Keeping People Informed

Postcards Don't have to be used to just promote a sale.
I get so many color postcards in the mail telling me about sales and upcoming product releases, but rarely for anything else. There's one particular company that I enjoy shopping at a lot who regularly gets postcard printing done. Now, pretty much every single postcard deals only with different specials or sales and never anything else.
Well, not long ago they moved into another building across town. I only found out about it when I went to the old store and saw the sign telling me where the new location was. During this move they were still sending out postcards to make sure their presence in the marketplace never faltered.
But here's my question: why didn't they send me a postcard telling me about the move and the new address? Postcards are just perfect for short to the point messages like this one, and would've saved me the time that it took to drive to the old location and then find the new one. A map could've been on the back of the postcard showing exactly where the new location was.
This is only one kind of message you can use for your postcards, and there are a whole slew of other possibilities if you're paying attention. Each business has several different things going on at the same time, many of which will affect the customers, and are often announced in newsletters or signs in the store.
A newsletter is a good source of information, true, but most newsletters are only going to get printed once a month at most, and more often only quarterly. Getting a newsletter done will cost you a lot more time and money than postcard printing, meaning you don't have the same level of control as to when you send those newsletters out if you can't pump that much money into it.
But with a postcard you can very quickly send out a brief message to your customers letting them know about anything important. There are a lot of details that people care about more than you might realize, and most people like to be kept in the loop when it comes to things pertaining to companies they regularly shop at.
Set up a system where you can regularly send out postcards for each important message you need to get across. I m sure when you sit back and consider what all goes into a newsletter you'll see a variety of different announcements you can get to people a little sooner.
Given how cheap postcard printing is, it isn't as if this is a huge additional cost or anything like that. Most of it is really just about realizing that postcards serve a purpose beyond just sales and discount announcements. Use postcards to the best of their ability