Sometimes print marketing can feel a little futile. How can you be sure your mailers are being read? Are your brochures just getting thrown away?

Postcards are a great medium for marketing: quick, fun and straightforward. A good goal for postcard marketing is to create something that recipients will be willing to display on their refrigerator doors. And just how do you create a fridge-worthy postcard?

Here are a few tips:

Use bright colors and clean designs

The first step in creating a fridge-worthy postcard is to keep it out of the trash. Postcards have precious second, between being pulled from the mailbox and tossed in the trash, to grab someone’s attention. Complicated images that require a bit of focus to “get” are not going to pass the two-second test, and dark color schemes aren’t as eye catching as their brighter counterparts.

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Use humor or philosophy

Once you’ve got their attention, you need to keep it. To get a little psychological, people enjoy postcards that are immediately attractive and then, at a second glance reveal something deeper. Give your customers a little reward for their attention, like a hidden joke or riddle (either visual or text-based) or a rhetorical question to make them think. Your customers will enjoy engaging in the postcard, as long as it is gratifying. It should make them laugh or offer an interesting bit of information or perspective.

Think way outside the box

Speaking of engaging, if you have a creative marketing team let them experiment with different ways of creating fun and unique postcards. Experiment with shapes, sizes, cut-outs, materials, postcards that fold into origami creatures… Whatever you can think of. If you can get someone to hold your postcard and think “hey, I’ve never seen that before,” you’ve done your job. You can bet that postcard will make its way onto a few refrigerator doors.

Minimize the pitch

The size limitations of postcards are actually one of their best qualities. Because the cards are so small, you’re forced to condense everything you need to say into the shortest, simplest and straight-to-the-point message you can craft.

Keep the sales pitch to an absolute minimum and relegate it to the back of the card. Anything too wordy or sales-y will probably not make it up to the fridge. To make sure you’re brand is associated with the card, put your logo, company name, slogan or product on the front, either incorporated seamlessly into the image or as a tasteful (but visible!) signature in one of the corners.

Consider the timing

For maximum impact, time your posting so your promotional postcard is the most interesting thing in the mailbox. Specifically, plan it so your postcards arrive on a Tuesday or Wednesday. These days have the lowest volume of mail (Monday has the highest) and aren’t likely to be buried under piles of bills and correspondence. Tuesdays and Thursdays also tend to be less hectic than Mondays and Fridays, allowing recipients to spend a little more time considering their mail.

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