Tag Archive for: direct mail

Tips for a Successful Holiday Direct Mail Campaign

Even with all the social media marketing and internet advertising, there is still no substitute for a smart, targeted, and well-designed direct mailing campaign. Direct mail is appropriate for any size business and are a great way to get your message in front of a targeted, motivated audience.  But it takes proper planning, the right target, and a great design to get noticed. Before you start to plan your campaign, here are some tips to help your holiday mailer on the right track.

Make sure you have the right target – How you go about choosing the right target is the most important part of your campaign. The greatest design in the world is meaningless in front of the wrong target. It’s pointless to send a postcard about roofing repair to an apartment complex, right? If you don’t have a working prospect list, you’ll have to find one that uses the right target criteria.

Make sure your mailer looks great – If your mailer looks dated and is poorly designed, it can do more damage than good. In fact, people will connect poor design to poor service. A better way is to design something memorable that shows your company as a vibrant, competent provider of a service or product. The content should be clear and free of typos, poor grammar, or misleading claims. The look should be colorful with pictures and easy-to-understand graphics. Your mailer should stand out, be relevant, and be useful.  This is an important way your piece will avoid being considered “junk mail.”

Use different sizes and colors – Larger and differently shaped mailers helps your piece stand out from the rest and gives you more room to add content which is more useful than standard postcards, or letter sizes. Color is an important factor to making your mailing piece stand out from the rest. Bright, vibrant hues of green and yellows are great ways to do this.

Anticipate a realistic response – If you send out 2,500 mailers you shouldn’t expect to close hundreds of new deals.  In fact, the response rate for a direct mailing campaign is between 6 and 3%. This figure should be used when trying to determine what kind of success you need to have in order for your campaign to be profitable.

Look at the competition – Remember that other companies are sending out mailers too and even if they aren’t direct competitors, you should get an idea about how they approach their mailer pieces. The best place to start is your own mailbox. Take a look at pieces that catch your eye and use those aspects for your next piece. Imitation is the best form of flattery after all.

Use QR codes – these make it very easy for a customer to scan and head to whatever online resource you want to send them to. This could be your homepage, a blog about your product offering for the holiday season, or a specific product listing on your site.

Track the response – Make it easy for you customers to contact you, but also remember to make it easy to track how they got to you. This will help you gauge the profitability of this campaign and give you feedback that will allow you to improve later campaigns.

Plan ahead – The best time to get your marketing materials in front of a customer is the week before Black Friday. Black Fridays are planned ahead of time nowadays as shoppers want to maximize their bargains and with your mailer in hand they can add your store to the list.

Presort can not only print and get your mailer distributed, we can assist you with the marketing research needed to find the most potential customers and make your campaign a success.  Call us today!

 

Postcard Printing

Make your mark with postcard printing.

You might normally associate a postcard with a faraway place that your parents went to once, but they can be a whole lot more than that with the right marketing strategy. Postcard printing and mailing services can be a huge boon for your company if done effectively—their high readability, cost-effective price, and high-quality, full-color design combine to make them a potent marketing tool in the right hands.

You might be hearing more and more noise recently about going digital. Pouring all of your resources into digital marketing isn’t necessarily a bad move, given how effective that’s proven to be for so many businesses. But if you do have room in your budget to diversify your options, it’s a no-brainer—more advertising platforms are better than less and spreading the word about what you have to offer across multiple mediums ensures that you gain traction in areas that otherwise might go untapped. We’ve highlighted some of the most pertinent benefits of printing custom postcards for your business so that you can effectively reach more potential customers than ever before.

  • They’re cost-effective: When it comes to deciding what marketing strategy you want to roll out for your business, the cost is an enormous factor. You must analyze which marketing strategy is going to yield the best results for the lowest price; as we mentioned above, diversifying your options is always a healthy decision if you’re looking to veer away from putting all of your eggs in one basket.
  • They’re measurable: Unlike convoluted, sprawling marketing campaigns, postcards offer a direct reflection on how effective your product is at reaching customers. You know how many you sent out, and you know how many inquiries or sales it generated. They’re perfect for test marketing—you can send out a small sample size and see what kind of response you get.
  • They’re versatile: Postcard printing services can be fine-tuned to meet your specific needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution—whatever you envision for your brand, whether it’s a specific font, color scheme, or image, printing postcards is one of the best ways to get that message across in a unique way.
  • They’re efficient: As soon as your audience receives your postcard, they receive the message—no opening tricky envelopes, no strings attached. Delivered right to your door, direct mail postcard campaigns are an effective way to get your information in the right hands without coming across convoluted.
  • They’re easy to produce: No more languishing around, waiting for your marketing campaign to finally roll out. Postcard printing gives you the opportunity to hit the ground running and get your message out quickly and effectively.
  • They’re ideal for targeted marketing: Not seeing the results that you anticipated with your advertising? It might be an issue with who your mail is being sent to. Targeted marketing is easier than ever with postcard printing. Make sure that your information falls in the right hands.

 

6 Reasons Why Inventory Management is Important

Businesses keep inventory on hand for a variety of reasons, perhaps it is needed to quickly fill special orders, or respond to an unanticipated demand, or maybe to supply spare parts quickly. Whatever the reason, your inventory management systems are vital to responding to these market demands quickly and efficiently. If you find your inventory methods are lacking, here are some reasons why it is important.

Increase employee efficiency – It is 5pm on a Friday and a customer calls for a replacement part. They are willing to pay more to expedite it, but it needs to be there Saturday afternoon at the latest. How does your business respond? Without an organized inventory process your business will find it difficult to respond to opportunities on these and profit from them. Your employees will spend the majority of their time digging through files and spreadsheets to make sure the product is available and in stock. Getting it there isn’t the issue, knowing you have it to send, is.

You will be able to close out more sales – If you are not sure exactly what is in stock and at what quantity, an employee can tell a customer that an item is out of stock when in fact it is available. A customer can be sent to a wrong store that should have an item, but your system isn’t capable of answering those kinds of questions.

You will be able to deliver on time – When your customer orders something and is told their products will arrive between a wide range of dates, it shows your company is not organized enough to fulfill a simple aspect of selling goods. This isn’t just poor customer service, it is bad business. Instead, a proper inventory management system will give you the ability to not only pinpoint a date for delivery but gives you the means to hit that target.

It is clear where your inventory is – It may seem like good customer service when one of your locations is out of an item and calls another to see if it is in stock there. On the surface this appears to be going the extra mile to help a customer, but the real issue is your system doesn’t allow them to know for certain that the item is there. A good inventory system will allow them to see this in real time and respond accordingly.

You will be able to order the correct amounts from vendors – Reorder points can be sent with ease when you have a solid inventory management system. This reduces cost when you are ordering things unnecessarily either through not knowing how much you have, or not ordering enough.

No need to duplicate purchase orders – A sophisticated inventory management system will either generate purchase orders automatically when your inventory levels hit a reorder point or allow you to create one from drop down menus which lowers the potential for errors.

Even small businesses that keep a minimal inventory on hand would benefit from even the most basic of inventory management systems.  Presort can help you find the right software and implement the right procedures to make sure that this aspect of your business is a strength and not a weakness.