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Why You Should Know: PostcardMania Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

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Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

Joy Gendusa, founder and CEO of PostcardMania, started a company in 1998 with zero capital. Her vision was to create postcards that spanned several industries and could get a trackable marketing message out to a large amount of people. The company, which has grown vastly since its beginnings, now has 192 employees and is on track to break $20 million for the first time this year. Herein, Gendusa explains her ideas about marketing and why she still believes in snail mail.

The genesis of PostcardMania was sparked by an incident of bad service. Tell me about that.
Gendusa: I owned a small graphic design firm. It was me and a couple other people. I had a handful of large clients and I was (very transparently) brokering printing as well. I had one big client who I could see was going to go down in flames. I received a promotion from a company out of New York and I called them and ordered postcards. They were really inexpensive. When I got my proof they had added their 800 number to the back of the card. I called them up and asked them to remove it and they promptly told me it would be $50 to do so. I was annoyed. I hung up the phone and went to my tiny team and said, "We are starting a postcard company. We are going to call it PostcardMania." I had something in my mind; I knew there was something on the tip of my universe that I was going to stumble upon. I knew it was there. So that was the moment.

One of the things I found unique about your company is that you didn't use outside financing. Many companies can scale up a lot faster if they grow with outside financing. Why did you decide to do this?
Gendusa: Probably because I am not only in it for the money and the growth. I just decided to grow organically.

Who do you look up to in marketing?
Gendusa: The number-one person I look up to is Flint McLaughlin. He owns a company called Marketing Experiment. He makes marketing look like a math formula and he explains each part of it and when you understand how to create want and how to get somebody to take action on your Web page, it is very analytical. He is a genius.

You have described yourself as a disciple of repetition when it comes to marketing – for example, sending a message out more than once. How many times is enough and how often should the message change?
Gendusa: It depends on so many factors. To market a dentist, for example, you have to look at how many dentists are in your region of where people would drive to a dentist. You need to understand who your competition really is and how much effort he or she is putting into the marketing. Then you can understand how many times your message can go out and what your message should be. How you differentiate yourself as a dentist is important because when you are putting that message out over and over again, only a handful are going to do it right and do it consistently.

In the postcard business, one of the challenges is proving reach. When you send postcards you don't know what the receiver will do. How do you handle that objection?
Gendusa: In defense of postcards, when you are going digital, you're one of many. To your question of tracking, what we have been doing for a number of years is putting specialized phone numbers on the cards and all our ads online. So if you are trying to get somebody to make a call or go to your Web site, you definitely want to send them to a landing page and have a different landing page for every direct mail piece so you can see exactly if that piece got them to take action. At that point, if they make it to the landing page but they don't convert to a lead, you see that they made it there. Then you can optimize that page for conversion. You can go to the page and figure out why they are leaving. You can fix every point along the way so it can become a lead.

What are things people do that bug you when it comes to marketing?
Gendusa: They give up. They say I tried that and it didn't work. It is giving up and not taking the time to understand that bothers me. One of my passions is to really empower small business owners and teach them. I have a 10,000 page Web site and it consists mostly of organized content they can learn from. I really want small business owners to succeed.

Congratulations on your success and thank you for your time.
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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