I am going to use a postcard that my wife received in the mail as an example that might be good to share with a wider audience. I typically want to support small hispanic-owned businesses, so in this case I’m going to hide easily identifyable information to protect their identity. There are two main reasons to use them as an example of “what not to do”: First, they make many of the common mistakes that small business marketers make when embarking on a direct mail campaign. Second, this postcard is in spanish – enabling most of you who don’t speak spanish to focus on the postcard design elements, indicia, & miscellaneous mistakes that can be made.
With that as a caveat, take a look at these images. I am showing the image side (non-address) first, because that’s the first image that I saw when I picked up the piece.
image-side
Image Quality – This image in the center of the screen is extremely confusing. The main image of a promotion postcard should get across very quickly what the problem/proposition/offer is, however this image suffers because of the low quality creation. The washed out image is so poor that I don’t think any modern printer could have possibly done this. My guess is that this piece was done in a local copy-mat using a run-of-the-mill black and white copier and colored copier paper. When and if this business ever prints their postcards in a professional facility, we may see the image be relevant to the overall message, but right now it just confuses a recipient and really hurts the eyes.
Call to Action Size & Position- The words that are underlined is the “call to action” (trust me). It offers a discount if one brings in the postcard on their next visit before the expiration date listed. A possible improvement is to highlight this call to action in a more dramatic way by enlarging the font and overlaying it on the image. Simple and low-cost tools like Microsoft Publisher allow anyone regardless of budget to do this.
Missing handwritten information – Many people like to bulk print a postcard – meaning print 2,000 postcards at once to save on printing costs, and then send out batches every few weeks by hand. This strategy is fine, but if you do this, remember to fill in the blanks. On this card, in the lower right hand corner, the expiration date is missing. Once again, a common mistake. To eliminate it, create a process checklist, or simply hard-code an expiration date and do smaller batches of postcard printing.
Paper type – Usually this isn’t a big deal with most professional printers out there. It’s really only the local copy shops that still enable businesses to make this mistake. I don’t know if you can tell by the photo, but the quality and color of this paper is similar to the type used by 2nd graders, and is extremely low quality. It’s an obvious attempt at color on a shoestring and in my opinion subtracts from the professionalism of this company’s brand. If you’re on a budget consider just going with plain white paper – there are heavier card stocks available that have a gloss to them. A creative graphic designer can come up with designs that would be effective even on pieces that are strictly black and white.
Color - Having said that it is possible to create a compelling piece in black and white, let me also emphasize that it’s much easier to use existing photos & images if you print the postcard in full color. Less need for amazing bursts of creativity 
address-side
Return address placement - the USPS location stamp overlaps the return address. This could be easily fixed on future postcards. This is a good reason to send yourself a postcard or “seed yourself” so you can see what your recipients see, tweak your design, and improve your piece.
Addressing with printed labels - This postcard exemplifies why this might not be the best idea. When using a varied color paperstock, your white printer labels throw the design of the piece off a bit. It’s distracting from the message of the card. A better alternative is just to have the addresses printed on a piece at print time, so there’s no difference in the color/fonts/sizing of the address compared to the rest of the text on the card.
Mail sorting barcode sticker – The USPS loves to make it’s job easier with these barcode stickers but they make our marketing pieces suffer a bit also. The sticker covers the tagline in the lower left corner, so again, this would be a good opportunity to learn from a piece sent to yourself in the mail and redesign the card so that there are no text elements in that portion of the card.
Having outlined these various “problems” with the postcard, I fully acknowledge that direct mail veterans have received very good response rates for 1-color and oddly colored paper types, although I’ve only seen this succeed with letter+envelope campaigns. The only way to learn if it’s worth going down this path is to monitor the response you get from a full color, oversized postcard and compare it to a small 1 color postcard like the one above. Hopefully you can do this with similar recipients at a similar time of year and with different calls to action (phone/email/landing page) , so you can most accurately decide if that approach works for you. At the end of the day, you also have to appraise this measurement against how you are branding yourself against your competitors. If your competitors are using full color designs on distinctive paper, do you want to offer up a lower quality marketing piece for a prospect/customers’ consideration? That’s a question every business owner and marketing professional has to answer based on a more general marketing strategy.
