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.

Personalized Print Is Not Only Effective, It’s Sustainable!

As marketers, we love personalized printing. It offers a lower cost per lead. It also results in higher per order values and increased ROI. But there is another (often overlooked) benefit of personalization, too. It improves sustainability.

Is personalized marketing more sustainable? Yes! Here’s why:

• It tends to be more targeted and focused. This means you are likely sending out fewer but more relevant pieces, reducing the overall footprint of your campaign.
• Personalization requires a clean and relevant database. Cleaner databases mean that your recipients produce fewer undeliverable pieces.
• Personalized printing relies on digital production, eliminating plates, chemicals, and spray powders.

Let’s look at three examples of how personalized printing can reduce the environmental impact of your campaign.

Personalized booklets: Say you are a small college, mailing four-color catalogs to prospective students. Each catalog is 252 pages, covering various disciplines and extra-curricular activities. Only 25% of the material might be relevant to each student, who never read the other 75%. What a waste of paper, ink, and energy! Now, say you print 64-page catalogs of highly relevant material instead. Not only does this increase the relevance (and impact) of the booklets, but you’ve just reduced your environmental impact by 75%.

Personalized postcards: In a static, untargeted mail campaign, you might send out 15,000 postcards to an undifferentiated mailing list. By personalizing the campaign, you mail to a highly targeted segment of customers instead. Now, rather than sending out 15,000 pieces, you might send only 5,000 pieces, but because these offers are more targeted, your ROI on the campaign is higher. Plus, you’ve just reduced your printing and mailing volume by two-thirds.

Database cleansing: Even if you still choose to mail to your entire list, you can be more sustainable by simply de-duping, updating, and cleaning your lists. By eliminating duplicates, misspelled names, and undeliverable addresses, you are eliminating the waste, cost, and environmental impact of producing mail that will never reach its destination. One cataloger slashed its print volumes by 50% simply by cleaning up its list!

Personalized printing is not only good for the planet, but it’s good for business, too. So do a marketing double-dip—personalize it!

Tapping the Unique Characteristics of Print

When it comes to marketing, no channel reigns supreme. Every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and part of creating relevance is capitalizing on the strengths of each one. For example, email is powerful for flash sales and quick updates, while print has a beauty, longevity, and stopping power that digital channels can’t replicate. Here are some ways to capitalize on the strengths that are unique to print:

1. Tap the tactile experience. Integrate tactile media, such as textured surfaces or stocks to engage your audience and create a memorable experience more deeply.

2. Use the wonder of printed color. Digital color is beautiful, but nothing replicates the depth and richness of a beautifully printed piece. Take advantage of the vibrant nature of printed color to evoke emotion.

3. Add special effects such as coating, die-cuts, and embossing. All computer screens feel the same — smooth and flat. Print offers the opportunity to add physical, tactile embellishments that make your audience want to engage with it over and over again.

4. Go dimensional. Whether it’s a piece that pops open into a dimensional shape or a lovely box containing a gift card, use the dimensionality of print to make people feel special. Dimensional mail is excellent for getting past gatekeepers in B2B marketing, too.

5. Include product samples, personalized booklets, and other incentives not possible in a digital world. The Global Ad Impressions Study from the Advertising Specialty Institute, for example, consistently finds that people are more likely to purchase from a company that gives them a promotional product, such as a branded bag or mug.

Every marketing channel has its unique benefits, and one does not replace the other. That’s why it’s essential to understand how to capitalize on the unique characteristics of direct mail, marketing collateral, and other print forms. Need to make people feel unique and valued? Nothing does the job like something they can touch and feel.

 

5 Ways To Stand Out With Direct Mail in 2022

by Summer Gould

022 has started off very busy. The toughest part right now for direct mail is the paper shortage. Everyone is scrambling to get paper and in direct mail, no paper means no mail. The best way to combat that is to plan ahead and get your paper secured early. Once you have your paper, start planning your direct mail to stand out in the mail box.

Here are five ways to get your direct mail campaign to stand out and get noticed:

1. Use color envelopes: Color is inviting and not used often enough. Your envelope will be opened because it is unique. There are many standard colors available that do not drastically increase your costs. They have been easier to get lately as well with the paper shortage since most envelopes are printed on white stock. Keep in mind some colors are not USPS approved, such as red. When was the last time you had a color envelope in your mail box?

1. Use stamps: There is a stamp for each postage class, use them. Nonprofits are best at this. When they send out an appeal letter there is a stamp on the envelope. Your piece looks less like the other pieces in the mail box with permits or meters. Keep in mind that the presorted stamps do not come with fun image options. The look of the stamp is not as important as the fact that you are using a stamp.

1. Use larger pieces: You can use up to a 6.125×11.5″ postcard and still pay the letter size postage rate. A folded self-mailer can be 6×10.5″. Take advantage of that. Larger pieces are noticed. It also gives you more room for design and larger text for your copy. Just because you have more room does not mean you should write a book. Keep your copy concise and on point.

1. Use taglines: Add fun taglines to your envelopes, get your recipients excited about what they are going to find in the envelope. Using diagonal text, bright colors, or fun fonts. The more creative the better. Consider using a funny phrase that is in-line with your branding. People love to laugh!

1. Use targeting: Target your message to the individual. If you are having a sale on fishing lures make sure you target people who use lures. I would not be a good target, as I like to bait fish. Send me a targeted piece on bait for sale. The better targeted the message the more likely they are to respond. Not everyone on your list is a fit for every offer, so make sure that you send relevant offers to the right people.

Remember to change only one thing at a time so that when you are analyzing your results you will be able to see if the change you made has increased your response. It would be best to have a control group of what you always have done and then split off a segment to try the new piece with. This will give you the most accurate results.

Remember to send a pdf of your new design to your mail service provider so that they can make sure your new design is still USPS compliant. You don’t want to print your great new design only to find out your postage is more than double because you did not meet USPS regulations. Are you ready to get started?

Got Metrics? Choose Your Best Option

Are you measuring the success of your marketing campaigns? No matter how beautiful the design or snappy the copy, what is most important is that it gets results. But what does success even look like? “Success” can be defined in many ways. Let’s look at five of the most common ways to determine whether your efforts are working.

1. Response rates: One of the top-line ways to measure success is response rate. How many people took some kind of action — made a phone call, clicked a link, or went to your website? If your marketing goal is brand awareness, the response rate is useful.

2. Conversion rate: Not every phone call, mail piece open, or click-through results in a sale. If you want to measure the effectiveness of your message, conversion rate (the percentage of people who took the desired action) is a more useful measure of success.

3. Dollars per sale: Once someone decides to buy, how much do they spend? This metric can make or break your return on investment. For example, if it costs you $10 to acquire each customer and your average order size is $10, it doesn’t matter if you get a 28% response rate. You still aren’t making money.

4. Customer retention: Profitability doesn’t come in a single sale for many companies. It comes in paid subscriptions, repeat sales, or other forms of recurring revenue. Athletic clubs and automotive clubs are good examples. Here, “success” is dependent on your ability to retain the customers you’ve gained.

5. ROI: All of the above metrics are important, but your overall profitability is determined by considering your total costs, including database management, design, print, and mailing. If your campaign costs you $50,000 and brings in $75,000, your ROI is 50%. If your campaign brought in $110,000 but cost you $100,000, you brought in more money, but the ROI was only 10%.

Which form of measurement is right for you? It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to boost brand awareness? Increase basket sizes? Ensure customer retention? Once you clearly define your goals, you can align those goals with the right measurement tools to get the insight you need.

Best Practices for Great Data

When it comes to marketing, one channel doesn’t reign supreme. All channels work together, and the foundation beneath them is data. Data helps you create relevance, whether you are sending print or email, and is what ties the two channels together. Gather as much data about your audience as possible, regardless of channel, and this data will help make your message richer and more effective.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Regularly cleanse and update your contact list. Did you know that nearly 25% of mailing addresses go out of date every year? Use the many tools available to keep your list current. Email requires that you do this more frequently than print since email addresses go out of date much faster.

2. Continually invest in new data to learn more about each recipient. It’s not just addresses that change. People do, too. They may be newly married or newly single; they change life stages, such as having children or entering retirement. Your list needs to keep up with them.

3. Segment your messaging to target your message to different customer groups better. Yes, personalization is an essential element of many marketing campaigns, but you can also create relevance by segmenting your message. Break your audience into buckets, such as “new moms,” “dog owners,” or “college graduates.”

4. Layer on as much personalization as possible. Whether it’s offering products based on a customer’s last purchase or setting a suggested donation level based on their giving history, personalize your message as much as you can. (Hint: This personalization doesn’t always have to be evident to the recipient.)

5. Integrate marketing channels like print, email, and mobile, so they work together. Use the strengths of each channel to boost the other. Sending a mail piece announcing a big sale? Blast an email teaser a few days before, telling them to keep an eye on their mailbox. Or send it a few days after the mailing window to remind them if they missed it.

Need more ideas? Just ask.