Welcome to the Internet's largest library of direct mail and postcard marketing advice! At PostcardSmart, you'll find articles from dozens of direct mail marketing and postcard marketing experts.

What is Direct Mail Marketing?

Direct mail is one of the most common forms of direct marketing in use today. Marketers have used direct mail marketing for decades to get their message across. It's a proven, versatile and measurable marketing channel.

How Do I Use Direct Mail?

Direct mail can be a powerful addition to your overall marketing program. But it requires quite a bit of research and planning to do it right. This website offers plenty of direct mail marketing advice to get you started.

What are the Benefits of Direct Mail Marketing?

Marketers have been using direct mail for decades, simply because it works. Direct mail marketing is a proven medium with a long history behind it. Because of this, direct mail marketing has its own set of best practices you can learn from. The direct mail marketers who have gone before you experimented with direct mail to find out what works best, and that's what this direct mail marketing website tries to offer.

The right direct mailing list targets people who want your product or service. The direct mail mailing list is a key factor in a successful direct mail marketing campaign and a major point to consider in small business marketing strategies where marketing ROI (Return On Investment) is a key concern.

What really makes your direct mail marketing and advertising campaign successful?

The biggest single factor in the success of your direct mail marketing strategy is who you send your mailings to.

The three basic kinds of lists that you can use are (you can use all three
1. Your own list of prospects and customers. This is a list that you collected with your own personal marketing efforts. This is known as a house list. These people are most likely to respond to your offers, because they have responded in the past.

2. A response list is a list of people that have actually done something. They have either purchased something from the people who put together the list or inquired in response to some offer or asked to be on the list. They have some level of interest in the topic or purpose of the list.

These people have not previously responded to you, but they have responded to someone in a related area (if you have purchased a correctly targeted list) so you know they are at least warm.

This is a direct mail mailing list you can purchase from the owner of the list (such as a magazine or company) or a list broker.

3. A compiled list is a list of people who were selected to be on the list because they possess the characteristics that you asked the list broker to screen for.

Case study: California based Sun Pacific MortgageÂ’s Forest Tardibuono found a great way to get the right direct mail mailing list for his company which has
a very successful direct mail marketing strategy based on postcards and direct mail mailing lists.
“The title companies give us the mailing labels free. IÂ’ll tell them we want all the homeowners in 95401 which is a zip we get most of our business from. So theyÂ’ll give us the mailing labels of anyone who is a homeowner from that lists. It saves money on labels and mailing lists. TheyÂ’ll even limit searches to specific categories such as all homeowners from that zip who got a loan from certain companies and theyÂ’ll do the search according to that so I can really target the public so that the mailing will be more effective.