Bramkamp Blog

Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing - WSJ.com

Despite Prevalence of Digital Media, Entrepreneurs Find Old Fashioned Direct Mailings Still Key to Winning Customers

Full Article: http://on.wsj.com/6Q7NiD
By TERI EVANS

Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company's annual direct mailing.

Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year.

The affordability of e-marketing, along with the explosion of social media and the desire to trim costs in the recession, has prompted many small companies like Per Annum to slash traditional direct-mail budgets. U.S. consumers received about 5.2 billion pieces of direct mail in the third quarter of 2009, a 27% decline compared with 7.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to Mintel Comperemedia, a research firm that tracks direct-mail marketing.

However, some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it's not so easy to dismiss.

Ms. Settle says that at first she blamed the economy for the dropoff, until she "started hearing from customers that they never got their 'reminder' in the mail." Ms. Settle quickly sent a postcard mailing in June, which recouped the 25% loss, she says.

Costs are still taken into account. Many entrepreneurs find that the boiler-plate methods of the past—such as purchasing mailing lists and sending fliers or coupons to a mass audience—often aren't cost-effective. Instead, business owners are creating personalized mailings, which may include special offers or other valuable information, and sending them to a hand-picked list of current and prospective customers.

The idea is to send something that's more appealing than "junk" mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners "to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have," he says.

To save money, Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a Los Angeles wholesale insurance broker, stopped his small firm's humorous postcard mailings last year. The colorful marketing pieces showcase the insurance broker's offerings through satirical movie themes, such as "Full Metal Policy," a parody of "Full Metal Jacket" and "Singin' in the Renewal," from the classic film "Singin' in the Rain." About 2,000 current and potential clients received the postcards, which cost the company $4,000 to send out every four to six weeks.

"We would visit some clients and notice they were hanging the postcards on the wall, collecting them," says Mr. Taffae, who says he secured $270,000 from a new client who chose to do business with the firm in late 2008 after receiving the postcards.

"After two or three months [of no postcards], we got a lot of emails and phone calls asking us, 'Did you take me off your list?' I figured if even 1% complained, then a much larger percentage were thinking about it," says Mr. Taffae, who restarted the postcard mailings in November.

William Kapas, president of J.C. Kapas Real Estate Co. in Rochelle Park, N.J., says he has secured clients as a result of his high-gloss, four-color monthly mailings that list who has bought or sold restaurant properties though the firm.

"Our clients look forward to knowing, and it's a little bit of gossip, too," says Mr. Kapas, who exclusively uses traditional mail to reach clients. "I think it's easier to delete the electronic junk mail without taking a second look."

Mr. Kapas spends about $1 a piece for the monthly mailings, sent to about 2,200 current and prospective customers.

Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. "The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what's the best way to communicate with customers," Mr. Anderson says.

Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Taffae is starting to take his satirical marketing approach to YouTube; he's created a parody of F Troop, the 1960s sitcom, to promote his firm online.

Full Article: http://on.wsj.com/6Q7NiD

http://theprintcouncil.org/WhyPrintBrochure.pdf

Quoted from "WhatTheyThink" - http://blogs.whattheythink.com/going-green/2009/08/why-print-here-are-10-good-reasons

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about print vs. pixels and today a piece arrived that will add to the discussion.

I received a copy of Why Print? (a Print Council promotional piece). It’s full of interesting tidbits for those who need ammunition to help print buyers understand how print fits into the marketing mix.

Here are the “Top Ten Ways Print Helps You Prosper:”

Print is for keeps.
Print is portable.
Print drives a higher ROI.
Print is beautiful.
Print plays well with others.
Buyers seek print.
Print is credible.
Print puts them in control.
Print is personal.
Print is everywhere.

There is a lot of “back story” to go with those ten points, so read on.

http://theprintcouncil.org/WhyPrintBrochure.pdf

We at Bramkamp would love to hear your own reasons for print - add your comments below this blog post!

http://printceo.com/2009/08/b2b-marketing-is-like-curling-say-what

A great example of how integrated campaigns that let the customer communicate on their terms help your sales.

By David Dodd on August 16th, 2009

During every Winter Olympics, I find myself watching at least a few minutes of the curling competition.  I’m not really sure why because curling is definitely not an exciting sport.  If you’re not familiar with curling, it’s a little like shuffleboard.  The big difference is that curling is played on a rectangular sheet of ice and involves sliding a large, polished granite stone weighing about 40lbs toward a target painted on the ice.

After one team member “throws” the rock toward the target, two other team members accompany the stone as it moves down the ice and guide it toward the desired position on the target.  The catch is, these players are not allowed to actually touch the moving stone.  Instead, they use long-handle brushes to “sweep” the ice in front of the stone.  Sweeping temporarily melts the top of the ice, and this reduces the friction between the stone and the ice.  By reducing the friction, sweeping changes both the speed and the direction of the stone.  Knowing when and how much to sweep is a critical skill in curling.

Now you may be thinking:  What in the world does curling have to do with business-to-business marketing and sales?  In some ways, though, curling provides a good model for describing the job faced by today’s B2B marketers and salespeople, particularly those involved in selling complex products or services (such as, for example, marketing services).

As I’ve written in earlier posts, B2B buyers are now firmly in control of the purchasing process.  They determine how and when they will access and obtain information about a product or service, and they decide how quickly they will move from one buying stage to the next.  In these circumstances, the most important job for the seller (whether a marketer or a salesperson) is to provide prospective buyers with the information they need when they need it.

Like the sweepers in a curling match, your main job is to reduce the friction that slows prospects down and causes them to veer off course.  You would like to be able to directly lead your prospects through the buying process.  That would be the equivalent in curling of tapping the stone, and that’s against the rules.  In today’s B2B buying environment, attempting to push your prospects through the buying process toward your desired objective on your desired time frame just doesn’t work – at least not very often.

So, you can’t dictate what buying decisions your prospects will ultimately make, and you can’t completely remove all friction from the buying process.  But if you consistently provide information that is useful to prospects and appropriate to where they are in the buying process, you can help them move more easily through the process and, even more importantly, make better buying decisions.  This also means, by the way, that you’re likely to win more sales.

By Dr. Joe Webb on April 29th, 2009

http://printceo.com/2009/04/post-recession-printing-business

Believe it or not there are still print executives who think business is slow because the economy is slow. They ask “when will the economy get better so things can get back to normal?” Normal? Lately, “normal” has been pretty bad. I’d like to go back to the printing industry of 1997 and freeze it; or that of 1987 or 1988! Readers of these notes and my columns have a leg up on knowing that things will be quite different.

The main reason is that technological changes keep going, and they are often encouraged by slow times as information creators, disseminators, and users search for costs and methods that match their increasingly scarce resources of time and cash. Time becomes more scarce because companies downsize (10 employees at 40 hours a week is 400 hours; 8 employees is 320; just because there are 80 hours left does not mean that the same corporate functions disappear). This is one of the main reasons why printers can find some upside in outsourcing logistics (inventory & fulfillment) and deployment (mailing, e-mail services), and digital media (video, podcasts, and others).

Since the post-recession industry will be different than the industry was going into it, printers have to change their costs. This is not a hunkering down process, but a recognition that costs reflect the investment printers have made to offer certain services that were needed prior to the recession. Changing costs does not mean doing less, changing costs means making different investments targeted to what will be needed a year and three years from now. This is why investment should be as constant as possible, about the same amount in good and bad times. If it’s not, printing companies often make big investments before slowdowns and miss business upturns. You want to hit upturns with the best costs possible, just as much as you want to go into downturns with the best costs possible. The information marketplace doesn’t wait for printers to have new equipment or services.

This week, the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future issued their 2009 report about Internet use (PDF Link). Here are some highlights:

The percentage of Americans who use the Internet has reached 80%

• 40% of those age 66+ go online, an increase from 29% in 2000
• The time Internet users spend online has grown in each year of the studies, and is now 17+ hours per week
• Light users spend an average of 2.8 hours per week online
• Heavy users who average 42 hours a week online
• 24% of American households have at least three computers
• The percentage of households with no computers continues to decline; only 15% do not have a computer
• Broadband is by far the dominant form of online service at home, nearly 80% of Internet users, more than double the level of five years ago, and eight times the percentage in 2000
• Access to the Internet by phone modem has dropped to 16%
• Two-thirds of home Internet users keep their broadband connection turned on most of the time while they are at home; only 20% percent do not

Just think of what these data will look like two years from now. What do printing entrepreneurs need to do to benefit from these trends rather than cowering in a corner having hunkered down hoping the 2005 printing industry comes back in 2010?

I use two trite sayings when I’m making presentations, and they get a good chuckle. The first is “ignore your competitors and stay ahead of your customers.” This is the essence of marketing and the purpose of strategic planning. By staying ahead of your customers, you automatically stay ahead of your competitors.

The second one is “when business is good, everyone looks like a genius; when business is bad, you have to be one.” This one has to be amended. When business is bad you have to be a genius entrepreneur. This does not mean you have to be a genius intellectual, you just need to be insightful. It often means that you have to become a master of the obvious, seeing things that are right in front of you that others are myopic about. It’s not easy, but it’s what print businesses need now. Are we up to the task?