• 4.25 x 6 classic postcards (First-Class Mail) increasing $0.03 each
• All International mailed products increasing $0.07 each 
• All other product sizes (First-Class Mail, Standard/Bulk and Non-Profit) increasing $0.01 each

AmazingMail can help you hold back the increase for two years.

As you may know, each card credit you purchase from AmazingMail includes the cost of postage. All card credits purchased before January 22nd lock-in the postage rate for up to 2 years.

This means you don’t need to cut into critical marketing budgets. All card credits remain in your online account for two years from the date of purchase. There are no restrictions on how you use these credits. Send one or one million, changing the graphics and recipients as often as you need to.

In addition, pre-purchasing card credits will allow you to qualify for volume discounts, awarding you even more savings!

AmazingMail card pre-purchase program saves you money.

• Lock in postage costs for 2 years
• Get volume discounts by buying now and using credits as needed
• Use your card credits as you need them – no minimums!
• Update your campaign content with each mailing, to keep your marketing communication current and fresh.

For more information on how AmazingMail can help you hold back this postage increase, visit http://ow.ly/8rBP2 or call us at 1-866-913-1482.

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

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

1. Think small – You can’t put a PowerPoint on a postcard. At its biggest the front and back panels of a postcard are only 5 x 5 inches. So don’t try to make yours a full sales presentation. Just select one or two benefits you think your prospects will find most compelling. But do add a “call-to-action” – where they can go for more information such as a website and where you can make the sale. (Insert graphic postcard example)
2. Think big – Because they’re small, you can mail postcards for as little as one-third the cost of First Class mail. So you can afford to think of a bigger distribution than you would for flyers and other types of direct mail. With the speed of modern-day postcard marketing and printing technologies at your disposal, you can send out thousands of postcards overnight.
3. Smarten up your mailing list – Postcard marketing firms can groom your mailing list, helping you better target prospects that are most likely to become new customers. Or, if you don’t have one, they can create a list for you, based on the gender, age, income, location and other demographics of your most-likely-to-buy prospects. Even better, at least one postcard marketing firm, AmazingMail.com, can take your mailing list of prospects and clone it. Digging into consumer and business databases, the firm can produce a much bigger “look alike” list of your best customers. (Link to AM home, and AmazingProspects page)
4. Reinforce with other media – A postcard’s call-to-action can direct your prospect to a personalized web landing page, or PURL as it’s known. That’s where you can capture (with the prospect’s permission, of course) the prospect’s email and cell phone number. Next step, refine your call-to-action e.g. “make an appointment to see us”. Then send out unobtrusive but helpful reminders of that appointment by email or text messaging that shows up on the cell phone. (Insert graphic Purl example)
5. Keep your mailing lists healthy – First make sure your customer and prospect lists are up to date. Check internally with all who use the list to make sure postal and email addresses in particular are accurate. As you add new prospects, keep refining the lists and your rates of return will rise. Unrefined lists may generate a return rate of only 1% or 2% but a list which is truly targeted on your best prospects, with repeat mailings, can go as high as 20%.
6. Measure your ROI – Once the campaign is over and the new customers are in the door, pull out your receipts and write down what the postcard marketing campaign cost you, all in, e.g $1,995. Then total up the number of your new customers, e.g. 52. Next make a hard-nosed estimate of what that customer means to you in terms of annual sales, e.g . $325. Multiply your new customers by that estimate e.g 52 x $325 = $16,900 – which, in this example, gives you a return on investment for you campaign of a whopping 847%! Not an imaginary or uncommon result, but the actual ROI of a very happy AmazingMail customer.
7. Think again – Resist the temptation in these penny-pinching times to shift your campaigns entirely to digital media. As the British say about spending their money unwisely, such a move would be penny wise and pound (£) foolish. Studies undertaken by the likes of the Winterberry Group since the onset of the recession show that: “Though some marketers shifted mail spending to digital media as a lower-cost alternative to their traditional campaigns, most have found that online channels demonstrate greater value as a complement to direct mail applications, reinforcing the value of integrated programs.” (Link to Winterberry Group site)

(Stephen Barrón is Director of Business Development for AmazingMail.com, Inc., and has more than 20 years of direct marketing experience. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)

In my role as VP Marketing of AmazingMail.com, Inc., I was invited by the Phoenix CEO-CFO Group, at its July 27 luncheon, to address 50 of their C-level members about how new direct marketing tactics and capabilities can drive revenue in a down economy.

Drawing on advice published and broadcast by other, better-known marketing experts I made the case that the key to effective direct marketing in today’s world boils down to careful targeting and personalized, focused and integrated multi-channel campaigns.

This is why AmazingMail has made a major investment in developing a new, automated multi-channel marketing platform called AmazingCampaigns that delivers trigger-based, text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURL) campaigns.

The platform employs an intelligent front end we call AmazingProspects. It’s an automated service that allows our clients to “clone” their best customers against consumer and business databases with profiling and modeling technology.
AmazingProspects utilizes automated analytics software to uncover hidden insights about an organization’s current customers (or in the case of non-profit businesses, donors), and delivers a ranked list of “look-a-like” prospects that are “clones” – having the same or similar characteristics of best customers or donors. As a result, these cloned prospects have a much higher likelihood of becoming new customers.

How this helps our clients – and any business – is that we’ve made analyzing their customers, targeting qualified prospects, and reaching those customers and prospects with integrated multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns easy and affordable.
This makes acting on expert marketing advice something any company can do, including SMB’s.
For instance, Barry Judge, Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy is considered a marketing industry innovator who writes a blog (http://barryjudge.com) that has a large business following.

In a down economy, he advises seeking out pockets of demand to invest marketing resources in. Specifically he counsels:

• Identify and focus investment on your highest value customers
• Target product segments based on “need” (e.g. mobile phone and PCs as necessities)
• Identify and invest in consumer segments that show growth despite a declining economy

Good advice, but to act effectively on it would usually be out of reach for most companies because it would take skilled analysts weeks, at a cost of thousands of dollars, to execute.

Not anymore. Using our automated analytics and predictive modeling software, these are tasks that can be done in minutes at a cost most any company can afford.

Judge also advises that companies focus and integrate their marketing programs:

• Maximize ROI by trimming back on programs with lower response (newspaper, radio, magazines) and increasing spending on programs that elicit higher response (direct mail, email)
• Integrate those programs so they are part of a focused campaign

Again, good advice, but how can an company with limited marketing resources get this done?

Answer: By using AmazingMail’s trigger-based automated campaign software that lets you map out an integrated campaign through simple icon-driven point and click.

Another well-known marketing expert, John Coe, CEO of The Sales & Marketing Institute and author of The Fundamentals of B2B Sales and Marketing (McGraw-Hill), advises that, especially in a declining economy when customer perception of value is changing, that you use knowledge of customer or prospect characteristics to guide your creative and offer development, and that you make each offer as personal as possible.

Again, our ability to automatically analyze and segment customer and prospect characteristics, combined with our capability to personalize mailings and landing pages, becomes a powerful but affordable way to act on this expert advice.

The bottom line is that through the last decade, AmazingMail has made technological innovation, cutting edge products, world-class service and performance our hallmarks for success. Let us put all that we have developed, and all that we know, to work for you. Let us help you win market share – right now – through smart, focused direct marketing.

“This is not the time to cut spending on marketing. It is well documented that companies who increase spending during a recession improve their market share and return on marketing investment at much lower cost than during good economic times.”
John Quelch, Harvard Business Professor, author of Harvard Business Online’s Marketing Know: How

(Peter Vanderlee is VP Marketing with AmazingMail.com Inc., located in Phoenix AZ. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)

First and foremost, no company that advertises direct to the consumer has any desire to send a direct mail piece that is of no interest to the recipient. There’s a significant cost to each mail piece and if it’s directed to the wrong demographic that has no affinity or interest in the offer, it becomes wasted money.

Second, most consumers don’t realize that our entire US Postal Service is funded in large part through the revenues produced by standard class mail. It’s a fact that the direct mail you receive ensures the delivery of your personal mail on a daily basis.

So how do we reconcile this dilemma? It’s obvious that we need to get better at targeting the right offer to the right person at the right time. Let’s start with the basics. My first name (Chris) is ambiguous, so it could be male or a female. If I received an offer for a craft magazine, I’d dump it straight into the circular file. However, if I received a golf magazine offer (or any other golf-related offer for that matter), I’d open it immediately given my addiction to the game.

This basic illustration exemplifies the need for direct marketing companies to target very specific segments based on demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle data points. In fact, the objective for all direct mail marketers should be to mail fewer pieces while generating a higher response, and thus a greater return on marketing dollars spent.

Marketing expert Philip Kotler, author of the new book Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in The Age of Turbulance, makes this very point in an interview in the July 2009 issue of Deliver Magazine.

He says, “I’ve always thought that direct mail was one of the best concepts for marketing because you can tailor your offering. Rather than send a big blast with the same offer to a million people, you can move into one-to-one marketing — if you have a robust customer database. If you have enough information about the individuals you’re targeting — occupation, income, age and so on — you’ll stop mailing offers to people where there’s no chance of them buying.”

He adds, “Predictive analytics can help you estimate the purchase probability of an offer to a specific customer. Your software can go down a list of customers and assign a probability number to each. You can decide ‘I’m only going to send this offer to customers who have a 50-percent or higher probability of responding.’ This could reduce the size of a mailing from 5,000 people to maybe 500 people. You’ll have a much higher response rate than the usual 1 to 2 percent we get from direct mail because you’ve identified the individuals who are most likely to buy — and your overall mailing cost is greatly reduced.”

Kotler’s advice resonates in a market that continues to incur year over year postal increases, and that’s why it’s increasingly critical that marketers know exactly who they should be targeting.
But if you’re a small to mid-sized marketer, how do you effectively target without spending a small fortune on analysts and software?

AmazingMail has a solution. We offer a low-cost, highly automated service that guarantees the very best response based on mathematical algorithms and scientific regression models. This service ensures your targeting is precise, and that in turn generates much higher return on investment for your campaigns. Then, for even higher lift, we can integrate digital marketing components such as personalized URL, email and SMS text into your targeted direct mail campaign, maximizing potential results.

(Chris Lynde is President and CEO of AmazingMail.com, Inc. and has more than 20 years of direct marketing industry experience. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)

“Thinking of you” has gotten a whole lot easier and fun for iPhone users with PicCard and Postino apps. PicCard and Postino let anyone send an in-the-moment postcard to anyone in the world with a few clicks on iPhone. And now AmazingMail has announced it’s opening up its Web-to-print platform to the imaginations of smartphone developers worldwide.

Postino smartphone app driven by AmazingMail Web-to-print engine

AmazingMail’s CEO Chris Lynde stated in a press release today that “Postino and PicCard are fabulous examples of how developers can generate margins of 100% or more with our Web-to-print engine.

We’ve already seen both of these apps evolve their feature sets in a matter of weeks based on iPhone user feedback. We’re also excited to talk to other developers from the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphone communities about how they can use our patented batch processing and limitless digital print capability to build new, exciting direct marketing applications for industry verticals.

Real estate, automotive, financial and high-end retail markets have proven highly receptive to tactile, timely and personal communication that can quickly turn a prospect into a customer.”

Key features of AmazingMail’s Web-to-print service include:

· Print and mail the next business day
· Super high quality card printing
· Automatically standardize recipient addresses for maximum deliverability
· Mail internationally via any mail service in the world
· Environmentally-friendly mailing options
· Enormous flexibility in personalizing text and images for each recipient
· Easy-to-use HTTP submission method
· Automated emails to the calling platform on mailing status for tracking updates

Developers interested in engaging with AmazingMail.com’s Web-to-print capability can find out more by contacting Gene Scholes, the company’s Director of Interactive Marketing, at (480) 281-4836.

(Nathan Rudyk is CEO of market2world communications inc., a tech PR and product launch company, and works with AmazingMail.com, Inc.)

People send emails because they are effortless and cheap. And plentiful as they are, people still buy cards to say “Happy Birthday” or “I love you” in some other way. When was the last time that you got a physical piece of mail from a friend? I’ll bet that it was a surprise, the same way that long distance phone calls were 20 year ago – “Hurry up! It’s long distance,” your friend would say, enough to bring you running from across the house.

Consumers and businesses can bring back that moment. Because AmazingMail allows you to send personalized postcards in a snap – just load an image, write the message and select the recipients from your address book. What you can do with email is now possible with postcards:

- Doctors can remind patients that it’s time for a check-up.
- Forgetful husbands can look great in sending automated anniversary reminders
- Mom can send family members pictures of her latest trip with a single click
- A non-profit can alert members to a charity fundraiser coming up
- And the list goes on…

Have you tried out AmazingMail to get your 10 free postcards this month, just for trying out the service?

(Dennis Yu is an internet marketer, CEO and co-founder with BlitzLocal.com)