Ironically one of the most effective ways to market product services online is through offline marketing – in particular, the use of postcards.

Postcards reach an audience where email might be filtered out or just overlooked. If the postcard is good, it attracts attention. In addition, many recipients hold on to them for awhile. If you have a memorable message and an easy to type url on the postcard, recepients are also more likely to go online and check it out.

But the creative work on the postcard – the marketing message and the graphics - are crucial.

The problem is, almost all postcard printing requires a minimum of 500 or 1,000 cards. The best deals typically would run you a few hundred dollars for printing and mailing.

And once they are printed, that’s what you have and you can’t change it. Think another headline or graphics would do better? Then you have to do a whole new printing order.

But what if you knew beforehand which creative works best…which headline and graphics happens to get more response than others, even before mailing your postcards?

There is no sure way to know other than mailing test postcards…but there is a way to come close and good idea of what creative works best. Use a flyer marketing test campaign before going ahead with your postcard campaign.

What I’m talking about is using the same headline, the same text, and graphics in a flyer that you would on the postcard. Flyers are much easier to design than postcards. You can have a headline and subhead at the top, insert the image below that and then the text below that. As simple as that and you’ve approximated the creative and the marketing message that you’re thinking of for your postcard. Since even the cheapest desktop printers now print color, you will have no problem in printing color images.

Flyers enable you to test creative in whatever small numbers you want.
Now, instead of printing all 500 or 1,000 postcards, you could test a sample of 100 people on your list. You could send one headline to 50 people (group A) and the other headline to the other 50 (group B). Or, use one image for group A and another image for goup B.

You would then need to set up a different landing page for each group. So the flyer for Group A is directed to url A, and group B is directed to url B. Then you can track which creative work draws the most people.

The cost for the test? Postage is 41 cents. Let’s add another 9 cents for paper and envelope. So sending out out 100 flyers would cost you $50. For that amount you could get an idea of what creative works best for your postcard rollout.

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Need help in testing or rolling out your next campaign?
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Here’s a unique technique to capture more leads and build your list:

There’s probably nothing more crucial to the success of your Internet business than having targeted traffic opt-in to your list. It’s so important that squeeze pages, which did little more than ask for sign-up to a list, became widespread.

Not only did reader frustration with this grow, but google stepped in and did something about it, instituting their google slap and landing page quality scoring. In other words, you now have to provide value and relevant content on the landing page or you will suffer the consequences: In Adwords this means paying more money ( a lot more) for keywords. It also affects your natural search engine rankings in google.

So with opt-ins so important and now harder to achieve, what do you do? This is where the technique I’m about to tell you about comes in. It worked beautifully pre-Google slap, and works even better now because it plays right into the new landing page necessities.

I call the technique: Contentus Interruptus

I first became fully aware of it years ago when I was writing sales copy and guiding marketing communications efforts for one of the biggest online financial websites.
We tested all sorts of techniques to attract signups for paid as well as free services, but the approach of interrupting valued content consistently outpulled other efforts.
While the idea is not new, the success of this particular method is in the details.

Here is how I came to discover the power of Contentus Interruptus, and how you can use it to squeeze more juice out of your squeeze pages….
To read the entire article, click Squeeze Page Juice