PostcardMania In the News

Venture capital (VC) funding has plummeted in 2023 due to high interest rates and less enthusiasm from investors. Research shows that VC funding almost halved globally in the first six months of this year, ushering in what some have called a VC winter.

Despite this, entrepreneurs shouldn’t give up hope of making their dreams a reality. Even though VC funding has slowed to a trickle, good ideas to launch a successful business have not.

You don’t have to immediately go into debt to start a business — I didn’t. All I had when I started was a phone, a computer and my own personal credit cards. I took my idea, ran with it, and now we’re bringing in over $100 million in annual revenue.

Keep reading here.

PostcardMania, the $97 million marketing technology with over 350 staff, reached record revenue in the second quarter of 2023 for its direct mail automation division, PCM Integrations. Revenue from the direct mail specialist’s most tech-centered services increased more than 20% quarter over quarter and nearly 25% over the same quarter last year. Year to date, the division has continued to expand, increasing staff count 25% despite a tech hiring slowdown that saw tech job listings halved between mid-2022 to early 2023.

PostcardMania launched PCM Integrations in mid-2021, and the division has quickly reached multi-million-dollar revenues. Its automated direct mail service offers businesses a lower cost of entry compared to traditional direct mail, endless programmatic targeting options, responsive lead nurturing, and can be applied at scale. The quarter’s strong showing demonstrates the marketplace’s growing interest in responsive, trigger-based direct mail automation.

Keep reading here.

In June, I reached a milestone with my business, PostcardMania: 25 years in business. It got me thinking about all the lessons I’ve learned as a business owner and entrepreneur.

Starting out, I was greener than green. There have been hard times when I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve made it from nothing to $97 million in annual revenue, over 350 staff, and we’re still growing — averaging 20% revenue growth over the last three years after a year of growing at a much slower rate of 5% in the decade previous.

Through those experiences, I grew as an entrepreneur and gained valuable business insights, but I sure wish I had someone to confide in at the time.

Lesson #1: Your marketing budget and revenue growth are tied together

There have been times in my career that I’ve had the choice to either pay myself or pay for marketing….

Read the full article here.

Automation has made many aspects of our lives easier, both professionally and personally. If you’ve ever used dictation to send a text or have separate “home” and “away” settings on your smart doorbell, you’ve likely benefited from automation.

When most people think of automation, they think digital. But automation has evolved to help us in the offline world, where its effects can be felt all the more keenly.

Case in point: Research shows that direct mail messaging has a deeper, more significant impact on our emotions than digital alone, resulting in stronger recall a full week later….

Read the full guide here.

Almost every superhero has a sidekick. It’s not that Batman isn’t capable of amazing feats on his own, it’s just that he can accomplish so much more with Robin at his side. Duo do-gooders, or even partners in crime, can be unstoppable together rather than alone. Would Abbot be as funny without Costello? Would Bonnie be able to get away without Clyde?

Take your pick of combos; it stands true that two are better than one, and the same goes for your marketing!

At my business, PostcardMania, we have the unique advantage of closely tracking successful client campaigns to determine what made them work — and we delivered just shy of 30,000 campaigns last year … 28,091 to be precise. So, I have some insight into what works and what doesn’t.

Continue reading here to learn about the marketing duos you should be taking advantage of.

PostcardMania, the $97MM marketing technology firm employing 350 staff in the Tampa Bay, FL area, added two new digital targeting features — geofencing and contextual search retargeting — to its nationally recognized multichannel marketing campaign package, Everywhere Small Business.

PostcardMania is one of the few marketing companies in the world capable of delivering complex online and offline-integrated campaigns like Everywhere Small Business without any outsourcing, affording clients superior quality control, shorter turnaround times and competitive cost savings, a driving factor in maximizing return on investment. These integrated solutions are all part of PostcardMania’s larger mission to help small businesses get the best results and the highest ROI from their advertising campaigns.

Going forward, PostcardMania’s contextual search retargeting, to be called Browsed-Content Targeting, enables businesses to reach prospects based on topics they research online. For example, an automotive repair company could display digital ads to people who research “check engine light repair” or “replacing car a/c.”

Read on here to learn more about these digital target features.

Joy recently had an interview with Street Fight, an online publication that keeps readers informed on marketing trends.

The article was titled: Direct Mail is Having a Moment. Incorporate it Into Your Mix.

She talked about the impact of direct mail and included news of our recent revenue growth. You can read it here.

Marketing technology firm PostcardMania has set new records in revenue in the first quarter of 2023 and projects growth for the remainder of the year. The direct mail specialist achieved a net revenue of over $25 million in the first quarter of 2023, $1.8 million more than last year’s first quarter revenue of $23.2 million. This marks a quarter-over-quarter growth of 7.82% despite mounting layoffs in the tech and marketing sectors, persistently high inflation, and fears of a looming recession.

PostcardMania ended the quarter with momentum, setting a new earnings record for the most revenue generated in a single month in March 2023.

Moving forward, PostcardMania plans to maintain its growth push with an additional marketing investment of $1.5 million, increasing its annual marketing budget by more than 20% to $8 million for the year. Recently, Founder/CEO Joy Gendusa decided to increase marketing and R&D investments this year in order to reach new goals and plan for the long-term future of her company.

Keep reading here.

If you’re a business owner, a lot has happened already this year to make you stop and consider the state of your (and your business’s) money.

Inflation has every dollar shrinking in value, federal rate hikes have made it more costly to borrow, and while recent bank failures may not have impacted your business outright, it certainly caused a justifiable stir.

With all of this going on, my husband and I decided to meet with a mentor and financial consultant who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital over the last 25 years to review our investments.

He pointed out that, while we both have various investments, we’ve primarily been putting our money into something that has paid off many times over standard stock market returns — and that something is our respective businesses.

Continue reading here to learn the three marketing moves to make your business recession-proof.

Building a successful business comes with a myriad of challenges, but I’ll argue that retaining amazing staff over long periods of time is in the top three … but not for me.

In 2022, about 50.5 million Americans quit their jobs, which was 2.7 million more than the number of Americans quitting in 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported. But even more shocking is the fact that both 2021 and 2022 were record-breaking years respectively, seeing the highest numbers of quits in history since the BLS started tracking the figure back in 2001. These are the years economists are calling the “Great Resignation.”

So, how does a business owner achieve the goal of attracting and keeping the best talent amidst these nationwide quitting trends? Continue reading here to learn the answer.