No doubt about it, creating nice postcards and sending them out to an appreciative audience is a lot of fun. But treating your postcard marketing efforts that way probably won't grow your business.

Your cards will grow your business when you think of them as tools in a marketing system. A successful postcard marketing system consists of the following six steps:

Step #1: Idea Generation
Step #2: Card Creation
Step #3: Printing
Step #4: Mailing
Step #5: Follow-up with Prospects and Clients
Step #6: Cost-Tracking and Evaluation of Results

Use this system by starting with Step #1, proceeding through the next five steps, then repeating the process, over and over again. Why the repetition? Four reasons:

1. Marketing expert Jeffrey Lant is a big proponent of what he calls the "Rule of Seven." What it means is that people need to be exposed to your message at least seven times in 18 months before they're ready to buy from you.

2. Think for a moment: How many businesses do you hear from on a regular basis? Not too many, right? And inattention to customers can prove costly.

How costly? Well, according to research conducted by the Price Waterhouse accounting firm, 70% of the people who leave a supplier do so because of lack of contact, follow-up or individual attention. That's not good. But think of how easy it would be to make your business stand out from the crowd if you sent your customers a regular postcard...

3. Another idea to ponder, and this one has actually been proven through numerous studies: It costs 6 times more to win a new customer than it does to make a sale to an existing customer. What this means that if you have a customer list, and if you send regular postcards to the people on that list, you'll build repeat sales for your business and become more profitable in the process. This leads right to our fourth and final Reason for Repetition...

4. A business that customers hear from is one that they'll keep in mind -- and keep on patronizing.