By Dave Coyne
One of the great advantages of advertising and marketing on the web is it’s cheaper than traditional print based promotions. No printing or photocopying fees. No postage costs.
And with email you can communicate to your prospect almost instantaneously.
So why bother with promoting your site offline?
The biggest reason is that most people are getting overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive, especially spam.
They may delete your message thinking it’s unsolicited email even though they have given you permission to contact them.
Also, the increasing use of anti-spam software to filter out unwanted mail is unfortunately targeting legitimate email as well.
I’ve been hearing a lot from other online publishers about the decreasing response to their email offers and how many of their customers and prospects aren’t getting their ezines anymore.
That’s why I suggest you supplement your online marketing with a bit offline promotion.
One of the cheapest forms of print advertising is postcards. (No, not the ones you send to Grandma while you’re on your Hawaiian vacation.)
The ones I’m referring to are blank. You feed them through your desktop printer as a full size sheet and then separate them along a perforated edge -- usually there’s four postcards on one sheet.
First, you need to write the headline and body copy for the postcard.
You don’t have a lot of room for your message. So you need to be succinct.
Your headline should spell out a strong benefit of your product. Here’s a headline I use for my own postcards promoting the Information Marketing Boot Camp http://www.dc-infobiz.com
“FREE Report How To Set Up and Run Your Own Home-Based Publishing Business... and Never Create A Product, Write An Ad or Talk to Anyone”
In the body copy, I follow up with a quick explanation of info marketing and then list the great benefits that it offers. And then I list my web site address where they can get more info.
Remember, that a postcard is similar to a classified ad in that you can’t use it to directly sell your product. There simply isn’t enough room on a postcard to do a complete sales pitch.
You use it as the first step in a two-step selling process. The postcard is only for generating sales inquiries.
You then follow up by directing the prospect to your website where they can find the full details and benefits of your product.
Or you can ask the prospect to send you an email and then reply with your sales letter.
Once you’ve captured their email address, you can follow up multiple times.
You can format your postcard in a word processing program. I use Microsoft Word and its Envelopes and Labels command to set the file up to print correctly.
Here’s a tip that Ron LeGrand, author of the Information Marketing Boot Camp, passed on to me.
Go to your local post office and buy their pre-stamped postcards. You just run the sheets through your printer, separate, attach the address labels and mail!
And, best of all, you’ll only spend a handful of change per postcard.
