If this is the first marketing article you are reading, go find some other more basic articles that I have written and then come back. This data is for the intermediate to advanced marketers.

I want to go over a three-step outline for your marketing which are:

1) Surveys

2) Getting Attention

3) Postage

Marketing surveys save you from flying blind in your business marketing strategies and are the best way to find out what you should be offering, to whom and how. When you don’t really know what to put in your direct mail marketing it’s because you haven’t done your research.

In order to get the response you would like on your direct mail marketing campaign, one area you need to look at is whether or not you are using a survey to find out what to say to your public. You may immediately answer “No – I don’t survey.” But truthfully, it’s very possible you do and just don’t realize it….read on.

You know your market quite well because you already sell to them. You’re unwittingly surveying all the time. Take this example:

An optometrist has an optical boutique. He knows that the biggest market for his eyewear are women from the ages of 40 to 65 years old. How does he know that? His women’s frame inventory is constantly being restocked fives times more than his men’s frame stock or even children’s. And the types of women’s frames are ones compatible with no-line bifocals. Interesting! Let’s look at what else this optometrist knows. He knows that these women pay a higher price point for their eyewear because the products he keeps reordering are from the more upscale designers so these women probably have more discretionary income. That is what I mean by surveying unwittingly.

Now let’s take an example where you are sure you have no data:

You are a mortgage broker and you don’t know what to say to people to get them to refinance their property, yet this is the area you specialize in. You assume that the best deal will attract more customers. You conduct a marketing survey, or get a marketing survey conducted for you that asks people indirectly for their attitudes and emotions concerning refinancing and what would be the advantages and disadvantages. You find the majority of people would like to refinance but think it is a very complicated procedure and so they never try. From this information you are able to determine what the tone and message of your advertising should take.

So, what should your promotion say? How about “We’ll take the hassle out of refinancing for you. Find out how.” You will get a response. You could send out thousands of promotional pieces telling your prospects that you can get them the lowest rate, but that isn’t their concern. Their concern is that it’s too complicated. Do you see how you could miss? A survey is the answer.

It is smart business to design a survey (or have one designed) to send out to your past customers that will keep you in the know, and not in the dark.

Now let’s go into the next logical sequence of how to break the first barrier of getting attention, so the “button” you found from your survey hits them before they throw away your promotion before ever even reading it.

Ditch the Envelopes!

The most common question that is asked when dealing with direct mail is “How do I get their attention?” This is a major problem because, no matter what you do to them, most envelopes look basically the same. Print on them in color, make a window, stamp it urgent – your customers have seen all these tricks before. They get thrown away before they’re even opened. They can tell from the outside that it is a sales pitch and they just get rid of it. This causes you to lose sales because of assumptions made before you even try to get your message across, when if you had the chance to let the customer know what you were offering they might have gone for it. Plain and simple, the easiest way to get around this is by using postcards.

Here are 8 dynamic marketing tips to help you increase your sales and profits fast.

1. Don’t Just Sell Benefits

Don’t just tell prospects what they gain when they buy your product or service. Tell them what they lose if they do not buy it. Most people fear loss more than they desire gain. Customers want your product or service to enjoy the benefits it provides. They will want it even more when you remind them of what they lose by not buying it.

2. Use Pleasant Surprises to Close Sales

An unpleasant surprise can kill a sale. But a pleasant surprise can help close a sale. For example, adding an unexpected bonus immediately before your prospect takes the last action to complete a sale will eliminate any last minute hesitation.

3. Provide Fast Delivery – Even When You Can’t

The faster you can deliver your product or service the more sales you will get. If you cannot deliver all or part of your product immediately, add something to the purchase that you CAN deliver immediately. It could be as simple as a series of helpful tips related to your product posted on your web site …available only to new customers.

Here are 7 low-cost but highly effective marketing tips to help any small business find customers and generate sales quickly.

1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business

Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales …now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising – and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version

Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

In my plethora of experience tucked away between these ears, I have managed to cull out for you what I consider the “best of the best” – in other words, I took the most proven details about postcards that were significant to you starting a postcard campaign and really winning at it. So here goes the most incisive highlights about postcards.

1) I know that a postcard is better than something in an envelope.

For many reasons, the main one being, in an envelope you can’t make your potential customer see your message.

People are fast. We see and read very quickly – actually much more quickly than we even realize.. Think about yourself – how fast do you go through your mail and process out what you want to keep and what you don’t want to keep? Pretty darn fast. It takes fractions of seconds to go through and process in your mind “bill, bill, advertisement, bill, advertisement, letter…” And it also takes fractions of seconds to decide whether you are even going to bother giving more attention to the pieces that you designated as advertisements.

With a postcard, even if they throw it away, they already saw your message regardless of whether they think they did or not. They saw it enough to throw it away, didn’t they?

And the next time they get that same postcard in the mail, they see it again as they throw it in the trash.

Let’s face it – junk mail gets thrown away. And postcards are junk mail to a lot of people.