“Misunderstood” might not exactly be the way a lot of of us might phrase it, but we do get a lot of questions about postcard design. Hopefully, this post will explain some of the more common issues many of us face when creating postcards.Postcards have gone from being a fixture of personal correspondences to an indispensable direct marketing tool. The relatively low price coupled with great return rates make postcards a great investment for any business. But how should you design your postcards? There’s no single way to go about this, but follow a few simple guidelines and you’ll pretty much have it made!
Postcard Design Tips You Don’t Want To Ignore.Find out what your local postal service has to say about postcard specifications. It would be a shame to invest so much time on a postcard design to find out that it’s actually unmailable as is. If you’re going with a printing service, they should be able to tell you just what you need. The diagram below is for 6 x 11 postcards, but you could scale it up or down for other sizes.Context. Make sure your designs are tailored towards your target audience. That means if your design has girl with bikinis on it, it might not work very well if your target market includes a lot of little old ladies. Likewise, a design with macrame angels might not work so well for younger people.
Call to Action. This is the whole point of sending out your postcards in the first place! While direct-mailing with postcards usually nets a relatively high response rate in relation to expenses, it would be so much better to try what you could to fine-tune your design. An improvement of even half a percent can potentially translate into thousands of additional responses.
Weigh your printing costs. We’re a printing company and it might seem obvious that we’d advise against printing at home. Printing at home is fine, but you have to know that making a one-off or more than just a handful of prints is almost always more expensive than going with a professional printer. Home printing simply does not offer the economy of scale offered by industrial offset and digital printers. If you’re about to go on a direct mailing campaign, home printing simply makes no economic sense.
