Yes, in fact, it does.
But design isn’t what you think it is. It’s about a lot more than just pretty pictures of smiling people and a big logo – and it can be the difference between getting hundreds of new customers or nothing at all.
Design is that whole process of understanding exactly how your customers interact with your postcards and addressing questions like:
- Who opens the mail, and when and where do they do it?
- Are your customers right or left handed? (more on that in a minute.)
- Where do your customers’ eyes go on your card?
- What colors and calls to action (CTAs) improve sales?
Whew, seems exhaustive, but each of these factors can impact how many people actually pick up the phone and call you. In fact, through testing, you can uncover inexplicable little tricks that cause your response rates to jump 5x – sometimes you won’t even know why, but you will know that it’s good design because it keeps the cash coming in.
Here’s how to improve your design:
1. Ask yourself: Who opens the mail, and when and where do they do it?
Knowing more about your audience can inform the colors, text, and font that you decide to use. For example, the Direct Marketing Association found that 91% of mail is always picked up by the same person and 80% of those people are women. If you’ve been tailoring your postcard to men, time to rethink your message.
Here are more examples: If you sell to doctors and nurses, know that they’ll likely open their mail extremely early or extremely late, and visibility at that time of day is very low. You’ll want to use higher contrast colors. If you’re marketing to the elderly, you’ll want to use bigger, more legible fonts. And if you are marketing to men, 8% are colorblind and have trouble distinguishing shades of red.
The bottom line: Find out who’s opening the mail, when and where they do it, and design everything just for them.
2. Ask yourself: Are your customers right handed or left handed?
Unless your business specifically sells to the left-handed community, know that 3 out of 4 adults are right handed. That means that when they pick the actual postcard up, their thumb will cover the right fifth of it. Knowing this means that you can design your postcards so that whatever is there is too big to be covered up.
The bottom line: Put your offer (they last thing they should see) on the right side and make it big enough so that it can’t be covered.
3. Ask yourself: Where do people’s eyes move across the postcard?
Your postcard always gets to tell a story. Which story? The one about why the reader should want your service. Draw their attention to the first thing you want them to see by making it big and bright and then use the yes-ladder method. This says that you should explain to them what they’re missing in the biggest font, show how you solve it in the next biggest font, and then present the offer, in that order.
The bottom line: Use size, font, color, and position to guide where people look to improve their comprehension.
4. What colors and CTAs perform the best?
It’s no secret that people react differently to different colors and words: every audience is unique. People in rural or metropolitan counties may each have different opinions of the colors red or blue. Californians might not know what to do with the word “y’all.” And the phrase “don’t mess with …” probably performs less well in Maine than in Texas.
Based on all your knowledge of them, use your customer’s’ preferences to your advantage to highlight the parts of your postcard that matter most. Test everything endlessly until you seize upon a trick that drives far higher call volumes.
The bottom line: A/B test colors, text positions, and CTAs one at a time to find what works.
Good designs get great results! Become a great designer yourself simply by getting started in web-to-print postcard mailer – it only takes minutes and it can earn you thousands in new business. We even have done-for-you templates.