Vistaprint Postcards – My Real Review + Today’s Best Coupon: If you are looking to use postcards as part of your marketing strategy, you might want to consider Vistaprint. They have some of the best pricing & highest quality custom postcards, and when you use a coupon you save significantly more.
So, here’s my review of Vistaprint postcards plus a great coupon:
- Vistaprint Postcard Coupons: Today’s best coupons for Vistaprint
- Today’s on-site promotions for Vistaprint – Up to a 50% discount & free shipping
Vistaprint Postcards for Marketing? Here’s My Review:
I’m building an online shop to sell t-shirts and posters, and looking to stretch my advertising dollars wherever possible. So, I saw the recent promotion from Vistaprint offering 50 small (4×6) postcards at 25% off. This lowered the price to only $8 + shipping, so I had to give this a try!
Postcards for marketing: An important factor that led me to postcards in the first place is that I’m looking at a relatively small profit margin from any t-shirt sales that I make. If each sale nets $5 in profit, I have to be careful where I spend my money.
Postcards for Profit: The other use I’m getting out of these cheap little postcards is to print my artwork on them and resell them as small “prints.” The quality is good enough to do so, and while they only cost me a quarter each to print, I can resell them for $3 each. Not a bad profit margin!
*Tip: If you want to read more reviews, there are actually customer reviews under every popular product, including postcards, at Vistaprint.com. These aren’t filtered, either, as some of the reviews are negative.
50 Postcards for Under 20 Cents each!? Even Cheaper When You Buy More – My REVIEW
In the last few years there has been a mad rush to spend advertising money online through sites like Google Adwords and Facebook. This is certainly understandable, as never before has technology allowed you to target niches of people online so quickly and easily. So, is there still a place in the marketing world for the barbarous relic that we call the postcard? Of course!
So, before Igo on, here’s my review: These look great and have me really excited about their potential uses. The annoying thing was that none of their postcard sizes (small, standard, or oversized) corresponded to the proportions of my design, so I had to take some off the top.
I chose a matte finish to make these postcards look vintage (the glossy finish would spoil that effect) and I chose small, 4×6 size so that they could fit in a standard frame. (more on that below)
You can cut the cost per piece in half pretty quickly if you are ordering a large number, but for my purposes I’m estimating their cost at about a quarter each, including shipping, as I’m only printing 50. Ok, I have these great cheap postcards, now let’s put them to use!
Vistaprint: People Like Holding Things Like Postcards, Dollar Bills, & Coupons (And Baby Bunnies!)
Here we are in the 21st Century, but still not lost in a world of virtual reality, or even virtual currencies. Even though digital money makes more sense than costly paper and metal currency, we still use it. Not only that, but the value of gold and silver has risen steadily since the invention and popularity of the internet.
This is because there is still great value in things that are tangible. Even though a Google ad serves a valuable purpose, it is not tangible, and disappears into the ether the moment you click, or move on to a different page.You’d also think that with the wide-spread use of of smartphones we could stop chopping down trees to print coupons, right?
Nope, people use those annoying coupon mailers you get every month because they are tangible. You just can’t replace that quality. Try petting a photo of a baby bunny on your iPhone… See, it’s not the same as the real thing!
So, let’s see how we can use this old-fashioned marketing medium in today’s digital world.
Vistaprint Postcards Review: Tack Them Up, Mail Them, or Hand Them Out
(Not to be confused with “smack it up, flip it, rub it down!” lyrics for “Do Me, Baby”) Since I’m only printing 50 postcards and investing about $15 here (including shipping), I can’t afford to festoon entire cities with my postcards. But, let’s see if I can make that meager $15 a good investment.
First, I’m going to tack one of these postcards on every free bulletin board in town. There’s one at Starbucks, the local library, pizza place, and hardware store, which happens to be next to a PetSmart. I figure a lot of people will see these postcards, so ideally the web address of my online store would be prominent on the front.
- 4 reasons to use postcard marketing instead of email marketing– Entrepreneur magazine
That may have been my first mistake, but I did print the back of the postcard for an extra $2.25 as well, (see below) prominently showing my URL. In this case, I figure if someone likes the design on my postcard enough to take it off the bulletin board and home with them, they are at least going to check out my website. At a cost of about a quarter per postcard (the same price I was paying for a click from Google) this isn’t a bad option.
*Related: Vistaprint Face Masks Review: Cost + Coupon
Idea: Consider framing & Selling The 4×6 or 5×7 Sized Vistaprint Postcards of Your Art, Designs, or Photos
The postcards I had printed through vistaprint.com are nice enough to frame, or sell on their own. There is no annoying Vistaprint logo on the back, (like Shutterfly has) so, as a customer these look more like “small prints” than “postcards. At a cost of a quarter each, you have nice room for a profit margin, even if you sell them for $1 each.
If you are at a trade show or event, you can frame one or more of these postcards, as they are a standard 4×6″ size.
If you print your artwork on them, it’s almost like a little handbill like the ones they used to give out for concerts. Add a cheap black (wood?) 4×6” or 5×7” frame from your local Michael’s store, and the framed postcard might only be a total investment of $5 or so.
Their oversized postcards are at a 8×5 x 5.5 size, so while they are great as a “print”, framing them may be annoying at this non-standard size.
I’ll bet that as an artist or photographer you could easily resell a framed postcard of your art or photos for $10 each! I imagine if you are paying to have a little space as an artist in a market somewhere this is actually a pretty good option for selling your designs. Vistaprint lets you choose the finish of the postcards, so you can decide on matte or glossy during the design / checkout process.
If you don’t want to resell these postcards, then at least display one of the framed ones for people to look at.
A small “postcard” of your design(s) would be a welcome, low cost addition to any Etsy store as well. Maybe your full-size prints are $20, but these can be added to an order for $2 each. Or, have a lot of them printed, and sell them as “postcards” in groups of 6 or more.
Idea: Vistaprint Postcards as Leave Behinds
(that’s my attention-grabbing back of the postcards; you know, like everyone rallying for Chairman Meow?) I have a framed poster up at a local coffee shop, so I’m going to leave about 20 of these postcards on the little table next to where my artwork hangs, along with some of Vistaprint’s free business cards coupon. This way, people interested in my poster can take something tangible home with them to check out the URL. We all have short attention spans, so with a business card or postcard they won’t forget to go checkout my shop.
Once again, the postcards are about a quarter each, so I feel good that at least 1 in 20-30 people who takes one will buy something from my site. Actually, the investment looks better on paper for the cheap or free business cards, (only 3 cents each) so I can leave a hundred of those behind and feel even better. If you want to leave a stack of postcards somewhere, I suggest printing many more than 50 to bring the price per piece down. Otherwise, at 20 cents each your return on investment may be too low. Here’s some postcard design ideas on Pinterest.
Be sure to use a coupons or promo code towards postcards!
Never place an order at vistaprint.com without looking for a good coupon or promotional link! There is currently an ongoing marketing sale on Vistaprint’s coupon page that applies a 25% discount towards any postcard order. There is also a site-wide promotion for new customers that offers 20% off + free shipping on your first order. (free delivery requires a minimum order size)