Know-How Exchange : Copywriting

Annmarie,
Who are you targeting at the hospital? Is it nurses, patients or top management? Whoever your targets are you should put their pictures on the post card. You can show a community of people helping eaching each. Or people working together.

My suggestion is that you hire a professional copywriter and art director, if you want to maximize the chances of your mailing doing what you want it to do. This isn't something that you should trust to amateurs, especially if it's your business/money on the line.

The cost of the mailing list, production, and follow-up are not the biggest costs of a successful direct mail campaign. It's the creative product that makes or breaks the mailing.

Separate issue: You shouldn't think about the mailing as "making" them reply. What "makes" them reply is a benefit that addresses an important need. If you want to "make" them reply, promise them something that's number one on their wish list, that will be so important to the target audience that they MUST reply. Of course, you have to be prepared to deliver on the promise, or the whole thing will be a waste of everyone's time and money.

The way you worded your question it sounds like you think a mailing can make people do something they might not otherwise have done. Marketing doesn't work that way. In fact, it's the other way around. Marketing just helps identify the need that's so important that people will WANT to reply.

Good luck.

The number one thing you can do to make people sit up and take notice is to put lots of short TESTIMONIALS on your postcard, quoting people from institutions that readers will recognize.

Print your website URL on the postcard. On the website, you can have longer testimonials.

You do have a website, or course... ? And satisfied clients who are willing to be quoted?

Go look at www.gerrymcgovern.com and see how well he pulls this off.