3 Tips to Communicate with All Types of Clients

When it comes to reaching your audience, a lot comes down to communicating with them in the language they will understand. We can learn a lot from Julia, a Pasadena ten-year-old. Julia is deaf; her new puppy, Walter, is as well. But, the two have found the ability to communicate with one another with ease. Julia has begun training the seven-month-old puppy by teaching him sign language. The dog knows the signs for sit, water, food and several others.

Julia's mother, Chrissy, said that when her Julia was born, she couldn't hear her mom and would smell Chrissy's neck for comfort instead. The moment Chrissy picked up Walter, he did the same thing. "I remember just looking at him, and I knew that he was meant to be ours," she said in a Humane Society video. Walter was the last puppy of his litter to be adopted, but the Humane Society did not give up hope.

The Pasadena Humane Society, which introduced the two, posted a video of Julia and Walter on their page. The reaction was immediate and positive. "Amazing!!" said one commenter. "This is my dog, Wyatt. He is also deaf, and he has no idea he is different."

When we are communicating with our prospects and our customers, we can take some valuable lessons from Julia and Walter:

1. Different customers will respond to different communication.

Customers are not all the same. You will deal with Millennials and Boomers, urban and rural folks, and people from different income brackets and areas of the country. It is important to segment your marketing lists and create materials for each individual group.

2. Remember that each group does not think of itself as a segment.

Just like the dog Wyatt who thinks himself like any other dog, your customers just think of themselves as ordinary people. Talk to them directly and respectfully. Never talk down to a group. Don't use slang that is not in keeping with your brand. This can feel false and off-putting.

3. Remember that consistent marketing is key.

Don't just reach out to each segment once. Create follow-up emails and other remarketing opportunities. If you do direct mail, send a follow-up postcard to go out to people who did not respond to your initial offer. Just like raising puppies requires a long-term commitment, nurturing a prospect from initial contact to conversion takes patience, time and effort.

Marketing segmentation takes more time and attention than a shotgun approach. But, over time, you will find that it consistently increases your return on your marketing investment and helps you build stronger relationships with your clients.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing and Human Resource needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

#print #directmailmarketing #printmarketing

Assumptions are Bad for Business

Most of us create a framework for our world through assumptions about how the world works. Our assumptions are based on past experiences and what we have been taught. However, in today's mobile-friendly world, assumptions can be dangerous. At the very least, relying on our assumptions can lead to losing business.

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

- Isaac Asimov

Assumptions are a Poor Way to Doing Business

With the ability to work from practically anywhere due to the internet and Wi-Fi, people from many careers often work from home. Working from home means that they may work in their grungiest clothes or even their pajamas. Depending on how eccentric they are, you may even find people shopping in their pjs.

It is amazing how many assumptions people make based on how other people dress. These assumptions can lead to insulting the wrong customer and losing business that you need.

Working from Home

Working from home is not a new invention. In fact, there are several careers that have traditionally been pursued from home or a studio, namely writing, photography, music, art and invention. It is notable that all of these careers are creative endeavors, often pursued by unusual people. The question is, when a famous writer comes into your shop to have their work printed or the next Picasso comes along to have a print made of their artwork, how do you differentiate them from everyone else wearing raggedy jeans and a t-shirt? You can't.

In fact, if a top executive from a corporation works at home, it is extremely likely that he will work in his most comfortable clothing. Therefore, when he walks into your store, you will see a man in jeans and a t-shirt, someone who looks like they are a college student or an average Joe.

Treating Every Customer like Your Best Customer

This situation is exactly why assumptions are bad for business. With mobile technology, any traveler can be your biggest customer. A paint-covered customer might be a famous artist instead of the house painter next door. And even if they aren't your biggest client, they might refer her to you if they like how you do business.

"Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends."  - Walt Disney

Kissmetrics notes in an article about customer service (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/true-love-with-customers/) that the best thing you can do to make your customer fall in love with your business is to genuinely interact with them. In other words, make every customer interaction a relationship-building one. Develop your customer by how you work with them each time they come in. Even if they are just a college student needing their final paper printed, they could be starting a career that will bring you the best customer you have ever had.

Don't make assumptions. They are bad for business.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing and Human Resource needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

#print #directmailmarketing #printmarketing

Using Science to Make Business Decisions

Many  business professionals base decisions on their gut feelings which are comprised of their intuition and experience. However, using gut feelings to make business decisions may not be the best decision-making technique. Many companies are now using analytics and science to make judgment calls. With modern electronics and online tracking, analytics are often available to gather metrics on a myriad of topics. However, you can take business decision-making a step further and design scientific experiments to discover answers to your questions. Here are some suggestions on how you can use the scientific method to learn what decision to make.

Why Use Trial and Error?

Even in our current modern age of computers and mobile technology, too many businesses use trial and error or other decision-making techniques without any evidence of potential results before they get started. Keeping in mind the adage of what happens to people who make assumptions, there are better ways to decide on business matters.

Using the Scientific Method

If you think back to your high school days, you may remember learning about the scientific method. Like many high school students, if you didn't pursue a career in science, it is likely that you have not thought about the scientific method in recent years. However, business is more like science than you might expect. You can prove and disprove many theories with factual evidence before risking time and money on a new project or campaign. Why should you risk your company income and employees' paychecks when you can test theories before you take the plunge? If you could predict behavior, you would be able to achieve much more reliable results.

Let's see how much you remember about the scientific method. The basic method is to create a theory and then set up a scientific experiment to test your theory. You need a test group equally divided into control and experimental subjects.

Setting Up the Experiment

Google is a prime example of a company that tests its theories on a regular basis. They are constantly running tests to see how people react to various changes in their search engine. When they find a particular change that nets the results they want, they then implement the successful change over a larger group of search parameters.

Tests have been run by various companies to answer questions such as these:

    Do lobster tanks increase lobster sales at Food Lion supermarkets?

    Do eBay users bid higher in auctions when they can pay by credit card?

    Do Subway promotions on low-fat sandwiches increase sandwich sales?

    Does a Toronto-Dominion branch get significantly more deposits when open 60 hours a week compared with 40? (from https://hbr.org/2009/02/how-to-design-smart-business-experiments)

When Tests Do Not Work

Testing does not work in all situations. You have to have a large enough collection of data to learn anything significant. However, when you do have enough data to create a test, testing will give you measurable and repeatable results. According to the Harvard Business Review,

"Whether in marketing, store or branch location analysis, or website design, the most reliable insights relate to the potential impact and value of tactical changes: a new store format, for example, or marketing promotion or service process."

If you have a situation with specific, measurable results, instead of guessing the outcome and taking the risk, create a test that will give you a valid answer and confidence in your investment.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing and Human Resource needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.

#print #directmailmarketing #printmarketing

Emotion in Print Marketing: What it Means and How to Do It Properly

In some ways, the most important goal of any piece of print marketing isn't merely to act as an educational tool for your target audience. While conveying the message of what your product or service does and why they need it is integral to the success of your campaign, it is only one small part of a much larger goal. One of the major keys to success in advertising involves evoking an emotional response from people, which is something that print marketing as a medium can do quite well - if you approach it from the right angle.

What Does "Emotion" In Print Marketing Actually Mean?

To boil it down to its essentials, invoking an emotional response from a person who views a print marketing material means that you've gotten them to think more than just "I understand what this product does" at the end of a piece. You don't necessarily want to leave a person with the idea of "This particular product will help solve my problem" per say - you want to leave them with a sense of "Not only will this product help solve my problem, but it will also make me happier at the same time." You want them to long for the emotion every bit as much as they do for the product, which is where the real success of this technique rests.

Nostalgia is the Key to the Emotional Response

One of the single best ways to inject emotion into your print marketing is through good, old-fashioned nostalgia. Even if your message is framed in a way as simple of "Things used to be great, but now you have a problem. With X product or service, they can be great again," you're going a long way towards tying your particular product or service to emotional past experiences that the customer has had. This lets them both acknowledge that they long for the days where things were much simpler and gets them to realize that with what you're offering, they may just get there again.

In the AMC television show "Mad Men," set against the backdrop of the 1950s print advertising industry, Don Draper at one point early on creates an astounding pitch for the Carousel from Kodak. For those unfamiliar, the Carousel was a slide projector that made it easier than ever to enjoy all of the wonderful photographs that you've taken over the years on a much larger scale than ever before.

Don didn't just zero in on this functionality, however - in an impassioned speech to the Kodak board, he talked about how the Carousel was much more than just a slide projector - it was a time machine. It was a doorway into the past, allowing someone to relieve those wonderful Christmas mornings when their kids were still small, or that family trip that they took to the Grand Canyon that they're still thinking about - all in the type of stunning detail that customers wouldn't be able to find anywhere else.

What made Don's pitch so successful is that he tied the product to a noble emotional response - something that people are actively looking for in what they consume, be it their favorite movie or the products they buy and everything in between.

It is inside that emotional response where most of your success in print marketing will reside. If you can tie a positive (and hopefully intense) emotional response to your product or service through marketing, you'll create a loyal army of customers who can't wait to buy what you're selling because what you have to offer is so much more powerful than any one product or service: you're offering them their own emotions.

To contact Chuck Gherman for more information about how Printing Arts Press helps organizations with their Marketing and Human Resource needs through print communications please visit www.printingartspress.com.


#print #directmailmarketing #printmarketing