When designing your business’ postcard mailer campaign, you have a choice between working with a professional postcard mailer company to design a custom postcard or going the DIY route, where you visit a website, select a pre-designed template, fill in your business name and copy, and maybe upload a logo. While pre-designed, do-it-yourself templates are cheaper and have faster turnaround time than a custom design, boilerplate postcard mailers simply do not get the same results as custom campaigns designed with the help of a professional direct mail company. Here are five reasons why it’s better to spend a little extra money and time and work with a direct mail professional to come up with a postcard design that is unique to your business.

1. Custom Mailers Help Bolster Your Brand

The problem with postcard mailer templates is that they’re … templates. They are designed to be quick and easy to fill in yourself. However, because of this, they allow very little customization, so your postcard mailer design may end up looking quite different from the design of your website, brochures, and other marketing materials. Your customers and prospects won’t be able to look at it and immediately recognize your business, and they may even confuse your company with similar businesses in the area. This dilutes your brand. A custom postcard mailer, on the other hand, can be designed to complement your website and marketing materials so that readers will immediately recognize your business, keeping it top of mind and strengthening your brand.

2. No Two Custom Mailers Are Alike

Another problem with fill-in-the-blank boilerplate postcard mailers is that they aren’t exclusive to any particular business. A company that designs custom postcards will not sell the same exact design to two different businesses; every customer gets their own mailer that is unique to them. Companies that sell DIY boilerplates don’t check to see if two businesses in the same area bought the same postcard template, so it’s always possible that another business in your neighborhood – perhaps even a direct competitor – will decide to use the same boilerplate that you did, possibly even with identical stock images. This creates confusion among your target market, further dilutes your brand, and makes it likely that your postcard will be tossed aside as junk mail.

3. A Custom Design Will Stand Out

Between letters, postcards, flyers, and coupon magazines, your customers’ mailboxes can get quite crowded. When people sort their mail, they do so very quickly; your postcard mailer has only a few seconds to capture a reader’s attention and stay out of the trash bin. Boilerplate templates tend to “look” like templates. They are bland, their design has not been optimized to make them stand out from everything else crowding a reader’s mailbox, and the colors and fonts may even make the postcard difficult to read. This causes readers to assume they are junk mail and throw them out without reading them.

4. Custom Postcard Mailers Are Designed by Professionals

Crafting a postcard that will stand out in a mountain of mail and drive sales can be quite difficult. The layout, colors, sales copy, and even the font type and size all need to be optimized to not only capture readers’ attention but also prompt them to take action and call you, go to your website, or visit your brick-and-mortar store. It’s also important that your postcard is designed and laid out in a way that makes it easy to read and gives customers all the information they need to decide to take the next step and contact you. By working with a professional postcard mailer company such as Cactus Mailers, you get to draw on the expertise of experienced direct mail professionals who know how to craft winning postcard mailer campaigns that convert.

5. Campaign Success Isn’t Just About the Design

When working one-on-one with a direct mail company, as opposed to just filling in information on a website, you get the opportunity to consult with a professional regarding other important aspects of your postcard mailer campaigns, such as:

  • The timing of your postcard mailer campaigns. The modern consumer’s buying cycle is quite short, so you need to get your products or services in front of customers at just the right moment, when they are ready to buy.
  • The selection of a fresh, accurate mailing list. Even the most well-designed postcard in the world won’t generate results if your mailing list is stale, inaccurate, or not targeting the right group of potential customers.
  • Features such as call tracking, which will allow you to measure the results of your campaigns and make adjustments if necessary.

A postcard mailer campaign is an important investment in your business’ marketing. A well-crafted postcard will capture readers’ attention, strengthen your brand, drive home your company’s unique selling proposition, and prompt potential customers to take the next step. A DIY template may be quick and inexpensive, but it won’t give you the results you want.

Read more: Direct Mail: Is It Dead?