According to the National Retail Federation, families with school-aged children will spend about $634 per household, on back-to-school apparel, electronics, shoes and supplies! That’s a back-to-school spending of $26.7 Billion across the USA.

If your business offers back-to-school products or services, now’s the time to launch your back-to-school direct mail marketing campaign!

Most school-aged children will head back to school in mid-August to early September. Make sure families in your area know about your upcoming sales and events, so they keep you in mind when they’re planning their back-to-school shopping trips; and don’t forget to include a persuasive offer or discount that they can’t refuse – you want to lure families into your store, instead of your competitors!

According to Prosper Consumer Insights Director Pam Goodfellow, families are “Hoping to spread out their budgets but still reap the benefits of getting the products their children want, parents this back-to-school season will comparison shop online and around town at their child’s favorite stores, potentially even more than once, as they seek to find bargains and products that offer the best value.”

Back to School Marketing Resources

• Find a mailing list of Families with Children in your area.
• Get help designing/printing/mailing your Postcard campaign.
• Got questions? 1 866 306 8674

Mobile Barcodes (otherwise known as QR Codes  / Quick Response Codes) are popping up all over the place.

You see them on direct mail postcards delivered to your door, on menus at restaurants, in newspapers & magazines, on advertisements at Museums and Airports etc etc. They’re a ‘hot’ new marketing tool that’s gaining in usage and popularity. They look like this:

ScanLife, one of the largest global providers of mobile barcodes, just released a quarterly report that indicates that in March 2013 they reached an all time high, of 6.7 million scans in just 1 month. You can see from this graph how the trend is growing exponentially, year after year.

Here are some other interesting facts about Mobile Barcodes and who’s using them, when they use them, and which ones are most popular:

Ever wondered how Zip Codes came about?

In 1963 a  Mr Zip  marketing campaign was launched in an effort to improve the sorting and delivery of mail nationwide.

This makes Zip Codes 50 years old!

The Zoning Improvement Plan (ZIP) was devised to help speed up the sorting and delivery of mail by using numbers to represent regions, cities, post offices & neighborhoods.

This is how a 5 digit postal code is broken down.

The first digit represents an area in the country.

The next 2 digits represent a central postal facility in the area.

The last 2 digits represent a post office or postal zone.

Comic books were used to inform us about how the new zip code plan would be used.

The Zoning Improvement Plan continues to help us get our direct mail campaigns to their destinations efficiently and on time.

Of course, any successful direct mail campaign depends on a good quality mailing list!

leadsplease.com can help you build mailing lists by zip code.

Now that was easy!

Credits to The Postal Museum which recounts the history of the postal service with entertaining videos and charming graphics!