Ancaire Business Cards

We got the Ancaire business cards back from the printer the other day. Love how the emboss and die cut turned out on these.

Mailing Imprint Indicia vs. Business Reply Mail.

Print pieces often have very specific calls to action. Sometimes that call to action is filling out a form and mailing it back to the sender. A really good way to make it as easy as possible for the recipient to take action is by paying for the return postage. Not only is it saving the recipient $.46, but it’s also saving them the hassle of finding a stamp and applying it to the piece.

But do you know how to implement it? And do you know the difference between a Mailing Imprint permit, and Business Reply Mail permit? If you’re sending more than 200 pieces through the post office, you need to know about both.

What’s What.

For the purpose of clarity, we’ll use a print project we’re working on now as an example. It’s a roll-fold brochure with a perforated panel featuring a quote request questionnaire. We didn’t want the recipient to think twice about filling out the quote request form, so we decided to make it as easy as possible for them by having postage on the return piece already paid for. We knew we needed a Mailing Imprint permit so we could easily send the job out in bulk. However, we also needed a Business Reply Mail permit so the perforated panel could be returned at no cost to the original recipient. Although they’re both permits, that’s where the similarities between the two end. (more…)

Forgotten Characteristics of an Effective E-mail Marketing Campaign.

E-mail marketing. With the right touches of finesse, it can be incredibly effective. You can’t just send out a group of words to a list of people and expect societal interest in your company to shoot through the roof. As with all digital marketing pieces, you have to carefully select your message, tailor it to an audience you’ve hand picked, and then time the delivery perfectly to get the best open and click-through rates. There are lots of little details to e-mail marketing right, but none of them mean anything if you haven’t done the four things below first.

E-mail Marketing Travels Well.

People get their e-mail virtually everywhere: on their smartphones, tablets, laptops… the list goes on. Responsive design is picking up speed, so you’ve probably already noticed marketing efforts are beginning to tailor themselves to different sized screens. Similarly, you should check to make sure your e-mail is going to render well in all the major e-mail clients out there. Each client will display the e-mail a little differently, and you don’t want to lose potential business because your e-mail looks broken. Your clients will think “G’z, how hard is to send an e-mail? If they can’t even do that right, what does that say about the rest of their business?”

Most e-mail software programs have a test you can run to see how your message will look under the different circumstances. Here are the office we use Campaign Monitor, but some of the other reputable programs include Constant Contact, MailChimp and Active Campaign. (more…)

Make the Most of Landing Pages.

Do you know what your most popular landing pages are? If not, we’re going to suggest you log in to your Analytics account and take a look. If you’re already aware of which pages your visitors frequent most often, are you doing everything you can to make them want to take their coats off and stay awhile? Maybe even nudge them toward a conversion?

Here are a few things you can review on your landing pages to make sure your captive audience stays that way.

Is Your Landing Page Content Easy to Read?

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to read five big ole’ long paragraphs of text… except maybe your mom. Make sure to keep the content only as detailed as it absolutely has to be. There’s a time and a place for the fine print, but when you’re trying to capture someone’s attention, putting a lot of words in front of them probably isn’t the best way to do that. So break the content on your landing page up in to smaller paragraphs and use subheads for easy scan-ability.

We’ll Ask You Again: Is Your Landing Page Content Easy to Read?

Making sure your landing page content is formatted in an easy-to-read manner is only the first part of the question. The second part is whether or not the majority can understand what you’re telling them. Did you know most Americans read at only an 8th grade level? Don’t miss out on potential customers because your inadvertently talking over their heads. (more…)

3 Ways to Optimize Website Content.

Did you know Google’s algorithm uses more than 200 elements to determine a site’s ranking? That’s 200 things that could improve (or hurt!) your search engine results page standings. You don’t have time to go through each and every one of them, so we thought we’d break it down and hit on an easy one. Let’s kick off with how you can optimize website content.

When Google crawls your website, it’s trying to determine what the site is about. The bots check each page for relevance, making sure the content matches the overall purpose. The more closely related the two are, the more positively Google will view your site. Here are three ways you can tweak your content to help you stay on Google’s good side.

Bold and Italic Content

A lot of people don’t know this, but if you place text in either bold or italics, Google pays special attention to it. Now, we are not recommending you put your entire site’s content in bold and italics, but an important keyword or phrase will earn slightly higher emphasis. This will help your keywords stand out, therefore improving the overall relevance of your site. It might be low on the algorithm totem pole, but it’s there and we don’t think it should be overlooked. (more…)