Online marketing may seem like it’s consuming every aspect of marketing out there, but the need for effective use of various print forms remains evident. Print now extends beyond direct mail marketing to take advantage of interrelated mediums such as associated direct mail landing pages and printed brochures with QR codes to help spread the word about your business. A solid online SEO strategy and professionally constructed website are still crucial to a successful business today, but an effective integrated marketing strategy incorporates offline components to propel your overall marketing strategy. Make Use of QR Codes Smartphones are almost everywhere now, and ...

Direct mail campaigns are a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Using them wisely can bring in new business, build customer loyalty and expand your brand awareness beyond other types of advertising. While they are one of the oldest marketing tools, direct mail campaigns require more than just sending out a postcard to a mailing list. Here are five pitfalls to avoid. Using a Bad Mailing List Today’s data hygiene services have advanced data tracking tools to ensure that mailing lists are up to date.  While reputable companies may charge you a chunk for a quality mailing list, it’s worth the extra dollars ...

Direct mail campaigns are a powerful resource for any business. Not only are they highly targeted, measurable and flexible, they are also easy to personalize and cost effective. The tips below will help you get your direct mail campaign on the right track for a great return on your investment. 1. Research Your Target Market – Knowing who you are selling to is one of the most critical steps in direct mail advertising. Since your research shapes the rest of your decisions, it’s important to understand your target market from the start. Research tools such as data lists are useful at ...

  In today’s internet-driven marketing environment, it’s easy to forget about traditional forms of marketing. After all, new practices should be better than old ones, right? Not always. Direct mail campaigns are still one of the best ways to reach out to potential customers. But any old postcard campaign will not do. To be successful, a postcard requires a good balance between art and marketing.Take note of the tips below to create a postcard campaign that will yield results way beyond the standard response rates. Go Big Size matters when it comes to direct mail pieces. Opt for an oversized direct mail piece that will stand ...

Direct Mail Marketing has been a marketing cornerstone since the first concepts of a postal service. Before the Internet's capability to feed information to anywhere in the world, marketing catalogs and other forms of direct mail marketing were often how people in rural areas purchased what they needed to survive. Just because the Internet is the hot new thing in today's commerce arena doesn't mean that the old guard is ineffective or outdated. Keeping this in mind, here are 5 ways marketers can pump some vitality into their current direct mail marketing strategies. 1. Make sure your message is clear As with all ...

Spring is here! Spring forward with a comprehensive marketing strategy that focuses on your local target market. Whether you have an online storefront or a brick-and-mortar store, local search marketing solutions are great for increasing the exposure and visibility of your business as well as generating more traffic to your website. Here are a few marketing tools every business owner needs to have in their marketing flowerbox: Google Places Google Places local maps optimization puts your business listing above organic search results, making it stand out among similar listings and creating an easy way for customers to reach you. A handy listing that ...

Organizing a company event, whether on a small or large scale, is time consuming and requires significant planning and coordination. Of course, all this is done in hopes of a great turnout. Event attendance, however, cannot be measured until the event is launched, so why not increase attendance rates by combining the power of direct mail marketing and PURLs? According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), close to 50% of direct mail recipients prefer to respond online than by any other method. PURLs, or personalized URLs, provide direct mail recipients with a personalized web page to submit their ...

It may be true that businesses have been able to function without high-tech marketing strategies for decades. However, this school of thought is now separating the businesses of today from the businesses of tomorrow. Today’s marketing environment is changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up with all the new trends and marketing techniques. Still, it’s important that every business stay on top of industry trends and new marketing techniques, especially ones being used by competitors. While we don’t recommend you adopt all new marketing techniques at once, there are simple ways of integrating new marketing techniques into your existing ...

See part 1 of this series on QR codes: What are QR Codes? As smartphones continue to increase in popularity, QR codes are an easy way to appeal to your tech-savvy customers while increasing the response rate on your direct mail campaigns. The power of QR codes stems from their ability to provide customers with instant information. Rather than having to call a special number or type in a URL into their mobile browsers, users simply point and scan QR codes found on direct mail pieces, print advertisements or even TV ads. QR codes automatically direct their mobile browsers to a ...

What Is A QR Code? QR codes are starting to gain more traction in cross media marketing. A Quick Response Code, or QR Code, is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is like a paper-based hyperlink. They have become popular (especially in Japan) for broad, often commercial purposes. How Does A QR Code Work? Using a smartphone, take a picture of the QR code, and then you can use a QR scanner program to read the code. Many newer phones are coming with default QR scanners, but there are a variety of iPhone apps, Android apps, and Blackberry apps available for this ...

Some marketers may feel that direct mail marketing is not a successful use of a marketing budget. However, in a recent study titled "Finding the Right Channel Combination: What Drives Channel Choice," ICOM found that consumers in U.S. and Canada between the ages of 18-34 preferred to learn about marketing offers via mail and newspapers than online sources like social media sites. Also, 36% of U.S. respondents, across all ages, trust the mail more than email — up from 29 percent in 2008. This means direct mail marketing is becoming even more important to companies looking to reach prospective customers. If you ...

Your direct mail marketing campaign cannot be successful if you are not using a quality mailing list. A beautifully designed postcard for your new steakhouse restaurant is worthless to vegetarians. A quality mailing list provider should know very specific details about the people living in your target area. Here are 3 things you need to watch for in a potential mailing list provider. 1. Look At Their Deliverability Percentage Deliverability is the number of addresses on the mailing list that are bad, or undeliverable. If you want a successful direct mail campaign, you need to make sure you aren't wasting money sending out pieces ...