Trade shows are a perfect way for business owners and entrepreneurs to showcase their products or services by reaching their target market. Why not increase traffic to your booth even further by contacting these potential clients or customers prior to the show? Offer an incentive for guests to stop by and let them know beforehand where they can find you.

AmazingMail can help make the most of your trade show presence with these simple and effective strategies:

There’s no better way to promote yourself or your business’ appearance at a trade show than with a series of postcards. Eight weeks out, send a pre-show “Save the date” card to potential customers and book the show.

Don’t know who your target market is? Not a problem. AmazingMail can help you maximize business by acquiring lists of potential customers. AmazingMail will even go a step farther by helping you develop your campaign message, create graphics, write copy, and design your cards so you can get the biggest bang for your marketing bucks. AmazingMail even has access to the mailing lists of most trade shows.

AmazingMail will even go a step farther by helping you develop your campaign message, create graphics, write copy, and design your cards so you can get the biggest bang for your marketing bucks. AmazingMail even has access to the mailing lists of most trade shows.

Once you’ve made that initial contact with potential customers, send another card four weeks before the trade show with an invitation to set up a meeting time. If needed, you can use a personal URL (PURL) to prequalify potential leads.

When the trade show is two weeks out, give potential customers another reminder and also give them reason to visit your booth. Have a drawing for a prize. Offer a prize that compliments your business and appeals to everyone. Have visitors and entrants sign a guestbook, fill out a ticket, or drop their business cards into a fish bowl. You can then use that gathered information at a later date to make follow-up contact.  Be sure to have plenty of giveaways on stock – pens, magnets, and anything else that has your company’s name or logo on it. Most people who attend trade shows are expecting to take home some goodies.

Immediately after the show, send out a fourth set of cards. It might be a “It was nice meeting you” card, or a “Sorry I missed you” card. But either way, it’s a great way to keep your name on the minds of potential customers and maximize your trade show appearance.

• Pick your product’s size, shape and style from our six available sizes or create your own custom size.
• Upload your own images or select from our ultimate holiday selection. Then, take advantage of our easy-to-use online tools to customize your message, color, font and text placement.
• Add the destination or addresses and schedule a delivery date – whether it’s tomorrow or a later date, review the finished product and hit “send.” It’s as simple as that.

You don’t have to worry about minimum runs – you can send one card or send a million. You don’t have to worry any more about graphics, permits, lists, stuffing or sending your holiday cards. AmazingMail will take care of all that for you.

When customers, clients or loved ones receive your holiday card from AmazingMail , they will instantly be reminded of your gratitude for their business and be left with a positive feeling about your company.

And that’s a holiday gift that money cannot buy.

The personal touch!

Imagine receiving a postcard on your birthday from a particular company that does not ask you for anything, but simply wishes you a great day! The message is timely, relevant and leaves a positive impression of your brand; what more could you ask from your mailings?

Personalized Holiday direct mail pieces that are tailored to specific customers are made possible by the use of Direct Smile’s “Image Personalization” technology. These cards combine the ideas of a friendly communication with the latest in technology to create a message that jumps off the card and grabs your customer’s attention.

Each card has an appropriate theme depending on the age group and a font built into the image that reflects the event such as the individual’s birthday or a seasonal greeting.

Creative direct mail pieces like this have increased conversion rates by 30-40%. Through use of “Image Personalization,” a corporate holiday card can be an effective means of customer retention and can improve ROI in the long term.

Imagine being able to send out personalized print products that are of such high quality, you’ll definitely get a smile out of anyone who sees them. It’s even possible to keep track of those “smiles” through campaign landing pages online where customers can give freely give opinions on what they received or take action on your offer.

There are many different kinds of creative direct mail pieces that can be personalized, a few of them being:

Personalize invitations!

• Birthday & Holiday Cards
• Thank You & Event Invitation Cards
• Calendars with the customer’s name creatively implemented on each month
• Brochures with a trade show attendee’s name printed on cover

At AmazingMail we process thousands of Mailings, and because we track customer results, we see plenty of success. This allows us to see practices that tend to work, and practices that tend to fail. From this, we have devised a few simple steps to guarantee a successful mailing.

The 5 elements of Mailing Success or failure:

1. Defining success
2. Targeting & Timing
3. Designing the mail piece
4. Defining the response process
5. Campaign Measurement

Defining success:

It may seem obvious, but defining the objective of a Mailing is the first and most vital step. How can you select your target audience or design your mail piece if you don’t have set marketing goals for success? Without a target result, you can’t determine its success or failure.

Many of our customers are small businesses with a limited number of employees – but typically more than one person has an interest or some input into a proposed Mailing. As soon as there is more than one person involved, there is an immediate need to get everyone on the same “page” (or the same “Postcard” for many of our customers).

The Sales Manager may expect the mailing to increase sales for the quarter, while the accountant may want the mailing to encourage sales of outdated merchandise.  Now, just imagine the problems the graphics department faces to design the mail piece!

So, the very first step is to get consensus on what you are trying to achieve, write it down and then put a number on it. If you want to keep your budget, don’t settle for sayings like, ‘find more customers”, “increase sales” or “move that old stuff”, and gain measurable ROI.

Targeting & Timing

Once we have decided what we want to achieve, the rest is easy – Get the right offer to the right people at the right time!

Look out for Part II. Targeting and Timing, next month…

The best product, the best offer or the best of anything has little impact if you’re hitting the wrong target: Eskimos may not be interested in a free air conditioning service.

Thankfully there are effective methods to help get you on the right track. First, avoid the spray and pray approach. Let’s get the right marketing message into the right hands.

There are a number of data modeling services that will analyze your existing database. These modeling tools will review your entire database and return an informative analysis that will detail all the important characteristics of your best clients whether they are businesses or consumers. A good modeling tool will deliver information such as age, gender, radius from location, habits and other lifestyle details of your current clients. Then it determines your most common type of customer and your best type of customer.

The biggest feature is then obtaining a mailing list that matches only the characteristics of your best clients. So, that next marketing effort will hit only those most likely to buy and it will significantly increase your ROI; less mailing and more results.

2. Repeat your message. Repeat your message.
Ok, now we’ve targeted the right audience and now we’ve crafted the right message. The next step is to spread the word.

The estimate of how many advertisements a person is exposed to per day range from 500 to over 3000. This number represents a significant and specific challenge to your advertising efforts: get noticed and get remembered.

The best way to accomplish this is repetition. When developing your next marketing effort, whether it is a direct mail piece, an email blast or some other medium, develop your campaign with a multi touch approach. Scope out your process with the number of times you will hit your target, the gap between touches and what each message will offer.

3. 1 +2 = Triggered Marketing
With these two critical steps in place, we can now focus on a method that produces high response rates and reduces wasted efforts: Triggered Marketing.

All outside branding efforts should contain a strong call to action. Once prospects take some action, we can now react to that with a customized response that is triggered by that behavior. Let’s say an email blast or a direct mail effort successfully entices prospects to fill out a form on a web site. Once that form is completed we can now trigger a follow up based on that action. If the form enticement was for access to white-paper that offered detailed information, we can send a postcard that is customized for that behavior. Another simple example would be triggered responses to trade-show sign ups. As you gather names of trade show attendees that stop by your booth, a triggered and customized message is sent just to visitors of your booth.

Triggered marketing can get much more complex and offer several levels of responses that depend upon users’ actions and subsequent actions.

1.  Knowledge Fire Sale

A method to promote both new and existing business is to educate your customers…  and do it for free. If you offer customers direct and actionable bits of information, they will become less cynical toward purchasing and treat you as more of a valuable resource of information rather than just a provider of a service or product.

On the next marketing drive offer valuable, useful and free bits of information. Clients will appreciate, respond and return.

This style of relationship with your clients will not only give you that respect as a knowledgeable resource, but it will also lessen the focus on price as your company is now more valuable all around.

2.  Word of Mouth Spreads Viral

The phrase “people do business with people they know” has been uttered many, many times. It’s time to think of your customer base as hundreds or thousands of salespeople. Don’t just sit and hope they’re going to tell others about your product or service entice them to do it…. Now.

Become that someone they know by setting up a referral program. This approach satisfies two important needs. It creates a system to reward your customers, by spreading the word, and it generates new leads from a trusted source.

If the referral setup is simple and the enticement is worthwhile it will go viral.

3.   Clarity

In times of abundance, marketing messages often have the freedom to be subtle and clever and depend more upon the repetition afforded by increased media buys and direct mail efforts. Today, less is more.  While most businesses are trying to do more with less and to focus on ROI, marketing messages should shy away from the clever and vague and be the clever and clear.

Review that direct mail piece and that email message. Is it clear and concise? Can your target audience grasp the message quickly?

Remember, if your company offers 10 services you do not have to nor should you try and fit all those messages in one campaign.

Stay Clear. Stay focused. Stay profitable.

The first question in any marketing effort should be: Who am I targeting? If you are sending a direct mail campaign to existing customers with a strong and clear offer you may well expect to receive a much higher response rate than 3%.

However, if you are marketing to a brand new demographic that has no relationship with your company; you may need to build that relationship before you can see higher return rates.

Furthermore, that new audience will require a different message than those familiar with your services. This means that your message needs to be tailored to your audience.  With the right message to the right audience, you will increase the response rate.

The last piece is to track. In order to learn what works and what doesn’t, you will need to incorporate tracking mechanisms. This can be accomplished using special toll free numbers, PURL’s, coupon codes, landing pages and more.

Now…. imagine vacationing on a cruise ship, take a picture with your cell phone, add a personalized messaged to the picture, hit the send button and have a real, high quality postcard printed and mailed the next business day. Your vacation adventure is now shared and delivered before you return to port.

Smart phone users can do just that by combining the picture taking ability of these devices with AmazingMail’s web-to-print engine to create real physical postcards – quickly, easily and inexpensively, from anywhere in the world, 24/7.

Using mobile applications developed by leading companies (ShootIt, Postino and PicCard), this capability is now available on your mobile device.

Basically, you snap a picture, add an accompanying message or draw it in some cases (i.e. your signature), enter the recipients address and send. That information is electronically sent to AmazingMail, who prints your high quality postcard and mails it the next business day.

You get high quality, personalization and quicker delivery for a lower cost… hard to beat that combination.

Your current customers are hiding a wealth of information and hold the key to new opportunities.

With services such as AmazingProspects, companies can now accomplish two things that were previously available only to large corporations with in-house statisticians: One, uncover hidden insights about their current customers and receive a revealing data analysis. And, secondly, get an accurate and targeted list of prospects that match all the attributes of your best customer.

This exciting new service gives all businesses the ability to quickly execute highly-targeted marketing campaigns that will deliver real responses.

Web to print, multi-channel solutions, integrated solutions and PURL are all solid and useful services that may get lost or diminished because of buzz word over kill. AmazingMail.com (AMI) has a handful of innovative and critical services that suffer this fate.

So, AmazingMail 101 is born.

First, we’ll start with the core service that every business and consumer can and should be using: AMI’s Web to print.

AmazingMail 101 – Web to Print

Web to print is pretty much how it sounds. Users go online and create a postcard (in a variety of sizes) by uploading their own images and/or logos, add their message, input the recipient(s) and send. The real postcard is sent the next business day… Amazing!

Here’s how anyone can use this service:

Home and Family Uses:

• Someone in your life have an upcoming birthday? Is mother’s day coming up? Or any other special occasion? Go to AmazingMail.com, choose from one of our many cards, add your own message and even images if you want, and then send a real card the very next business day
• It’s that easy. Plus you save the cost and time from traveling to the store, buying a card, getting stamps and then mailing it out
• Lessen the stress of wedding planning – choose from 1000’s of images or upload your own, upload your guest list and send out real, high quality cards the next day reminding all to save the date
• Traveling soon? There are a couple iPhone applications (Postino) that allow you to take a picture with your phone, type a message and send a real postcard that’s in the mail the next day
• These are only a few of the unlimited uses for our web to print technology

Business:

• Send out 1 or 1 million high quality postcards tomorrow to your clients or prospects
• Create a “thank you” card and after each sale, referral or meeting and send one postcard (yes, just one if you need)  to thank them
• And, schedule a second reminder postcard to go out in a week or a month

That’s just a simple overview of one of the amazing products from AmazingMail.com

Next AmazingMail 101… trigger based marketing

Dean Batson  |  Marketing Manager  |  www.AmazingMail.com

Office: 480-281-4829  |  Cell: 208-651-0121