In order to understand what your postcard printing needs to accomplish you need to first understand how postcards work as marketing devices.
Looking just at the postcard itself, a postcard is obviously quite small and only two sided. Given the small size the message you put on it naturally has to be quite small as well. If you start to get too many points you need to make then the postcard just isn’t going to be right for you.
The size also means you might have a delicate balance between images and text. All marketing needs strong images in order to do the best job, and this is certainly true for postcards. But if you start taking up too much space for images than you aren’t going to have as much space for text, limiting even further what you can say.
So to make a postcard do the best job possible you’ll often want to have a very short message. This might be just an invitation to come into your store and a declaration about an upcoming sale with a few brief details about it. That way you can use as much space as you want for the image while still have a strong message.
Now, the primary thing to consider with postcards is often going to be distribution. Unlike most other forms of advertising, postcard printing is often tied to a very specific means of getting it to the customers. This is direct mail marketing.
Using this approach you get a list of names and addresses and send your marketing directly to people. This form of marketing works well with a postcard because a full color postcard is going to grab the eye from a pile of mail, and you’re making sure that your marketing gets directly into a person’s hands.
The cost for printing postcards in bulk is cheap, along with the mailing costs for them, meaning you don’t have to break your budget by using this style of marketing.
This isn’t the only way to make use of postcards, merely the most recognized form. Postcards are by nature meant to be sent through the mail, so it isn’t surprising that this would be the most chosen method for getting your postcards to your customers.
But if you have a strong image and clear message with your postcards you can still hand them out at your store like flyers, or have a stack of them for people to take similar to business cards. The choose will always be yours, and your business or your area might naturally have a more unique and favorable method for delivering marketing material.
My point isn’t to say exactly what you should do, but to give you a feel for what a postcard is meant for, and how they are typically used. Now it’s up to you to figure out how to make them work best for your business.
