Don’t Lose Customers Due to Inaction!

Do you know the primary reason companies lose customers? They stop communicating with them. It is that simple. When companies stop communicating, their customers lose interest. They move on to the competition and brands that pay attention to them. This is why it is not enough to just have a customer acquisition strategy. You must have a customer retention strategy, too. 

In this effort, one of your most powerful tools is personalized print. Think personalized newsletters. Personalized postcards. Personalized holiday giveaways and gifts. These are your customers. They should not be treated the same way as people you have never done business with. You need to reinforce the existing relationship and speak to customers on a personal basis.

When one chain of hair salons wanted to reduce guest churn, for example, it set up a customer retention program that included personalized direct mail. It personalized its mailers based on customer name, images, offer, salon location, and reward program status. Franchise owners started sending postcards every six weeks to stay current and top of mind with their hair salon clientele. 

The results?

•    The chain has a high customer retention rate.

•    Its rewards program customers have a one-third higher top “spend” than other customers.

•    Franchisees have a much stronger upsell rate for their female customers.

Print personalization is all about strengthening relationships. It helps you stay relevant. It helps you stay top of mind. How often do you need to send out personalized campaigns? At a minimum, more often than your competition does!

Need ideas? Let us look at your list and talk about ways you can be engaging your customers on a consistent basis.  

Three Tips for Getting More from Your Paper

It’s no secret. Marketers are benefitting from today’s healthy economy. But competition for consumers’ shopping dollars is still fierce, and marketing dollars are under more scrutiny than ever before. One of the places you can stretch your print dollars is with smart selections in paper. Here are three easy ways to manage your paper costs without impacting the quality of your print campaigns.   

1. Spend less, get more.

Paper prices fluctuate often, so if you haven't standardized on a specific paper, ask about less expensive options. Just because you notice a subtle difference between stocks doesn’t mean your customers will. (In fact, they probably won’t.) If you are mailing multi-page documents, consider switching to a lighter stock that can help you save on postage, too.

2. Try our in-house brand.

If your piece doesn't demand a specialty paper, opt to use our house stock. House paper isn’t less expensive because it’s lower quality. It’s less expensive because we purchase it in volume and pass the savings on to you.

3. Avoid the use of bleeds.

If color needs to go to the edge of the page, depending on the specs of the job, the job may need to be printed on a larger sheet of paper or on a larger press. This can increase your costs. If you don't include bleeds, your project might require less paper or be able to be run on a smaller format press. You might also be able to get a similar effect at lower cost by using colored paper.

We are experts at helping our customers maximizing their marketing budgets, including their use of paper. Need some ideas? Give us a call!

Best Practices in Personalized Marketing

If you want great marketing results, it’s important to personalize text, images, and other content based on what you know about the recipient. But just dropping in data-driven content doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes other factors can dull your results. Maybe the offer is great, but the design is so uninteresting that nobody reads it. Or the headline is snappy and the design is great, but there is no incentive for people to respond.

Let’s look at three best practices that need to be the foundation of any personalized print campaign.

·      Traditional marketing rules apply. Even with personalized marketing, traditional rules hold firm. Ultimately, all of the elements — creative, message (including personalization), offer, segmentation, call to action, and incentive —need to come together to determine success. 

·      Focus on relevance, not “personalization.” It doesn’t matter how “personalized” a document is. If it isn’t relevant, it is worthless. Take the shoe market. You don’t want to sell orthopedic shoes to teenagers. You can deck out the mailer with text messaging terms, pictures of X-Games, and use all the contemporary lingo, but it’s not a relevant message unless a teen needs to purchase a birthday present for grandpa.

·      Know your customers, then market to what you know. When the National Hockey League began 1:1 communication with its customers, it asked them to fill out a survey that indicated that 40% of the of NHL’s fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means these fans can’t easily go to games or access highlights. Imagine the opportunity for the league! So ask yourself, what don’t you know about your customers now that might allow you to create relevance in a more powerful way later? Do a customer mail or email survey. Use what you find out to speak directly to the needs and interests of your customers.

Investing in your marketing database and developing an intimate understanding of your customers takes time, dedicated resources, and manpower, but it is one of the most important investments you can make. Personalization is a powerful tool, but to get the big pay-off, it cannot work alone.

Maximizing Your Multichannel Advantage

Did you know that 72% of consumers say they would rather connect with brands and businesses in a multichannel environment (SailThru)? And that 55% of marketers now use three to four channels to reach their target audiences, up from 44% two years ago (Direct Marketing Association)? Creating a multichannel mix doesn’t have to be daunting. Here are five tips for maximizing your efforts: 

1. Don’t let data paralysis keep you down.

“Multi” begins with two. Start with a simple one-two punch with email and direct mail. Or direct mail to mobile marketing video via QR Code. Add social media sharing buttons to blog posts and e-newsletters. Then add in other components one at a time.

2. Know the strengths and weaknesses of each channel.

Marketing channels are not interchangeable. Each has strengths and weaknesses, so know the pros and cons of each channel and match them to the right stage in the campaign.

3. Know your customers’ channel preferences.

For some campaigns, you may want to use multiple channels to reach the same customer at different times and in different ways. Other times, you want to communicate primarily or initially through their preferred channel(s). For example, if you offer a customer newsletter, don’t assume everyone wants the print or email version and send every person the same thing. Ask which channel they prefer, then honor their request. You’ll get more responses and improved customer loyalty that way.

4. Remember that social and mobile channels are driven by print.

If you want to grow your email and social media efforts, start with print. That’s because print is one of the key drivers of awareness of email and social media exposure and sign-ups.

5. Break down the silos.

Although multichannel campaigns don’t have to be integrated, simple reasoning says that they should be. All of these components need to work together, whether through a marketing automation system or being driven by human decision-making. This requires breaking down data silos.

6. Match channels to their place in the sales funnel. 

Marketing channels are not interchangeable. They are used at different times and for different purposes. Understand the role each channel plays in your sales funnel and match the channels up appropriately.

Need help understanding the benefits of each channel and putting together an effective mix? Give us a call!

What Is Really Motivating Your Customers?

When we think about motivating consumers to make a purchase, we think about using the right mailing list, creating the right offer, and having a compelling call to action. Whether creating a direct mail piece, a sales letter, or a magazine advertisement, those elements are critical. But the reasons people buy can also be more complex.

Particularly in the B2C environment, emotional factors are often at play. For example, if you are selling exotic vacations, you aren’t just selling a cost-effective hotel with great food and a seafront view.

·      You are selling relaxation.

·      You are tapping into the desire to escape from the daily grind of meetings, presentations, and child rearing.

·      You are selling the desire to be catered to. 

Tapping into these deep emotional wells can help you sell more.  Instead of mailing a postcard with the headline, “Get 25% off plane tickets today!” Try, “Don’t you wish the office were a Thousand Miles Away?” Or, “Isn’t It Time that Someone Pampered YOU?”

Think about a parent dreaming of excitement beyond the children’s homework, playing shuttle for soccer practice, and meetings for the PTA. A trip offering whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, and skydiving might tap deep emotional needs for adventure.  Try a postcard with an image of the face of a skydiver, wide-eyed and exhilarated—cheeks flapping in the wind—that says, “You, too, can FLY!”

Whether you are developing direct mailers, sales letters, or magazine ads . . .

·      Think about unmet frustrations and deeper emotions that might drive recipients to make a change.

·      List the potential motivators. To be recognized at work? Get a promotion? Be challenged? Break out of the mold? Feel empowered, youthful, and sexy?

·      Show — don’t tell. Use the power of graphics to tell a story.

Emotions are powerful marketing tools. Emotionally driven purchases tend to be less price-sensitive and more spontaneous. The medium of print has the ability to tap into those emotions and motivate behavior in a way that no other medium can do. Take advantage of it!