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One of the main concerns with doing direct mail marketing with consumer and business mailing lists is the cost. Between postage, and the costs of paper and printing, an advertising campaign based on mailing can run up the cost per piece to well over a dollar apiece.

This cost per unit is of great concern, as it should be, since how much is spent on the mailing comes out of the profits, but there are many ways to reduce the costs of these mailings.

One is to use lighter paper weights. Another is to keep the number of pages to a minimum or using only partial pages rather than full pages. One of the most effective ways, though, is to use postcards rather than envelopes and pages within them.

There are multiple advantages of using postcards for a mailing.

First, you can target your prospective customers using the exact same consumer or business mailing list you would have used for an envelope based mailing. Another is the savings on the cost of mailing a postcard over a standard envelope, which is significantly less. As of the writing of this article, the cost of mailing a letter is 45 cents, but a postcard only costs 32 cents. When mailing to thousands of people, those savings can be very significant.

Another advantage of post cards is they can be very effective as an alternative to telemarketing. Instead of cold calling a list of people, they can be approached through a postcard with a phone number on it instead. Using this approach, a great deal of savings can be had over a telemarketing list since phone numbers are expensive to acquire.

Yet another advantage of postcards is the message they carry. Because that message must be limited by the size of the postcard itself, a simple straightforward message can be delivered to even the most ambivalent target. A reader will see the message just by checking out the source of the mailing. This alone is a great advantage, as the most difficult part of any mailing is to get the offer read by the target.

So if you are going to do a mailing using a consumer or business mailing list, a great deal of consideration should be made to decide if the offer might benefit from being done with postcards. It can make a difference, both in response and costs.