Good opportunities for successful free or low cost marketing are all around when we look for them. But a lack of objective measures of success stops many excellent marketing initiatives. "We used to do invoice messaging, but we stopped." one company told me. Over the course of the year they mail 70,000 invoices and in postage alone, that represents about $20,000. If your invoices are reaching the desks of decision makers for your product or service, then invoice messaging can save you postage and direct mail production costs. If they had advertised on their invoices for five years, they would have received the benefit of over $100,000 in postage and sent about 350,000 advertisements.

Estimating the savings on postage and the number of impressions you will get are excellent objective measures. But ultimately your objective is to increase sales or reduce inventory or introduce new products and services. So write out a reasonable objective and determine how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. You can measure traffic to your website before and after the notice, or measure inventory reduction or sales leads generated or dollar sales increases.

For example, "run notices on 10,000 invoices by end of quarter, generate 100 inquiries and 10 sales of new improved widgets."

So what kind of messages can be placed on an invoice that stimulate sales? Space is limited. So one possibility is to consider something that draws them to your website for more information, "special pricing on widgets, see http://www.entityinc.com/". Another possibility is, "mention code IN500 for 10% off on widgets until December 31, 2001."