How You Sabotage Your Own Marketing (despite your BEST intentions!!)
Updated on June 7, 2023
Dear Small Business Owner,
I want to discuss something with you.
Basically, I will be VERY upfront…
From time to time, I’ll ask my customer service team how our clients’ campaigns are progressing. I’ll even personally weigh in on some of my clients’ orders to suggest edits on postcard designs — especially if they’re a brand new client.
It’s REALLY important to me that your marketing produces the leads and sales you need it to.
So when my customer service team told me there’s this ONE thing you personally could be doing that SABOTAGES your marketing (and results), I had to write this article…
Ready to hear the truth??
Sometimes your input will sabotage your campaign’s results! My customer service reps see this all the time.
But there is a problem.
And let me be clear:
The problem is with both of you!
Let me paint the scene for you.
You get your postcard design back from your customer service rep, and naturally you want to show it around — to your spouse, business partner, staff — to gather feedback.
You’re excited about your campaign, and you want to make sure your design is perfect!
After discussing your postcard with colleagues and family, you decide you want to change a few things…
You email (or call) your customer service rep, and ask for a couple of changes, because you are sure your suggestions are great…
And herein lies the issue:
To put it plainly, your design suggestions can be just downright bad.
Bad for your postcard, for your marketing, for your response — for a lot of things.
Why are these things bad? It could be any number of reasons, such as:
- Not enough room — now people won’t look at your overly crowded postcard
- Too many random details — you’re watering down your message
- And I could go on — in fact, I have devoted an entire newsletter to this before
So:
A customer service rep might say to you, “Sir/Ma’am, I don’t think it’s a good idea to add this.”
And then, you might say, “But I really think it will help us stand out.”
Here’s what happens next…
My customer service reps don’t want to:
- Insult you
- Come off as disrespectful
- And tell you that you are wrong
And on the flip side:
You don’t respect their experience and training because they seem like “mere employees.”
Okay – this is definitely a generality, yet it happens every single day!! So my point is:
It does happen, and I thought I’d make you aware of it!
Believe me…
I’ve made my customer service reps painfully aware of this problem! That’s why we have them actually “drill” talking to you with authority and conviction — so you listen to them and their trained expertise!
They also drill politely telling you that a change you want to make will NOT be good for your results.
Because that’s what WE’RE focused on:
Results.
That’s what your marketing ALL boils down to – right?
After all…
You will use us again if you receive some return on your investment, right? We want this so badly!! It’s a win-win for everyone!!
So how can I get you to get the best results possible from your marketing?
Off the top of my head, I can immediately think of 6 things we can help with to improve your results:
- Integrate Google. Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, and YouTube with your postcard campaign — we now offer this as one all-inclusive, done-for-you marketing package that puts complicated multi-channel coordination on autopilot for your business.
- Use the 12 elements of effective postcard design — You don’t have to figure out how to design the perfect postcard. Just use this handy list of 12 design elements. Our customer service reps constantly use this list, and most of them have it memorized by my instruction!
- A clear & bold headline
- Relevant images
- Color that POPS
- Special offer(s)
- Subheadline on back
- Benefits, not just features!
- Company name and logo
- Call-to-action in a bright non-matching color
- Contact info & web address
- Return address
- 5-star review
- Map of your location (for local business that customers go to)
- Use a targeted mailing list to generate high-quality leads — The quality of your mailing list can either make or break your postcard campaign’s success. Mail to unqualified leads, or bad addresses, and you’re flushing money down the toilet. Make sure your mailing list isn’t a total waste of money with this guide. You can also run a FREE mailing list count and get 1,000 free records.
- Capture some of the 95% of people who land on your website — That’s right: 95% of prospects who see your marketing and have some interest head to your website before deciding whether they’ll do business with you (or not). So you need to make sure your website is set up to capture leads for your business so you can actually contact your leads and close them as new customers. While you’re at it, check your website for these 16 common revenue-killing mistakes.
- Respond to your leads FAST — Consumers today expect service and communication at light speed. If you or your team take too long to respond to a new lead, you can assume they’ll visit another business instead (aka, your competitor!). Make sure whoever manages your leads is on the ball, chasing them up as fast as they come in. If you’re looking for a more automated solution, our Catch and Close Booster Package helps convert your website visitors into leads and automatically follows up with them via email to get them to contact you or make a purchase!
- Put lead-capture forms on your website to catch leads — Like I mentioned in #4, almost all your prospects who became interested from the postcard (95%!) will likely visit your website before contacting or buying from you. One way to grab those online leads is by placing lead capture forms (including pop-ups) on your website. In fact, we tested different pop-ups on PostcardMania’s website (over many years) and saw our leads increase by a staggering 400%! It was crazy! So we developed a VERY affordable tool to help you do the same: the Catch-That-Lead Tool.
My team and I have spent a LOT of time training our customer service reps and marketing consultants to be able to advise you and your campaign correctly.
Remember:
If YOU win with your marketing, so do we! We have a very vested interest in making sure you generate tons of leads and sales from your marketing, so please listen to us!!
And remember this:
- We don’t know what happens when the lead reaches in to your business.
- We don’t know if you track where they came from.
- We don’t know if your receptionist is making them feel welcome and cared for.
- We don’t know what happens when they get to your website or if you have a place for them to fill in a form, or even a good reason for them to fill in the form.
There are soooo many things that, combined, equal the best results possible.
We cannot control them all. BUT we can help you with a lot of these things!!
We charge NOTHING for all this advice and education. We really sell the means to get you the results, and in the end:
We will give you what you ask us for, even if we don’t think it’s ideal.
(We even read you a verification script after you’ve paid to ensure you know exactly what you bought! We send you design checklists in the hopes that you will realize the error of your ways. We will cross our fingers and hope!).
But every time this happens, and we agree to change your design for the worst, I hope you’ll realize that you are likely diminishing your result to some degree.
And a marketing results money fairy, somewhere, loses her wings.
Okay, I made that very last part up.
So here’s what I’ll leave you with:
Every little campaign suggestion that comes your way from PostcardMania’s staff is engineered, tested, and proven to get you the best results possible.
So listen up! 🙂
If you need any one-on-one help with your marketing, that’s what my expert marketing consultants are here for! You can speak to any one of them by calling (800) 628-1804 — remember, their advice is 100% FREE, and it’s there for you to use and learn from!
Or, you can always email me directly at joy.gendusa@postcardmania.com.
Best,
Joy
4 Comments
WOW. Thank you for sharing, Jeannemarie!
Your post is so beautiful. Thank you very much for sharing the post with us.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
Hi! I live on disability so this is my first trial event with any marketing corporation and their idea of mass marketing for my series of books entitled “Passages”, a trilogy of relatively plain, but often with allusions of Master Poets, which I tried to keep simple enough.
The first book in the series, “Time Over Mind”, introduces the the reader to different forms of poetry with various examples, making a good learning text for a short class. The second and third skip over the introductions and go right into the poetry. with more subtle usage of the different forms introduced in the first volume, “Passages: Time Over Mind.”
The second volume is aptly titled, “Passages II: The Road To Melancholia”, and the verses in this chapter isolate themselves to poems about missed messages, and lost opportunities in that which is the most important issue in all humans’ lives, love.
The third and last book in the trilogy, “Passages: The Long Road Home”, studies the thoughts and feelings of the persona in this journey at last returning home from his/her journey through life or part of it to having finally experienced an epiphany. Now, older and wiser, the persona is ready to face the issue s/he could not face before, from which s/he fled to pass through the long journey and become ready to face that reality that seemed too awesome before. The persona has been through many passages to become prepared to face what seemed too challenging before, and now easily steps through the final passage onto adulthood.
After getting the third book in the trilogy back from this publisher, its been a long road with this publisher, and I’m still committed to a book of short stories with them.
My new publisher seems like they are going to work at a faster pace on my children’s folk tales, and they come with illustrations, which I am hoping are going to come out very good. In a children’s book,
illustrations are a most important feature to making it appealing to the child. The first, “The Woodcutter and the Moon Girl” is from an old Vietnamese folk tale that my late husband’s youngest brother learned in elementary school in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, and told to my son, in English of course, when he was very young. So, I asked him if that was a Vietnamese folk tale, and he said yes, and I have kept that story in my head for about 30 years, to now putting the skeleton, the short story he told me, onto paper and embellishing it with details I know about the Vietnamese people I learned when 13 of my late husband’s family escaped by boat, i.e. boat people, and when they arrived at refugee camps they were allowed to make one phone call each, and to my husband they made their first call to let him know they had escaped and where they were and could they come and live with us in Boston, and of course we said we would be delighted to have all 13 of them come and live in our brownstone, and as soon as our renters leases were up, we told them, and they already knew of our predicament, so they knew they would have to find apartments elsewhere. The only person who stayed by rights drawn into the sales contract was the former owner of the building who, at 88, did not want to go and move in to live with her son on Martha’s Vineyard, so she stayed as long as she wanted to, which was as long as she lived, and when we went to the wake, her son was so grateful that we took such good care of her and that was the only right thing to do, she could have been my grandmother. Then we had 5 floors of 2 bedroom apartments, which soon became totally filled up with marriages and babies, but since my late husband was the eldest in his generation, he was the An Hi, and me, the wife, Chi Hi, and we were responsible for the well being of the rest of his generation. It was a real learning story for me. And that became my first children’s book, “The Woodcutter and the Moon Girl”