Keep in Touch With Your Past Customers

In marketing it is generally accepted that it is cheaper to get past customers to make additional purchases than to get new customers.  By keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis with new offers you achieve a better return on marketing investment than by sending out mass mailings trolling for new customers.

It is a fairly simple and inexpensive process to create a postcard mailing to your existing customer base.

The Customer List

The first thing you need to do is keep a list of your customers.  Some old time retailers keep their list by creating index cards with customer contact information.  Over the years they add personal information like birthdays and significant purchases.  The problem with this paper system is that each mailing must be hand addressed.

Luckily, I operated my jewelry store in the modern age and created my customer database on computer.  This way I could mail my customers without hand addressing postcards.  There are many good customer and contact management software in the marketplace.  In my case I found that Act! was a simple and intuitive software.

With my list in Act! not only could I send personalized letters through Microsoft Word, I could generate pressure sensitive labels in just a few minutes to use on postcard mailings.  Keeping the list up to date by correcting changed addresses is good for keeping mailing costs down.  Each time you send out a mailing you will get a certain percentage back as changed address.  Go ahead and change the customer address in your database so the next mailing does not repeat these mailing errors.

Creating the Postcard

Postcard Designed at Design Outpost

This is the part of the process that seems to intimidate the most of my friends who are retailers.  Many of them are not creative and the idea of sending out sub-standard marketing materials is a real risk best avoided.  I am about to give you my best marketing secret, one that each of them has called me later to get specifics on.

There is a website called Design Outpost that is a blessing to small business.  This site offers access to graphic artists around the world.  The way this website works is that you offer an amount for your project that you fund in advance.  The site has minimums but you can offer more if you want more designers to participate.  I consider the minimums to be quite low, $150 for the design of a postcard.

After you fund the project the website sets up a bulletin board style forum for your project.  First you upload the digital images you took for your project.  These do not have to be professional quality because the designers will crop, brighten, and drop out the background for you.  The images just need to be large enough for print quality.  For this purpose you need at least a 3 megapixel camera. 

You will then describe your project, what you hope to gain, who is your target audience, and what colors and style you are looking for. Then the competition begins.  Graphic artists will start mocking up designs and you get to ask for modifications. 

The designers will also offer stock photography that they will eventually purchase, if their design is chosen, from a royalty free stock photo site.  You can also purchase this photography for a few dollars, royalty free, from websites like iStockPhoto and include it in the project description.  I purchased the girl in the photo on the right from iStockPhoto for $3 and had her superimposed into my shower picture. 

This goes on for a week or two, until you reach the deadline you set.  The designers tend to not work too far in advance, so until your project gets near a week before deadline you may not get too many participants.  Then you choose the design that you like best and the thread is moved to a private revisions forum so you and the chosen designer work out the final revisions.

Visit the competition I set up for a business logo to see how the process works.

Printing and Fulfillment

While the next step is sending your newly designed artwork to the postcard printing company, you will have already chosen the printer before having the card designed at Design Outpost.  Each printing company makes their template available on their website and you will have included the link in the project description for the designers to follow.

I have used various printing companies for different projects.  Modern Postcard is a company I use when I want the cards printed and also mailed.  You will send them the design file and also the customer list.  Modern Postcard will process your file with the National Change of Address list to ensure it is up to date.  They will then inkjet the addresses from your list onto the printed card and mail them out with their postal indicia.

The cost per piece drops dramatically with the increase in print quantity so when I want to print more postcards than I will send in a single mailing I do the fulfillment myself.  I get the postcards printed and delivered to me, print adhesive address labels from Act!, and put them on the postcards (alright, I actually bribe my wife and kids to do it).  I have found very low prices and great quality from Overnight Prints.  They even offer rounded corners which I find to be a very nice touch.  2,000 4 x 6 cards run about $100.

The largest card you can use with the lower priced postcard rate is 4 x 6.  I recently wanted to send out a larger 6 x 9 size card and found very good rates at PsPrint.  They have an online estimator for the various options so you know exactly what you will pay.  The quality was a little less than Overnight Prints but definitely acceptable.   Unlike past projects where I mailed to my customer list I decided to purchase a list of new movers.  This is because my current business does not lend itself like the jewelry business to repeat purchasers.

I was able to purchase a list of people who had moved into their homes in the last 9 months in the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas from InfoUSA.   But back to the point of this article, the options for mailing a professional quality postcard for a reasonable cost makes it viable for small retailers to keep in touch with their customers on a regular basis.