Going bigger with postcards and direct mail

I received a call from a client the other day who was thinking about doing a small postcard drop to his neighbourhood. He was thinking of dropping 1500 cards. OK, I said. Designing and printing that many full colour cards will cost you around $1000. With a 1% response rate, he might get 15 responses as a cost of $66 per response. Small quantities makes for expensive responses.

Instead of doing that, I told him he should consider printing 50,000 cards, costing him $3500 to design and print. The same response rate will give him 500 responses - or a cost of $7 per response. These aren't sales yet, but if I were him,  I'd feel much better about converting sales from 500 responses than 15.

And one more thing - if he had a good client list and printed the postcards digitally, we could design it so each card was printed with the address (no extra address labelling costs), and include the client's name on the front ("A Special Offer for Owen"), almost guaranteeing a better response rate.