Facebook and Google have both been reaching out to prospects recently, using direct mail and print as part of their marketing effort.

Yep, that’s right. The two biggest companies in the worlds of online marketing and social media are using a channel that many marketers continue to shy away from.

In both cases, Google and Facebook are reaching out to people to promote their advertising platforms (Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, respectively).

If you are a marketer, then this may be worth paying attention to the next time you contemplate cutting direct mail or print out of your marketing budget.

If Google and Facebook are using direct mail and print to make an impact on their target audience, then you probably should too. Call us at CQ. We can do the same for you.

Every year, marketers search for the next big thing that will make or break the success of their interactive marketing campaigns. A lot of buzzwords like “mobile” or “social” inevitably get thrown around but what does it really mean for marketers? Before you refresh marketing goals for 2011, here are five resolutions to consider.

1. Make data the foundation of your marketing

Collecting data has never been a problem as we know that it fuels our marketing programs and overall business decisions. But achieving visibility and usability is often another story. Many times information is stored in data warehouses and databases across the organisation and tedious exporting needs to be undertaken before being able to take any action. Simply put, many marketers are missing opportunities to engage with customers because their information and processes have become outdated before the customer engagement metrics are aggregated and sorted.

Making a change to the way you currently use click-through rates, online browsing history, shopping cart abandonment, previous purchase history, and other customer information starts with an assessment. Understanding what tools you have before you take action will pay off in the long run.

2. Use mobile to connect with customers

Mobile marketing is often overshadowed as social media and email marketing becomes more sophisticated. But as consumers rapidly begin to adopt smartphones, mobile marketing can no longer be viewed as a “silo” in a marketing campaign.

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to begin mobile marketing is SMS. Creating text-in voting programs, Q&A text response campaigns and mobile coupons for your target audience are simple tactics to engage customers. Developing content that is specifically designed for mobile phones is also important – perhaps you might even consider creating a mobile app for your company.

3. Market to customers as individuals

It’s all too easy to be swept away by the creativity of the advertising instead of its relevance. Prioritising customer service before sales is crucial and there are some innovative and simple ways to do this. One example is to listen and be a part of the conversations that are happening online about your company. There are many online monitoring tools available to easily do this and you’ll be surprised by the amount of insight you’ll receive from listening to you customers.

4. Make social media a real part of the marketing mix

For many, 2010 marked the year that social media became a reality instead of just a trend for marketers to watch out for. We know that in the past, customers who had a bad experience with your brand would share it with 5 of their different friends but today, a bad customer experience could lead to negative information about your brand posted to 500 Twitter followers.

One way to integrate social media into your campaigns is to do some social ‘soul searching’. Gather metrics about who is hitting the ‘like’ button on Facebook, who is re-tweeting and what content attracts more user engagement. Another simple tactic is to use social media to gather local data. Geolocation devices and apps such as Foursquare give you the opportunity to find out who is visiting your store and how often.

5. Engage in ‘smart’ automation

In any campaign, there are some jobs that are tedious and time-consuming but remain essential. At the same time, marketing budgets aren’t getting any bigger so marketers need to find ways to work smarter, not harder.

With so much data to manage, automation is a great way to make information usable. Marketers can engage in ‘smart’ automation tools that integrate new customer data and preferences such as tweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook into every communication that is sent out.

Each new year offers a blank slate and a new outlook to start the year off right. And while you may not stay as organised as you’d like or as in shape as you had hoped by mid-year, making resolutions to improve your interactive marketing program can be well worth the investment.

Place point of sale signs at appropriate locations (check-out, table, counter or wall) and let the customer subscribe to your emailing list before they leave – just by using their cell phone!

• Set up your own unique text keyword
• Tell customers to text the keyword to a three digit number (easy)
• add that they’ll go into a monthly prize draw!

It takes under a minute and over 90% of customers will use their phone without hesitation.

And once they’re on your email list, we have tools that can automatically gather up more details from them online into your customer database, like their names, delivery address, favourite wine, interests, birthdays etc.

Building a customer database has never been this easy!

• Build up the customer database
• keep in touch with them via text, email or direct mail
• use offers to encourage visits to your physical or online store

This can boost monthly sales by 15-25%.

This is a great “print to mobile” loyalty marketing campaign.

CQ can help with all of the steps required to make this happen.

• POS signage
• TXT and email services
• Direct and personalised mail.

Email dean@cq.co.nz to find out more.

More and more business people are looking to import business card information into their databases. So until bar-coding like QR Codes and Microsoft Tags become a standard feature on business cards, people are using some form of business card scanner with OCR technology.

Whether with an OCR mobile app (see below) or a flatbed scanner, OCR can drastically simplify the process of transferring contacts from paper to your contact management database.

But even the best OCR business card reader technology has limitations.

Cards with certain design features simply don’t scan well. And as scanning becomes more common, this is something that business card designers should keep in mind if they don’t want to use bar-coding. That contact was important enough for you to give your business card to; you need to make sure you make it easy for them to accurately add you to their contacts list.

So here are some helpful hints for creating a scannable business card.

Don’t:

• Use fancy fonts. These easily confuse OCR software, especially on letters like “c” and “e”. A clean font like Helvetica may seem boring, but it is easy for OCR to translate.
• Combine your name and title. Names and titles separated by a comma on a single line (such as “Nancy Nally, Editor”) don’t translate correctly in OCR.
• Overlay text on a pattern. This is too confusing for OCR.
• Angle text. Currently OCR scanning doesn’t translate text that isn’t parallel to the edges of the card.
• Mix orientations. Keep all the text oriented in the same direction.

Do:

• Keep it big. If you get squinty looking at your card, so will OCR software.
• Give text breathing room. Keep letters nicely spaced so that the OCR can distinguish them easily from each other.
• Keep it light. Cards with dark backgrounds seem impossible to scan (even those with high-contrast white text).
• Put your company name somewhere in text. OCR can’t translate stylised logos, so make sure the company’s name is in text somewhere too.
• Keep it on one side. Scanners only read one side of a card, so keep all the critical contact information on one side.

This last issue is a very common problem with many cards. Double-sided printing is becoming very “trendy” which creates the temptation to spread the critical contact information on both sides of the card, making it inaccessible to card reading technology.

Ideally, you should have contact information on only one side of the card, and then use the other side for a logo or mini sales brochure. Here at CQ we have the ability to print a different back on each card in a set, offering the ability to get very creative with a card back’s promotional uses. Meanwhile, the front of the card can hold all of the traditional contact information in a clean and simple (scannable) format.

Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2010

Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company’s annual direct mailing.

Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year.

"We realized we had made a huge mistake," says Ms. Settle, president of the New York firm.

The affordability of e-marketing, along with the explosion of social media and the desire to trim costs in the recession, has prompted many small companies like Per Annum to slash traditional direct-mail budgets. U.S. consumers received about 5.2 billion pieces of direct mail in the third quarter of 2009, a 27% decline compared with 7.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to Mintel Comperemedia, a research firm that tracks direct-mail marketing.

However, some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it’s not so easy to dismiss.

Ms. Settle says that at first she blamed the economy for the dropoff, until she "started hearing from customers that they never got their ‘reminder’ in the mail." Ms. Settle quickly sent a postcard mailing in June, which recouped the 25% loss, she says.

Costs are still taken into account. Many entrepreneurs find that the boiler-plate methods of the past—such as purchasing mailing lists and sending fliers or coupons to a mass audience—often aren’t cost-effective. Instead, business owners are creating personalized mailings, which may include special offers or other valuable information, and sending them to a hand-picked list of current and prospective customers.

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than "junk" mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners "to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have," he says.

To save money, Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a Los Angeles wholesale insurance broker, stopped his small firm’s humorous postcard mailings last year. The colorful marketing pieces showcase the insurance broker’s offerings through satirical movie themes, such as "Full Metal Policy," a parody of "Full Metal Jacket" and "Singin’ in the Renewal," from the classic film "Singin’ in the Rain." About 2,000 current and potential clients received the postcards, which cost the company $4,000 to send out every four to six weeks.

Customers complained when ExecutivePerils dropped its humorous postcards.

"We would visit some clients and notice they were hanging the postcards on the wall, collecting them," says Mr. Taffae, who says he secured $270,000 from a new client who chose to do business with the firm in late 2008 after receiving the postcards.

"After two or three months [of no postcards], we got a lot of emails and phone calls asking us, ‘Did you take me off your list?’ I figured if even 1% complained, then a much larger percentage were thinking about it," says Mr. Taffae, who restarted the postcard mailings in November.

William Kapas, president of J.C. Kapas Real Estate Co. in Rochelle Park, N.J., says he has secured clients as a result of his high-gloss, four-color monthly mailings that list who has bought or sold restaurant properties though the firm.

"Our clients look forward to knowing, and it’s a little bit of gossip, too," says Mr. Kapas, who exclusively uses traditional mail to reach clients. "I think it’s easier to delete the electronic junk mail without taking a second look."

Mr. Kapas spends about $1 a piece for the monthly mailings, sent to about 2,200 current and prospective customers.

Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. "The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers," Mr. Anderson says.

Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Taffae is starting to take his satirical marketing approach to YouTube; he’s created a parody of F Troop, the 1960s sitcom, to promote his firm online.

Have a look at how marketing has dramatically changed over the last few years, and how a well planned direct marketing campaign can produce extremely good responses, profit and return on investment!

Let your clients know you love them, ask them how they have they’re coffee and spring one of these on them!

For a bit more fun add in a PURL (personalised web address) to visit your website.

Design templates available from Dean dean@cq.co.nz

New Cool Print-to-Mobile Tools

Instead having people attempting to key in those long text messages or complex website addresses on their phone, we use the mobile phones’ built-in camera to do it all for them in seconds. i.e. The phone instantly captures specific instructions from a specially printed item. e.g.:

Just snap a photo of the barcode which then:

1. tells the Phone web browser to go directly to the product providers webpage for more information, even to buy the product or
2. prepares the phone to email or forward a special message on, with a link back to the suppliers web page with a special offer or
3. simply tells the phone to just save the details into it’s built-in address book or perhaps use the message as a discount voucher.

All this could be very handy if say you see a promotion on a magazine ad, website page, on a building, even street, realty or bus sign, and don’t have time to take down all the details. Now you’d just snap a photo of it and the special QR barcode (click photo left).

This provides the information for the phone to do its special ‘thing’, like sending you to the corresponding website on that product or property, or translating it into readable text. This will take off this year as people upgrade to 3G Phones.

N.B. Many Vodafone users here with a good camera phone may already have this QR capability and don’t realise it. Simply TXT QR to 710 to find out. They will text back a link to download the correct QR Code reader, for free.  (Details click here)

As discovered overseas, QR Codes in printed signs, cards or flyers is a great way to connect with a youth market that’s notoriously difficult to reach – not just because it offers something new and different for them to interact with, but also because it generates a lot of street buzz.

Why Wait? Simply call us to discuss adding your personal QR code to your next brochure, poster or business card .

Looking for more neat QR code ideas? View the videos below:

What to see more? Checkout our new Video library

I’ve pointed out previously that while you might spend days, even weeks, crafting a direct mail message, recipients will spend just seconds deciding whether it’s worth their attention.

Here’s a video from Pitney Bowes illustrating this simple idea.

Let me first say that I disagree with the comment that a plain envelope is “boring.” The fact is, a plain envelope, especially one that looks personal, is a great way to get people to actually open the envelope and look at what’s inside.

Most of the other comments are worthy of consideration. For example, you have to get the recipient name and address right. Nothing will kill a mailer faster than addressing it to the wrong person. You must clean your list before you mail. And please remember to make sure you’re sending just one mailer to a home address unless you intend otherwise. I’ve been seeing a lot of waste recently with the same mailing arriving for various spellings of my name and my wife’s name.

Above is an excerpt from the DirectCreative Blog

Note this particular vendor video also show us how much more advanced mailers are in the US market. More innovative personalisation plus a trans-promotional mailer (the credit card bill), that we don’t see down here.

Note that most of the items shown in this video would not comply with the local NZ Post layout guidelines, allowing you to obtain the discounted postal rate. Call us if you want to try these more innovative ‘high response’ techniques in your next direct marketing campaign or billing mailout.