Marketing is essential to business success, but not all marketing strategies are equally effective. To complicate matters even more, what worked in the past may not work now. Therefore, regularly testing the effectiveness of postcard printing campaigns will keep your efforts turning a profit. Testing will help you know what works best for your audience.

Reasons to Test
There are lots of reasons to test postcard printing results.

You may want to find out what made a particular campaign so successful so you can increase the success rate even more. It might be that the response to your last marketing campaign was disappointing, and you want to find out how to do better next time. Another reason is that you want to expand your customer base, and you want to know how to reach more types of people. Or perhaps you want to test the popularity of a new product or service.

What to Test
Test several different variables. Test the headline to see if it gets people interested in your postcard. Vary the way you state your offer. Test the offer itself to see if it makes people want to do business with you. Try different background colors or images for each postcard printing order. Test the placement of your offer; try putting it on the front, back, or both; also try top and bottom of the postcard. You may also want to test the timing of your direct mail campaign. Test to see if it is better to send postcards at the beginning or end of the month, before or after the holidays.

How to Test
Test one element at a time. Create two postcard printing designs that are different in one way. Mail them out at the same time to the same demographic. Mail at least a thousand of each to get meaningful results. Then record the response to each. You can keep track by asking each customer for his or her address, or you could put a different phone number on each card. Some companies give a different promotion code on each mailing, and then the sales person asks for the code.

Postcard printing is one of the easiest and cheapest forms of direct mail. It even has a record of beating out larger forms of advertisements such as TV commercials because of a postcard campaign’s high return on investment. Testing your postcards will only insure greater results, so take the time to plan and execute some testing and you are sure to reap all of the benefits to be had from your postcard printing campaign.