Leverage existing content you’re creating for customers to generate print content.
Things like:
• Email blasts become direct mailings – Convert your email design to a fantastic oversized postcard that fits easily into our direct mail templates.
• E-book content becomes a bound and printed book – Arrange your ebook content into a bound layout. Using either InDesign or Illustrator, your content becomes a hard copy bound book or booklet that has much higher perceived value and much longer “stick” as it gets passed around among colleagues.
• Digital ads become Point-of-Sale printed collateral driving more actionable awareness at the moment of purchase.
Printing services are a great way to generate additional revenue in billable hours for print design as well as markups of 30-40%. Agencies are given our distributor level wholesale pricing with the submission of a valid resale certificate.
Convert Email Blasts to Direct Mail
One of the latest trends seen in the digital communications arena is actually moving in reverse of the historical norms. Since the invention of e-mail, communications have been migrating to digital format and away from print, but interestingly we’re now seeing a new migration start take place in the opposite direction.
One major example of this is the fact that MailChimp is now offering printed postcards as a compliment to their email delivery services. With higher than average pricing and some basic design capabilities, it’s interesting too that one of the big online digital communications players is seeing the advantages of print as part of the omnichannel experience.
The advantages to direct mail have long been known but are adjusting slightly in our ever-changing communications world. With the buzz and clutter of digital now threatening more than ever to become static-white-noise that brand messages get lost in, direct mail has a unique quality that is growing in strength every day – marketing “stick”.
The marketing stick – or rather how long it will remain viewable on someone’s desk or countertop – is something we’ll cover in more detail in the next section but is highly important when it comes to remarketing your message. When you’re spending thousands of dollars every week on digital remarketing and retargeting campaigns, grabbing an extra 100 targeted impressions. This effect is heightened when you consider that your client’s potential lead has already expressed “interest” in not throwing the mail-piece away. When used effectively to the right audience, direct mail can become a strong part of the omnichannel.
Effective use of direct mail means, in part, that your direct mail gets where it needs to go. We’ve helped to design hundreds of thousands of direct mail templates over the years and understanding the postal requirements is the first step in making sure your direct mail arrives at its intended target. While there are many additional factors involved with mail-piece effectiveness, getting it to the recipient is a core component that many mailers overlook. To help with this, we’ve created a number of direct mail postcard templates for you to use in your next direct mail campaign artwork creation. These postcards adhere to the latest USPS postcard and oversized-postcard (letter class) guidelines while maximizing your designable space.
Convert E-book to Printed Books
The free e-book in exchange for a potential customer’s contact information is a play that’s reaching fever pitch as more and more useful, high-quality information is hitting the internet these days. The effectiveness of this concept has been analyzed and understood now for nearly a decade. Service providers provide value to convert sales by entrenching their brand as the authority on a given topic. Simple and effective.
Now marketers are using print to take it to the next level.
One underlying contradiction within the digital content marketing strategy is content “stick”. We talked about this in regard to direct mail, but the content stick can be even more powerful in terms of timing.
Why is digital content marketing powerful? “Because I need to know right now!” is the most common response. It’s the instant gratification of understanding immediately. However, the downfall of this is that as quickly as information can be ingested, the brand or information source can be forgotten if the potential client or customer is not ready to act. With a barrage of information assaulting us each minute of every day, the staying power of print is growing.
While the actual stick length of a printed material hasn’t changed dramatically in recent years –print materials are hanging around on office desks and kitchen catchalls just as long as ever – it has now become far more powerful, and we’re starting to understand it’s real potential.
Think of online digital remarketing. It’s hugely popular and you really can’t get by without it these days. You need to hammer customers with your message. You know they’re too busy to act the first time they’re exposed to your brand, so you’ve got to catch them at the right moment. One very effective way to do that is constant re-exposure. Embedding your message into a consumer’s mind. The most interesting thing of all is that printed books have been remarketing themselves for DECADES!
When your client’s printed content sits on a prospects desk in their office as a bound book, it’s hard at work collecting impressions, staying in the forefront of the mind. Once the information is consumed, the book remains. The book is still hard at work, still collecting impressions and perhaps getting shared with cohorts or colleagues if the content is compelling enough.
Like all print jobs for agencies, this becomes a profit center when you purchase at our wholesale distributor pricing. You probably grab some billable time as well during the design process of turning your client’s digital content into print ready artwork. To save you some time on this internally, we’ve mocked up a nice paginated book template for you to use in Adobe Illustrator. This will save you some time figuring out spreads and covers. If you’re still unsure about any aspect of the book layout for print, we’re always happy to help put the final touches on your work before the job hits our presses.
Convert Digital Ads to POS Print Materials
Point-of-sale (POS) situations are all about timing. The average retail POS transaction in America lasts less than two minutes. During that time, a consumer may need to make some key decisions that affect your client’s bottom line. Do they take the upsell or cross-sell? Sign up for the loyalty program? Book their next appointment?
Taking a look at why print at the POS interaction matters, we can take an example of our agency partners that had recently launched a loyalty program for one of their clients. The program was both compelling and valuable to the consumers. The agency promoted the program for their client through digital channels – web, social, email, all with re-targeting. The agency also scripted a compelling sales pitch for their client’s cashiers to prompt customers to enroll in the program. Initial results were fantastic. The first week saw higher conversion rates than were expected!
However, as the weeks wore on, customer enrollment dwindled. With the 30-day campaign ending, and the buzz and excitement starting to wear off, cashiers were feeling like they had to “sell” the program too much. Not wanting to feel pushy, they started not mentioning the program which further impacted enrollments. After a couple of months, a week went by that saw zero enrollments. Not good.
As an agency, it can be difficult to influence your client’s operational procedures sometimes. At the end of the day, you’re not always on site to coach or guide them about fully utilizing some of the tools you provide. In this case, our agency partner found a creative way to influence their client’s operations with a simple solution. Printed rack cards at the POS stations.
The result? Ongoing loyalty program conversions that rivaled the opening day of enrollment for the program.
The problem wasn’t that the campaign efforts were not targeted, relevant, or on point, it was simply that they weren’t timed properly. The buzz about the loyalty program hit tens of thousands of customers and garnered thousands of responses – all positive. However, when those customers came to the crucial two-minute window during their checkout process, they weren’t compelled to act. They had forgotten about the fantastic program and thus did not enroll. Print can help because it’s there. To make it easier for you to get it there, we’ve made up some common print format templates for your creative team to use when they start their next print project with us.
