During the course of our discussion, the owner suggested that perhaps they could print and mail a postcard. The requirements needed to produce this postcard perfectly matched our company’s abilities. This job could have been designed, printed & mailed within a week or two and would have counted to our sales goals for the month. Despite all of this, I did something that I have never done previously and is counter-intuitive to any owner of a printing company. I told the client we could produce the direct mailer for his company, but, in my opinion, his company was not ready to do a mailing and would gain very little from it. I recommended against producing a product that my company is perfectly setup to create.

Before anyone suggests that I should have my head checked, there are very valid reasons that I suggested not to proceed in this manner. Many of these reasons I have discovered during our own in-house marketing process, which can serve as a case study as to the dos and don’ts of any marketing campaign. The primary reason that I did not want this client to proceed with the mailing is that I wanted him to view any campaign we put together as a success for him. Mailing a postcard without going through the process of properly identifying your target, having an integrated website to drive them to and having no integration with any other forms of media would have generated little or no response. The client would have then blamed the mailer and walked away feeling that print is not a suitable form of advertising because it is costly based on the amount of response it had generated.

When done in isolation, the chances are that the result would be as predicted. However, when used as part of an overall campaign, print can be a valuable resource to help drive client response and play a significant role in making a successful campaign. Using a combination of the multiple channels available to reach your client (including print) will yield far greater results in the end.

Photo credit: www.steamfeed.com