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!
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About This IssueAbout UsOne or two small paragraphs
about you and your company.
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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
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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.