Here’s how you can put this to work for you: You can strengthen your market position by learning how these psychological factors, along with the psychological impact of your graphics and marketing message, affect your target audience. Change your strategy from marketing features and benefits to the promise that you can satisfy at least one of these psychological motivations and you will create a winning marketing strategy.

Say you are a manufacturer of cologne, and 90% of customers say that they purchased your product because it smells good. So you pour marketing dollars into promoting the best-smelling scent on the planet, but pallets sit unsold in your warehouse. Why? Because we often make purchases for emotional reasons, such as acceptance and association, then justify them with a rational explanation. The challenge for marketers is unearthing those secret reasons for making a purchase.

In the example above, the hidden impetus is that cologne makes the wearer feel more attractive. Change your marketing pitch from how good your cologne smells to how it fulfills the purchaser’s desire to be alluring and — voila! — the product flies off the shelves.

The trick is to thread your marketing promise into every element, including product image, advertising and promotion strategy, product packaging and display, and even your pricing. Use the design and copy to quickly lead the reader to how the product can satisfy one of their needs, wants, desires, or fears. Graphics will have better recall than words, so choose images that are harmonious with your copy.

You can create print marketing that is well-designed and well-written, but that still fails miserably if it’s not credible. Pair a good product or service with a focused marketing strategy based on an understanding of what truly motivates your customers, and you will dominate your market.

The post Use Psychology to Boost Sales! appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.

If you have not yet used personalized URLs to boost response rates and survey your customers, what is stopping you? Is it because you don’t have a database to deploy the campaign? If so, you might have a misconception about the way personalized URLs work.

While there are some campaigns that use detailed customer and prospect databases to create very sophisticated, highly personalized mini-sites, these are the exception. Most personalized URL campaigns are used for lead generation and can start with a simple mailing list, whether in-house or rented. The purpose is to use those initial contacts to develop a more sophisticated database for later.

Personalized URL campaigns really shine as a data-gathering technique. Success is all about how you use that all-important survey page. You might survey respondents about pain points in their business, their preferences in electronic gadgets, or their political opinions. The goal is to gather whatever information will best suit your larger campaign goals.

One marketer, for example, experienced a 74% sales conversion rate following its personalized URL campaign because it used the personalized URLs to survey its prospects on their pain points before making personal contact. This put its salespeople in a position to suggest the appropriate programs right away—during the initial meeting—making those contacts highly effective.

So don’t allow lack of databases to be a barrier to implementing personalized URL applications. Instead, look at these campaigns as tools that allow you to gather information to increase the effectiveness of your sales follow-ups or to improve your targeting the next time around.

The post Keys to successful PURL campaigns with limited data appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.

In order to produce a successful 1:1 printing campaign for Direct Mail, all you need is a great database, right? Not quite. Producing a successful 1:1 print campaign starts with having a great database, but once you have the data, you have to figure out what to do with it. Often, that means data mining.

Data mining. The very phrase strikes fear into the hearts of marketers, but in reality, it is simply the process of finding patterns in large data sets. That doesn’t have to be a daunting proposition. In fact, you can do simple data mining in Excel.

There are three steps to data mining:

• Know what data is available.
• Ask questions about that data.
• Look for useful relationships.

This is something you can do from your own desktop. The first step is simply to understand what’s in your database. The next step is to start asking questions of that data.

If you are a retailer, for example, you might ask, “Which customers purchased hardwood flooring last month?” Then you might ask, “What else did these same customers purchase?” You might find that these same customers also purchased area rugs and floor conditioning products. Now you can ask even more questions. When do they typically make purchases? Is there a pattern by time of month?

Over time, you will start seeing relationships that will be highly useful in your 1:1 marketing. That’s data mining! And it’s well within the grasp of any sized marketer. So get curious!

The post sure way to increase Direct Mail Response appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.

A survey of 415 smartphone users conducted in February 2011 by MGH, a Maryland-based advertising and media planning firm, found that 65% of smartphone users have seen a QR code. Of these, nearly half (49%) have used one.

Where are people seeing QR codes? Most smartphone owners reported having seen them on product packaging, in a magazine, or on a coupon.

If you are not familiar with QR codes, they are a direct connection between print and the Web. Simply scan the code with your smartphone and you are taken directly to a website, image, YouTube video, sweepstake sign-up, or any other content the marketer desires. QR codes can also launch and prefill emails, store calendar information, and import contact information into the prospect’s phone.

QR codes tap into a powerful demographic. According to MGH, people who have noticed QR codes have higher levels of education (54% have university+) and higher household incomes (69% over $50,000) than the general population. Among those who have actually used QR codes, those numbers jump even higher – 63% and 71%, respectively.

QR codes offer unlimited potential to add interactivity to your print pieces and creat engagement with your brand. They also provide yet another way to track responses, especially among key demographics in your target market.

If you haven’t delved into the world of QR codes, what are you waiting for?

The post Targeting a Tech Savvy Audience Makes Perfect Cents appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.

Proofreading is a step that too often gets overlooked in today’s compressed marketing environment. But it’s not an oversight you can afford. Not convinced? Here are some true stories that tell it better than we ever could!

• A national plumbing products manufacturer supplied the artwork for a product catalog. The catalog looked great. The images looked great. The product information was dead on. Unfortunately, no one bothered to proof the front cover. There in 76-point Helvetica, it read: “Plumming.”
• A financial services provider created a billing insert for one of its statement cycles. Once again, proofing was lacking and nobody noticed that the contact number had a misplaced digit. Instead of sending customers to a toll-free order line, it sent them to an order line of a different and rather racy nature!
• A graphics shop was hired to produce a last-minute ad for a cruise ship to run in a local magazine. In the rush to meet the deadline, it did not realize that the line “Our uniformed Captain and Crew will make your evening memorable” had been misprinted to read, “Our uninformed Captain and Crew will make your evening memorable.” Fortunately, there was still time to make the correction.

These stories are funny, but they have a very serious message. Every step of your mailing is important, from the snazzy graphics to the mundane details of proofreading. So remember to check everything – headlines, copy, phone numbers, addresses. You never know what embarrassing typo might be trying to sneak by you!

The post Proof Positive – Want a Successful 1:1 Campaign? Don’t Do this! appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.

Before you event start your campaign, you should understand…

• the different types of response metrics,
• what each metric is telling you, and
• what you want to track and how you are going to do it.

Here are some examples of response metrics:

Response rate: These are the people who respond in some way to the campaign. They might make a phone call. Log into a personalized URL. Scan a QR code.

Conversion rate: These are the people you convert from prospects to sales. Perhaps you got a 12.8% response rate to your direct mail campaign. What percentage of those people bought something?

This number can tell you a lot. If you have a low percentage of respondents but a high conversion rate, you know that perhaps your marketing message is weak (or target audience overly narrow) but your sales process is strong. Conversely, if you have a high response rate but a very low conversion rate, you know your marketing message is compelling but there is a problem after the initial contact that is causing you to lose the sale.

This can help you identify – and then close – the gaps in the sales process.

Cost per response: To get the cost per response, add up all the costs of the campaign then divide that by the number of respondents. This tells you how much it cost you to get each person to contact you or take some other action. This is a great way to compare the value of 1:1 printing against traditional, static printing.

Cost per sale: If you’re tracking conversion rate, you can learn even more about your investment by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions. This tells you how much it cost you to make each sale. This is an important number because if it costs you more to sell a product than you actually receive in sales, you’ll need to make some adjustments.

Return on Investment (ROI): In a best-case scenario, you’ll track each customer all the way through the sales funnel so you know how much revenue they generated. It is not unusual for revenues for 1:1 campaigns to be significantly higher than for traditional ones, so this is where 1:1 printing really shines. With well-crafted campaigns, not only can you get a higher response rate, but combined with higher revenues per sale, your ROI can go through the roof.

When you measure, you can manage, plan, and strategize. Build in ways to track, whether it’s using invisible barcodes, adding personalized URLs, giving QR codes their own campaign-specific landing pages, or printing discount codes on your direct mailers. Get measurement in place so you can maximize the value that 1:1 campaigns offer. Otherwise, you could be leaving money on the table.

Looking for ideas on how to build tracking into your campaigns? Talk to us! We’ve got lots of ideas.

The post Closing the Gap appeared first on Strategic Print Solutions.