As you can see, letterbox marketing is a continuous learning process, but collecting and analysing the data you get from each campaign will deepen your understanding of your customers. Here are some tips for doing just that:

Measuring response and conversion rates

One effective way of measuring your letterbox marketing success is to determine your response and conversion rates in terms of percentages. Soft offers, such as free promotional merchandise, are often better than hard offers, like trial periods, in measuring response rate. A good campaign will have a response rate of one to three per cent.

The conversion rate measures the number of responders that inevitably make a purchase. Coupons in direct-mail flyers are a good way to measure this as you can easily keep track of the number of flyer coupons that come back to your store. A conversion rate of between 30 and 50 per cent is often considered a success.

Measuring the return on investment

Measuring the success of your letterbox campaign in terms of monetary ROI is also very useful. Basically, you are measuring how much profit is made from a campaign compared to how much you invested in the campaign for things like printing services, postage and so forth. Measuring your investment against your profit in this way provides an accurate dollar value, which will help you determine how successful your campaign was. The most commonly used formula to measure this is:

(Number of Mailed Pieces x Response Rate x Conversion Rate x Sales Income) – Campaign Cost

Campaign Cost                                                                          = ROI

Of course, this formula will only tell you how much your campaign made in profits, but doesn’t indicate other factors like where your buyers came from. To get around this, you can use tactics like geographic offer codes to determine which people responded and which ones also made purchases. This also helps you identify consumer “hot spots” that you can then target more effectively in your next campaign.

Customer mailing lists

While it’s still important to constantly reach out to new prospects, marketing to loyal customers will help you achieve a much higher response rate. Following a letterbox campaign, any prospect that ends up becoming a customer by making a purchase should be moved from the prospect mailing list to a special customer mailing list. This is extremely good practice because your direct marketing materials should approach these two populations differently.

When measuring the response rates, keep track of the customers that came on board as a result of the letterbox campaign. Distinguishing these customers from the ones coming in from other marketing methods gives businesses extremely valuable information.

Numbers in terms of financial dollars, as well as the knowledge of where customers are coming from and why, are each important for measuring the success of a letterbox campaign. Determining this information will ensure each successive campaign is more effective than the last.

Testing Out a Letterbox Campaign is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Use natural speech

When developing your speech, imagine you’re talking to your next-door neighbour or a friend about your work. Think about how you would simplify complex ideas to make them more understandable and compelling to average people. Especially for today’s audiences, a good speech needs to sound conversational and should be free of technical jargon and unnatural-sounding sentences. People speak differently than they write, so keep this in mind when you’re coming up with your speech.

Design your presentation materials well

Your presentation materials need to be designed well in order to get your message through clearly, whether you’re using a poster, overhead projector or PowerPoint slides. Sharp contrast between background and font colour is the first step in making your presentation more clear. Also, ensure your text is legible by choosing the right type and size of font.

Before you finalise your PowerPoint or order your poster printing, step back to view your presentation and make sure it’s not too cluttered with text. To ensure your audience can follow your presentation, also consider printing handouts of your presentation material for each person to have something to refer to and make notes on throughout the presentation.

Avoid too many details

Presentations that contain too many details are sure to lose some of the audience along the way. Start by thinking about the big picture: why is your work important? What are the benefits of your work? Without getting too detailed, what are the basics of what you’re trying to achieve? Asking yourself these questions will help you narrow down a broad concept, allowing you to present only the most compelling information. Throw in a couple of facts, a story or an anecdote that helps to drive home the message.

Edit your presentation

Editing your presentation is one of the best ways to ensure your message is clear. Revise it by deleting any repetitions, digressions, bland phrases and meaningless clichés. Think about your presentation from the audience’s point of view, and get rid of any information that seems excessive or that dilutes the impact of your message.

Use specific examples

When explaining events, ideas or concepts, using specific examples will keep your audience engaged and will boost your credibility. To keep things concise, choose one example that perfectly sums up your message and leave it at that. Any additional explaining will only muddy the waters and cause your audience to lose interest.

When presenting, it is crucial that you explain your message in a clear and concise manner. Especially when communicating a very technical or fact-heavy concept, you need to simplify your message to ensure everyone understands it and remains interested.

Making your Presentation Clear and Concise is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Targeting niche market segments is important for maximising the effectiveness of your marketing and makes it far more cost-effective. This means you can advertise with greater frequency, accuracy and with a better media mix. Not only that, but niche marketing is a relatively low-risk way to grow your business, as long as you consider some of the following important tips.

Decide Which Niche to Target

The overall marketplace is filled with countless niches, but not all niches are the same. To be successful, you need to be able to differentiate between the niches that are worth pursuing, and those that won’t be receptive to your message. Think about things like whether a market will grow in the future, how your business fits in with the values and resources of customers, what your competitive landscape is like and so forth.

Understand Their Needs

Now that you have a niche market in mind, you need to develop their customer profile and become familiar with their exact wants and needs. Market research is an effective way to discover useful insights about your target audience, and it could be as simple as going online and reading blogs, websites and other publications that are read by those in your niche. Once you have information, you need to organise it in a meaningful way. For instance, think more about their habits, behaviours and beliefs rather than limiting yourself to superficial niche characteristics like ethnicity and language.

Now, try to connect this information with the products and services you offer. Depending on your business, this could be inherent in your products and services, or you may need to slightly tailor your products and services to create something uniquely compelling.

Speak Their Language

The language you use for your marketing strategy should be easily understandable for your niche market. This is the best way to build rapport and establish a more solid connection with them. For example, you should be able to communicate with them as a member of their community, rather than an outsider that is trying to sell them something. A large part of “speaking their language” is knowing what their key issues are, what their beliefs are, and what is important to them.

Focus Your Marketing Strategy

Whether you are going after one niche market or many, you’ll need to create a marketing strategy with messages that will directly relate to each one. When it comes to niches, there is no one tactic that will reach them all. For instance, some groups will respond better to promotional gifts such as household items, sample products or promotional clothing, while others prefer information in flyers, brochures or blogs.

While you don’t need a full-on marketing plan for each niche, you need to ensure your marketing plan contains something special or unique depending on which niche you’re targeting. If you can do this effectively, then you are far more likely to create messages that will resonate with the customers and build long-lasting brand trust.

Targeting Specific Markets Effectively is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Unfortunately, even though more than half of all retailers use coupons as a marketing strategy, the industry average coupon redemption rate is only about 1 per cent. Saving money on a product isn’t always enough incentive for people to use coupons, so businesses need to come up with a strategy to improve the redemption rate – thus the return on investment – of their coupons. The following are some specific things you should keep in mind to improve the redemption rate of your coupons.

Make the Coupons Accessible to Everyone

There are many different ways you can get your coupons into the hands of consumers, and using a variety of avenues is the only way to make them accessible to more people. For instance, while direct mail coupons will work for some, more and more people prefer to receive online coupons via email or SMS. Additionally, like business cards, your coupons should have all of your business’ contact information on them so that people can either call, email, check out your website or come into your store to redeem them.

Offer Something People Actually Want

Many retailers offer coupons based on what is best for their business, such as a discount for a product that is cheap to produce but that has a high retail value. By doing this, you’re not considering what consumers actually want, and you’re far less likely to get a lot of sales with the coupon. Instead, offer a promotion that people will actually want, such as something that’s in season or that is your most popular item or service.

Target Your Coupons

Putting out a general coupon for one offer to many people probably won’t help your redemption rates. People like offers and deals that are specific to their wants and needs, which are different for everyone. Instead, decide who your target audience is and market directly to them, even if that means printing off a few variations of coupons and distributing them separately.

Make the Coupons Easy to Redeem

All too often, coupons don’t get redeemed simply because it’s not easy for customers to do so. For example, sending out paper coupons that must be redeemed in store makes it difficult for customers that live far away from the store to benefit. Similarly, some coupons that come via email or SMS need to first be printed out before they can be redeemed. Instead, put a code on paper coupons that allows for redemption over the phone or online, and online coupons should also be presentable in the store in digital format.

Calculate Their Effectiveness

For a coupon campaign to be effective, the outcome needs to be tested and measured. The use of tracking codes on the coupon will allow you to determine which customers redeemed the coupon and where the coupons were picked up. Measuring the coupon delivery method, coupon response, product sales and profits is a great way to hone the effectiveness of your coupon campaign and make better coupon offers in the future.

Increasing Coupon Redemption Rates is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Choose the Right Trade Show

Since trade shows are quite expensive, it’s important that you choose the right ones to attend. Consider the following points when deciding which ones you should be attending:

1. Your objectives. Come up with your primary objectives for the trade show before deciding which ones to attend. For instance, are you marketing a new product? Expanding your company? Establishing partnerships? Hoping for media exposure?
2. Your product niche. For many industries, the more specialised the show, the better the prospects will be. Choose shows that are specifically created for your industry.
3. The number of attendees. Many trade shows are audited by independent organisations to find out important features like number of attendees, industries represented, attendee demographics and so forth. This information will help you decide whether or not a trade show is worth attending.

Make Preparations

To make your presence at a trade show more effective, it’s important to make all the necessary preparations beforehand. To ensure you’re ready for the opening day, consider the following tips:

1. Set goals. Make sure you have specific goals for the trade show. For instance, a goal might be to acquire leads that can be converted into sales. If you’re unveiling a new product, your goal might be to achieve a certain number of product demonstrations or to give out a certain amount of promotional gifts. If you want publicity, set objectives for media interviews.
2. Send invitations. If you can, send out advanced invitations to draw visitors to your booth. Coupling an invitation with a free gift or redeemable coupon is a great way to bring in prospects. Sending out promotional products is a great way to encourage people to visit your booth.
3. Train your staff. Your booth jockeys should be able to pick out the serious customers from the non-serious ones and complete interactions with prospects in 10 minutes or less. Train your staff to listen to prospects and to ask all the right questions, such as why the visitor is at the show; the role they have at their company; and whether or not your products might help them.

After the Show

A trade show is useful for facilitating connections with people, but it’s the follow-up that will generate the sales. Immediately after the show, compile information about whom you met and who expressed the most interest. For instance, if you have a small list of very promising leads, send out a personalised package that includes more information about your business and a small gift to each one.

Besides following up with the connections you make, you should also examine the results of your efforts. For instance, how many trade show leads resulted in sales? How long did it take to close deals? This will give you an accurate ROI as well as set a benchmark for next year’s show.

Expanding Your Reach at Trade Shows is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Success isn’t always defined in marketing, but it is measurable. Whether you are using promotional products or a direct mail campaign, there are tools available to determine their effectiveness. To paint an accurate picture of your campaign, the following are the key areas that can be measured and assessed using analytical software.

Number of Conversions

Knowing the number of conversions brought about by a marketing campaign is very useful information. Ultimately what you want is to convert a lead into a sale, and measuring how often this happens and how this happens is a great way to assess the quality of your marketing campaign.

Number of Page Views

Your website is a goldmine of information when it comes to assessing what your customers and potential customers are doing. On the most basic level, you can easily look for an increase in the number of visitors that land on your page following a marketing campaign. From there you can even determine how many people stay on your page and navigate through it as opposed to those that leave immediately.

Links and Referrals

Having other sites refer to your website is very important for boosting traffic as potential customers are directed towards your businesses without you having to lift a finger. Basically, having more links means that authority sites are directing potential customers to your site because they see value in your company.

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is one of the most important metrics for measuring campaign success. Of course, to get more feedback you must actually invite customers to give it. Once you have the feedback, you can measure how well you reached customers as well as identify weak points in your business and improve on them.

Retention Rates

Bringing in a customer is one thing, but getting repeat business from them is something else entirely. Tracking repeat purchases is a great way to see how many people look to your business as their “go-to” source for products or services, rather than a one-time supplier. People who return to your business more than once are also more likely to refer you to their friends and family, so this is a particularly important metric.

Response Rates

Another critical metric you should be measuring is your rate of response. Mail-in responses from direct mail marketing, redeemed coupons from your flyer printing campaign and the number of people who opt in via forms on your site, email marketing or social media, tells you how many people are interested in learning more about your company.

When measuring your marketing campaign, these are just some of the more important metrics to follow. When you put information from each one together, you will start to get a more accurate picture of how well your campaigns are performing.

Important Metrics to Measure for Marketing Campaigns is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Get to Know Yourself

The first important step in cleaning up your brand is getting to know your business. It is important to think about how your business started, what it has offered and what it has become today. The background story of your business is important because it will help you to recognise the core values and the real purpose of your brand image.

List Everything You Do

Listing everything you do as a business will be a lengthy task, but recognising every stage of your business processes is important. Asking your employees what they spend most of their time doing will help you in this task because it is often the smaller and unnoticed efforts that really add value to your company. With a list of everything your business does in a week you will then find it far easier to narrow this down to a core list of essential services.

Identify Core Services

With this big and messy list to hand you will then need to cut it down to recognise what the truly core services of your business are. The core services of your business are the steps that simply could not be put on hold for a week without your business falling apart.

Ask Employees and Customers

Surveying employees and customers about what they think your business does is a good way to help narrow down your brand image. In 20 words employees and customers can sum up what your business is working towards and how it gets there. Often this process will throw up some surprising ideas and give you a better idea of how your services are perceived.

Cut it Down

With your list of core values and some ideas about the content of your business vision statement it is then possible to begin to cut the message down. Your brand message should include only 6 to 7 words so this is a tough task. Looking for regularly repeated words and messages, however, will enable you to identify what the real core values of your business are and how best to present this idea.

Brainstorm Options

At this point it can be difficult to find the best option straight away, so it is worth carrying out a brainstorming session with your marketing staff and other key figures in your business. Drawing up 3 or 5 options for your clear brand statement will enable you to decide on the best before you begin to spread your new clear promotional message.

Remain Consistent

When rolling out a new concise iteration of your brand it is important to do so consistently. Brands often become confused because they are treated inconsistently and added to without proper evaluation of the impact. To keep your brand image clear and concise it is thus important to remain consistent in all that you do and be sure to protect your brand from distortion.

Cleaning Up a Confusing Brand is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Refresh the Image

An important place to start with boosting a brand image is to refresh the way that it is presented. When first decorating your shop front it will have been bright and attractive, but sun damage, dirt and rain will all have an impact on this image. By repainting your store and placing a new overhead sign above the shop, you can give your brand a new lease of life. This simple process will make your store more noticeable and more attractive.

Promote Locally

With a newly refreshed storefront your business will be more noticeable, but customers will need to be encouraged to engage with your store again. Promoting your business locally with flyers and posters is a great way to achieve this. Offering discounts or loyalty options to customers will enable you to create wider interest within the local area.

Renew Your Website

Online technology is rapidly changing and the chances are that your old website does not live up to the standards of websites today. Engaging in web design to improve your online presence is a great way to help promote your brand and give it an extra boost. New websites enable far better usability and this can have a huge benefit. Making your website accessible from mobile devices, for example, will enable you to engage a much wider demographic of potential customers.

Utilise Social Media

Social media also offers a good means through which to reach customers and engage them with your brand. Social media requires a lot of input, but the return from this effort will be worthwhile because it enables consistent contact with customers and provides the best platform for peer-to-peer promotion.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is another great way to boost your brand in the local area. By sponsoring a local sports team you will be able to create a sense of connection with the community that can be translated into customer loyalty. Alternatively it is possible to sponsor an event in the local area to increase visibility to a large number of potential local customers. Sponsorship is a great way to improve your connection with the community and boost your brand.

Training

Having well trained staff and ensuring that your service is always provided with a smile is another hugely important part of ensuring that your brand is viewed well and appreciated. No matter how well you promote your business online and with flyers, if you are not providing the correct level of service then you will not be able to retain customers and build your brand. Remember that people should always leave your business as satisfied customers as this will ensure that they come back to you for repeat business.

Investing in Your Brand

Boosting your brand image will require an investment of time and money. Promoting your business is an ongoing challenge and one that cannot be neglected, but the returns from doing so are excellent. By promoting your business you will be able to generate interest and greater profits too, so it is completely worthwhile investing in flyering and improving your online presence.

Boosting a Brand’s Visibility is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

Consider using your online printing to produce special deals and offers – encourage your clients to take advantage of fitness plan upgrades. This could include them paying more per month but receiving extra benefits – being able to pay less to use certain facilities or to attend set classes. Cross promote the classes you have running already – let your clients know about any new deals or promotions. Use business card printing to promote client only deals on the back of your card to help encourage clients to try a new class or join more classes.

Do you sell clothing, shoes, equipment, accessories or supplements? If you do, why not consider placing different items on special to encourage your customers to wear your clothing or try something new at a discounted rate. Often your customers might not use or wear these products, but they will be encouraged to try if they know they are getting a good deal. Keep your customers coming back by increasing their awareness of your deals and special offers. Use your online printing services; social media your website and e-mail to make your customers aware of what is on special now.

Keep all your offers new and up to date to keep your customers interested. While fitness studios for the most part, have very motivated and dedicated customers everyone can and does go through different phases and will often workout more than at other times. It’s often more expensive to attract new customers so why not consider marketing to the clients you do have.

Organise some business card printing that is just for your existing customers with a special deal or offer on the back. Offering discounts on classes, clothing or other products is a great way for you to let them know how much you appreciate them, and to encourage them to keep coming back. If you have noticed numbers are down why not create a *welcome back* type deal with a special discount for past members to renew their membership with you and e-mail it to them. Sometimes people just need a small incentive to get them back into starting a workout programme again, so take advantage of that and market a campaign to re-attract past members.

Business card printing and online printing mixed in with your social media campaign, website and special deals will cover all the bases and help make your fitness club the hottest thing in town.

This entry was posted in Tips for Promoting an Event by Print2day. Bookmark the permalink.

How To Promote Your Fitness Club – (Part 3) is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips

You need to attract new customers to your fitness club, while encouraging existing customers to still use your facilities. Printing Services can help with all your printing needs such as flyers and posters to help you attract customers. When new customers join or have contacted you for more information be sure to grab their e-mail address, you can then build up your own data base of e-mail addresses of people who have joined, or who are interested in joining your fitness club. This way you can e-mail new and existing customers with your most recent offers, or direct them to your website or face book page to find out more.

You can also use your printing services to print flyers that are then available for customers allowing them to find out what is going on – what offers or deals are available. Your e-mail list can help you reach new customers which can in turn lead to them becoming clients and even long time customers.

Filling up your classes is a very important way to keep your business running and running at a profit. A full class is a fun class, a trainer still gets paid the same money regardless of whether there is one or twenty students in the class – the more students the more money your business is making. You can help increase class numbers by offering great deals and incentives.

Use both your printing services and online marketing campaign and offer some client only special deals. Clients feel like they are getting something back when they are given customer only deals. Consider that you have brought new customers in using discounts and special offers; you need to keep that going and entice them with offers that will keep them coming back. Via both printing and online marketing – offer some deals that are valid during slower times – such as mid week or during the day – discounts such as 2 for one deals or discounts on set classes.

Schedule free guest passes for the times when the club is quiet, it’s easier for you to show new people around and perhaps the new customer is receiving a free assessment from a trainer, you’re not taking the trainer away from a regular or paying customer. Give new guests special deals that are only valid at quiet times of the day. Consider offering last minute specials via your social media campaign for any classes that aren’t yet full, and offer bonus times on your standard deals – such as a week free at times when you know things slow down – over holiday periods and during the colder months.

Teaming your online campaign with a printing campaign helps your business grow and attract new customers

This entry was posted in Tips for Promoting an Event by Print2day. Bookmark the permalink.

How To Promote Your Fitness Club – (part 2) is a post from: Printing & Marketing Tips