I have not tried this strategy but I read about it and I think it would work extremely well in a solo home business application.
It's relatively inexpensive and easy to do, yet it brands your business in ways that you determine and it will make your direct mail stand out from the crowd.
I read about a lady that uses an inexpensive digital camera to snap photos of everything from her own portrait, to images of her products, to places she likes to visit that relate to her business.
The idea is to get pictures she can use legally in her advertising that relate to her products.
If you have visited some of the large stock photo stores on the Internet, you know that buying the rights to just one small image for use in a mail campaign can cost up to several hundred dollars.
Anyway, once the images are taken, they can be downloaded onto your computer and manipulated in size (cropped) with the aid of a simple graphics editor.
Photoshop is the professional industry standard, but it is expensive to purchase and takes awhile to learn.
I use Paint Shop Pro which is quite a bit less expensive, very easy to learn, yet still does a nice job for most amateur applications.
Once the image you want to use is properly sized to the exact width and height of a postcard (like 4x6, for example), it's easy to print a number of color copies on heavy photo paper.
You can do it yourself, although having a large quantity printed at one time will save you lots of money.
Kinko's can do this type of job and there are many online printing services like Vista Print that will take your job and turn it around fast.
Once you have the stack of printed photos, turn them over and write on the back, just as though this was a postcard. You can include your business return address, the mailing address of the company, and a coupon or other message you want to send.
These home made postcards will stand out from all the other offers the client receives in his mailbox.
They are a great direct marketing vehicle when they are targeted to specific customers and appear as though they're a personal message from the business owner.
It's almost as though the president of the company is sending out pictures of his children to you, his friend.
There is so much mass marketing that appears in consumer mailboxes these days that it makes perfect sense to personalize and brand your business with something out of the ordinary that appears as a personal message.
Postcards are mailed at a discount to regular letters, so this method of advertising your products or brand to targeted customers makes a lot of sense. And the range of images that you can use is unlimited because you own the shots that go on the postcard.
Why not give this strategy a try and let me know how it works for your solo business?
