Virtual Postcards Are Here - Every Card Builds A List You Own

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This changes everything. You asked for it, and I'm delivering. Gone are the days of sending off the 5,000 piece 9 by 12 postcard and just starting from scratch the very next month. And gone are the days where your clients' crappy landing pages just failed to convert leads altogether, and then they blame you for the postcard not working. And gone are the days of linear growth in our 9 by 12 businesses because this this is about to cause compound growth.

If you are a partner at Our Local Spotlight, listen up. And if you're not a member yet, you better still listen up because you honestly might get left in the dust by our partners now. I kind of just changed our business model a bit, to be honest, but I promise it's in the name of easier sales, far greater income potential, and providing way more value to your clients than you already are. All with zero extra effort or dollars on your end. The virtual postcards update is officially live today at Our Local Spotlight.

And if you're an exclusive partner, you now have access to this feature in your dashboard as soon as you log in. But please watch this full video before you even go look at it cuz you have some learning to do because this feature would be useless and could even hurt you if you don't know how to properly frame it with your clients. And that's what this video will be all about. here's a simple version of how it works. Every physical 9 by 12 postcard you mail out now, you can build a digital version of it sitting behind a QR code right on the card.

So somebody gets your postcard in the mail, sees an offer they'd like to redeem, scans that code with their phone, and boom, they land on a clean digital version of the same card all with the same local offers on it. They tap on the offers they want, they redeem the offer, and they activate them all right there. And that part's cool on its own as a feature, and I'll show you live in a second. But honestly, that's just the very tip of the iceberg because like I said, this basically changes your business model. The real beauty is what's happening underneath it because this is the part that turns your postcard business into something that compounds on its own every single month.

Remember how I said we're looking for compound growth now, not linear? I wasn't lying. So first, let's be real about how print has always worked. You mail the card out, it hits the mailboxes, and that's it. One and done.

Whoever got that card, you have no real clear way to reach them again unless you spend thousands of dollars to send another mailing. You didn't build a list of your own. You didn't collect any data other than maybe how many people scanned your QR codes. So, the very next card, you're starting back at zero, and you have to spend thousands of dollars again to hit the same exact amount of people. And your advertisers are on the same boat.

They paid for one mailing, it went out to 5,000 doors, and that was that. Nothing carried over, nothing stacked over time, and every card was a fresh start with nothing saved. That's the boring model that I've just absolutely shattered, and man, am I excited about it, as you can tell. So, here's what changed. With Virtual Postcards, the card is not one and done anymore.

Every card you mail now does two brand new things. Number one, it builds you an email list. The people who scan and opt-in become subscribers that you own. They are your audience now. And number two, it hands your advertisers something that they've literally never had with direct mail, data.

They can actually see people engaging with their offer, instead of just wondering if anybody saw it. But here's the real kicker. Once you've built that list, you can broadcast to that list directly from Our Local Spotlight. Every single month, when you drop a new card in the mail, you can also send an email from your dashboard to your entire email list saying that the fresh offers just went out. Do you see what that does?

The reach of every advertiser on your card grows every single month, month after month. Their offer doesn't just hit the mailbox once and then vanish. It goes back out to a bigger audience every single time you hit send. And I mean, think about it. Let's say your town has two zip codes.

Let's say you sent 5,000 postcards to the zip code 00000 in May. And let's say 500 people redeemed an offer, and now you have a bunch of consumers' contact information in the zip code 00000. And now, let's imagine the next month, in June, you're mailing your next postcard to the 11111 zip code. Before Virtual Postcards, your reach would still only be 5,000 postcards. However, because you can now broadcast your postcard virtually to your list, your reach is now 5,500 people because of all the people that redeemed the previous month.

You didn't have to pay for more mail over here. Your advertisers didn't have to pay for more, but your reach grew. And you can imagine how this can just compound month after month as your list keeps getting bigger, broader, and denser at the same time. And that's the engine. Everything I'm about to show you exists to feed that.

So now let me show you how it works instead of just talking about it. And then after I show you how it works, it's important you stay. This is going to show you how to frame it with your advertisers, which is very important. Okay. As you can see, I have a postcard here, and I have one postcard.

Let's say this had an offer for 10% off, and it says scan to redeem here. There's a QR code right there. I'm going to record my screen and show you what it looks like if I was a consumer that received this card in the mail, and I want to redeem that offer. Let's show you. Okay, so here's the postcard.

I'm going to go as a consumer. I want to redeem this offer. I'm going to just hover over the postcard and scan it, and it's going to bring me to Our Local Spotlight. It brings me to the virtual postcard for Boston. And as you can see, the bottom right corner, that ad is the one that I scanned.

So that is the one that's bobbing up and down. You'll see on the back end when I show you. As the partner, all the QR codes are already generated for you for each one. In the Our Local Spotlight app, you don't have to go to any other app to create QR codes, and it'll all be trackable and everything. Okay?

So, the consumer can obviously see the full card, and you can build the card to be any template you want. But they would click on that ad because that's the one that they wanted to redeem. They'll see what the offer is. Free 10-oz conditioner. Obviously, there's fine print, there's description.

You'll have full control over that. And they would put in their contact information in order to unlock the the code. So I'm going to do that real Okay, I've put in my information. Now I'm just going to press unlock offer. And remember, I'm the consumer.

Okay, so I unlocked the offer. So the consumer can redeem their offer at any time. And the reason it's not showing right away is so that it's you can actually track when they actually go into the store to redeem it. And that's important. You'll see on the back end.

So when they're ready to redeem, they would press activate offer. It's going to give them the code, which I mean, whether it's a storefront or whether it's a landscaping company, it'll all be in the fine print how to redeem it. But that's the code. They can copy the code. They also received an email with the code and the ability to activate and now you have their data.

So, I'll show you what it looks like on the back end, but let me really quickly show you the front end one more time. So, there's obviously a bunch of share buttons. So, they're probably going to share this postcard with friends if there's a bunch of good offers on it. They'll be like, "Hey Susie, look, they're giving a 20% offer at Tony's Pizza." And also at any time if they want to opt in to give you their information so that you can send them future postcards, which if you're putting on great offers, of course they're going to want future postcards, they can opt in right here at this field.

And all of this connects to your personal landing page. There's a page for all of your past postcards. These are just generic for now. But, there's a page for all your past postcards. So, not just one postcard, you can post all of your postcards, current, future, and present.

And it's all connected to your landing page. So, it's a section right down here, which you can activate from your dashboard. Okay, now let me show you what it looks like on the back end as the partner. Okay, so now I'm going to show you what it's like as the partner. All you're going to do is log in to your dashboard It would ask you for your password if you haven't logged in before.

And then you would click virtual postcards right This is where you can see all of your past postcards. If you haven't built any, you would press add new card. But, I'm not going This isn't a tutorial. I'm just going to show you everything on the inside. But, if I go to this card right here because obviously I just showed you that I did a redemption, you can actually go and now see that that redemption went through.

This is the contact information I put in. I now have this guy's contact information. This is a local consumer in my town. I can now email him whenever there's new offers out there. This is so valuable.

This is my list. Now, there's two things there. You can export all your redemptions at any time if you wanted to go to a different email marketing software. But, remember you can broadcast a card one to your entire list from this. So, let's say I just built this card.

I just mailed it out. I just built it virtually as well, and it is live. Now, I can actually broadcast this card if I have an existing email list already built up. I can press this button right here, and you can only do this once because we don't want to destroy our sender reputation, and we don't want to harass people. As you can see, I have 539 subscribers, and just by typing in the name of the card and pressing send broadcast, I would send an email out to all of my subscribers saying, "Hey, we just dropped a bunch of new offers.

Go check them out." And then they would have a button to go straight to this new virtual postcard via email. I'm not going to send it right now because I have a lot of dummy emails in there, and I don't want to destroy our sender reputation, but that's just it for Aside from that, in order to build the card, it's pretty standard. It's just drag and drop. Actually, I'll show you how to build a new card.

So, you'd press new card, you'd name the card. There is all sorts. You have 6 by 11, 6 by 11 verticals, horizontal, 9 by 12s, all the above. You can choose a publish date, so it won't publish until a certain date. You'd press create, and then it's just drag and drop.

However you want your template to look, or however it actually looks, like it should look exactly like the card that you actually mailed out. And that's how you build your card. Now, I'll go back to one of my existing cards real quick. So, you can see there's also a ton of analytics that comes with this, and this is what's powerful. You can see the analytics per advertiser.

So, if you have a specific advertiser that wants to know how many redemptions they had over a certain period of time, you can find that information. If they want to know how many redemptions they had for a specific card because they joined you for multiple cards, you can narrow down that information. You've got redemption activity, you've got their conversion rates, how many people scanned, how many people captured, how many people redeemed the offer, how many people repeated because once we have their information, we've got them locked into the system, and we can figure out the repeat rate. You've got card views overall, and you can see the trends by the day. Literally more information than you'll ever need.

You're You have it. You have your leads list right here. This is every lead that ever redeemed with you, but you can easily filter it however you want. If you want just the leads that redeemed for Baystate Home Services, that way you can send them the email list, you would just click Baystate Home Services and export that list. You can send it right over to them if that's what you agreed to.

The world is your oyster. And we are fully compliant for email and SMS. Of course, if you're sending via SMS, that's on you. Make sure you're compliant. But all the opt-ins are actually kept track of.

Unsubscribes are handled automatically. If people unsubscribe from your list, they'll be taken out. That way we're still fully compliant. And that's it. Okay, here's what I really love about this.

This works so well because everybody in the loop wins. It's a net benefit for everybody. The consumer gets real local offers at their fingertips, and they get reminded when new local offers are live because now you're sending them a broadcast whenever you send out a new card. Secondly, your advertiser benefits because they finally have data instead of a black hole. They can also have their leads' contact info if that's what you guys agreed to.

You can send it over to them. And their reach climbs every single month without them having to pay you anything extra. And third, you benefit because you own the list. You've got the data, and you've got a real reason for every client to stay now. Now, an advertiser is way more enticed to stay for the long term because they don't want their competition to benefit from the list that you guys grew together.

Also, broadcasts are just the start of what you can do with your email list. Have you ever dreamt of running a local newsletter in your town? Now you can do that. The world is your oyster. Just remember to always lead with immense value.

But here's the point. When the incentives line up for all three parties like they do here, the consumer, the advertiser, and you, people redeem, people share, people pay, people renew, and people never want to leave. And that's the whole ballgame. And real quick, the next section in this video is extremely important because I'm going to teach you how to frame this properly with your advertisers so that this helps you make sales rather than hurting you because it could hurt you if you don't do it right. But first, if you're excited about this new update, tap the like button for me.

It genuinely helps the channel. And as a thank you, here's a kiss. So, how do you actually sell a slot now? The pitch actually shifts a little. Of course, the old one was literally just buy a slot, get in front of a a thousand homes.

And of course, that's a oversimplification of the pitch, but it was basically just structured like that. And it worked fine for the most part, but it's a one-time pitch. Now, the new pitch should be something more like this. When you buy a slot on the card, you're not buying one mailing. You're getting onto a card that goes back out to a growing audience every month through our list.

The longer you stay, the more people your offer reaches, and the amount you pay us will never change. Plus, you actually get data. We will hand you the list of redemptions with contact info, which is literally a list of your potential customers who were interested in what you would have to offer. They redeemed to your offer. And let's just pretend for this part of the pitch they are a roofing company that we're talking to.

People in your industry spend hundreds of dollars per lead. We're just going to hand them to you as a thank you for joining the card and helping us grow our business. Okay, that's the end of the pitch. And that's the frame. You can customize it however you wish, but you're not selling a one-time drop, you're selling a spot in a channel that keeps on growing.

And now it's a smoother sell because it feels like you're partnering with them, not just selling them. And now, here's something you really have to get right because this is where it can go sideways. The entire engine depends on people actually scanning and activating offers. That's what builds your list and creates the data. And now, to be clear, virtual postcards can have slots that don't have offers.

I would expect that. They just won't have an offer on them on the card. And that's fine. So, if you have an advertiser that opted out of something like this, totally fine. But for the advertisers that are counting on this, their offers have to be real, and they must have a very clear call to action to actually scan the QR code in order to redeem.

So, this is your job to coach your businesses to put up something actually good, like genuinely good. Something an actual person, an actual consumer would want to claim. So, don't let them throw up a watered-down 5% off deal just to be on the card. Because if the offer is weak, nobody's going to activate it. And if nobody activates it, you don't build a list, they don't build a list, the business gets nothing.

It's literally a lose-lose. So, the rule is dead simple. Make the offer real. It does not have to be a massive discount or anything crazy. Just has to be something worth scanning a QR code for.

And that's the most important coaching that you'll do for your clients. And like I said, the call to action has to make it very clear to scan the QR code to redeem your offer. People need very clear instructions like that. Okay, now before I recap, I have a gift for you. To celebrate the launch, I'm running a promo for the next 7 days starting from the moment this video is published.

So from the day this video drops, you've got 1 week to grab the annual plan for an extra $50 off for your first year. And to be clear, the annual plan was already discounted, but now it'll be discounted by another $50 for the next 7 days. So it all shakes out to right about 4 and 1/2 months free if you go with the annual plan. So if you've been sitting here nodding along to the whole compounding thing, where your list grows every single month and every advertiser on your card actually wants to keep paying you, then locking in the full year probably makes sense for you. Either way, 7 days from today that offer is going to end.

So to recap the important points, and you might want to write this down, every card you mail makes your list bigger. Every month you send, your reach grows, which means over time, you're not just some guy who mails out postcards, you own a local audience in your market. A real email list of local people who actually want local offers. And it belongs completely to you. That, my friends, is called an asset.

It compounds quietly in the background while you just keep doing the exact same thing you already do. A regular 9 by 12 postcard business never had that. Yours does now. So that's virtual postcards, and to be clear, this feature is only accessed as a paying member of Our Local Spotlight. If you have a free pin, you won't have virtual postcards.

If you're already a paying exclusive member, which means you have a star pin and a landing page, then this is live for you right now. So go log into your dashboard, click the virtual postcards button, and start building your list with your very next card. And the sooner you start, the sooner that list starts growing, and starting earlier literally just means a bigger audience later. And hey, if you're watching this and you're not a partner yet, but you plan on becoming one, I recommend joining soon because this is location exclusive, and if somebody else takes your location before you do, you're probably out of luck for a while. And I suspect this update will drive many new sign-ups, so you might want to join quickly.

The link to join Our Local Spotlight is in the description of this video. I'm so excited to see how this absolutely catapults all of your businesses and helps you smother the competition as well. And I can't wait to see the tricks you guys will come up with along the way cuz you're smarter than me. All right, see you inside the community. Love you.

Bye.