Boosting Customer Engagement with Themed Promotions

Fall to winter is a beautiful time of year with cooler weather in some regions, and connotations of family in all parts of the country. It brings with it traditional themes of back to school, falling leaves, carving pumpkins, football, and winter holidays. One of the most popular traditions during the fall season is the range of pumpkin-flavored treats available. Using these themes, you can create campaigns to drive new customers and return business.

1. Giveaways and Contests

It is always fun to promote a coupon or giveaway with a fall to winter flavor. These can include coupons to neighboring businesses for cross-promotion or sweepstakes for fall gifts. For B2B companies, it is best to keep these rewards under $10 because some industries have strict limits on what they can receive as gifts. Easy gifts are seasonal doughnuts, bags of coffee, pumpkin pie or other food specialties of the season. If you prefer to offer non-food rewards, small sports-related gifts make good selections. It is best to have rewards that appeal to most clients whether men or women and any age.

2. Seasonal Discounts

Offering seasonal discounts as companies ramp up for the year can drive business. These discounts should be offered in early in the season to allow for planning time. Giving customers bulk discounts for large orders is a good incentive for any product or service.

3. Educational Videos

Combine some video with your print promotions to encourage loyalty from your customers. Videos can truly be on any subject to help customers better understand what you do and how best to approach you for specific jobs. Humorous videos are an excellent way to help customers remember what they have learned. You can promote custom products and services that make your business unique and invite them for a free sample after viewing the video.

4. Fall to Winter Infographics

The football theme is a great one for fall to winter infographics. You can lay out a play-by-play scenario for a custom service on a colorful direct mail infographic that will catch your customer's eye. Use it as a poster in your building, email it to your customer list, and hand it out with orders. Infographics are great for simplifying complex ideas with simple illustrations and graphic arrows.

These are just a few ideas to get promoting. Remember, if you need help with your printing and marketing, give us a call today!

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 #directmail #printmarketing #marketing

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Dr. Patrick Moore, Co-Founder, Greenpeace

From Small Things Come Big Changes

Pierre Omidyar didn’t plan to start a mega-corporation in the late fall of 1995. In fact, all he wanted to do was get rid of some computer equipment he had laying around by selling it through a digital garage sale. However, once he realized how popular his simple web page started to become, and the fact that he could charge a fee for folks to use it, eBay was born.

In three short years, the eBay online auction concept went from a private website to a viable business that quickly began to explode. Omidyar had hit on what many in business invention call a “primal need,” something that everybody needs and doesn’t yet exist.

With the help of Jeff Skoll, Omidyar brought in Meg Whitman, the same Whitman who later ran for California’s governor, and corporate eBay took off. By 1998, eBay had gone beyond just selling used and collection items and was quickly becoming a viable brand name for online selling in general. The model continues today and competes directly against regular retail selling.

Seeing What it Could Become

The key aspect of Omidyar’s success, however, was not Whitman and her corporate choices of personnel, nor was it the smart linkup with PayPal to make eBay’s payment processing extraordinarily fluid and easy for customers. Omidyar could see that he had something valuable and, if given the resources, what it could become. This key talent is what makes the difference between inventors and idea people who never quite achieve success, and people like Omidyar who realize what seems to be impossible starting out.

Omidyar had a number of essential factors present and working in his favor:

• Again, the primal need for an online auction platform or similar garage sale digital tool was needed.
• Second, it could be easily accessed by anyone who wanted to participate and pay the fee.
• Third, the tool was easy to use and produced immediate results and rewards for those using it.
•  Fourth, and most important, no one else was making the same idea happen successfully at the time.

Without these elements in place, Omidyar's personal website might have made some small cash and even generated a small following, but it would not have turned into the worldwide corporation we know as eBay today.

Finding Ways to Make it Grow

Some explain the opportunity as a momentary blast of good luck or fate, and others argue it’s the genius of the person involved producing some incredible new service or product. In reality, eBay is neither; it is a product of Omidyar being able to see the promise of an idea and finding ways to make it grow and become more useful, accessible, and popular.

Ebay expanded and became a household name because the company took every opportunity to follow the four principles above in its business strategy. That constant commitment to creating value in a brand is why people keep coming back to eBay as a service some 20 years later, regardless of what the internet and technology have provided since.

If you need help creating value in your brand, we're here to help. Give us a call today!

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 #directmail #printmarketing #marketing

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Dr. Patrick Moore, Co-Founder, Greenpeace

4 Productivity Tools That Will Give You Back Your Sanity

Whether you're working from home or the office, distractions happen, and they can be a productivity killer. Nearly everyone has an example of weeks that you look back on and wonder "What happened? I know I was busy . . . " while still feeling as though you've accomplished nothing. With deadlines crashing down on your head and the constant demands of family and work, it's important to be as productive as possible to maintain your sanity. These productivity tools are vetted by experts to help bring balance back to your life -- while still getting things done.

1. Time Trackers

Even if you're not a fan of tracking every task that comes across your desk, a time tracker can provide a valuable way to give yourself mental freedom from specific tasks. For instance, what if instead of tracking the time you're doing something, you track the time when you're not doing something -- like checking email? Set a timer for three hours and (gasp!) close your email client completely. Turn your phone over on your desk, and turn off the ringer. For three hours, allow yourself to focus on something other than responding to others. You will be pleasantly surprised at how productive you're able to be without the constant distractions caused by emails, text messages, and social media without feeling like you've been out of the loop for too long. Of course, you can always use time trackers in the traditional way, by setting estimates for time and tracking how long specific tasks will take. Either usage will help bring your productivity back into focus!

2. Take it to the Cloud

Cloud-based document and data storage platforms allow you to be productive regardless of your physical location -- a critical need in today's always-on business world. Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box are a few of the options that offer low-cost ways to sync your information between tablets, mobile phones, and laptops or desktops, so you're never truly away from the office. More corporations are utilizing these cloud alternatives to traditional enterprise data storage due to the relatively inexpensive cost and ease of use for employees.

3. Expense Management

Mobile apps such as Expensify allow you to take a quick snap of receipts and classify them by project, something that is invaluable for today's busy professional. Keeping track of receipts and ensuring that they get assigned to the right account is yet another of those small yet nagging tasks that can reduce your available mental space without a single return. Clear out the clutter mentally and physically when you use a digital expense management tool.

4. Email Productivity

Professional emails can be a hassle, from trying to remember to send something at just the right time to getting off the myriad of email lists that tend to stack up in your inbox. Tools such as Unroll.me will quickly unsubscribe you from a wide range of email lists in a few short seconds, while tools such as Boomerang allow you to schedule messages for delivery at a later date. This keeps your email from hiding at the bottom of an inbox that is stuffed full overnight.

Ultimately, these productivity tools will help you squeeze a few extra moments into your day by automating simple tasks such as unsubscribing from email lists and having the information at your fingertips when you need it. When you're able to take these actions when you think of them, you're clearing your mind for additional productivity -- instead of having to maintain a mental database of open tasks to be completed. Take back your sanity by becoming more productive and regaining some of your focus!


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 #directmail #printmarketing #marketing

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Dr. Patrick Moore, Co-Founder, Greenpeace