Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

There's no effective or useful answer other than: it depends.

You could run on consecutive or alternate days; you could run over three weeks.

But here's the thing: to make an effective impact you need to be sure of the action you want people to take once they've watched your video.

OK so the cards as a campaign might drive some kind of response and boost traffic to that specific landing page.

But then what?

How many people are on your list?

How long have these people been on your list, how did they get onto your list, and why are they on your list? If this is a list you've bought and with which you have little affinity you may have a problem. The secret here is not the frequency of your mailing, or what the mailing says. It's the congruency of the need to respond and the value, to you in sales of the desired action.

Let's say I'm one of your recipients. I receive three postcards from you and I finally cave and watch your video (about whatever). Then what? If there's little ultimate value for me (regardless of price point), I'm gone and all you've done is waste my time. Not good. So, it's time for you to be thinking beyond the mailing and the watching of the video.

I was going to say that last night - but left before answering just in case someone came up with an idea. So let's have a quick look at what you can do to find out what they do like.

You have a mailing list - is this one you've built yourself or did you buy it in? If you bought it in, what were the parameters you gave when buying it - you don't need to tell me, you can use this in the next step.

Because you have a humorous campaign - that's ideal for a quickie on Facebook. You can target their demographic (the parameters you gave your mailing list supplier - or just info you've picked up through your campaigns). You can target their geography and many, many other things. You can even tip your email list into the algorithm as a start - I'm not sure you can do this with physical addresses, but the idea's there. You can target the general area.

You will need some kind of landing page, Facebook or otherwise.

You can put one of your postcard images on the ad and once they've clicked ask "when do you want to see the next one?" - if the postcards aren't synchronous you can split test them, find out which they like most. Test headlines and goodness knows what else.

Depending on the size of your mailing, you'll have meaningful data in an afternoon - or at least a couple of days. It'll cost you a couple of hundred dollars and the kick it'll give your postcard campaign will place it in lower earth orbit.

You can use Google's Display network system for this too.

In either case, the pricing is way less than a postcard. It's way faster and you can tune it and react to the things you're discovering that'll steer your postcards in the right direction.

Which didn't answer your question, but will give you the answers you need for the first mailing on Monday. Oh, and you'll have driven some traffic to your website in the mean time ...