Designing a successful Touchcard is an important part of your campaign, and many of us shopkeepers are our own ad hoc graphic artists, marketers and strategists. To make your professional hats a little more comfortable and a little easier to juggle, we’ve put together a little best-practices list for designing your Touchcard.
1. Design
A nicely designed Touchcard will always be well received. Here are three things that will definitely help you hit the mark.
Design for simplicity and consistency
Your store sells your product; your Touchcard should sell your brand. It should be a visual extension of your shop.
Your design should be simple and consistent with your product, branding and messaging. A card that’s too busy is distracting and takes away from your ability to encourage customers to take the next step. Strong branding lets someone who’s been to your shop before get a sense that your card is from you even if they don’t notice the logo.
Choose crisp, relevant graphics
A well-placed, high-quality lifestyle image can be very effective, but it’s even better if you can include one that’s relevant, features your product and aligns with your brand. If you find the image on the internet, be sure to use a stock photo or one that’s not protected under a trademark or copyright.
Use a clear, legible font
Make sure that your copy is easy to read by avoiding over-stylised fonts with a lot of decoration. Your font’s contrast with the background color or image should make your copy clear and stand out. Avoid putting light fonts against light backgrounds and dark fonts against dark or colored backgrounds.
Check out the detail on this Touchcard. The grainy texture aligns with the brand’s handcrafted, traditional appeal.
2. Copy
Spark interest with your headline
The point of a headline is to grab attention. Unless you sell poetry, focus on a clear, relatable message over anything too lyrical. A simple, honest “Thank You” in an attractive font can go a long way.
Drive the message home
Particularly if your headline suggests a premise for sending the card, back it up with the rest of your copy. A “Thank You” Touchcard should explain what you’re thanking your customer for (in this case, probably a purchase or a show of support). If you’re offering a token of your appreciation, it’s nice to give it a little intro, too.
3. Benefits
You’ve probably heard the marketing adage to sell the “sizzle,” not the “steak,” and it’s particularly true when marketing to people who’ve had a taste of your product already. Your Touchcard should highlight the benefits of returning. Whether it’s a discount incentive or a picture of some best-seller merchandise they might have overlooked, focusing on what’s in it for them is sure to get them salivating. Let your customer know what they’re missing if they don’t come back for more.
4. Offer
It never hurts to offer a little incentive to get your customers back in your shop. Touchcard makes this easy by automatically generating a unique coupon code for your customer. There’s a reason discount coupons are so prevalent in Ecommerce marketing: they’re effective.
Our discount codes also let you customize the expiration period based on when the card is sent. A pro tip is to add a little pressure to the sale by keeping the expiration period reasonably short. People are more inclined to purchase if they know they’re going to miss out on a deal if they don’t act fast. (But remember to consider the delivery timelines: about 1 week within the US and a conservative 3 weeks for international shipping.)
If you have a strict no-discount policy or your brand doesn’t lend itself to discounting, you can still include an offer like free shipping. (A coupon for this would need to be created via the Shopify Admin panel. Contact us for help.)
5. Call to Action
What do you want your customers to do? Your Touchcard should have a single, clear call to action (CTA) to get people to take the next step.
Avoid having a website URL, support email, phone number, and social media account all on one page. This will only confuse your customer.
Help them by keeping your Touchcard clean and making their next action a no-brainer.
Note: When designing your postcard be sure to design on an 1875 x 1275 canvas. To help ensure you get sizing correct we’ve created some useful templates that you can download here.
Still have questions about creating your campaign? Get in touch if you need help.