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Improving postcard glance readership (part 2)

By Staff Writer

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In part one of this article, we discussed creating a great headline to drive readers into reading the rest of the text. Now learn how to continue to drive readers further into the copy of your postcard, and to fulfill your postcard’s objective.

The headline. So, at a glance, your reader reads your headline. Bam. Kapow. Zzzip. OK, don’t lose him now–to sustain readership, use subheads. Your postcard’s subheadlines create a fascinating but short storyline of brief bits, bullets and bites of boundless bulleted beauty … er, information. Sorry, I got caught up in my own
alliteration.

The subheads, as we call them in the business, will continue to fascinate your audience and make that final push to get readers to read the rest of the copy, the dreaded “tiny type,” the meat of your postcard.

The tiny type. That’s the last holdout, the final frontier for selling on your postcard. And do you sell anything here? No. This is still NOT the place to sell your product.

In fact, the entire postcard isn’t really the best place to sell your product. Really. And I can already hear the yelps from my clients: “I paid good money for the creative, the printing and the mailing. What’s this guy talking about? When do I sell my product?”

The postcard is not the place to sell your product. Your postcard is the place to ask for a call. That is the objective of the card: Generate a phone call. If I send you a postcard and get you to call me, excellent–that post card worked and worked really, really well. Period.

The objective. There is only one objective of your postcard. The postcard should make the reader pick up the phone and call. That’s all. If the reader makes the call, the card succeeds. Then YOU sell your product. To make the reader call, offer something FREE.

Jeffrey Dobkin is a speaker who writes letters and direct mail. Dobkin has written five books on direct marketing. He can be reached at [email protected].