Direct Marketing Blog

Filling in some more cross media blanks

Last time we met – email, direct mail and QR codes were the soup du jour. Today we take a look at SMS text messages, social media and special events.  These 3 marketing channels are constantly evolving and should not be ignored.

SMS Text Messages

As the sister component to QR codes as it relates to mobile marketing, text messaging has great possibilities.  Like QR codes, they allow for on the spot interaction, great coupon offers and new drip marketing techniques.

Let’s say you have paper table tents set up inside your make believe coffee shop.  You could add a number on there, ask folks to text “Hit Me Up” to that number and start them on your special offer drip marketing program. Now you’ve got an audience waiting for you to talk to them on the medium they prefer. I don’t have the stats on hand but the average response time to a text vs. an email is considerably faster which we can all relate to. 

So if you snag new customers when and where they want to be snagged, you can open doors to brand new marketing methods.  Those table tenters could become part of an “SMS Only” group that gets to receive offers not available anywhere else.  If Tuesday afternoon is your slow time, set up a text program that gives this special audience a time sensitive coupon – “Come to the store between 1 and 4 and receive a free cookie with your coffee”.  Get rid of the slow day and watch the customers flock!

Social Media

So many opportunities, so little time. Social media is really a marketing program unto itself, depending on what your company does and how big your marketing department is.  But if you’ve yet to put your toe in this pool and are unsure where to begin, the best advice is strip down and dive in! If you don’t have the resources to keep up with this new avenue as part of your marketing program, there are companies that can handle it for you (like SVO, just sayin’).

The big 3 are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Each has its own strengths and unique points but we’re not going there today.  Typically, a marketing program will utilize Facebook and Twitter in a B2C setup.  A B2B approach may have more merit with a LinkedIn strategy. In either case, it’s important to test what’s working.  You can hold contests, post videos, advertise and a host of other possibilities.    But if you think of it as another marketing channel, then remember you need to determine its effectiveness with your audience.

The simple method is to track what brings in the most traffic to your marketing campaign.  Like A/B testing in the traditional sense, you can create an A/B set of messaging.  What are your fans interested in?  Do they want to enter a contest or do they want information and educational updates?  Not to beat a dead horse, but you need to test this channel along with all the others we’ve discussed to determine if it’s working.

Special Events

This could be a trade show, street fair, conference or any other event your company will be attending, exhibiting at or both.  Most companies have a handful of these that are attended each year.  But most companies do not have a strategy in place to maximize their return on investment.  Trade shows, especially, can have high costs attached.  Are you getting your money's worth?

Certainly you can just show up and hope that folks will come a knockin' on your booth, just itching to learn more about your company.  Unless you're giving away a bag of cash, this is unlikely.  Let's be proactive and pull these people to us, give them a reason to be there.  If you're attending just to hang out, great, no need for a plan. But if you want to come home with a bag full of leads, you need to prep.

A quick example is running an integrated marketing campaign in the weeks and months leading up to the event. If you have the list of attendees, perhaps you implement an email and direct mail component.  Certainly social media is a valid add on.  If you can get a hold of some cell numbers using an integrated camapign, you can send text reminders during event. "Stop by the booth in the next 20 minutes for a free ice cream cone!"  There are a multitude of other approaches, but you get the idea.

This will wrap up our journey along the roadmap of a marketing strategy. Though it really only scratches the surface, it’s a good place to start.  There are plenty of other ways to approach all this and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us for a FREE consultation!

Time to connect (some of) the integrated marketing dots!

In our last discussion, we looked at the importance of testing all available marketing channels before going whole hog into 1 or the other. Today, we’ll explore 3 of those channels and some thoughts on dropping them in to your marketing mix:

• Email
• Direct Mail
• QR Codes

Email

Where to begin? Email has plenty of pros, plenty of cons. 

Pros

• Cheap
• Fast
• Easy
• Targeted

Cons

• Cheap
• Fast
• Easy
• Overused

How are cheap, fast and easy in both columns?  Well, they can work in your favor for obvious reasons but can be detrimental in perception.  If your marketing consists solely of email, customers and prospects may wonder why you can’t be bothered to showcase your wares in new and exciting ways. 

Email is a critical component in any marketing strategy, as long as it’s implemented properly. Here are some tips

• Get Personal – your audience is smart and can see a generic blast coming a mile away
• Easy Does It – let’s not numb our database with broadcasts every 30 seconds
• 2 Way Talking – don’t just hammer 1 way communication, engage with surveys, landing pages and more
• Testing 1, 2, 3 – nothing worse than finding out your email is loaded with broken links!

You can setup your own, branded email marketing system like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Or you can tie your email marketing in with the rest of your marketing efforts to ensure all tracking and response data is in 1 place.  At SVO, our marketing dashboard shows data for email, direct mail, mobile, social media and every other channel you can think of.

So, keep your email efforts up and running. But don’t bury your customers with it and make sure it jives with the rest of your marketing approach.

Direct Mail

Good ol’ direct mail.  Old and dowdy? Or new and fancy? That depends on how you work it into your plan.  For years, direct mail had little personalization and lots of blanket coverage.  You can always send your flyer to the entire town, addressed to “Resident” but would you open that package?  Me neither.

Time to spruce that postcard or letter package up! With personalized URLs, personal jQuery QR Codes, variable imaging and funky sizes, you can ensure your mail jumps out of the clutter sitting in your customer’s mailbox.  One major benefit of direct mail is that it always has to be physically handled.  Your target will look at it – make sure they KEEP looking at it!

Postage is certainly a concern as it continues to creep up in price but there are methods available to mitigate those cost.  Just talk to your friendly local direct mail specialist (like SVO for instance) and find out how you can bring the unit cost down.

Think of snail mail as smart mail and change your perception.  It may take some effort but with solid graphic design, multiple response channels and the ability to measure your results, this is a channel worth considering in the mix.

QR Codes

These little guys are everywhere – Best Buy in store product descriptions, restaurant table ketchup bottles, magazine ads and more.  As smart phone usage increases, the mobile marketing channel is a must-do.  QR codes give you the ability to talk to your target when and where they want to be talked to.

You can catch them at their mailbox, on the train, on the tube or anywhere else you can think to apply the codes.

Though you can go nuts with where to place them, try to stay on target with how they’re used.  Don’t send folks to your home page if it’s not optimized for mobile.  It’s no fun tapping and dragging to try and read whatever message you’ve got for the faithful code scanner. 

And if you do have a mobile optimized page (you should), make sure the content is relevant and actionable.  When someone scans a QR code, they’re expecting something to happen.  A video of your latest innovation or a sweet coupon.  But if they land on your “Contact Us” page, well, they probably won’t.  At SVO, we use the jQuery platform which allows for all sorts of fun applications. 

If you’re not familiar with QR codes, flip to the ads in the back of your favorite magazine or just keep an eye out the next time you’re shopping. When you do find one, scan it and see what happens.  You’ll quickly notice good applications and the not so good.  Keep those good ones in mind as you tack these funny looking data bytes into your marketing program.

Onward and upward!  Next time we check out SMS text messages, social media and special events – woo hoo!

We got ourselves a marketing events calendar, now what?

The last blog post talked about the importance of a plan to best use your marketing budget.  So, now that you’ve got one all laid out (you do, right?) what forms of media should you use?  And how should you use them?  What works and what doesn’t?

Because there are some many marketing channels available, we’ll split this into 3 blog posts. 

1. What works and what doesn’t
2. Email, Direct Mail and QR Codes
3. SMS Text Messages, Social Media and Special Events

Let’s look at #1 today – the “What works and what doesn’t” question. Unless you have a track record of using a particular channel, email for instance, there’s no way of REALLY knowing which avenue will be most successful for your organization. 

There’s an endless flow of information bytes and experts out there claiming their particular channel is the only one you’ll ever need.  Not so long ago, email marketing was touted as the end-all-be-all way to get your marketing out there.  Today, you spend precious hours each day and week attempting to crawl out from under the resulting pile of email spam.

The best practice approach is to test all available channels to determine what YOUR audience will respond to.  Maybe they love getting emails every 6 hours.  Maybe they’re Crackberry junkies just looking for that SMS Text fix.  But how do you know if you don’t test or simply ask them? 

The other critical bit of info is to keep your brand and message consistent across all channels.  So when someone sees a train station poster, then gets an email and finally picks up your brochure at the street fair – they’re not wondering if that was 3 different companies.

So the answer to this question of “What works” is “You don’t know until you effectively explore your options”.  Don’t start littering your Facebook page with hourly updates or sending postcards to the entire state.  In order to effectively test your options, it’s imperative you have a plan AND can track and measure every aspect of your marketing activities.  And as you may have guessed, at SVO, we can do just that!

Keep yer eyes peeled for the next post about how to integrate the email, direct mail and QR code channels.

Marketing Plan? We don’t need no stinking marketing plan!

As 2012 gets underway, most companies are thinking about some or all of the following:

• How can I grow revenue this year?
• What should I do with my marketing budget to get there?
• Is social media a viable channel?
• Mobile marketing – what’s the deal with all that?
• Can I integrate my current marketing process with all these new options?
• How on earth will I find the time to make sense of all this stuff?

With so many possibilities, it’s critical to put together a plan of attack.  All the dominoes need to be in place, so you can knock them down as the time comes.  Without a plan, you can’t effectively use your marketing dollars.  And if you can’t effectively use your marketing dollars, you’ll struggle to to answer the bullet points above. Scrambling to come up with a domino the day before you need it just doesn’t work. 

This doesn’t have to be overly complex.  Start with a dry erase board, lay out a calendar of the next 12 months with all the holidays and any special events you have in mind.  Circle those you want to target and get cracking!  If you can’t find the time to get this done, hire an outside consultant to drive the strategy school bus for you.  And of course, here at SVO, we’re ready and able to help on that front!

Ok, great, you have a calendar of events in place.  Now what media channels to use?  Where to use them? How do you know what will work and what won’t?  Stay tuned for the next blog post where we’ll continue this discussion!

Cording Landscape Design Outdoor Signage

For this project, we worked with Cording Landscape Design of Towaco, NJ to to update their outdoor signage.  The current version, a wood insert on a freestanding sign, had become weathered over time. 

 

Using an outdoor spec 2 mil premium white vinyl, top laminated with Oracal 290 glosss and mounted on 0.04” white aluminum, we created a sign that should stand up to the elements nicely.

Both sides of the sign feature the Cording Landscape Design logo. The overall size is 58 ¾”x 15 ½”.

Morris Habitat for Humanity Compressed T Shirts

As part of Morris Habitat for Humanity’s annual appeal we had an opportunity to create a unique T shirt giveaway known as compress T’s. (The overall campaign structure will be detailed in a future blog post) Unlike a typical T shirt, these T’s are printed and then tightly compressed into a variety of available shapes like cars, boats and animals.

In this instance, the framed house shape was the obvious choice.  Along with the printed shirt, the final product includes a 4 color card stock insert.  This adds a finished look to the piece when its shrink wrapped to final shape and size.

The front of the shirt was designed with a simple nail and hammer image sitting over the text ‘Morris Habitat for Humanity’. The back of the shirt repeats the design of the insert, a framed house with the full Morris Habitat for Humanity logo centered inside.  Along the bottom of the house is the text ‘Follow me to the www.MorrisRestore.org to encourage folks to visit the retail side of the organization.  Both sides of the shirt were run as 2 spot PMS colors matching the Morris Habitat logo.

Mattress Factory FestiFall Poster

The Mattress Factory in Fanwood, NJ wanted to improve the potential response of their cross media marketing campaign during a street fair.  The campaign, which will be detailed in a future blog post, included a variety of media channels.  One of these channels was an opportunity to be in front of prospective customers at a local street fair know as FestiFall.

They had plans to host a booth at the event and discuss their product line.  To complement this effort, we produced a 24” x 36”, 2 ½ mil gloss white vinyl poster mounted on 3/16” foam core. 

 

The design of the poster incorporated 3 key elements:

• Theme and offer of the campaign
• Trackable QR code for instant response
• Trackable URL for additional potential response

We also added an image of the owner standing with the oversized QR code to add to some personality to the finished piece.  Actual results of the QR code scan rate and URL login rate will be tallied once the campaign wraps up.

SVO teaming up with TMR Direct for Exciting Webinar!

SVO, Inc. is partnering with TMR Direct to put on a webinar for nonprofit organizations.  The more time we spend with nonprofits, the more of the same challenges we're hearing.  If you're feeling like this....

• "We're using a lot of available channels to reach our base but we don't know how to tie them together"
• "How can we increase the number of individual donors without breaking the budget"
• "Our reporting and measurement is very limited"

...then you should attend this webinar.  You'll learn:

• How to mix direct mail and snail mail workflows
• What outreach channels are most effective for your particular organization
• How to effectively tie social media into your other media channels

All registrants will receive a copy of a recent case study detailing how this approach generated excellent results for a major nonprofit.

The webinar will take place on December 8th at 1 PM EST.

Sign up today!

I Dare You Challengewear – Retractable Banner Stand

This was a fun project for a new customer, I Dare You Challengewear.  They were preparing for a local street festival and wanted to ensure their new company was properly represented.  Promotional product handouts are always worthwhile for these type of events but in this case, the customer needed something to stand out, literally, from the rest of the crowd.

The resulting product we created was a 3 foot by 8 foot retractable canvas banner, with a single sided, full color graphic.  We incorporated 2 QR codes – 1 sending visitors to their Facebook page, the other to their website.  The customer was pleased with the final piece and received great feedback at the festival.

SVO Cross Media Webinar - 843% Return on Investment

SVO recently co-hosted a webinar with MindFire, Inc. to showcase the results of a cross media campaign for a nonprofit fundraising appeal.  The promotion of the webinar was a cross media campaign unto itself utilizing the following marketing channels:

Postcards – 3 unique postcard invitations were mailed at 2 week intervals over the 7 weeks leading up to the webinar.  They featured a PURL and QR code as the response channel.  Visitors arrived  at a personal landing page to answer 1 question and register for the webinar.

Email – 3 email broadcasts were interspersed with the postcard mailings using just PURLs to generate registrations.

Social Media – the 3 major outlets – LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – were posted to with content specific to each site. In the case of LinkedIn – certain nonprofit groups were targeted to attract the right audience.

Text Messaging – the day of the webinar, all registrants that had provided cell phone numbers, received SMS text message reminders to attend the webinar.

For all channels used, source tracking was implemented to allow for in depth post campaign analysis.

The offer for the webinar was a download of the case study on the nonprofit appeal campaign.  The survey question for registrants asked what their biggest fundraising challenge was.  This was helpful in understanding the unique roadblocks each organization faced.

The total cost of the campaign was $916 and the revenue to date is just over $8500 for a total ROI of over 840%!  To read more about this campaign and why social media was such an important factor, download the case study here.