News

Super-size your postcards

June 16, 2005

One of Kamron Karington's most successful pizza promotions ever was run on an oversized, 5.5 x 8.5-inch postcard. The barbecue chicken pie featured in the promo sold so well that Karington's Red Rock Pizza unit ran out of the sweet-smoky sauce before the promotion expired.

Despite hitting a grand slam with the deal, when Karington reran the same promotion the following year, he unwisely fooled with success.

"Silly me, I figured I'd save some money and use a smaller (4 x 6) postcard, but it didn't make much of a blip on the radar screen," said Karington, now a marketing consultant. "The photograph and the offer were the same, but the smaller postcard caused only a little rise in the tide. In the end, we had cases of barbecue sauce stacked up."

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When it comes to getting noticed in a mail campaign, Karington is a firm believer in the "bigger is better" axiom. Size matters with postcards because they stick out in the mail pile and make people say, "That's different." That wider berth in the mail pile is often the difference between the fridge door and File 13.

Still, size is no guarantee customers will respond, Karington added. "A lot still has to do with what the card looks like. If the art's tacky, it goes to the junk mail pile immediately. Even if it were four times the size of a normal postcard, it would still get the same impression."

Roth Christopherson, president of A'Deas Printing, agreed that a printed piece has to be attractive to merit customer consideration.

"The design and the four-color (printing) need to be really high quality," said Christopherson, whose company is in Wichita, Kan. "Also, the larger the piece, the more color you'll get on it. It's got to be eye-catching."

Make it fun

It helps greatly if the piece is interactive, too, said Karington, citing marketing research that favors the use of stickers in mailers.

"They've found that getting people involved with the mail gets a higher rate of response," he said. "That's why you've seen junk mail that tells you to take the sticker, put it over here and send it in. When you can create some interactivity with your mail, it's a good thing."

That's good news for a company like A'Deas, which invented the Stick-It postcard three years ago. Customers simply remove a small adhesive strip cover from the back of the postcard and stick the piece to the fridge or a computer screen.

"It's repositionable, which is not like a Post-It," said Robin Christopherson, manager at A'Deas. "You can move it around several times and it's not going to fall to the ground like a Post-It note."

That little bit of effort, Karington insisted, is all it takes to get a customer involved. "It adds value because that thing is more valuable than a post card just lying there. You can stick it on the fridge and, odd as it sounds, people like that."

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