Posté par admin le February 3, 2009 – 11:00 am
The Direct Marketing Voice: Real Estate Agents: Do You Understand Your Client Personas?
Noted below are a few practical ways real estate professionals can increase brand recognition, build their client base and get more out of their marketing budgets while educating prospects.
Boulder Daily Camera: USPS responds to costs
In the U.S., direct mail is a $900 billion industry that supports 9 million jobs nationwide. In Colorado, direct mail is a $9.2 billion industry that is vital to the commerce and economy of our state. Colorado has thousands of businesses and organizations that use and count on direct mail. There are more than 150,000 jobs related to the direct mail industry in our state, in addition to our 11,000 postal employees.
PrintWeek: Digital faces clean-up test
Two of the hottest topics in the industry at the moment are the environment and digital printing. The issue of the de-inkability of digital print is the crossroads where the two meet. Improving print’s environmental credentials is a crucial step towards ensuring its place in the media mix, but so is the adoption of digital technologies to improve its effectiveness.
ActiveRain: When is “Too Much” too much?
In the emergence of Social Media Networking I am trying to discover what medias work for me and which ones don’t.
Posté par admin le January 27, 2009 – 9:23 am
The Direct Marketing Voice: A Preliminary Look at How Business are Marketing Themselves in 2009
I’ve said it once before and now I’ll say it again-rather than focusing specifically on marketing spend, businesses should be reevaluating their marketing strategy.
PrintWeek: DM industry welcomes introduction of PAS 2020
The launch of PAS 2020, the direct mail (DM) industry’s environmental standard, has been met with enthusiasm by the sector.
Ballantine’s Printing Blog: How To Save Money With Clean Release Cards
Today’s video is about clean release cards. If you include plastic cards in your direct mail packages, or you’re thinking about doing so, you should find this video helpful.
Green Printer: Unofficial ‘Hot’ List of Green Design Firms – Green Printer’s picks for January 2009
And yes, it’s been drilled into our heads: “you can have a great product, but if you don’t [insert verbs like 'market', 'brand', 'package' here], you won’t succeed, etc.”. And it true. But design is more than just a means to an end to sell more of your widgets. It also plays a role in the improvement and development of your offerings and sometimes, your organization.
Posté par admin le January 6, 2009 – 9:47 am
The Direct Marketing Voice: Direct Mail Postcards As Sales Support For Customer Retention
A great example of the right way to use direct mail marketing for customer retention appeared in my mailbox the other day from a small clothing shop I had recently visited. This piece stopped me in my tracks, put a smile on my face and left me planning my next trip to the store.
Reuters: Traffic Builders, Inc.(sm) Launches Industry-First Green Direct Mail Initiative for U.S. Automotive Dealers
The We Auto Go Green program gives dealerships’ service departments an added benefit that competing direct mail providers cannot offer. Beginning the first of 2009, program participants will have their mailers printed on recycled paper.
NPR: Postal Service Sees Less Mail In Slumping Economy
Mail volume always suffers when the economy suffers, but this economic downturn is hitting the Postal Service particularly hard. That’s because the slumping housing and financial sectors have typically been big users of direct-mail marketing.
BtoB Magazine: Three considerations for evaluating direct-mail campaigns
In an increasingly competitive multichannel environment, marketers are struggling to optimize their marketing budgets and deliver the greatest returns on investment. Direct mail continues to be a strong driver of incremental sales, but with a greater number of orders taking place online it is becoming difficult to understand which marketing investment is driving ordering activity.
Nonprofit group ForestEthics recently published their third annual list of ‘Naughty and Nice’ direct marketers. The list focuses on sustainable practices in direct mail/catalog marketing and highlights who’s doing a great job at thinking green and who’s not.
The list ranks companies based on four categories:
- Where the materials came from to make the paper
- If the supply chain, from forest to paper mill to printer, is FSC certified
- How much post-consumer recycled material is used to produce direct mail pieces
- Effort taken to reduce overall paper waste and consumption
Patagonia, Williams-Sonoma, Victoria’s Secret and Dell were among the ‘greenest’ direct mail marketers, receiving a prancing reindeer (that’s good) in every category. Companies that earned a lump of coal (that’s bad) in every category included Sears, Neiman Marcus, Eddie Bauer, Capital One, Chase Bank, Citi and American Express. You can see the complete list here.
I don’t understand why some direct marketers are still sending out 100-page catalogs and un-targeted direct mail. With great technologies now available—digital printing on demand, prospecting tools for targeting a precise audience type, eMarketing for companion marketing, etc—there’s no need to waste money or our natural resources.
Direct marketers, don’t be afraid to talk to your vendors, printing and fulfillment houses included. Work together and come up with green, targeted solutions for your advertising and marketing plans that will ultimately save you money and offer a better return on investment. Best of all, you’ll be able to ensure that you won’t be getting a lump of coal in your stocking from Santa next year!
Many of our customers are consistent in asking us here at
QuantumDigital what ‘green’ procedures we implement, especially since
direct mail and
printing are two of our main services. We have spent time developing our own ‘green’ story – which if you are interested can be found on our
green initiative page. I’ll plan to go into more detail of our own efforts in future blogs.
However, what I’ve decided to do is start sharing what other leading companies/brands have implemented — more of a ‘green’ ideas guide. Many of you may be struggling with the fact that ‘going green’ is a big endeavor both on the bottom line and in resource time. There are companies out there that specialize in consulting on this very topic, but for those of us that don’t have multi-zillion dollar budgets to work from, sometimes just researching what other companies are doing will give you some great insight on what sustainable efforts you can implement for your own organization.
I decided to start with some of our own vendor/partners. UPS takes care of our on-demand printing deliveries. I just came across one of their fact sheets titled,
“UPS Avoids Left Turns to Save Fuel, Reduce Emissions and Improve Safety.” Now this took some planning and serious thought, but how impressive! And this idea has actually turned into measurable results. The fact sheet reports:
In 2007, UPS route planning technology, which minimizes left hand turns:
- shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes;
- saved 3 million gallons of gas; and
- reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.
Impressive statistics. Now think what would happen if we all tried to avoid left hand turns!
This same fact sheet was featured on
groovy green, an information hub for all things sustainable that you may find interesting.
Until my next ‘green’ discovery,
Jamie
