One potential problem, however, is the risk that people will beginto notice and dislike the repetition that will naturally develop if oneis used too often. For some forms of advertising, this does not matterquite as much, because they are long enough to allow you to makeseveral visual changes to mask the fact that the template is the same.

With postcard templates, you do not have this same luxury.

Because a postcard is so small, you have fewer things you canchange about it. Your customers will quickly notice a single templatebecause of the repetition it will create. Most only have three or fourdifferent things on the front of it. Just rearranging them will notlead to a wide variety.

This leads to one of the pros and cons of postcard templates. Thecon is what I just listed, but the pro is that postcards are naturallyeasy to design.

This means you can more conveniently create three or four differenttemplates, if not more, to cycle between. Going with a system like thisyou can have distinctively different ones for each of your postcards,and then within each, you can make things more varied by altering whereyou put images and text each time you use them.

The best kinds of templates are the ones that will give you a largeamount of flexibility in terms of what goes where on the postcard. Themore variation you can get out of a single template the better it willserve you, which is why I would suggest spending a lot more timedesigning it than you would normally spend on just a single postcard.

The number of templates you need, along with how often you updatethem, will depend entirely on how often you send them out. If you onlydo one template, once a month rather than three or four, it might lastfor a few years. If you send them out biweekly or more, than you willneed to alter or update them every year or six months at least.

Remember too that the more complicated and unique your template isthe easier it will be to spot again when you only change around a fewthings. Good ones lend themselves well to multiple arrangements withouttipping people off to the fact that it is the same. Be creative, but donot get so carried away you end up with one that is only meant for asingle situation.

Katie Marcus writes about the postcard templates technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.