What is Postcard Marketing?

Postcard marketing is a traditional method of reaching out to customers through personalised, visually appealing cards. These tangible pieces of marketing material can be customised to convey your brand’s message effectively. A forgotten art, but exactly why it can help you stand out.

Postcards captivate attention and establish a tangible connection with your audience, fostering a more memorable interaction. The ability to infuse postcards with personalised details adds a touch of warmth, making recipients feel valued and appreciated. Postcards also boast a high open rate, since it’s difficult to ignore physical mail, so it guarantees that your message doesn’t go unnoticed. Their versatility further enhances their appeal, allowing them to seamlessly transition from promotions to commemorating special events, making postcard marketing a multifaceted and impactful tool in your marketing arsenal.

Combine Postcards with Your Email Marketing

The magic happens when you seamlessly integrate postcards into your existing email marketing strategy. The fusion of email marketing and postcard marketing reveals a dynamic duo that can build your email strategy to new heights. By combining the immediacy of emails with the tangible charm of postcards, marketers can engage audiences on multiple fronts.

The personalised touch of postcards, coupled with the efficiency of email, creates an impactful omnichannel approach. Postcards serve as an attention-grabbing tool for a more detailed email campaign. While design limitations on a postcard’s relatively small canvas mean restricting the amount of information conveyed, this can be balanced with a more informative email campaign. This seamless integration ensures that your brand message is not only noticed but also remembered, fostering a deeper connection with your audience. Together, these mediums form a winning strategy that captivates, resonates, and ultimately drives customer engagement to unprecedented levels.

Here are a few tips to strike the perfect balance:

Consistent Branding: Infuse your postcards with a design and messaging that harmonises seamlessly with your brand identity. This consistency across channels contributes to building a unified and memorable customer experience.

Coordinated Messaging: Coordinate the content of your postcards with your email campaigns. This creates a reinforcing effect, making your message more impactful.

Timely Delivery: Timing is everything. Enhance the anticipation of your promotions by orchestrating the delivery of postcards to align with your email campaigns. For instance, sending a postcard a few days before a promotional email can create a sense of excitement and expectation.

Trackable Elements: Use trackable elements on your postcards, such as QR codes or unique URLs, to monitor customer engagement and gather valuable data.

How to implement postcard and email marketing

What can be difficult in postcard marketing is surprisingly the personalisation element. Having to segment out your audience and add personal touches while also sticking to your brand identity can be a daunting task especially if you want to do this on a large scale, let alone when you want to combine it with your email marketing campaign. All these elements can be hard to keep track of, however with an email marketing automation platform, such as Maileon, you can count on all this information being in one place.

Streamlining your omnichannel mix becomes efficient when all your data and campaign designs reside in a unified platform. With a Print.One integration, you can send out some lovely personalised postcards directly to your clients and partners. You can start as quickly as tomorrow if you have a Zapier connection. You can also segment groups precisely how you want to, and effortlessly incorporate design elements that showcase your brand. The versatility of Print.One liberates you from timing constraints, allowing you to dispatch postcards at your convenience—whether for a single piece or large-scale orders—with swift turnaround times, eliminating the need for restrictive order sizes. Perfect for special client occasions such as birthdays.

In the realm of postcard and email marketing, it’s all about finding that sweet spot – a strategic balance that turns pitfalls into triumphs and transforms best practices into game-changers. Here are the dos and don’ts of this omnichannel marketing mix

Do:

• Segment Your Audience: Organise your postcards and emails based on customer segments for a more targeted approach. Reach the right customer with the right message, at the right time.
• Add a Personal Touch to Your Postcards: Just like you use personalisation in your emails, your postcards will benefit.
• Keep it Consistent: Maintain a consistent brand voice and messaging across both channels.

Don’t:

• Overwhelm Your Audience: Be mindful of frequency to avoid overwhelming your audience with too many messages.
• Forget the Follow-Up: Use postcards as a touchpoint to encourage customers to engage further with your email campaigns.
• Forget the opt-out button: Some people might be sensitive to paper use, so make sure that even with postcards people can opt out.

5 Strategic Examples

Unlocking the power of postcard and email marketing doesn’t stop at theory – it’s all about the application. So, let’s dive into these 5 strategic examples we have for you, and roll up your sleeves to see how you can seamlessly weave postcards into your email marketing strategy.

1. Welcome postcards to new clients and/or partners:

Make your new clients or partners feel welcome with a warm postcard, and express your gratitude for choosing your brand. Combine this with your welcomes campaign, where you provide them with all the information they need to get around your shop or services. Include a call-to-action that directs them to their first step or include a thank you promotion code. Even a plain welcome can really make a difference.

2. Postcards for Special Events (e.g., Birthday, Christmas, Easter):

Who doesn’t like a postcard at Christmas or on their birthday? This is one of those postcards that doesn’t need a reason or a promotion, the card will speak for itself. It will tell customers you care about them. With a touch of personalisation, you will stand out from the crowd. Leave the email campaign to do your promoting, the card will remind them to open your emails.

3. Big Promotions (e.g., Summer Sales, Black Friday Deals):

Announce your big promotions with eye-catching postcards. Use these to build anticipation before sending out detailed promotional emails with enticing offers. You can also celebrate some of your best customers with an exclusive sneak peek postcard to tease upcoming products. This will build up anticipation and curiosity, leading your audience to subscribe to your email list for further updates.

4. Re-engagement Campaign:

Nothing worse than losing a great customer. Use a postcard to revive this dormant customer relationship with a thoughtful ‘We Miss You’ or ‘How have you been?’. If your email re-engagement campaign hasn’t worked yet, it might after this. The postcard will illustrate that you care and you have noticed them. Watch and you’ll notice how your emails will get opened after that.

5. Customer Milestone Celebrations:

Delve into the joy of your customers’ milestones, whether it’s the anniversary of their partnership with your brand or hitting a loyalty milestone. Make it personal with tailor-made postcards that reflect their journey, and then extend the celebration with an email campaign with exclusive offers – because milestones deserve more than just a pat on the back; they deserve a personalised party that resonates with their unique relationship with your brand.

In a world dominated by digital noise, the fusion of postcard and email marketing offers a refreshing and effective approach. By harnessing the tactile appeal of postcards and the immediacy of email, you can create a compelling omnichannel strategy that engages and resonates with your audience. Experiment, personalise, and watch the synergy unfold as you combine the best of both worlds in your marketing endeavours. For more information on a Maileon and Print.One implementation, get in touch with us here.