GRAPHICADVISOR

ISSUE TWENTY ONE

Your logo here

Smart Marketing in a Recovering Economy

What Motivates Your Customers?

About Spot Colors

Just in Time.

Marketing Strategies to Keep a Watch On.

ISSUE TWENTY ONE

Your logo here

Smart Marketing in a Recovering Economy

What Motivates Your Customers?

About Spot Colors

Just in Time.

Marketing Strategies to Keep a Watch On.

MARKETINGADVISOR

N Target your marketing campaign based on

current customer data. Clients who have purchased

from you recently know who you are. They just need a simple

reminder, such as a postcard or sell sheet, to give them a reason

to buy from you again. Pay particular attention to retaining

customers with the highest profit margin, and then target

prospects in similar companies with the presumption that you

will be able to serve them profitably as well.

N Get inside your customers’ minds. Marketing must be

meaningful and relevant to your target audience. You can only

satisfy buyer motivations if you understand what your prospects

love and hate—their hearts’ true desires and what keeps them

awake at night. Have sincere dialogue about what they want and

why they want it. The time spent developing this relationship will

pay off in repeat sales and quality referrals.

N Craft your message from a position of strength.

During rough economic times, people don’t stop buying; they just

become more selective. Establish yourself as a strategic business

partner, who offers the most relevant products at the greatest

value, based on quality and performance. Add credibility to your

message with customer testimonials and other sources of validation,

such as certifications and awards.

N Exploit the weaknesses of the competition. Your best

marketing campaign is worthless if the competitor down the street

is closing the sale. Design print materials to persuade prospects

to not only buy the product or service you’re offering, but to buy

it from you. Determine what your competitors are doing—or not

doing—that you can use to position your company, product or

offer more favorably.

N Give prospects a reason to buy today. No matter how

magical your marketing message is, fewer people will likely respond

in a recessionary period. Spur prospects to action with a limited

time offer, such as a discount or complimentary service. Recognize

that fear is a part of the buying decision. Guarantees are an

effective way to ease buyer doubt.

Companies that market superior products and value prevail in times

of both prosperity and recession, while those with inferior products

and exaggerated marketing claims fail. Whether it’s branding,

prospecting or customer retention, make smart decisions today,

and enjoy a vastly stronger market presence when the economy

bounces back.

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Smart Marketing in a Recovering Economy

Companies that market superior products and value prevail in times of both prosperity and recession

It’s temptIng to slash your prInt marketIng budget as you

scramble to make ImmedIate, hard-dollar expense reductions in today’s

uncertain economy, but now is the time to do exactly the opposite. The more

visible your company is, the more confident your customers and prospects are that

you will be around in good times and bad. When you stop inviting them to do business with

you, you open the door for your best customers to become your competitor’s best prospects.

Even astute marketers who appreciate print marketing’s role as a revenue-producing

venture might face the reality of budget cuts during an economic slowdown. Delivering a

value-driven message to high margin customers is a surefire way to reap returns from your

marketing investment.

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.

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Subhead needed here, me thinks

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 marketing

the promise that you can satisfy at least one buyer

motivation.

Thread your marketing promise into every element,

including product image, advertising and promotion

strategy, product packaging and display and even

pricing strategy. Design and copy should lead the reader

quickly to how you can meet a need, want, desire or

fear. Graphics will have better recall than words so choose

images that are harmonious with your copy. Color is an

important emotional trigger, but you should select it carefully

as every shade has both a positive and negative connotation.

Red as the dominant color might successfully evoke an image

of love and passion, but it might also tap into the darker

feelings of rage and violence. Green can stimulate thoughts

of money and self-actualization, but greed and envy are

associated with this hue as well.

Your Customers Have a Secret

here’s the hard truth: No one wants

to buy your product or service. What your

customers do want is an answer to one

of their basic psychological motivations—

needs, wants, desires and fears.

CASE STUDYImagine you are a manufacturer of

cologne, and 90% of customers say that they

purchased your product because it smells good. That

is logical. You pour marketing dollars into promoting how

you have the best-smelling scent on the planet, but you have

pallets of unsold bottles 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 to unearth those secret reasons for making

a purchase.

In the cologne example, the hidden impetus is that your product

makes the wearer feel more attractive. Change your marketing

pitch from how good the cologne smells to how your

product will fulfill the purchaser’s desire to be alluring.

By matching what you have to offer with the true

motivation of your customer, you create a

win-win marketing strategy.

are things you think you must have, such as medicine

when you’re sick. This is the premise of traditional

marketing; find a need and fill it.

are things you can survive without but would like to have

anyway—like candy or a new shirt.

Desires are things you dream about; things you don’t

necessarily expect to get but serve as very powerful

motivators—wealth, fame, romance, adventure.

are things you don’t want to happen, such as the fear

someone else will try a new product first or that you’ll

make a bad choice. Buyers balance needs, wants and

desires against fears in the final purchasing decision.

NEEdS

waNTS

fEarS

dESirES

What truly motivates your customers?

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“Color” in these studies often refers to full color printing or process color printing. However, even using spot color printing can have the same beneficial effects on direct mail response.

In process color printing, we overprint

four transparent inks (cyan, magenta, yellow

and black) in various combinations to produce

the gamut of reproducible colors. spot inks, in

contrast, are opaque, and we do not combine

them. We specify a desired color using a unique

number.

So, in process color printing, if you want

green, we overprint cyan and yellow inks. In

spot color printing, if you want green, you

specify, for example, Pantone 370, which refers

to a specific, standardized shade of green.

Many logos and corporate colors are

spot colors because it’s easier to maintain

color consistency across a variety of printed

documents and print providers by using a

specific spot color. Additionally, the CMYK

color gamut is a fairly small one, and some

shades are impossible to reproduce using

process colors. Spot colors can fill this gap. We

can also use spot inks to print white.

Specifying spot inks can be as simple as

picking a desired shade and noting its “PMS”

(Pantone Matching System) number. There are

other color swatching systems, but Pantone’s

is the most common. Adobe InDesign and

QuarkXPress define spot color swatches the

same way that any color swatch is defined.

Both of these programs have built-in spot color

libraries.

In InDesign, for example, to specify a spot

color, select New Color Swatch from the

Swatches palette menu. In the New Color

Swatch dialogue box, change Color Type from

Process to Spot. From the Color Mode pop-up

menu, select the spot color library you wish

to use. We recommend using either Pantone

Solid Coated or Uncoated. Coated or uncoated

refers to whether we will print the job on

coated or uncoated paper. Select Pantone Solid

Coated to bring up all of the available spot

colors. Highlight the one you want, and click

the Add button. The spot color appears in your

Swatches palette.

It’s important that

you not edit a spot

color swatch, as

this will defeat the

whole purpose

of specifying spot

colors by number!

Your monitor might not display the spot

color exactly the way we will print it. For best

results, consult a printed PMS swatchbook.

Spot color can be a simple yet effective

way to liven up a document and boost the

effectiveness of your direct mail campaigns.

It also bears mentioning that if we print your

documents on a digital press, the spot/process

color issue can be a gray area. Please let us

know if you have any questions or concerns

with regard to using spot colors.

increase response

rates

BY aS MUCH aS 80%

increase reading

comprehension

BY aS MUCH aS 73%

increase retention

BY aS MUCH aS 78%

colored text was recalled

more than bold text

BY aS MUCH aS 14%

increase payment response

BY aS MUCH aS 30%

Various studies of direct

mail over the years have

repeatedly found that

using color instead of

black-and-white can:

about spot colors

A simple yet effective way to boost direct mail res

ponse.

INSTEAD OF BLACK AND WHITE,

CONSIDER ADDING A SPOT COLOR. IT CAN LIVEN

UP YOUR NEXT DIRECT MAIL CAMPAIGN!

About This IssueAbout UsOne or two small paragraphs

about you and your company.

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MARKETINGADVISOR

Printer NamePhasellus porttitor elit

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MAILING INFO HERE

About This IssueAbout UsOne or two small paragraphs

about you and your company.

One or two small paragraphs

about you and your company. One

or two small paragraphs about

you and your company. One or

two small paragraphs about you

and your company. One or two

small paragraphs about you and

your company. One or two small

paragraphs about you and your

company. One or two small para-

graphs about you and your com-

pany.

Programs used:InDesign CS

Illustrator CS

Photoshop CS

Paper used:What paper did you use to print this issue?

ink used:What kind of ink did you use to print this

issue?

Coating used:What kind of coating did you use to print

this issue?

Computers used:iMac G5

Press used:What kind of press did you use to print

this issue?

Bindery used:What kind of bindery did you use to print

this issue?

GRAPHICADVISOR

Printer NamePhasellus porttitor elit

In hac habitasse plateaDonec tempor nonummy

MAILING INFO HERE

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in-House and Under-Utilized?

With a little training, you can utilize the

software you likely already have. You can use

Microsoft Access and Excel, for example, or free

solutions like MySQL, to create pivot tables that

will do simple sorting (most dollars spent, most

frequent purchases) and create cross-tabs to

understand your data better.

With additional training, you can create more

sophisticated tools, such as customer lifetime

value (CLV) models and recency, frequency and

value (RFV) models that will help you profile,

sort and “score” your customers in even

greater detail.

If you don’t want do this yourself, there

are small, affordable outsource solutions

providers who can do it for you. There are even

companies that have created Internet-based

data mining interfaces that allow you to upload

your data and work with it on a “software as a

service” (SaaS) model.

With a little extra effort, you can focus on

the ones that are the most profitable to you.

Boost the impact

Once you are focusing on your most

valuable customers (the definition of “most

valuable” will vary from company to company),

you can boost the impact of that targeting with

personalization. Side-by-side tests repeatedly

prove that not only are customers more likely

to respond to well-produced, personalized

communications, but when they do respond,

they order more than those who received non-

personalized communications.

Once you begin profiling your customers, you

can really begin to cultivate those relationships.

If you know your highest volume customers,

you can encourage them to purchase more

frequently. If you know your most frequent

customers, you can encourage them to

purchase in higher volumes.

After all, retaining customers is valuable.

But retaining and then cultivating

relationships with your most profitable

customers is even better.

not all customers are created eQual. Some customers buy more

than others. Some buy less, but they buy higher margin products. Some

customers buy less, but they buy frequently and give you a steady cash

flow. Some buy so little that keeping them actually costs you money.

Do you know which customers are which? Why not get the greatest

“bang for the buck” by spending it on the customers who bring the

greatest return?

How do you find out who those customers are?

Save Money, Shed a Customer

SOrT by behavior

idENTifY the most profitable behaviors

SElECT aNd TarGET the

most profitable segments

PErSONalizE the content

fOUr STEPS TO PrOfiTaBlE CUSTOMEr rETENTiON

A good customer retention program should include these four elements:

1 2 3 4

These days, customer loyalty and customer retention are hot topics. After all, customers are more valuable than ever. But are you looking to

retain every customer, regardless of their value to your company? Believe it or not, this isn’t the best route to improve profitability.