You have a great product and a great marketing message, and you are eager to turn prospects into customers. But what does it take? Sometimes it really is a matter of persistence, time, and exposure.

This is the philosophy behind “drip marketing:”

• Send a postcard on Monday.
• Blast an e-mail on Wednesday.
• Mail a marketing letter the following Monday.
• Update your social media Tuesday.
• Make phone calls Thursday, etc., etc.

By continually putting your message in front of people through multiple channels, you stay top of mind.

Drip marketing is not just about staying visible. It’s also about keeping your competitors at bay. It’s a common marketing adage that customers can only keep three to five brands in their heads at one time. The more visible you are, the less room there is “up there” for your competitors.

What Makes a Successful Drip Campaign?

Repetition and meaningful content. Sure, you can offer discounts and promotions, but most importantly, you should work on building relationships and creating conversations with your prospects.

This means you must write something your customers and prospects actually want to read. To do this, you need solid content—testimonials, case studies, advice, customer education articles—that positions your company as a “thought leader.”

A Drip Becomes a Flood

One firm used drip marketing to turn its zero response (yes, zero response) marketing letter into a campaign with 1,700% ROI! How?!

First, the company scrapped its traditional one-page marketing letter with the dry, boring introductory paragraph, service pitch, and standard closing, and replaced it with a more engaging pitch.

Then it followed up with a phone call from a live person. Ten days later, it sent a second letter. The total cost of the campaign? $2,600. The results? The company closed on $90,000 in sales within six weeks.

Of course, it wasn’t just the drip marketing that led to the success. There was a change in marketing and sales strategy too. But part of that change involved adding the drip marketing approach of multiple contacts through multiple channels over time.

Drip marketing can exploit many channels, including postcards, newsletters, marketing letters, and email. Regardless of the media used, the goal is the same. By engaging your customers; positioning your brand; and fostering trust and credibility, you will stay top-of-mind, keep your competitors quiet, and boost your sales.

News Leak: Best Practices of Drip Marketing

Want to see what drip marketing can do for you? Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Focus on content—If it doesn’t provide value, it won’t create customer engagement—just clutter.
• Be consistent—Make a commitment. Create a marketing schedule. Then stick to it.
• Follow up—You can drip, drip, drip, but at some point, you need to give a call to action. Follow up in person by phone, e-mail, or other media.

Thanks for reading my blog. To download your 1:1 marketing best practices white paper, click here.

Everywhere you look, today’s marketing communications are getting personal. Log into Amazon.com, and you’ll get recommendations based on your past purchases. Purchase tulip bulbs through Breck’s, and they’ll follow up with a mailer that includes a discount offer on the bulbs you like, and, believe it or not, a personalized cartoon to really catch your attention!

These days your mailbox is likely filled with similar personalized offers, addressing you by name—often right on the envelope—and making you offers based on something the marketers know about you. Are you capitalizing on this trend?

Why It Works

Here are some powerful reasons personalized marketing works and why you should be doing it.

• Personalized communications give your customers the feeling that you care about them because it takes more time and effort to talk to someone by name (“Hi, <First Name>! We have a special offer just for you!”).
• Targeting based on a customer’s particular needs and wants makes them feel noticed and valued.
• Personalized mailings are more relevant to your customers. When you market based on their interests and needs (such as past purchases or their demographic), they are more likely to respond.

Better Response Rates

Personalization can really pay off in your response rates. Caslon & Company, a training and educational consultancy for the printing industry, tracked average response rate increases for best practices 1:1 printing campaigns over traditional static campaigns. It’s 2010 Response Rate Report found that:

• Lead generation: 1:1 campaigns got an average 8.2% lift over static mailings
• Direct orders: 1:1 campaigns get an average 9.8% lift over static mailings
• Loyalty programs: 1:1 campaigns got a whopping 28.0% average lift over static mailings!

We Can Help!

You do have to take different steps to personalize your documents than you do for traditional campaigns. But don’t be intimidated; the process doesn’t need to be difficult, nor do you don’t have to be an expert in databases or IT.

Quartier’s experts are here to help. Talk to your customer representative today about transforming your static marketing communications, making them personal, and getting more lift and better return on your marketing investment!

When you combine Quartier’s printing, mailing, and list management specialties, you can create direct mail (DM) pieces that really reach in—that are targeted, personalized, interactive, and multi-dimensional. Combine one more of our services—promotional items—and you can add another dimension (the third!) for DM that is truly creative, tactile, and memorable.

The goal of DM is to attract attention. High-def color printing, cool finishes, and variable data all help a printed piece stand out in the mailbox. And marketers, designers, and printers (Quartier has them all) continue to innovate to get messages noticed.

The Complete Package

For instance, there’s a growing trend toward “dimensional” mail. Dimensional mail is also known as “lumpy mail” because the idea is to provide something a bit more substantial—or “lumpier”—than a flat, two-dimensional postcard or letter.

The “lump”—the object included in the package—is an integral part of the campaign design. Your lumpy mailer could be …

• An envelope containing a pen, flash drive, keychain, or other useful item bearing your logo.
• A package with a product sample.
• An object that symbolically ties to the campaign’s marketing message: seed packets for a spring campaign; a magnifying glass asking customers to “take a closer look;” a thermometer for a “we’re taking your temperature” survey campaign, etc.

The idea is that everyone likes receiving something unique—especially when there is an appealing or clever gift in the box. This increases the likelihood that the recipient will not only open the package but also respond to the message—and tell others about it. Return rates using lumpy mail are almost always better than those garnered using regular, flat DM pieces.

If you like the idea of lumpy mail, but need help coming up with ideas, contact Quartier, and one of our print and marketing specialists will be only to pleased to help!

A Few Considerations

• A dimensional campaign will cost more per unit to produce, assemble, and mail than a regular direct mail campaign, and Quartier can work with you to carefully narrow, segment, and target the recipients.
• Another challenge, especially in this time of heightened security, is to not frighten a recipient with an unmarked package. Don’t send to recipients in a business that might have concerns with mysterious packages, and be sure to integrate a marketing message on the outside of the envelope or package.
• Quartier can help you consult with the Post Office to ensure you are not violating regulations, not mailing something the USPS (or any other carrier) would deem unshippable, and not overpaying.
• Quartier also can help you test your campaign by mailing samples to a test list to gauge the impact and condition of the package. Does it get wedged into a small mailbox and mutilated? Does it survive the mail stream?
• And don’t forget to track and measure your results so that you can establish a realistic benchmark for success!

At Quartier, we’ve made investments that offer our clients the truest color reproduction possible. Our high-definition, G7-calibrated printers deliver consistent, proof-to-press/press-to-press color-matched pieces, and we’re the only printer in Central New York whose staff, equipment, and procedures have earned a G7 Master Printer certificate from IDEAlliance.

Why does this matter? How can you be sure that the additional investment in choosing and reproducing the right colors is worth it? Used correctly, color has a long track record of increasing the effectiveness of print.

Consider this: Color Communications, Inc. has found that consumers make a subconscious judgment about people, their environment, or products within 90 seconds of initially viewing them—and that between 62% and 90% of decision-making is based on color alone.

Additionally, a University of Loyola, MD study found that color increases brand recognition by up to 80%. And 92.6% of survey respondents told the 2004 Seoul International Color Expo secretariat that visual factors were most important when purchasing products.

Why is color so powerful?

1. Total Recall—According to the American Psychological Association, by hanging an extra “tag” of data on visual scenes, color helps people process and store images more efficiently.
2. Emotional Shades—Color taps into emotions. That’s why mega-brands guard their look closely (try to think of McDonalds without thinking of yellow and red). And that’s why major brands such as Cheerios and Tide revive retro packaging, using mid-20^th century styles and colors deeply familiar to consumers and tapping into happy childhood memories and positive associations.

The power of color to influence purchases can be seen in a recent addition to the venerable Heinz brand. Millions of dollars were invested into what seems like a crazy idea—green ketchup.

But the brand managers and food psychologists did their homework and knew the wacky color would be a hit with kids. More than 10 million bottles of Heinz EZ Squirt Blastin’ Green ketchup were sold in the first seven months following its introduction in 2011, leading to $23 million in sales—the highest sales increase in the brand’s history.

So, what can you do to tap into the power of color?

1. Make Color a Priority—Think about the power and meaning of various colors when planning your next campaign (red = strength; orange = joy; green = growth; blue = stability/depth.) If you need help, Quartier’s graphic designers and print experts can guide you and build you a brand or campaign palette.
2. Compliment Color with Great Graphics—It’s worth spending a little extra money on artwork, photographs, and design to really make your colors pop. Quartier can provide photographers for custom work and graphic designers for matching artwork, colors, fonts, and design.
3. Manage Color Carefully—Work with Quartier to manage your color all the way through the printing process. We’ll help you submit images in the right color space (and explain what CMYK really means!), use the most exacting standards to set color profiles, and optimize your color with our state-of-the-art proofing system.

You’ll be surprised! These steps will go a long way toward maximizing your brand image and selling power—taking your marketing pieces from “ho, hum” to “yum, yum!” Just like that green ketchup!

You may be tempted to nix your company’s brochures, deciding they’re budget suckers no-one is going to read. But in order to partner and interact with your clients, you need a conversation starter—and your brochure can be just that. All it may need to get the best ROI is a makeover.

And don’t forget—always feel free to contact us at info@quartierprinting.com to discuss your next brochure and how we can help you add value to it!

1) Tune Up Your Strategy: Purpose & Audience

To update your corporate brochure, first re-tune your strategy.

Thinking With Purpose. What job do you want the brochure to do? Is it introducing a prospect to your company? A brochure saves time that you might otherwise spend reciting your corporate history and mission. Or is it a leave-behind for trade shows? A brochure can be ideal forum to give readers a taste of the full spectrum of your capabilities.

Play to Your Audience. Are your prospects well-versed in your industry? If so, your brochure’s language can reflect this and provide a sense of your expertise and thought-leadership. But if your brochure is introducing your company to a wider audience, don’t overdo the jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms!

2) Engage the Reader

If you don’t engage the reader immediately, your brochure—and your investment in design, writing, and printing—is going straight into the trash bin.

Cover Design. The cover is your first opportunity to capture the reader’s interest. A brochure is not a line card, so think beyond a product picture and logo. A designer can help pick out a bold photo or design, a unique font, a splash of unexpected color, or a customized font. Ask your print about unusual, stand-out paper stocks, sizes, shapes, or finishes.

Break It Up. Use headlines, sub-headlines, break-out boxes, and pull quotes to make your text more readable, to highlight your most compelling points, and to give your readers enough that they get the gist at a glance and want to keep reading. Your brochure should read more like a glossy magazine than an annual report.

Be Conversational. Don’t write a technical manual or white paper. These reports have different purposes and audiences. Try to write in a conversational, friendly tone of voice, with your best information front-and-center. To give your copy a human angle, include case studies and customer testimonials. Selectively use factual information to make your piece both interesting and believable.

3) Call to Action.

You have drawn your customers in. You’ve informed them about your company and your products. Now what?

A prize in every pack! There’s only one correct ending—include a call to action! Give the reader an exclusive invitation, a free white paper, or a perforated card to request more information about your products and services.

Continue the conversation. Beyond displaying your contact information and web address on the back cover, continue the conversation by directing the reader to your social media channels or your corporate blog.

Companies tend to limit distribution of corporate brochures because of the cost involved, but a well-designed, professionally printed brochure can be worth a great deal more than its cost.

The real expense comes from printing the first copy. You can order thousands of additional copies for comparatively little money. Get them in the hands of your employees, vendors, distributors, customers, and prospects and see where an effective brochure takes you.

Anyone can print business cards and letterhead, but a well-produced brochure sends the message that you are a legitimate company with a strong history, expert team, slate of satisfied clients, and solid brand.