testing and measuring to predictably grow your business to any level you desire!

Once you’ve got your marketing mix tuned in to the market, the world, as they sat, is the bivalve of your choice.