Advertising is a gamble; you pay a certain amount to join the game of probabilities and numbers. Postcard printing may be cheap and exceptionally easy mail by the bulk, but what exactly are the stakes involved? Is it a hit or miss?

There are different ways to view the success or failure of your postcard card printing. These are 5 metrics among the many ways to set your expectations.

1. Readability

Advertisers often fly blind sending out their marketing materials and simply crossing their fingers hoping they land in the right hands. Often their marketing strategies are ignored while a few gets read.

Readability simply refers to the probability a print ad has of being read. Although readability is difficult to measure on an actual campaign, sample studies show that postcards have the highest readability of as much as 98%.

Without an envelope, a postcard is easy to pick up, inspect, turn over and read. The question though is how much of the postcard converts casual curiosity, and how to push mild curiosity to action.

2. Response Rate

From those people who have read your postcards, how many will be interested enough to respond to your postcards in any way. Will they proceed to check your website, make a phone call, visit your shop, or request for additional marketing materials?

One of the main advantages of direct-mail-marketing is your ability to zero-in on a certain demographic from a mailing list. This gives you a higher than average response rates compared to other non-targeted advertising. On average postcards receive an industry high response rate of 2-3%. Give or take, you will have around 20-30 leads for every one thousand postcards.

3. Conversion to Sales

How many of those respondents though actually go from being a prospect to an actual customer?

Many promotional postcards for retail stores or service shops offer discounts, coupons, or other promo to entice customers to come and actually enjoy high conversion to sales. Real estate businesses though and other big ticket items may have one or two sales from a thousand postcards, or sometimes even none.

A simple head count though sales conversion studies fails to take into account the profits made from each sale.

4. Rate of Return on Investment

How much money can you make from your investment for a given time? ROI indicates whether the 1% conversion to sales is enough to shoulder the cost of printing and mailing the postcards and return a profit. You can use this to see if your marketing campaign was profitable or not.

5. Long-Term Loyalty

The ROI focuses on one-time sales you generate from your campaign. Often this comes at the expense of discounts, give away items, or coupons. What you need to know though is the potential for these one time sales to convert to long term clients. It is also possible that prospects will respond beyond the given time frame for your campaign.

Your postcard printing may result in additional indirect revenues later on that will be difficult to tie exactly to your postcard but have high impact as well.