Choose Your Marketing Color Scheme with Emotion in Mind

Studies show that people react almost instantly to color. Bright reds and oranges inspire energy. Green rooms spark creativity, while blue and white have a calming effect. Did you choose your color scheme with emotion in mind? Are your direct mail marketing materials, logo, website, emails and other marketing materials making the emotional impact you want them to make? Or are you turning your customers off instead of turning them on to your business?

Check the chart below to find out!

The Emotion of Color

Blue is associated with the sea, the sky and longevity. It communicates trust and loyalty, as well as stability. It also symbolizes intellect and faith and is primarily associated with masculine endeavors. (Hence the reason people buy blue instead of pink when a baby boy is born!) Blue is perfect when you’re advertising expertise and professional service; however, as it’s been shown to suppress appetite restaurant owners might want to think twice before making it a major player in their advertising campaign!

Red is associated with energy and power and, because it’s the color of blood, with life itself. It has high visibility and is a strong symbol of leadership; however, when used excessively it can convey the mental image of a child bouncing around his room who has had one too many candy bars that day! Red is a fabulous backdrop, making it the perfect choice when you want your text to stand out and make an impact.

Black is the color of death, of elegance, and of mystery. Black conveys sophistication and prestige (i.e. a black tie affair, a black

What are your colors saying about you?

limousine) and is often brought forth as a show of power, as with a black suit. When blended with red, black can make quite an impact; however, if you’re not careful a black background can draw attention away from your text and make your message difficult to read.

Yellow is sunny, bright and cheerful, and is usually associated with happiness, good cheer and comfort. It’s also used to invoke energy and intellect, and when used excessively can be quite over stimulating. Yellow is great for promoting children’s products, leisure products and highlighting key points of other products on the market one wants associated with a bright, cheerful appeal.

Purple fluidly combines the energy of red and the stability of blue, hence the reason it’s often associated with royalty. Purple conveys an aura of wealth, extravagance and luxury, as well as creativity, and in studies was preferred by 75% of all teenage consumers. It’s also popular to promote products for women and children, as a light lavender is considered to be an extremely feminine shade.

Green is strongly associated with both nature and safety, and it’s often considered to be a symbol of growth. It’s restful and healing, making it a great choice for the medical industry, but in various shades can also be associated with ecology, money and prosperity.

What do your colors say about you? Tell us below!

The Secret to Writing and Designing Newsletters Your Customers Will Actually Read

You send newsletters out month after month in the hopes that your customers will read them. You spend time choosing just the right topics to write about, the right fonts to use and the right images to catch their attention. But how can you guarantee that carefully crafted newsletter that cost you so much time to send (and money to print and mail) won’t get tossed straight in the can the minute your customers see them lying in their mailbox?

Content and design.

Content

It’s not hard to learn how to write content for a newsletter, and yet it’s something that a large number of businesses find themselves struggling with month after month. When writing a newsletter, there are really only three things you have to remember. It has to be relevant, it has to be interesting, and it has to not be loaded with attempts to promote your company and your merchandise. They have sales ads for that.

Are your customers reading what you're writing, or are your direct mail marketing materials going straight in the trash?

Choose topics that are relevant to your industry and, therefore, to your clients. For example, if you ran a print shop you could talk about how to write a newsletter! Remember that this isn’t a lecture, and they’re not going to be tested on it afterwards. Present your information in a fun, engaging and interesting way, and frame it in a way that’s going to relate to them. Even news about selling insurance, which has a tendency to err on the side of “dry as dust” can fascinating if you put it in a way that people want to hear.

Choose catchy, engaging headlines and you’ll have them eating out of the palm of your hand!

If you struggle with your headlines, try running them through the AMI’s Emotional Value Headline Analyzer. Not only will they tell you how you’re doing, they’ll also give you some great tips on how to spice up your news!

Design

Colors and photographs, and a noticeable branding header. People are visual creatures. We see something that catches our interest, we stop and check it out. A bright, interesting graphic (coupled with an engaging headline) will do more to catch your customers’ attention and spark their interest than page after page of well-written content ever will. Why do you think best-selling books always have engaging covers?

It’s all about visual appeal and choosing the right colors, graphics and fonts to portray your company’s image.

Direct Mail Marketing: How Variable Digital Printing Separates the Wheat from the Chaff

Here’s a statistic for you. According to the Oberlin College Resource Conservation Team, the average amount of junk mail (read: Direct Mail Marketing Materials) Americans receive in a single day could, if recycled, produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes. For how long? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. The point is, when you send out your direct mail marketing materials you’re one of thousands  of advertisers targeting the same (relatively) small group of customers.

The single biggest challenge facing any direct mail marketing campaign is how to get your customers to actually look at what you’re sending them before they throw it away. It’s almost a reflex-if it looks like an advertisement, it goes into the trash. Variable digital printing separates mediocre materials that are a complete waste of your marketing budget from the power players that drive huge amounts of business to your door every single day.

The only way to sell to today’s savvy consumer is to make them believe you’re marketing directly to them-not to them and the thousands of other customers out there that they could be marketing to! Through the careful use of variable digital printing you can customize your marketing materials to incorporate their business, personal and professional interests and any particular areas that may pertain to one client but be completely irrelevant to another.

Today’s customer has no desire to do business with a nameless, faceless corporate entity with no perceived interest in their personal or professional needs. There are enough companies out there that are happy to give them the one-on-one attention they deserve that they don’t need to waste their time with anyone else. You want to be the company they want to do business with, and you can make that happen through the marriage of variable digital printing and your direct mail marketing campaign.

What is Variable Printing?

What’s the hottest word in digital printing today? Variable. As in, variable printing, or variable digital printing. Variable printing has more aliases than most professional gangsters, but it all boils down to the same basic concept: Customized products designed to maximize the appeal of your company.

Defining Variable Printing

“A form of on-demand printing in which elements such as text, graphics and images may be changed from one printed piece to the next without stopping or slowing down the printing process and using information from a database or external file.” (Wikipedia Definition of Variable Data Printing)

What’s in your mail? The credit card offers you get in the mail every day are a great example of variable printing. Why? Because nine times out of ten you’re going to see your name at the top.

Now, when you see a letter pop up in the mail with “Dear Friend” at the top, how long do you wait before you throw it away? One sentence? Two? Or do you shoot on sight? Tune in next time for the why’s and the how’s. For now, let’s just say variable printing acts as a rocket booster for your marketing campaign.

Types of Variable Printing

There are four different types of variable printing orders professional print shops tend to see come across their desks:

1)      Full variable printing, when every part of the page can be customized to your clientele.

2)      Selectable variable printing, where certain parts of the page remain static and unchangeable and others can be adapted to your purposes. You often see this in form letters, allowing certain parts of the form to be filled with information particular to your client.

3)      Personalization, when the product is static (for example, a direct mail marketing postcard) but can be personalized with your customer’s name or the name of your organization.

4)      On-Demand short run printing, when pre-defined prints are created in short runs. Commonly used for presentations, folders, binders, etc. with an organization’s insignia.

Variable printing bridges the gap between you and your customers and eliminates the anonymity and “cookie cutter” personality of most mass marketing materials. What can variable printing do for your business?

Direct Mail Tip #4

4. Establish Credibility
Prospects want to deal with businesses that are experts in their field or marketplace. Here are some techniques that can build this sense of credibility into the direct-mail package:
Add a few quotes from happy customers, it makes prospect comfortable about what you offer. “Taco Palace has the friendliest staff and tastiest food. My kids won’t eat anywhere else! Thanks Taco Palace!” “Bob’s Bug Bashers provided fast and professional service; they showed up 20 minutes before my dinner party to remove a dead rat in the wall. I will always use Bob’s Bug Bashers for all my bug bashing needs!”
If there has been positive press, you may want to add that too. “Taco Palace – Voted Houston’s best Taco 3 Years in a row!” “Bob’s Bug Bashers received the award for most bugs bashed in 2007.”
Name drop (if it is relevant – and true). “Oprah’s favorite taco spot in Houston!” “Bob’s Bug Bashers services the homes of Mayor John Doe and rap star Real-E!”
Include associations you are a part of including the Better Business Bureau.
Make sure the direct mail item is consistently branded with what prospects have seen before from you. This increases recognition and builds consumer confidence. (Just putting your logo somewhere does not count)

Direct Mail Tip #3

3. Encourage a Targeted Response
How do you want these prospects to contact you? Phone? Email? Decide and make that message loud and clear! If you want them to pick up the phone – your phone number should be in at least 2 VERY VISIBLE places. Want them to email? Same deal? Want them to visit your web site? (That can be a slippery slope if you are not using PURL as you are asking for 2 actions – visit web site and then contact us – you may loose some along the way) But always free to promote your site by providing your web address. Those doing research or wanting to learn more about you will appreciate it. Bottom line – contact information should always be clear and easy to read.

Direct Mail Tip #2

Tip #2 Develop a Secondary Offer
Your primary offer will attract prospects that are ready to do business today or in the near future. However, this represents only a small fraction of the potential market. Therefore, you need to make a secondary offer to attract those prospects who are not ready to buy right now but may have a need in three, six or 12 months. This secondary offer can be a free booklet, special report, brochure, fact sheet, free gift or other item the reader can calling or visiting your site or PURL. Going back to our taco example, it could be something like, “Purchase a $25 Taco gift card and get a $5 Taco gift card for yourself!” Stress the primary offer with strong graphics all over your mailing. The secondary offer needs to be visible, but think of it as a “P.S.” in terms of the impact it needs to make visually. For our exterminator your message could be “Call today to request your FREE 3 Simple Steps to a Pest Free Home Guide”

Tips on developing a Direct Mail Campaign

Over the next several days I will give you tips on how to best develop your direct mail pieces. Here is the first one.

enjoy…

Tip #1. Develop A Primary Offer
If you sell something – tacos, make-up or elephant dung – that is pretty simple. Create an offer that would interest clients like, “Free Taco Tuesdays for Kids”. If you are in a service industry – accountant, home design, exterminator – this step may not appear easy, but it is! It is a two-step process. FIRST you have build the value of the service to your audience – then you can offer them things like a free consultation, discounted rate on hourly services, or free evaluation. Here is a good example, “We will inspect your home for pests at no cost and make recommendations on how you can avoid future infestation, while saving you 10% on your first home treatment.”

Effective Direct Mail Campaigns

Many of you may have tried direct mail marketing only to feel like it was a waste of time, energy and money. Why did your campaign not perform? What type of response were you expecting and how did you measure that response. I am sharing this information with you because I want you to succeed – not just with your direct mail campaigns – but in everything you do.

Here is what you should know about direct mail
The average response rate for the 1,122 industry-specific campaigns that the DMA studied was 2.61%. Within sectors, nonprofit fundraisers enjoy the most success with direct response, getting rates of 5.35%. Close behind are retail stores (with 3.36%) and establishments selling services to businesses (3.34%). Manufacturing delivers 3.17%; personal and repair services 3.07%; and travel 2.98%. The two sectors at the bottom of the list — computer/electronic products and packaged goods — still get better than 2% response. Variable Print Campaigns increase the response rate by up to +5%.
(From http://www.directmag.com)

So what does that mean to you?
Have a reasonable expectation. If you send out 1,000 postcards to a qualified mailing list, you should expect about 20 people to respond (don’t confuse respond with purchase). Make it a variable print campaign and that number could up to as high as 75 people.

Here are some tips to have a successful direct mail campaign.

• Use a qualified mailing list. Seems like a no brainer, but often companies miss this step.
• Have a reasonable expectation on the return. Don’t expect a 50% response. It isn’t going to happen.
• Take advantages of new technologies to drive up and track your response rate.
• Variable printing (where you can customize the message on each card to be relevant to the recipient) has great power and will increase your response if done correctly. (Not those stupid postcards you get with a billboard that has your name on it – very, very lame.
• Personalized URL (PURL) allows you to add a URL to your campaign where recipients can log on to get their offer. For example, you can offer a generic 10% discount for your product or service, but then have a second “Visit http://www.personalizedurl.com and get 20% off!” When they arrive, you can give them what you have offered, ask them to take a survey, gather more information from them etc. It is a win-win for everyone.

Make sure you direct mail campaign is strongly branded and consistent with other items you may already have out there. You want your prospects to recognize you and have a sense of familiarity when they receive the item. Working with a graphic designer can be a very critical key to this process. For example, you send out your item, someone goes to your website and they leave because they think they are at the wrong place – there is no visual consistency to tie your messages together.

How to create an effective business card

Question: What information should go on a business card and where?
Business cards serve many purposes but their primary purpose is to tell what you do and give the recipient a way to contact you.
Answer: At the very least a name and contact method (address or phone number) should go into a business card design. As for where to put this information, there are hundreds of possible arrangements, but there are a few commonly accepted guidelines for where to place the most essential information. When in doubt or when there is little time to experiment, follow these guidelines for creating a basic, serviceable, and effective business card.
Minimum Information for a Business Card
Other information is optional but as a minimum the business card design should usually contain:
Individual’s Name and/or Business Name
Individual’s Title or some other descriptive text to indicate what the person does if it’s not obvious from the business name
A way (preferrably multiple ways) to contact the person — could be phone, fax, email, web page, mailing address, street address, etc.
It is not necessary to but a complete listing of services or products on the business card. Keep it to the essentials. Use brochures and personal interviews to disclose the full range of services or products offered.
Orientation
Horizontal layouts are the most typical, most widely used format for business cards.
Name
Whether using a horizontal or vertical arrangement, the person’s name or the business name are usually the most prominent text item on the card. It is usually placed in the center or upper half of the card and emphasized with a larger or bolder font.
Contact
Contact information is usually placed in the lower half of the card (left, right, or centered). The preferred method of contact (such as phone number or email) is often emphasized with a larger size, bolder font, or more prominent placement.
Mini-Ad Layout
Business card layouts frequently mimic the common and successful Ogilvy ad layout formula that places the visual (logo) at the top or upper left of the card followed by the headline (name) with the signature (contact information) in the lower right.