5 Tips for Creating a Strong Brand

There are many ways to engage your audience, raise your company's visibility, and define your brand in the marketplace. From drip marketing to event planning to strategic direct mail campaigns, you have many tools at your disposal. Regardless of which tools (or combination of tools), you use, here are five tips to keep in mind.  

1. Plan your timing carefully. Although you want to communicate with your audience frequently using the right channel mix, be strategic in your timing. Some companies bombard their audiences so that those audiences begin to tune them out. Pick your channels—and your moments—and make them count.  

2. Don't complicate your message. It's tempting to load up your communications with every bit of information right out of the gate. The risk, however, is that your audience will get overwhelmed and buy nothing at all. Keep it simple. Let your most compelling points come ringing through.  

3. Don't go it alone. Encourage the departments within your company to work together. Whether in marketing, sales, or customer service, break down the silos and lean into each other's experience. Bring in outside perspectives, as well. Ask objective experts. Do focus groups. By all means, ask your customers! Just because your message is clear to you doesn't mean it's clear to everyone else.  

4. Remember the call to action (CTA). Once recipients have read your communication, tell them what you want them to do. Call for more information? Buy a product? Sign up for a seminar? Without a CTA, the communication can get set aside for later, then be lost or forgotten and never acted upon. We mention it because the CTA gets overlooked more often than you think.  

5. Don't rush. When you've got a great idea, it's tempting to want to take it to market quickly. But take your time to get it right. 

Before planning your next campaign, pick up the phone and call us. We can often offer suggestions on targeting, mailing formats, coatings, and other critical elements of a mailing that you might not have thought of.

Have Lapsed Customers? Win Them Back!

Every business loses customers, but just because customers stop purchasing from you doesn’t mean that they are gone forever. You can win them back! You just need a plan. Here are five tips for re-engaging lapsed customers.

1. Defined “lapsed” customers. At what point do you consider a customer to have lapsed? This will vary based on your type of business. If you are a coffee shop where customers tend to come in every day or multiple times per week, you might consider them “lapsed” if they haven’t purchased after 30 days. If you are a retailer, it might be three to six months before you can be sure these customers have disengaged.

2. Write specifically for this audience. Typically, marketers will use language like, “We miss you!” or “It’s been a while!” But be creative. Other lapsed customer messaging we like includes “You + Us. We miss that.” Or “Breaking up is hard to do.” Then there is the more direct approach: “We’re wondering. Do you still want to get offers from us?”

3. Remind them what they love about you. Do you know what these customers bought in the past? If so, personalize the mailer with images of products you know they’ve purchased before. Remind them what they love (and miss) about shopping with you.

4. Test your offers. You will likely use deeper discounts or more powerful offers to re-engage lapsed customers than active, happy ones—test different offers and messaging to see which ones resonate most strongly with this particular audience.

5. Use direct mail, not email. Email marketing can be powerful, but once someone has already lapsed, they aren’t likely to open your emails anymore. Direct mail goes straight to their mailbox, with no opt-outs or spam filters. Direct mail more easily reaches lapsed customers than email.

When you are coming up with the messaging for the mail piece, remember that these are customers who already know your brand — and they’ve already shown that they like what you have to offer. So get your “win back” on. Sometimes, they just need a little nudge.