Meet the Mailers: Why are Postcards So Effective?

Since we revived Who’s Mailing What!, we’ve strived to support the direct mail marketing community as much as we can. Who’s Mailing What! provides creative inspiration and insights to marketers and industry vendors alike. And as we noted recently, we’ve made major improvements based on feedback to improve your customer experience.

Let’s face it: direct mail marketing is all about people. People who work hard every day – often in challenging conditions – to plan, write, design, print, and mail campaigns that generate response.

Introducing Our Video Interviews

What’s on the minds of direct mail marketers? Why does direct mail work today?

In our new video interview series, Meet the Mailers, we’ll get the answers to these and other questions.

We’ll be talking one-on-one with great performers from across our vast industry about their companies, jobs, and the exciting possibilities of direct mail.

Meet the Mailers – Episode 1: Joy Gendusa of PostcardMania

In this debut episode, I chatted with Joy Gendusa, Founder and CEO of PostcardMania. Her company helps small businesses grow using postcard marketing, as well as digital channels.

Joy credits continuous direct mail promotion as one of the keys to PostcardMania’s success, even when the pandemic hit in 2020:

She also said that it’s critical for any businesses mailing postcards to track their responses. Analyzing results tells you if your campaign has been successful:

We also talked about:

• What industries postcards work best for
• How to get testimonials from your customers – and use them on your mail
• Why direct mail gets attention and still works
• How to generate interest in the minds of your prospects
• What digital response device works well in 2021 and beyond
• Why integrated campaigns are the next great trend

• Do postcards equally work well for all industries?

Who I would not recommend postcards to are people who sell things that are $29.99. I would not recommend them to an author to get his book read or purchased. You need to have a product that’s either the lifetime value or the one year, like how much is somebody going to spend in a year?

Like a physical therapist maybe gets $90 for every visit. But if they get 10 visits a year, then you’ve made $900 and that’s kind of good. You kind of have to look at, “What is my return on investment?”. You know, somebody buys a widget and it’s kind of a spontaneous purchase and they’re not going to need it again. Bad business model.

• What is the biggest mistake marketers make in mailing postcards?

So many things, I mean, we have got this down to a science. They’re not analyzing the results, so they don’t really know unless they have some way to track the results of their clients. So if their clients aren’t forthcoming with the results they want, they don’t know if that campaign worked or not.

We’re so analytical about it. Like anybody who reorders and does the same design, we jump on that to find out what the data is. They’re not doing that. So there’s sort of shooting from the hip. We’ve come up with exactly what needs to be on that postcard to get the most eyeballs to your website as possible. So I think they just don’t have the data and maybe they just need to spend more time with you [Who’s Mailing What!]

• In your Postcard Marketing Guide, in the Chapter “Two-Step Marketing” you state that “The purpose of your postcard´s message is to generate a sufficient level of interest in the mind of your prospect”. What are the top ways to generate interest if you’re a small business?

In today’s society, everybody thinks that they’re entitled to free things. And if you look at why it’s like that – Google is free, I can’t live without Google. We all complain about Facebook, but it’s free. I have friends from high school that I hadn’t seen in a million years that I found on Facebook.

We’re entitled to these really valuable, free things. So the best thing a small business owner can do is figure out what is something they can give away with a super high perceived value that doesn’t cost them very much that then will entice somebody to go : “Okay. That’s valuable to me!”

And just to give you an example, like one of my favorites is an orthodontist: give away an iPad! You’re charging $5,000 for the braces. We know they’re not costing you that much. Give away an iPad. If your competitor doesn’t – you’ll get the kid!

• What industries are most and least likely to benefit from adding testimonials to their postcards?

I cannot think of any industry where it would not be beneficial to the marketer to have somebody else, especially with ratings and reviews…If you’re in a B2B, sometimes it’s harder to get ratings and reviews.

We figured it out. We’re B2B. We have over 900 Google reviews and a 4.7 star rating, which took us a long time to figure out how to pull that off. But it’s beneficial because people are looking for that before making a buying decision.

• We’ve seen over the years that the CTA used to be almost 100% for physical visits or phone calls. But today, there are a lot more QR codes or even PURLS. What are the advantages of using QR codes in direct mail marketing?

Even if you’re brick and mortar, even if you need your phone to ring, which I do, they [customers/prospects] are still going to your website first. So you have to have the call to action of driving them to the site.

The beautiful thing about QR codes is their trackability. If somebody gets to your site via QR code, you can find out who that individual is (not on the static mail – it’s one QR code for everybody).

What happened in 2020 is all the restaurants are not letting you touch menus. The general public has become really understandable. We’re all trained on QR codes now. So I just became a fan, especially for the trackability, especially with digital printing, because you can make every single QR code different, and you totally know exactly who from the mailing list is interested and then you can call that person. So I’m just like on fire about it.

• What do you see as the value proposition for direct mail compared to other channels, like social or web ads? Why does direct mail still work?

All these pop-ups and emails and things that are happening online, scrolling – it’s taking your attention from what you want to be doing, right? But when you go to the mailbox, you take that mail out of that mailbox on your own volition, you bring it into your house, you put it on the kitchen counter…When you decide to go through that mail and decide which pieces are going in the trash, and which pieces are going in this later pile – you’re making that decision at that moment and nothing is interrupting you. So all of your attention is on that direct mail piece.

And it gives credibility to the business too, because anybody, any scammer can come up with a website, photos, Instagram ads. You wonder, why are these brands still doing catalogs? Why am I still getting a stack of catalogs? Because it’s the credibility factor.

Thanks again to Joy for an interesting and informative chat! To learn more about PostcardMania, visit www.PostcardMania.com

Here is our conversation. We’ve added timecodes for your convenience.

Our Hopes for These Interviews

Your comments and ideas are very important to us in making your Who’s Mailing What! experience even better for you. Through these engaging and informative talks, we hope you’ll take away practical tips, insights, and stories to inspire and build your own success.

If you have any feedback – or are interested in being an interview star yourself – please reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you!