Filed under: News
Arlington, TX, July 25, 2008 – Having been in operation for 2 years, PrintPlace has already established itself as one of the leading companies in the online printing industry. In their short history, PrintPlace has shown beyond a doubt that they are committed to providing the very best printing services possible. But they are certainly not resting on their laurels. Instead, PrintPlace continues to improve its services and wow its customers. They continually discover ways to improve upon their already impressive processes.
Providing print-perfect results is PrintPlace’s primary goal and their remarkable team of designers and developers are dedicated to providing accurate proofs for each and every one of their customers. In line with this, they work tirelessly to improve their proofing engine to make sure their proofing service displays as accurately as possible the appearance of the finished product. With the fastest, most advanced proof rendering engine on the Internet, electronic proofs are converted and visible on average in less than two minutes per page and accurately display safety zones, cut lines and bleed lines for all products.
And, in yet another attempt to provide impeccable customer service, they have added a digital press to, allowing them to make hard copy proofs on the same stock as the finished piece, with certain size restrictions. With such a streamlined approach, PrintPlace is setting the industry standard in making the proofing process faster and more user-friendly.
We expect to hear more advancement from this exceptional full color printing company as they strive further beyond the competition to redefine quality printing and excellent customer services. They are truly passionate about online printing and being the very best in the industry.
About PrintPlace – PrintPlace is a partnership between print professionals, designers and developers committed to delivering the best online printing experience. PrintPlace has an ISO 9001 certified manufacturing facility. They boast the industry’s most powerful and flexible quote tool. They have engineering a unique workflow that guarantees end-to-end color management. In short, they have established themselves as the best online printing company in business providing poster printing and brochure printing services.
If you are planning on making up a brochure for your business, here are a few tips to help you out:
Include Products
If you have a small to medium sized catalog of products, consider adding them (or some of them) right into your brochures. This makes it tremendously easy for your customers to buy from you, with very little effort or time required.
Introduce Yourself
Be sure to include some information about your company, to give the reader a sense of who you are and what you are doing. Be careful, however, to avoid talking about yourself too much. You want the focus of your brochures (and all of your marketing material) to be on your customers, not on you.
Hand them out at Shows
If you sell products at craft shows or art fairs or anything of that sort, take some brochures with you to hand out. That way, if a customer likes what you are offering, but does not want to buy right away, they will still have your information so they can do so in the future. And, along the same lines, if a customer does buy from you at the show, giving them a brochure makes it easy for them to do so again in the future. Either way, it means more profits for you.
Use Snail Mail
Consider sending brochures via old fashioned “snail mail”. Brochures are read more often than other direct mail pieces such as letters. If you design a good looking brochure that gets the reader’s attention quickly, sending them directly to the customers can be beneficial to you.
Design is everything
The design of your brochures has to impeccable. You have to have something very interesting on the front page, because that is the first thing people will see. If that does not grab the reader’s attention, then your brochures will be useless. Also, use colors that relate to your business and appeal to the customers’ eyes. Overall, your brochures should be aesthetically pleasing and informational. You should consider investing in a good desktop publishing program such as QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign.
Give Information
If you can, include some useful information in your brochures. Write articles that give your readers a reason to keep your brochures around and use in the future. If they keep your brochures for future reference, they just might see something they like at some point and call you up. In that case, your useful information will basically be wearing the customer down.
Filed under: Printing Help, greeting cards, marketing | Tags: greeting card printing
Do you send greeting cards to your customers? If not, you might want to consider doing so in the future.
Greeting card printing and mailing can do a wonderful job at building a personal connection with your customers, and help to enhance customer loyalty. Obviously, this is especially true when you personalize the greeting cards by using the customer’s name and, for a really good touch, hand writing the message inside.
Of course, Christmas time is the most logical time to send out greeting cards to your customers. And, if you know your customers’ birthdays, that is a great time, too. But those are not your only options. To have a truly effective greeting card marketing campaign, you want to send cards to your customers regularly in order to make your business stand out in the customers’ minds. So consider investing in enough cards to carry out your efforts throughout the year.
Here are some other times when sending a personalize greeting card to your customers can be a powerful marketing tool.
Valentine’s Day
I am a firm believer in the theory that Valentine’s Day was created just to make money for greeting card companies. But we can’t change it, so we might as we embrace it. Send cards to your loyal customers on this “holiday”, and see what happens. Make sure to keep the tone of your cards light and happy.
Easter
Easter is definitely not known as a “greeting card holiday”, but that shouldn’t stop you. If anything, that should make you even more willing to send cards out at this time. Most of your customers will not be receiving too many other Easter cards, so yours will have a very good chance of standing out.
Fourth of July
Here is another holiday that does not generally see a spike in greeting card mailings. And that is why you should step in to help fill that void. Make sure you personalize your cards and hand write the envelopes (if you can) to maximize the effect.
Thanksgiving
To me, this is the most important time to send out greeting cards. Without your customers, you would not be in business, right? So you should be thanking them for their business every chance you get. What better time to thank them than at Thanksgiving? Send out (as always) personalized cards that let your customers know just how grateful you are.
Filed under: folded postcards, marketing, postcards | Tags: postcard marketing, printing
Direct mail is a powerful marketing tool for businesses of any size, but especially for small businesses. Direct mail can get expensive, but oftentimes you can keep the costs reasonable and still have the same effect as a more expensive direct mail campaign.
With direct mail, you can send brochures, letters, postcards, flyers – basically anything you can stuff in a mailbox! But postcard mailing is the most efficient and effective, and here’s why:
Postcards are cost effective. Your printing costs will be lower because you only have a small area to print on, and that smaller piece of paper stock will also cost you less to purchase. Your mailing costs will be lower than letters or brochures because you don’t have an envelope and extra paper weighing it down. If you send postcards that are smaller than 4” x 6”, your postage will only cost .21 cents, rather than the first class rate of .34 cents. It may not seem much if you only send out 10 postcards, but if you send out 5,000 postcards at a time, you’ll save $650 with each mailing!
Postcards are read more than the other types of direct mail pieces. People are leery of opening envelopes and boxes with the somewhat recent anthrax and bomb-in-the-mail scares. You can’t hide anything dangerous in a postcard!
Also, people have to be motivated enough to get through the envelope to the contents inside to read the message. With a postcard, there is no barrier to your message. If you have a great design and eye-catching headline, you can grab recipients’ attention from the moment they start sorting their mail.
Postcards are chameleons. You can use postcards for myriad reasons:
• To promote a new product or service
• To offer a discount or to announce a sale
• As an invitation to an event
• To announce a new Web site
• To announce a new location
• Those are juts a few reasons, you can send out a postcard for just about anything that doesn’t need an in-depth explanation.
You can measure their effectiveness. You can measure response rates by making people redeem their discount by bringing in the postcard. If you send out 5,000 postcards and you get a response rate of 125 people, you know you earned a 2.5 percent response rate, which is pretty darn good for direct mail.
You can also track which demographic region responded most to your postcards by color-coding them. Or if you’re sending out postcards for a discount on your Web site, you can vary the discount code by Zip code, so you know pretty closely where your best customers are located.
The bottom line is that postcards are an affordable way to market your business or product by drumming up new business or keeping your current customers with announcements. Postcards are flexible, which makes them an excellent choice for any size business and any type of business.
If you’ve embarked on a direct mail campaign and it doesn’t seem to be working, there could be a number of problems. First of all, though, keep in mind that the normal response to direct mailing pieces is only 1 to 2 percent. If you only sent out 500 pieces of direct mail, that’s only 5 to 10 people who would respond normally. And, when does anything that has to do with statistics happen normally?
Now, if you only got a few responses from 500 or so, there’s really nothing wrong with your direct mail campaign. You just need to do it a few more times to build up people’s memories. However, if you haven’t gotten even one response from your direct mail campaign, one of the following must have happened:
• You didn’t target the right people, so your piece got ignored.
• The design and/or layout wasn’t appealing to the recipient, so it wasn’t opened or read.
• The copy wasn’t clear or the entire piece wasn’t motivational enough (read: a snooze fest) to prompt action and the piece was thrown away.
• The offer wasn’t good enough to motivate people to get off their couches, or it was a badly timed offer.
If you used a targeted mailing list, you can eliminate the first reason. The other reasons aren’t so easy to eliminate. Ask yourself the following questions to try to figure it out:
1. Did the direct mail piece clearly state your product’s or service’s main benefit (if not multiple benefits)? Does your copy tell the reader what need or want the product fills for them?
2. Did you mention what advantages you provide over your competition as a reason to give their business to you? (Do you have a higher quality product? Lowest price in town?)
3. Was the timing of your piece right? Does your product or service have a season when it’s more likely to sell? For instance, people won’t be thinking about or looking for a lawnmower in the middle of winter. It’s best to send out direct mail for a summer item in the spring.
4. Is your product or service a major purchase for people? With big-ticket items like cars or major appliances that are only purchased every few years, it’s normal to see a zero response rate to one direct mail piece.
5. Examine your offer. Did you offer a big enough discount? Did you offer a free gift that is worth making a purchase for?
Generally, no matter what your problem was, it can be helped by doing one of the following:
Including a testimonial to show that your product or service has been proved to be valuable to other customers.
Repeat your direct mail piece. Send it out three times a month so that people have time to build a memory of your logo, your company name and your product or service.
If you did your own design or layout, consider hiring a freelance designer to help you out. You can pay for just this one project to see if it was indeed the layout that was the problem.
Change your offer. If you only offered 10 percent off a purchase, you may need to raise that to 20 percent off or some other kind of enticing offer.
Take a look at your direct mail materials, ask yourself these questions and try one of the suggested alterations and you’ll most likely see your response rate climbing.
