Incredible Customer Experience Isn’t Just Important — It’s Profitable

Looking around, most companies are making the same claims these days. They offer great products at great prices. What sets you apart? This is where customer experience (CX) becomes so important. Customer experience is more than customer service. It’s everything about how people experience your company, from the direct mail pieces you send to how you handle returns.

Here are three reasons investing in great CX is so important:[1]

• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.
• One in four customers is willing to pay 10% more for a great customer experience.
• Two-thirds (66%) of customers expect companies to understand (and, by extension, respond to) their needs.

How do you create excellent CX? There is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, here are five steps you can take in your marketing efforts.

1. Make your phone number, email address, and web address easily visible on your marketing materials. Don’t make customers look for it! Ensure that your company representatives are friendly and welcoming.

2. Make your customers’ lives easier through education. Offer seminars and webinars. Tutorials. Newsletters with information valuable and relevant to your customers’ lives. Make them look forward to hearing from you.

3. Don’t send irrelevant communications. Ensure that every communication you send, whether a postcard, an email, or a text, is relevant. If you sell sporting goods, don’t promote football equipment to people who only buy volleyball gear.

4. Create customer appreciation events. Invite your customers to special appreciation events, and don’t try to sell them anything during the event. Make them feel special—just say thank you!

5. Solicit their feedback. “How can we do better?” Not only does this help you improve your communications and inform your business strategy, but asking their opinion makes them feel valued. Then act on what you learn.

Not every company has great CX, but every company can create it, starting with relevant, proactive communication. How can we help?

 

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[1] “9 Customer Experience Trends & Stats That'll Define the Next Year” (HubSpot April 18, 2022)

5 Tips for Logo Redesign

Did you notice when Angie's List dropped the "list" and "e" from its name and became simply Angi? After 20 years as America's "go-to" place for finding home contractors, the company spent millions on a rebrand, including a new logo. With the company offering more than just lists, it was time. The new logo reflects that.

Does your logo need a refresh? If so, here are five factors to consider when undergoing a redesign.

1. Is it easy to recognize? Make sure that your logo is easily recognizable. When possible, retain enough elements from the previous logo to help people make the transition. Unless your logo is horrible to begin with, think "update," not "overhaul."

2. Does it represent who you are? Just because something looks cool doesn't mean it's a good logo. Make sure the new look represents the heart of your brand. If you are a summer fun destination in Ohio, make your water graphics look like rivers or lakes, not ocean beaches.

3. Can it be resized easily? Your logo will be used across multiple channels, so think about a design that can be easily scaled across print and digital, regardless of size. Your logo may appear on media as large as a billboard or as small as a mobile screen. Simple, vector-based logos can easily be adapted without losing quality.

4. Can it accommodate different color spaces? Your logo will appear in many places, and not all of them in color. Consider how your logo will appear in (or create secondary versions for) two-color or black-and-white.

5. Is it up to date? No matter how professionally designed, logos age. Color trends change. Typefaces go in and out of style. Keep your logo fresh and relevant. Research current logo trends and avoid those that say, "so last decade."

If it's time to refresh your logo, you may not want to go it alone. Let our talented graphic design staff give you some support!

Got the Latest Marketing Lingo?

Are you hearing a lot of new marketing terms lately? Drip marketing, engagement marketing, loyalty marketing, trigger, and omnichannel marketing. What do these terms mean? Whether you are doing print or digital marketing, these concepts are essential to understand. Let's look at these five common marketing terms and what they mean to you.

1. Drip marketing: Some purchases happen spontaneously. A buyer is enticed by a coupon or a direct mail offer, and they make a purchase right away. More often, however, buyers arrive at a purchase decision over time. They get a direct mail piece. They see an email a week later. They see an online ad or receive a follow-up mailing. Drip marketing feeds buyers bits of information over time until they are ready to buy.

2. Trigger marketing: Buyers may also receive information based on what they do or the marketer's knowledge about them. An upcoming lease expiration triggers a trade-in offer on a new vehicle, for example, or the first anniversary of a pet's vaccination triggers a reminder to come in for the next round. Triggers can also be based on customers' behavior. If someone downloads a white paper, they might receive a follow-up phone call later that day.

3. Loyalty marketing: Once you have gained a customer, you want to keep them. Loyalty marketing is designed to engage customers with the brand, often through discounts, incentives, and rewards.

4. Engagement marketing: This is the process of creating meaningful interactions with the buyer. This differs from loyalty marketing because the goal isn't always to make a sale. It's to create an emotional bond. You might use stories about the brand's mission or encourage users to share their content through social media—anything that makes people want to continue interacting with you.

5. Omnichannel marketing: Your customer wants to receive a consistent brand message regardless of their channel. Whether direct mail or email, social media, or your website, the mission, messaging, and branding should be consistent across them all.

See one of these concepts that catch your eye? Great! Give us a call, and let's talk about it.

Personalized Maps: Make Your Event Easy to Attend

 It’s simple psychology — people are more likely to attend an event when they know how easy it is for them to get there. “I know right where that is!” Or, “That’s only 12 minutes from our house!” This is the value of adding personalized maps to your direct mail and email campaigns. They make it easier for your audience to say “yes.”

Personalized maps use open source or proprietary street data and show the route from the recipient’s home or office to the location, along with the drive times. Although the technology behind personalized mapping is complex, designing a piece with personalized maps is no different from designing one using any other image. You create a unique ID for each person on your list, then treat the maps as you would any other variable image in your layout.

Why do personalized maps work when your audience can simply plug your address into Google Maps? Because you’ve already done it for them. As soon as they open that direct mail or that email, it’s right there. A visualization is a powerful tool. Once your audience has seen the map and visualized how to get there, you’re already on your way to a sale.

Do these maps work? Just to give two examples: AARP’s Driver Safety (ADS) team had been experiencing declining audiences for its in-person courses. By showing drivers the way to their closest training location, AARP’s Driver Safety team boosted attendance by 50% in the first year. In another example, a restaurant in the Tulsa, OK, area was opening a new location, so it purchased a prospect list within proximity of the restaurant. It created personalized maps showing the route from the recipient’s home to the restaurant and included a $10 coupon. The offer had a 24% redemption rate.

Personalized maps can be generated anywhere from 300–1200 dpi. If you choose the option of reducing the contrast between background colors, when the recipient sees the mailer, the highlighted route jumps out. It is the first thing they see.

Personalized maps have proven results. What kind of results could they produce for you?

 

How Far Would You Go to Keep a Customer Happy?

Nearly half (49%) of companies say that dollar for dollar; they get a better ROI from their customer retention efforts than from their customer acquisition marketing. How far are you willing to go to retain your customers? How creative are you ready to get? Here are three examples of just how far three direct mail marketers were willing to go and the impressive ROI they received.

1. Metal Mail: Royal Mail was losing customers who mistakenly thought they couldn't mail packages over 5kg. So Royal Mail sent key customers a weighty message—literally. It distributed a metal envelope engraved with the recipient's name and address. Think it was too heavy on the budget? Quite the opposite. The campaign saw an ROI of 23:1.

2. Mystery diaries: As airlines continue to eliminate less-traveled routes to slash costs, ANA Airports wanted to keep its Lisbon airport away from the knife. They created a campaign involving a fictitious traveler, John Smith, who sent the airlines handwritten diaries of his travels explaining why he keeps coming back to Lisbon. The diaries incorporated vital information, including that 75% of Lisbon tourists are repeat visitors, 90% of tourists recommend Lisbon to others, and 80% of visitors state that Lisbon exceeded their expectations. The results? While other airports were losing routes, Lisbon Portela Airport kept 100% of them.

3. Static to interactive: An automotive company had been sending traditional postcard mailings for years. The results were good but not good enough to significantly impact its revenues. The company wondered what would happen if, instead of pulling back on its direct mail efforts, it made that investment even deeper. It replaced its singular postcard with a series of three interactive 3D mailers. The 3D mailers were triple the cost of the 2D postcards, but the results spoke for themselves—a 300% increase in call volume.

While these techniques aren't for everyone, they show just how powerful creative direct mail remains as a customer retention tool. Contact us to brainstorm ways to use direct mail to maintain your customer loyalty and keep those customers coming back.

UV Coating: There Is Nothing Else Like It

 

Some print pieces stand out from all of the others. Maybe the color is more brilliant. Maybe the gloss has a shine that catches your eye. Or perhaps it’s the reverse—the piece has a luxurious matte finish but with brilliant accents that you can’t seem to look away from.

“Wow,” you think. “There is something special about this piece. I wonder what it is?”

The answer is likely UV coating.

Whether you’re looking for a high-impact shine or a more subtle effect, UV coating is a specialty finish cured instantly using ultraviolet light. It creates a brilliant finish that is precise enough to highlight even the fine details of images or text. UV coating is also highly resistant to scuffing and moisture and helps to protect the piece over time.

Whether UV is used to flood the piece or simply to provide highlights, you can’t miss the effect. As soon as light hits the areas where the coating is applied, they dazzle.

·       If you’re an automotive manufacturer, you might add UV spot coating over the entire body of a car to enhance its gloss and shine.

·       On a business card, you might use spot UV coating over the top of your logo to make it leap off the page.

·       If you’re a nonprofit raising money for a clean water project, you might use spot UV over water droplets falling from the spigot on a newly drilled well. Your eye is immediately drawn to those droplets, which sparkle like shimmering rain.

Spot UV can be used on a wide range of stocks, but for maximum impact, try using it on matte-finished paper. Thicker weights are generally preferred. This will create the most remarkable contrast with the glossy coating.

Here’s another benefit of spot UV: The process emits no VOCs, so it does not release toxic compounds into the air. This means it does not contribute to environmental pollution.

Need more reasons to love spot UV? Ask us for samples!

 

Why Aren't Businesses Taking Advantage of Personalization?

We all know that personalization drives results, but what do consumers really want? And does personalization impact all consumers equally?

According to InfoTrends, consumers respond strongly to personalized mail. The research firm found that 84% of consumers say that personalization makes them "much more likely" or "somewhat more likely" to open mail. Yet businesses are not using this to their advantage. How do we know? Because these same consumers say they "rarely" or "infrequently" receive personalized mail.

This is truly a missed opportunity, especially among certain demographic groups. According to InfoTrends, personalization is more motivating to some consumers than others, particularly younger ones. For example, when asked whether personalization makes them more likely to open mail, here is how different groups responded:

• Just over half of all consumers, regardless of age, say personalization makes them "slightly" more likely to open mail.
• Among consumers aged 18–24, 35–49, and 50–65, the percentage saying personalization makes them "much more likely" to open mail is about 30%. 
• Among those aged 25–34, however, the percentage saying personalization makes them "much more likely" to open mail rises to 36%.

You might expect consumers to be inundated with personalized mail with these numbers, but research shows the opposite. Only 24% of consumers say they are "frequently" or "very frequently" receiving highly personalized direct mail. Forty-one percent say they only receive personalized pieces "once in a while." More than one-quarter (27%) say they receive personalized mail "rarely."

Fortunately, missed opportunities by competitors mean open doors for you. If you are already personalizing your mailings, keep it up! Invest in customer profiling. Build the depth of your database. Increase your level of precision. If you are not yet personalizing your mail, jump in. Get started before your competitors do.