The Book on Marketing: Card Decks.

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I wrote yet another book! This one is pretty big, actually, with over 90 chapters, all of which are rather meaty. The book, The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction, can be pre ordered or, depending on when you see this, purchased by clicking the link HERE. A new chapter will post daily for close to 100 days and then the book will be available for immediate purchase instead of just preorders.

I also released the rough drafts of the book chapter by chapter on my website and you can read what I wrote and get the gist of the chapters. Honestly, you don’t even need to read the book. There is enough information between the blog postings and the resources pages found HERE that the rest of the book might just be fluff.

With that said, the blog is a very first draft, mostly notes, of the final book. It’s out of order and a tad messy. This gives you a peek inside my writing process where I do the technical, eclectic part first and the voice tends to change depending on the topic I am discussing and the research I did for the chapter. Paraphrasing from common knowledge sources in the first draft gives it that eclectic look and feel. So please, enjoy my scattered brain and typos in this draft of The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction.

The book itself its a much easier format to read plus adds a lot more of me into it as it goes on with real world, easy to grasp examples where I could put them and honestly, I would truly appreciate your purchase.

Card Decks.

These are stacks of index cards that are mailed to certain groups of people. Each card in a deck may have an advertisement or a discount, and there may be 50 to 200 cards in a deck. On the back, they might serve as a reply card for business. It's extremely crucial to have a fantastic headline and layout because your advertisement will blend in with the sea of others. 

Due to the fact that all of the sponsors are splitting the postage costs, card decks are cheap. For mass mailings, they can run as low as a few cents per prospect. They are often affordable, which is useful for testing even for little mailings.

Make sure you carefully select your audience. Targeting a certain market is easy with card decks. Free books or reports are very effective in this situation because the phrase "FREE" will catch the attention of the person looking through the cards. As always, make sure the call to action is very clear. Multiple response options are typically more effective than just one. For instance, customers might send the card, make a free recorded message call, visit your website, etc. Additionally, you can have various possibilities for leftover space, so always try to bargain for a lower price (how hard is it for them to stick another card in their mailing...their costs are incremental and their profit is high even on remnant rates).

Two further hints: You may often assume that a deck is effective for an ad if it has repeat advertisers. It would be an excellent one to try in if that advertisement also targets your specialized market. Test the copy that you are already confident will work.

Even in this day and age of Google AdWords and other online marketing, postcard decks remain one of the finest ways to quickly develop robust mailing lists especially in your B2B (business to business) marketing program to help you create or improve your own company's mailing lists.

Thank you for reading this little piece of The Book on Marketing: No More Excuses for Marketing Inaction. If you received any value from what you read, I ask you to please consider purchasing this book by clicking HERE. Thank you for everything!