Blogging allows you to create constructive encounters with your customers – these experiences can completely change the way your customers view you and your business. The more you appreciate your customers, the more these positive experiences will occur, and the more successful your business will be. A happy customer sends other happy customers your way.

Like every major communication tool, blogs expand the ability for companies to operate and ultimately to create entirely new opportunities for growth, product development, and quality control. However, blogs take this communication a step further by bringing the best aspects of mass marketing and transforming them from one-way communication into a two-way dialogue.

Blogging is a communication tool, a marketing technique, a listening device, and a way to interact directly with customers one-to-one on a personal scale. Your business can benefit by using blogs to spread the word about what your company has to offer and to gain immediate feedback from customers.

The question for you, then, isn’t should you get into blogs, but how will you get into blogs and how will you leverage them to maximize their return to your business?

I am getting much of this material about blogs from a great book called Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright. I suggest everyone add this book to their marketing library.

Blogs are altering the world of business as we know it, redefining marketing, public relations, and customer communications, to name a few. If you aren’t embarrassing this change into your own marketing mix, if you haven’t started to use this marketing phenomenon, your competitors are, and I guarantee they’ll leave you in the dust wondering where your sales have gone and why your customers are deserting you in droves.

Blogs are not only here to stay, but they will have an effect on your business. The question is, will you use blogs to benefit your business, or will you ignore them and experience negative consequences that takes you completely by surprise?

If you are interested in the future of your company, you need to understand and start blogging.

Believe it or not there are still people that think of blogs as online diaries or journals. The tide has turned as a small handful of forward-thinkers, leaders in the march to tomorrow, have recognized that blogs are having much more of a profound impact on the world of digital communications then we have ever seen.

If you don’t have a blog yet - stay tuned. I think in the next week I can convince you that must change.

1. There is only a limited amount of space available on a postcard, use it wisely. You need to fill the space with information that will only address the main concerns that recipients have. A rule to remember, white space is better than a bunch of words that clutter your message.

2. Headlines need to be powerful, well-positioned and thought-out. They’ll make or break the success of your postcard. If you grab them with a clever headline, they’ll continue reading. Your headline has one objective: drive the reader into the rest of the copy.

3. The subheads are then written and designed to intrigue and arouse the reader further. The subhead is not quite as large as the headline type, and not quite as small as the body copy type. It is the line that provides a smooth transition between the two areas. This line also has the same objective as the headline: get them to read further.

4. Use graphics only if they have a purpose and contribute to the communication of your message. (more…)

Postcards are persistant. Send 8 postcards to your mailing list each year. In between mailing you should stay in touch with key clients and prospects with handwritten postcards. Postcards are the perfect tool to use for repetitive follow-up of prospects. This type of follow-up has resulted in substantial increases in sales. It’s okay to send a card more than once. Successful cards can be sent forever as long as they continue to cover their costs.

A postcard isn’t just something to send through the mail. You can use postcards to drive traffic to your website, generate sales leads, use as oversized business cards, hang tags for your products, mini-information sheets or how about a newsletter on a postcard. I have personally used that with fabulous results.

Postcards are one of the best investments you can make with your marketing dollar.

The post office will return cards for free with undeliverable addresses back to you. Lots of catalog companies do this before mailing their catalog — it’s much cheaper to get cards back than to pay for getting unusable catalogs back after the normal post office handling.

One of the benefits of using the postcard first class rate is that the postcard will be mailed back to you if it has a bad address, which helps you keep your list up to date.

Need a quick survey response? Create a short survey postcard Ask recipients to fax them back to you, or go to your website and answer the questions. There’s a good chance you’ll get lots of responses. Testing your offers with postcards is easy. Just send your card to a small group of people and see how many of them respond. If you’re satisfied with the results, then roll out a bigger mailing!

Postcards can be produced on a very tight production schedule. Postcards are simple to create and send, there is no assembling, collating, stuffing, licking envelopes, etc.

The hardest part of sending a postcard is putting on the stamp.

Your postcards can brand you and your business in ways that most marketing materials cannot. Once you start and then stick to a regular postcard mailing program, you and your business will gain a reputation, perhaps even a little notoriety.