Create Effective Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail — or unsolicited newsletters, advertisements, promotions, or coupons — can help increase your sales by allowing you to target a specific market. With USPS’s Every Door Direct Mail program, companies that wouldn’t normally send out direct mail are now able to send it easily. They can target specific neighborhoods, zip codes, and mail routes, increasing the chances that the people who receive their mail will be more likely to act on that mail.

But direct mail has been around for a long time, and many companies employ the following techniques in order to create effective direct mail campaigns.

Narrow your specific market.

Instead of sending out mass direct mail pieces to anyone in a specific area, you can narrow your target market a bit further so that you can send your campaign to people who are more likely to be interested in your product or service. You can build targeted lists based on your customers’ age, their zip code, the date of their last engagement with your company, and even whether they have moved recently or not. When you understand who your target market is, you can help ensure that you get a higher ROI.

Create a flexible message.

The appeal of direct mail (besides the fact that it comes right to your customers’ doorsteps) is that you can create a variety of different campaigns. Direct mail is great for promotional campaigns (usually involving coupons), but direct mail can also prompt customers to visit a landing page in order to take the next step (purchase an item, request a service, or sign up for an email list). By leading your customers through a specific process, you can control and adjust the type of content that they see and, hopefully, influence the way they feel about your product or service.

Create hype.

Whenever customers think they’re getting a special or personalized message, they’re more likely to respond positively. If you have customers who have been with you for a long time, or if you’d like to target people who’ve never used your services, direct mail might be able to help. By sending out early-bird specials, sign-up promotions, or refer-a-friend deals, you can entice customers who might not have been interested in your products to begin with.

Sep

24

Fundamentals

Think Outside of the Box

Gaining new sales isn’t only about creating a constant connection with clients or providing a quality service. Sometimes, gaining new sales has more to do with thinking creatively than anything else.

Shift the Way You Market

No matter what type of company you have, you can incorporate genre-blending influences in order to make an impact on customers. Just because you’ve created an online application doesn’t mean you shouldn’t incorporate printed postcards. Just because you have a shoe company doesn’t mean you can’t connect with your clients on social media. No matter what type of company you have, you can always look to other forms of media to promote and engage with your clients, and eventually gain new sales. Guerrilla marketing is one way that you can surprise and entice your customers.

Go the Way of the Guerrilla

People absorb information in a variety of ways, so if your product stands out enough, your customers are likely to remember it. Guerrilla marketing is when you incorporate visionary and unconventional marketing techniques, usually created at low cost, to catch your customers off guard. When you incorporate guerrilla techniques, you essentially surprise your customers with your advertisements. Some guerrilla marketing techniques include

Leaving product information in unexpected places. When people see marketing material out of context (i.e. a postcard on a chair at a movie theater), they’re more inclined to pick it up and actually read it.

Incorporating larger-than-life signs or promotional material. When potential customers are surprised, they’ll be more likely to pay attention to what they’re seeing.

Beyond the Tactic

Some companies incorporate tactics like stealth marketing, graffiti marketing, and publicity stunts to shock customers, but you don’t have to go into unknown territories to gain new sales. Usually, changing the way you connect with your clients can be enough to increase your sales. Whether you choose to incorporate guerrilla marketing techniques into your marketing plan or not, you can still do little things to connect with your customers and keep them coming back. Little things like handwritten cards, responding to queries on social media, and generating friendly email responses can be enough to ensure that your customers are loyal to your brand.

Sep

14

Fundamentals

Why Custom Built is Better

It’d be easier to purchase a premade product or website. It’d be easier to throw your information into little boxes that look just like the other little boxes everywhere. It’d be easier to purchase a template or website building program instead of getting a custom-built site. But just because something is easier doesn’t mean it’s actually better.

Why custom-built sites are the way to go.
There are a few reasons why we prefer to go with custom-built sites instead of working with drag-and-drop layouts.

Your brand’s preferences will be taken into account.
Getting a site custom built means you get to show off a part of your brand. When you work with a web design firm, you can incorporate small details that would get overlooked while using a template.

Custom-built sites can incorporate little accents that refer back to the larger symbols in your brand. This type of attention to detail creates cohesion that can only be found when a company takes your goals, mission and preferences into account.

A custom-built site will save you money.
Think about what happens when you put content into a template. It will probably look okay for the first few weeks. Then you get more new content to add, and so you put it in its separate slot. Then your boss calls and sends you 5 new documents to insert. Now you’re running out of space. So you search for a new layout or template that can house these documents, but in the process, you lose 10 hours and screw up the way the content is ordered. If you had gone with a custom-built site from the beginning, you would have been able to save money (and time…and energy!) in the long term.

A custom-built site means you get to decide.
While custom-built sites might involve a bit more research (i.e. you have to think about what you like and dislike), you get to have control over your image. Do you want users to be able to search your stock and order items directly from your site? Would you prefer to incorporate a custom font or graphic? Custom built means exactly that — a design team will listen to your goals and preferences and will create a website based on your specifications. No matter what your needs are, it’s simply better to manage them by getting a website custom built.

Working with a web design firm is like having a personal design team at your fingertips. They can make pretty much whatever you ask for. It’s a good idea to think of some specific questions to ask before you hire a firm, so take some time to think about your needs and wants before you find a design partner.

Sep

07

General

Spotlight on Brand Plumbing

Brand Plumbing has been providing plumbing solutions to the Wichita area since 1981, and we were excited to design a site that would show off their services and advance their mission — to provide reliable and trusted plumbing services to the Wichita area.

Challenge

Brand Plumbing was interested in both showcasing their plumbing services and providing educational resources to people in the Wichita community. Instead of creating a traditional corporate website, we wanted to create a bold site that would present their services alongside their educational resources.

Process

We pulled from Brand’s logo to create a website that would be informationally sound and aesthetically cohesive. We paired a diamond motif with deep ocean blues, light blues, and dark brown hues in order to create a graphic website that would evoke water imagery. The diamond reflects the clarity and transparency of Brand Plumbing and the wisdom of Brand’s plumbers.

Font

We chose Steelfish font for the headers because we wanted something bold and cool that would pop off the ocean blue background. The paragraph text is Lucida Grande because we wanted to create a light and complementary texture between the two fonts.

Outcomes

All of Brand’s information is now easy to find and properly located. We created space for their blog so they could record and present their best plumbing advice without interruption, we ensured that their logo was a darker hue than the rest of the content for easy navigation. Check out their full site here.

Check out our portfolio here.

Sep

03

Client Work

3 Tips on Client Communication – Enter the Archives

We keep hearing that companies need to figure out how to communicate effectively with their clients, so we wanted to recap some of our favorite communication tips and trips from the Entermotion blog. Enter the archives:

What we can do to fix this.

Next time you’re in a communication rut with a client, ask yourself- how can you fix it? What could you have done earlier on in the process to avoid it in the first place? Look in the mirror to find the problem, and know that at the end of the day, you truly did everything you could to prevent communication errors. It’s a good feeling.

Be part of a team.
Our outlook on client relationships is that of a partnership. To us, teamwork means using everyone’s expertise. The client knows their product best- we know design best. Our best work comes from a relationship where this is understood and we can use our creativity to make something great. This situation doesn’t always happen easily, though, and sometimes the whole thing requires a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Get real. Honesty is good. Customers believe and trust it. There’s no better way to build a relationship with them than by being yourself. Beyond that, there’s one last thing. When your customers see how much you care about your own business and reputation, they’re receiving a very strong message about how you’ll care for their business and reputation. When actions speak louder than words, custom built is the only way to go.

Remain open.
We take on each project with a case-by-case mentality- and explain things to the client as we go. The majority of the time, this process works well; it gives us lots of opportunities to communicate with the client, and it gives the client opportunities to trust us.

Aug

31