Great Creative Leads To Direct Mail Marketing Campaign Success ...

Whether you're starting a new business and want to spread the word, or attempting to capture a bigger market share for an already established business, direct mail marketing is a useful - and relatively inexpensive - tool. To be successful, however, your direct mail piece must hit all the right nots with your prospects.

You may be familiar with the 40-40-20 rule of marketing. It is an old adage proposing that 40 percent of any direct mail campaign's success depends on the mailing list, 40 percent depends on the offer the campaign contains, and the remaining 20 percent depends on the creative aspects of the marketing piece. "Creative" includes the copy, color, graphics and imagery of the campaign mail pieces.

The sole purpose of the creative is to capture the attention of prospects - the result of which is a few moments spent reading your marketing piece. If the piece is never read, the offer will never be accepted. It's that simple. Unfortunately, many professionals become distracted by the desire to create a beautiful or artistic mail piece and end up with something unreadable, incomprehensible, or nice to look at but lacking in substance.

In these tough economic times you don't want to waste your company's marketing budget on mail pieces that find their way directly into the trash bins of your potential customers. Avoid this sorry fate by keeping a few basic design and typography principles in mind when you design your marketing postcard. These principles include maintaining the readability of the copy, choosing the right colors and utilizing effective imagery.

All typography included on your marketing postcard should be easy to read. After all, within the copy is where prospects will discover your all-important offer. Generally, postcard copy should be kept quite simple. A postcard that is literally covered in endless lines of text is likely to find itself in the "circular file" of your busy potential customers. Type from nine to twelve points in size is considered to be the most readable. If you are addressing an elderly audience, use a bit larger type. You can also utilize larger type for headlines and call-outs. Sometimes more than just a sentence or two of copy is needed. In this case, give the reader's eyes a place to rest by indenting every paragraph and leaving a space between paragraphs. Divide larger blocks of copy into smaller, though logical chunks. This will make comprehension of the offer easier for your prospect. As for the best fonts to use, studies have shown that serif fonts facilitate the natural left-to-right eye movement of reading best. Keep these other helpful typography tips in mind as well:

People love lists because they are easy to skim and understand. You should use them as often as you can to promote better understanding of your subject material.

If your copy contains lots of numbers, spell out the ones that are less important and use actual numerals where you want to call the most attention.

Some professionals fall into the trap of using all caps for headlines. Avoid this, as it makes your headline more difficult to read. Stick with initial capital letters followed by lower case letters as you would for the rest of the copy.

Left justification and right ragged edges yield copy that is easier on the eye than left-right justified text.

It is acceptable to include your phone number, email or web address in a larger font. You certainly do not want to bury them in tiny type somewhere within the layout. If you want your prospects to call you, email you or visit your website, make that information stand out.

Typography is just one of the essential principles of design that make up the "creative" and contribute to the success of your marketing postcard. As mentioned earlier, you should also pay attention to your choice of color and use of imagery and graphics. These principles will be discussed in the next article. Check back, because you won't want to miss them.

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John Welsh is the co-owner of http://www.postcardsandinvitations.com Along with his wife, Ginny, he's combining years of mailing expertise and great graphic design in one company to make marketing simple for busy professionals. Visit his website for powerful customization tools and astonishing service. You'll find designing an effective postcard easy with John's online design tool.

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