What is NFC?

NFC stands for Near Field Communication and the short answer would be that NFC identifies us. It allows smartphones to be identified and it establishes a radio communication. Think short range wireless RFID technology.

You may have heard of NFC and its ability to make mobile payments easy. Account information is stored on the smartphone and when in close contact with the payment receiving technology, it passes along that account information, enabling a payment to be made.

However, NFC can be a great marketing tool for mobile marketing. And there is also talk of how NFC will help in terms of rewarding customer loyalty. The bonus is that NFC is more interactive and engaging than your typical marketing message. It’s not a “look at me” marketing strategy. It’s more of a “hey, look what we’ve got for you, are you interested?” kind of connection with the audience.

How does NFC work?

NFC is like your short and skinny pal. He can’t reach very far. And he can’t throw a weighty punch. But he’s scrappy and useful in certain situations.  This low power and short-range wireless link allows for information to be passed between a smartphone and another device. While it is short range (think inches), it does not require contact. But most importantly, it allows for the information to relay back and forth between two devices instead of that relay being a one way street.

Not only is it short-range, NFC is slow. Especially when you compare it to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. But the perk is that NFC consumes very little power. It won’t strain a smartphone battery and suck it dry.

A smartphone enabled with NFC can share and interact with another NFC device, or with a “passive” NFC tag. No app needed. And the NFC tag is like a tiny chip that may be embedded (in a poster, a business card and so on) somewhere and has data ready to transfer to a NFC enabled device. The tag doesn’t even need power. Instead, the radio frequency field generated by the NFC device (like your smartphone) does the work, and the data from the tag is transferred to the device.

• What’s so awesome about NFC?
• How is NFC used in the real world?
• How can you put NFC to work for your business?

Get the answers to these questions and more in:

Taking stock of your fulfillment company is an important part of achieving and maintaining success. You rely on your fulfillment company to fill orders, and to do so with a high degree of speed and accuracy. Even if things seem to be going well, it’s always a good idea to take some time to assess your fulfillment company and make certain that it’s the right “fit” for your needs.

Click on this image to receive a white paper on integrated marketing!

Head Back To School

Well, not really. But if you remember back to business classes, your instructor likely had you do at least one quasi-SWOT analysis. Need a refresher? SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities. And a great way to evaluate your fulfillment company would be to look at the strengths and weaknesses. We’ll call it a SW analysis.

Working on an in-depth SW analysis of your fulfillment company requires you to dig deep. This isn’t the time for listing superficial issues or problems. This is when you really get to the nitty-gritty of what’s working and what’s not. What strengths your fulfillment company consistently displays, such as efficiencies within their systems and what weaknesses (such as order inaccuracies) have popped up on your radar.

Don’t forget to do some basic research. Things may have easily changed over the time you have been working with your fulfillment company. Look for customer testimonials. Search for reviews or forum threads that may dish on your fulfillment company. If a former customer is not happy, you may want to know why, so that you can try to prevent any similar issues occurring for you.

If you have never physically evaluated the facility, or it’s been a long time, then you should take a tour. This isn’t time for a white glove test. It’s not about being squeaky clean, but you most definitely want an orderly and organized warehouse for your materials. You want to know that it’s OSHA compliant. That safety is taken seriously and policies are in place. You also want a secure location and a warehouse that has security in place to deter theft. You want to know what your fulfillment company is doing to protect your inventory.

Check The Data

You should have metrics in place. If you don’t, you need to put them in place now, though it’s hard to make a true assessment of how things are going if you haven’t been tracking anything.

Look at costs. Have any costs been reduced since working with your fulfillment company? Is your fulfillment company working towards reducing costs? Have they identified ways to reduce costs and made it clear to you what needs to happen in order to achieve those numbers?

Your fulfillment company should have a clear organizational structure and should be set up to optimize the ROI on everything from employees to inventory to fulfillment software.

Here are some measurements and information you should ask your fulfillment company for:

• Delivery / distribution speed (broken down at points such as picking, packing, shipping)
• Number of errors per day (in order fulfillment process)
• Length of time inventory sits
• How often inventory is tracked / updated
• Who is accountable for data, and how is accuracy of data confirmed

Click on the image to read more of my team’s take on fulfillment.

Would You Like Fries With That?

Everyone knows that fast food chains are notorious for upselling when a customer places a food order. Sure, you were only there to pick up a soda, but those fries sound pretty tasty. And hey, it’s easy to say “Yes.” The point is, your fulfillment company should have value-added services they can offer you. And they should make you aware of them, whether you need them or not.

Imagine working with your fulfillment center for a couple of years and not knowing that they have additional services that would have made your working relationship easier or more advantageous for you. Something like this would make you question whether your fulfillment company has your best interests in mind. They should always be thinking about ways to make your working relationship better and more advantageous on both ends. And leaving out important information like other services they could offer you is a huge oversight.

Pull Out A Scorecard

Scoring your fulfillment company may sound hokey, but it’s not. When you assess your fulfillment company and look over the strength and weaknesses of that company, keep score. It can be as simple as a range of 1-10, and then developing 5 to 10 key components of your relationship and their ability to provide accurate and on-time fulfillment. As you score each component, you may have a little light bulb going off over your head. Maybe things haven’t been going as smoothly as you thought. Or maybe things aren’t as bad as you imagined. It’s easy for one or two situations (especially bad ones) to really cloud your vision.

At the very least, you should score your fulfillment company in the areas of customer service, inventory management and tracking, warehousing and shipping. But you may want to drill it down to more specific components in order to better see where the issues (if any) are.

Keeping score and then coming up with the overall tally can paint the big picture for you. If your fulfillment company is hitting mid-range scores on every key component then you really need to decide if mediocre work is going to cut it. In fact, as you create your scorecard, you should determine an overall score that will mean it’s time for some major changes, time for a meeting of the minds or time for a big high five for all involved. In the end you want to feel 100% confident that you are getting what you are paying for and that you’re not paying for more than you actually need.

Thanks to my VP of Sales, Karen DeWolfe, for helping on this one! 

Fulfillment is a process. Not one specific task. It involves everything from warehousing materials, to filling an order, to packaging and shipping it in a timely manner. The materials may go directly to the end user, or it may go to the business in larger quantities so it may be sent out to the end users, taken to conferences and trade shows or used in other ways by the marketing and sales departments. From the initial placement of the order, to the final shipping of the order, fulfillment requires the actions of employees across various departments.

It’s understandable that many businesses outsource fulfillment because it takes up valuable time and resources. As their business grows, the needs for materials grow. Let’s face it, while every business has to work on various tasks to get them to the point of profitable marketing and sales, if they spend too much time dealing with fulfillment, they might be diverting too many resources from their end goals.

They should be concentrating on what they do best. Outsourcing fulfillment also means that a business doesn’t have to deal with the possible highs and lows with the demands that go hand in hand with the need for electronic and physical literature. A good fulfillment center has the employees and the resources to deal with a sudden onslaught of orders.

Competition in the fast-paced business world has pushed fulfillment centers to a level of automation and precision that can (and should) work like clockwork. The right software can mean 24/7 access and real-time reporting. Inventory levels can be easily tracked and needs forecast. Metrics are in place to determine what is working and what’s not.

Learn more about our warehouse operations  > >

A couple of crucial aspects to fulfillment are accuracy and timeliness. It makes sense. Order fulfillment is important, but can you imagine filling an order without regard to getting the items correct? The end user should be getting items A and B, but somehow items C and D get picked instead. Or what if the shipping information is wrong? So the correct items get picked, but they get packaged up and sent out to Jill Schmill in Idaho rather than your intended recipient, Joe Schmoe in Maryland.

Inaccurate orders can be a nightmare. And even an accurate order can go wrong if too much time lapses from order placement to order shipment. We live and work in a world where people want what they want – and they want it as soon as possible.

Order fulfillment – on-time and accurate order fulfillment – is crucial for today’s business. Both electronic and physical literature fulfillment is vital for e-commerce. The idea for the average business is that by using a fulfillment center, that business can reduce costs associated with fulfillment (ranging from employees to warehouse space) and spend their financial and time resources instead for the business’ core competency…meaning, doing what that business excels at doing.

Learn About interlinkONE’s Fulfillment Software

Did you know that you have a marketing voice?

Your marketing voice is what makes your business resonate with your prospects and customers. It’s distinctly “you.” (Of course, the “you” here is a business “you.”) It’s all about your tone in all your marketing materials. The style in which your materials are written. From your marketing videos to your social media posts, your company has a personality, a voice that comes through loud and clear (hopefully) to your audience.

It’s easy to get sucked into the latest and greatest. You see an ad, you watch a video, you read a case study. You think, “Wow, that’s so cool. We should do that.” But it’s important for you to stop and evaluate whether that cool new idea would even work with your company and its personality.

Let’s put it in a personal perspective for a minute. What you say. How you say things. What you do. How you do them. These are all things unique to you. And they create your personality, your voice.

Your company has a voice as well. Everything from your first touch with prospects, to your customer service follow-up with long-time clients. Your company voice is all about what you “say” and how you say it. From QR codes to personalized URLs to sales copy and beyond.

To find your company’s marketing voice, you need to analyze the personality of your business. A quirky little company doesn’t want to come across as some stuffy bore. A sleek, cutting edge business doesn’t want to come across as clunky and behind the times.

Your voice needs to match your business personality. So to avoid getting in a rut, or having a marketing meltdown, you need to ask yourself some key questions:

- What comes naturally to our business? What feels “right?” When we write our marketing copy or create our videos, does everything just seem to fall into place?

- How do our prospects and customers see us? (This might call for a short survey…which could also turn into a fun marketing strategy).

- What really resonates with our audience base? What do they relate to?

Have you ever met someone and as soon as they started talking, you were taken aback? Maybe their voice was huskier than you would have thought. Perhaps their mannerisms didn’t match up with how they were dressed or the words that were coming out of their mouth. In any case, you were probably standing there thinking that it was weird. And suddenly, you weren’t paying attention to “what” they were saying, but how they were saying it, or how they were being totally different than what you initially perceived.

This is what can happen to your business. If you don’t have a clear voice, or are acting in a way that really throws your audience for a loop, you’re gonna lose them. You’re going to lose your audience. They will be so put off or weirded out that they are no longer listening to you. They aren’t paying attention to your marketing message. They have already moved on. And your chance to engage with them has passed.

It’s imperative that you find your marketing voice and have that voice ring loud and clear through all your materials – online and off. From sales brochures to social media posts, use your marketing voice to connect and engage with your audience in a way that is distinctly “you.”

Now that you’ve found your marketing voice, its time to find your sales groove. 

You should plan your content, all your content, for mobile. Sound crazy? Maybe it is. But here’s the thing – you know you need to keep your mobile content relevant. Mobile users don’t want the fluff. They want what they want, when they want it…on their various mobile devices. So when you are planning your content using responsive web design, you should think from a mobile standpoint.

Ask yourself:

• What information do I need my mobile users to see?
• What information do my mobile users want to see?
• What other content would be beneficial to my mobile audience?
• What else can I add that would improve the overall mobile experience, not seem stupid or come across as absolute fluff? What would be cool but not annoying and useless?

Once you answer those questions, then look to your website. Think about your desktop audience. Would you answer any of those questions differently when posing them about your desktop users? And if you do answer those questions differently, why?

Look, just because you have more real estate when you’re creating your website for your online (desktop and laptop) audience doesn’t mean you should abuse that real estate and fill it up with a bunch of gratuitous images, text blocks and so on. No, you don’t have to have a minimalist approach, but you should think in terms of streamlining.

Ever been looking for something online, whether you are on your smartphone or on your computer, and gotten annoyed at trying to wade through a lot of “junk” that just makes it that much harder to find the content you really need? Well, consider your audience. You don’t want them to be that annoyed user who is one touch away from heading to another site to get what they are looking for.

It wasn’t too long ago that many businesses were stripping away content as they developed a mobile site. They looked at their traditional website and wondered what they could take away to make it “fit” on the small screen of a mobile device. And some are still doing this.

And when you get down to it, doesn’t it just sound…well, wrong?

Doesn’t everything you have on your traditional site have a reason for being there? Isn’t it all wonderful, tasty goodness that you (or someone on your team) thought at some point had a good reason for being online?

It’s depressing to think about what you need to strip away in order for a mobile site to be readable or useable to the audience. Sure, there are certain businesses that have mobile users who are searching for very specific things. And having a different mobile site (or perhaps even an app) may make absolute sense. (Not sure what your business needs? This is when you partner up with a company like Grow Socially – they can take a look and help you either way).

But when you know that you don’t need specific mobile functionality that would necessitate an app or separate mobile site, isn’t it logical to provide your audience with a responsive, seamless design? And in that case, working from small and then scaling up makes total sense. You aren’t stripping away anything. You are building a new, awesomely terrific experience that can be enjoyed by users across all devices.

Learn more about responsive web design and mobile strategies here.

The mobile marketing world can be full of obstacles and pitfalls. Some marketers may ignore it in an effort to deny its importance. Others may just not want to deal with the work involved with gearing things toward mobile devices. And many marketers dabbles in it, getting their feet barely wet and stepping slowly, as if trying to avoid any major screw ups.

But taking any one of these paths can set you back with your audience. Because it ignores the obvious – your audience is using mobile devices. Your competition is using that to their advantage. (And if they’re not, then you can gain some serious ground by beating them to the punch and adopting various mobile marketing methods into your overall marketing strategy.)

Whether or not you have joined the fray, you may very well be losing the mobile marketing battle. Here are some signs that you’re behind the 8-ball and need to step it up:

• You lack a mobile optimized site or app.
• You’re not sure what to provide or offer to your mobile audience.
• You’re not sure how to tap into the mobile marketing world and start integrating mobile marketing into your overall marketing plans.
• You don’t believe there are any differences in marketing to your mobile audience versus your online audience.
• You are unable to figure out how to bridge the gap from other marketing efforts, like your print materials, with mobile.
• You have been dabbling with mobile marketing but your current mobile marketing efforts are lackluster.
• You aren’t tracking efforts so you don’t know the success or failure of your mobile marketing campaigns.

If you recognize your business with even just one of these above scenarios, you are losing the mobile marketing battle.

Mobile marketing is moving along at lightning speed and while you may think it’s hard to keep up, you still have the ability to create a support team that helps you handle all of these issues with ease.

When it comes to marketing, I absolutely love talking about the various ways that companies can increase awareness of their products & services and then generate leads. If you are a services provider, I’m sure you do as well.

But the bottom line is this — we can’t just stop at the awareness or lead-generation stages. Our marketing efforts (whether for ourselves or for our customers) must help the company to close more sales.

Today, I’d like to chat about how a marketing automation approach can be use to help companies convert more of those inquiries and leads that you are generating into actual sales… and create more business overall for you!

Always Think of The Funnel

Oh, the sales funnel. It all starts with the top – the largest ring – the target market. And then it narrows down from there as the true leads come out of that target market. Then those leads are worked, some staying put as that funnel narrows, becoming sales.

But where does marketing automation fit into the sales funnel? At what point does the automated system kick in and help make that sales funnel work?

Here is one of my favorite charts that helps to demonstrate this process:

At the top of the funnel is that target market. This is the group of people you know you have a product or service that can be a benefit to.

You set up your campaign, choosing the various channels (email, social media, direct mail, phone, etc.) you wish to reach your market through, all the while ensuring that the messages remain consistent across all channels.

Each of these messages include a call to action and have personalized landing pages and direct mail as your prospects respond.

Measuring and Following Up

With automated marketing systems, your efforts across all channels are tracked and data is compiled. This data is useful for analyzing the current campaign and future campaign efforts.

But more importantly, the automated marketing allows for personalized responses to go back out to these new leads, warming them up for the sales team.

What warms up the leads is the nurturing through a multi-touch response campaign. Depending on the response mechanism used by the prospect, the next automated contact will be initiated. Perhaps the next contact will be an e-newsletter. Or perhaps it will be a personalized email with a personal URL. Or it could be a direct mailer. Each of these events are automated and each lead actually encounters multiple contacts.

Putting Data in a Centralized Location for the Sales Reps

Throughout those contacts, all data is still being tracked and compiled. The sales team is being kept in the loop and even assigned tasks that would fall in line with the automated system.

Perhaps a prospect has clicked on a personalized URL that indicates an interest in further information. The sales team will know about each contact and what the lead is looking to find out so when that phone call is made, all of the ground work has already been laid.

Treating New Sales to Excellent Customer Service

Once the sales have been made, its vital that the new customer’s experience getting started is a good one.

At that point, the customer service department can move in to help ensure a terrific customer experience. How can you help to play a role in that regard as the service provider?  Well, a marketing automation solution can often be responsible for ensuring key touch points (such as Welcome emails, Getting Started emails, Contact Information notices, etc.), are delivered on time — and in the format that the person preferred to receive messages throughout the lead process.

Succeeding with Marketing Automation Can Lead to Long-Term Success

From the top of the sales funnel to the bottom, marketing automation helps to ensure a marketing campaign is consistent, efficient and capable of being analyzed for the benefit of future campaigns.

If you can deliver those types of end-to-end solutions for customers or your own sales team, you will certainly put yourself in a position to reap long-term benefits!

This week, I’d like to turn the spotlight on one of my employees briefly. Michelle Jollymore has worked very hard for many of our clients (and for our own marketing efforts) to effectively incorporate QR Codes onto printed materials.

To serve as a checklist for herself, and to help others succeed with QR Codes, she has compiled a list of things to do and things to avoid when it comes to QR Code usage.

I hope that you find them helpful!

Do’s for QR Code Usage

1. Do make sure that your QR Code is large enough. From our own testing and usage, a QR Code should be NO smaller than 1/2″ x 1/2″. If possible, it’s wise to make sure that your QR Code is at least a 3/4″ x 3/4″. As the cameras on our phones continue to get better, more people will have the ability to scan smaller QR Codes. However, there are still plenty of people walking around with phones that would have major trouble scanning a 1/2″ QR Code.

2. Do make sure that there is enough white space/padding around your QR Code. Learn more about white space and QR Codes here.

3. Do make sure you have simple directions next to the QR Code. This can be as simple as saying “Scan the QR Code with your smartphone to learn more”, or “Don’t have a QR Code reader? Download one from your App store”.

4. Do offer some kind of incentive for people to scan the QR Code. This could be something such as”Scan the QR Code to win an iPad”, or perhaps “For more information on this event, scan the QR Code now!”

5. Do add QR Codes to your printed materials. Business cards, brochures, magazine advertisements, etc. Make print interactive and start reaching the growing mobile audience!

6. Do add an image to your QR Code if you’d like to find a way to make it stand out. Learn more about adding an image to a QR Code here.

7. Do consider changing up the color of your QR Code to make it match your design. Learn more about color options when it comes to QR Codes here.

8. Do track your QR Codes efforts! Make sure that you know how many people are scanning and what printed materials they are responding to.

9. Do make sure that your QR Code points to a mobile website.

10. Do create your QR Code in a way that allows you to change the destination URL at any time.

11. Do shorten the destination URL when creating the QR Code.

Don’ts for QR Code Usage

1. Do not make your QR Code too small.

2. Do not have a QR code that links to a standard, desktop-based website.

3. Do not make your QR Codes in color combinations that are hard to scan. Light colored QR Codes do not scan well. Same goes for dark QR Codes on dark backgrounds.

4. Do not forget to put directions along with your QR Code or a call-to-action. Just having a plain QR Code on your piece is not going to attract people to scan it or teach people “how” to scan it.

5. Do not put your QR Codes on items that are useless for people to scan – i.e a highway billboard (no one driving 70mph down the highway is going to be able to scan it).

6. Do NOT cover or distort the 3 squares in the corners of the QR Code. If you cover any 3 of them your QR Code will NOT scan successfully.

Mobile + Print: Better Together!

Yes, there are other technologies that can be used to integrate mobile and print. But QR Codes still have a place in the marketing mix today and in the future. However, they must be used properly!

I hope that you find these tips helpful as you look for ways to reach the growing mobile audience!

Recently, I had the chance to spend some time at the DMA 2011 conference in Boston. While I absolutely enjoyed my time at Graph Expo, I was excited to attend a show that primarily consisted of marketing agencies and in-house marketers. I was looking forward to seeing what topics were trending, what challenges were being hotly discussed, and what technologies and channels were being debated.

It’s certainly very important for all of us that are associated to the printing industry to understand what marketers are thinking and talking about. Thus, I’d like to share some of my observations from DMA 2011. I hope that you find them helpful!

1. Marketers are absolutely in need of integrated solutions:

One theme that seemed to exist in many of the conference sessions was the need to break down silos and to integrate marketing efforts. As more and more marketers move to reach their customers and prospects through multiple channels, many of them have fallen into the trouble of storing and managing multiple databases. Those databases might store conflicting or simply varying bits of information about their contacts. This harms a marketer’s need to try to communicate with their audience in real-time. It also prevents a marketer from truly delivering one-to-one and relevant messages.

Thus, service providers (especially those that are committed to offering marketing services through multiple channels as opposed to only print, mail, or fulfillment) have a tremendous opportunity to promote and offer solutions of that nature to their customers to help them solve those challenges.

2. The Primary Discussion was Digital — But Print Still Has a Place in the Marketing Mix!:

I won’t lie – many of the discussions at DMA 2011 centered around online marketing and other digital marketing initiatives. But there were still a number of great case studies shared that involved print and direct mail components. Some of the main reasons why I heard marketers share why they still chose print as a channel included:

• It is tangible.
• It can be personalized.
• It can create a deeper emotional impact.
• It can be a very effective way to drive people to online content.

3. When it comes to social networks, businesses have a lot to learn:

Judging by the attendance of various sessions, many companies are still striving to learn how to effectively use social networks in the B-to-B space. Here were a few of the tips that I heard that I’d like to share:

• Twitter’s search features can be one of the most powerful websites for companies to utilize. It enables us to really listen to what’s on the minds of customers and prospects.
• Facebook’s dominance in the social networking space is truly astounding — thus, we most likely all need to invest more resources there. They have 800 million users! Nearly half of them log in each day.  30 billion pieces of content are shared there each month! Those numbers clearly dwarf the activity that other social networks can share. With that much volume, it’s certain that some of the content being shared and discussed has to do with companies and products. In order to capitalize on the opportunities there, business of all shapes and sizes must be on Facebook too.
• People love video. It’s true. Video is being used more and more by marketing agencies and other companies to tell their stories. I truly think that many service providers can utilize video to do the same thing

4. Mobile and QR Codes Were Huge… and Growing:

There were a ton of QR Codes at the conference. They were on posters, signs, collateral, and clothes. While that is a good sign to me when it comes to printing, I also noticed that most of the QR Codes were not used 100% properly.

• Primarily, most of them seemed to point to non-mobile websites. I truly think that there is a tremendous opportunity for service providers to grow their business by doing more than just providing or printing the QR Code; but rather, to also offer the building and hosting of the mobile website or mobile landing page.

Note: This is Part 8 of a 9-Part series based on the book “Business Transformation: A New Path to Profit for the Printing Industry”

Social networking is certainly one of my favorite passions. I truly believe that it can help print, mail, fulfillment, and marketing services providers in many different areas — including marketing, sales, customer support, and HR. However, many companies still primarily view channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as ways to simply distribute press releases.

While there certainly is a place for using social networking channels for distributing news, they can absolutely help companies in other areas.

Here are 3 ways that your company may be able to find success through social networks:

• To Provide Customer Support:We have probably all done it by now. Maybe it was to an airline or a restaurant. Perhaps it was to a manufacturer or retail store. For one reason or another, the company treated us in a way that we didn’t appreciate. Thus, we turned to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to express our complaint to others. While it might simply feel good to let out some steam, don’t we feel much better if the company does something to react to our public grievance?The same thing could be happening to your business right now. Someone could be displeased with a print job, the time it takes to get a call back from a sales rep, or the lack of information on your website. If those folks complain on social networks, you certainly may cringe. But at least you’ll have the opportunity to know about the complaint and then address it!

  How can you know if someone’s complaining about your business online? There are absolutely tools and services that can help you.  For example, you could use Google Alerts to set up notifications for your company name. You could use Twitter’s search feature. Or you could partner with a 3^rd-party.

  No matter what the case, social networks give you the ability to listen to what people are saying and then quickly take action to provide some sort of customer support to them.

  Of course, social networks also allow you to proactively provide customer support. Through your social networking accounts, you could provide links to how-to-guides that provide suggestions and best practices for ordering a print job. You could provide links to other resources and case studies that may inspire a customer or prospect to do more business with you.

  If your customers are on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, then you should absolutely be there to provide support when they need it.

• For Finding Leads:This one may sound obvious, but I do not believe that companies are using social networks enough to actively find and connect with leads.One way that this can be done is to search Twitter for terms and phrases that may indicate that someone needs help with a print job. While you certainly could search for variations of the word “print”, you also could look at companies that are exhibiting at upcoming trade shows or hosting seminars. No doubt, they may have printing needs. Social networks may allow you to quickly connect with them.

  Also, LinkedIn offers plenty of opportunities for sales reps to engage with potential prospects across the verticals that they may sell to. If you take the initiative to join and contribute to the Groups that your target audience participates in, you may increase the chances that they’ll turn to you when they need your services.

• For Finding & Recruiting New Employees: When a printer is transforming their business to offer additional marketing services, they may recognize the need to find and invest in employees that may have slightly different skill-sets than they’ve looked for in the past. You may need someone that has website design skills, that can write prolifically, or that has a passion for social networking! One way to find these people is via social networks.It’s fairly easy to search for students or recent graduates from schools that traditionally produce people that are interested in the graphic arts and printing communities. Once you find them, you may be able to find out what other passions or talents they may have, and then you’ll have the opportunity to engage them in possible employment discussions.

These are just a few of the ways that companies could use social networking to improve their business. If you’ve had any success with these, I’d love to hear about it!

To learn more about my book, “Business Transformation: A New Path to Profit for the Printing Industry”, visit  my book’s website.

“Right message, right time, right medium” is the mantra that we’ve been hearing regarding the need to make communications more relevant, personalized, and tailored to a person’s interests and preferences. One area where we’ve seen increased focus on applying this concept is in the area of customer communications, which encompasses informational, transactional, and promotional communications that are sent from an organization to its customers across a variety of mediums. More and more, those three applications of customer communication are converging, all while organizations are striving to deliver better overall customer experiences across every touchpoint with those customers.

While working to achieve higher relevance  with customer communications can have effective results, aligning both business strategy and technology continues to be challenging. Walls need to be broken down between key departments like IT, marketing, public relations, and customer service to have uniform understanding of goals with customer communication, as well as to open up information sharing. At the same time, technology also needs to be aligned, integrated, and leveraged to meet customer communications goals, and needs to be user-friendly enough for business users to easily utilize it. Aligning the right business units with each other can ensure the right technologies are used for the right application and valuable information is driving those applications.

The customer communications technology landscape itself continues to evolve as companies continue to strive for better ways to execute on their communications strategies. Overall customer experience and engagement has become one of the pillars of the business technology IT stack, and communications is a big part of that. From call center management to CRM tools and content management systems, technology is being aligned to deliver consistent, relevant, and ultimately satisfying customer experiences.

This technology stack also includes tools that enable increasingly multi-channel output, including print, e-mail, text messages, and even Web presentation. We would traditionally categorize these tools as “document composition,” although over the past five years, many of these systems have greatly expanded in scope to manage and output communications across a variety of channels. In addition, as large, enterprise IT vendors have continued to help transform customer communications for their clients, they’ve needed to leverage document composition technology to manage the “last mile” of communications output to the customer.

Because of this need, we’ve seen a spate of acquisitions of document composition technology providers by enterprise-scale vendors:

• 2004: Pitney Bowes acquires Group1 Software
  
• 2008: EMC acquires Document Sciences
• 2008: Oracle acquires Skywire Software
• 2008: HP acquires Exstream Software
• 2009: FIS acquires Metavante
• 2010: OpenText acquires StreamServe

In general, these acquisitions serve as a way to support broader objectives of enabling businesses to execute customer communications in a more seamless way. Even those vendors that remain independent maintain partnerships with large-scale vendors and have worked to ensure that their technology can integrate with a wide variety of third-party systems.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that no single technology is going to be able to enable communications that achieve the concept of “right person, right time, right medium”. Enterprise IT vendors have realized this, and have grabbed many key output technology players to integrate that component with other systems in a modular way. Businesses need to be thinking the same way: leverage the right technology where appropriate and make sure it aligns with an overarching customer communications strategy. Achieving relevance and value through delivering a great end-to-end customer experience is more attainable than ever, but it requires goal-driven business and technology alignment to realize.

While he was tramping around Peru, Peter O’Neill, a web analyst from Australia, dreamed up a blog about achieving excellence in “joined-up” marketing.

Peter concludes that the marketing management tools and web analytics that measure revenue at various online touchpoints don’t reflect the contribution of offline activities like friends’ recommendations, using multiple computers when ordering, in-store purchasing, and so on. Add in such other influences as PR, print advertising, and social media and – clearly – “What drove the sale?” becomes an inscrutable question. At least for now. But maybe not for long.

Undaunted, Peter says “The measure of success of a marketing campaign is quite simply whether the incremental profit generated was greater than the incremental marketing spend (including salary costs for people working on the campaigns) during the defined time period.”

That makes some sense, but it really doesn’t work for direct marketers who have followed Lester Wunderman since 1967, testing, measuring, adjusting, testing, measuring… and so on.

Though they didn’t admit it for years, all this weighing must have made quite an impression on TV, radio, newspaper, billboard, and print advertising folks, because — somewhere on the way to the scales — a strange thing happened. Every channel began to quietly calculate how it, too, could measure.

As extensions of traditional direct marketing, email, p-URLs, landing pages, and all other online media were naturals of course. But the guys with the scales also began to find measurable profits in infomercials, radio, publishing, television, mobile marketing, and even social media.

In fact, even though apologists had let PR and media advertising off the ROI hook for years, the first arrows shot at social media’s launch charged that nobody could measure its results.

So, is it possible to calculate ROI across multiple channels? It is. Increasingly, it is because direct marketing suggests we can.

p.s. The notion that direct mail is the only measurable non-electronic marketing media still makes it stand out in the crowd.

The environmental impacts of forestry and pulp and paper operations have been extensively investigated, reported and in certain cases exaggerated and dramatized for maximum impact, including images of clear-cut areas of forest, mill sites emitting wastewater and air emissions.  But, there is a positive side to communicate as well. Over the last three decades, the pulp and paper industry has come a long way in terms of environmental and social responsibility. In Europe and North America forestry practices and pulp and paper mill environmental performance have improved dramatically. Emissions to air, water and landfills are now a fraction of what they were 30 years ago. These positive changes have been due in part to more strict environmental regulations and major investments by leaders in the industry such as modern mills using best-available-technology (B-A-T) .

However, environmental performance is dependent on individual companies and the regions where operations are located. The strictest level of environmental enforcement is typically seen in developed nations and the least strict in developing nations. The same goes for use of B-A-T. For example, large multi-national companies may have relatively modern mill operations throughout the world whereas small or medium sized pulp and paper producers based in developing countries may still be running old technology and be faced with less regulation. One thing is clear: there has been a more significant focus on the sustainability of paper products in recent years. More paper buyers are now evaluating the environmental and social responsibility of their paper suppliers to minimize risks and develop business relationships with producers who are engaged in sustainability.

Below are some basic tips that help define “sustainable paper” based on procurement policies I have had the opportunity to review and key guidance documents such as the WBCSD / WRI Guide on Sustainable Procurement of Wood and Paper-based Products.

 1. Reduce impacts over the life cycle of paper.  

Paper has environmental impacts at all stages of its life cycle: raw material procurement including forest management, manufacturing of pulp and paper, paper distribution, transportation, recovery and disposal. The goal of sustainable production should be to lower the environmental impact, or the overall environmental footprint, of paper products over their life cycle. Reporting tools such as EPAT , Paper Profile , and the WWF Paper Scorecard  assess product performance across a wide range of indicators such as percentage of certified fibre from sustainable managed forests, recycled fibre use, water and energy use, emissions to air and water, solid waste to landfill, greenhouse gas emissions, social responsibility, certifications and reporting.

 2. Show regulatory compliance.

Most people expect companies to be in full compliance with environmental regulations. When problems happen, pulp and paper producers should show how they reacted and how they will prevent re-occurrence. Openness and transparency maintains credibility and good business relationships.

3. Promote sustainable forest management and biodiversity.

One way to prove sustainable forest management is for pulp and paper producers to certify forest land and their fiber tracing system using standards such as PEFC , SFI, and FSC . Additional initiatives can include the implementation of a biodiversity strategy or having policies against forest conversion and old-growth forest protection, to name a few. When paper products are labelled with the PEFC, SFI or FSC logos it is a sign of responsible forest management.

4. Recycle and use recycled fiber sustainably.

Recycling paper is very good practice, but sustainable use of recycled fibre means using it at the right locations and in the right paper grades based on economic and environmental considerations. In general, it makes more sense to use recycled fiber in lower end grades such as cartonboard and paperboard products (ex: packaging) than in graphic papers like magazine and catalog grades. Today, over 80% of recovered paper globally is used in packaging grades because the manufacture of these grades does not typically involve de-inking and / or bleaching (i.e. less cost and environmental impacts). Newsprint and tissue paper is also a large user of recycled fiber.

Other factors to consider are transportation distance of the recovered paper (i.e. usually near areas of large population density) and paper quality needs. In many cases, wood fiber may be a more sustainable choice providing a better balance between economic and environmental considerations. In the papermaking process, wood fiber can be recycled an estimated 4 to 7 times, after which the fiber breaks down and becomes waste. In other words, recovered paper is not an infinite source of raw material. To make the global fiber cycle work, a continual input of 35 to 65% of fresh wood fiber is needed depending on the grade of paper manufactured. If no wood fibre were used then degradation through recycling would result in the world running out of paper in within a period 6 to 18 months depending on the paper grade. Visit PaperLifecycle.org to read more on this topic.

Whether you purchase wood based or recycled paper, engagement in recycling of all paper products should be part of your life and your business. Stay tuned for “Part 2″ next week where I present the remaining tips on identifying sustainable paper.

Phil Riebel is a senior sustainability advisor to the forest, paper and print sector. He has 23 years of international experience in the sector including senior management positions in industry and consulting. Phil also owns and manages 200 acres of sustainable forest. He can be reached at philriebel@bellaliant.net

I received a press release from Pitch PR touting a Chicago-area company that’s got “a new way for business to market their services electronically/paper-free.”

For $199 a year, Pitch says a business can go green, go mobile, and “stay in touch.” It can create “electronic brochures, flyers, messages, schedules, electronic business cards, and more.”

I checked it out. The enterprise is “a property of” a real estate investment company which specializes in lease-to-own real estate and also appears to be affiliated with a now-defunct appraisal company.

In 2011, promises will be coming out of the woodwork to “help” businesses get green, mobile, and marketed. For serious marketers, this can only underscore the value of experience.

For one thing, eco-conscious direct marketers are already stomping the carbon footprint. Meanwhile, “paperless” is by no means a sure sell. Both consumers and the government are increasingly suspicious of “greenwashers,” so the pros are keeping it real.

Mobile marketing remains tricky. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says smart phone users are leery of marketing outreach to their devices and lawsuits are on the rise.

And then there’s direct mail. According to The DMA and other industry observers, in 2010 direct mail advanced as a trusted marketing medium.

That’s why, for now and in the foreseeable future, direct mail — along with all other serious opt-in direct marketing — will be the best channel standing.

By leveraging current technology, marketers can use print as a way to create a dialogue in B2C communications. Send an email, then a targeted print piece with a PURL, a microsite or QR code to increase points of contact and gather more information about the customer’s interests. In doing this, they’re saying goodbye to the old-school “spray and pray” direct mail methodology and choosing to spend more on the piece to ensure its visibility and return on investment. So what does folding have to do with it? Successful direct mail involves the alignment of several variables, and choice of folding style is one of these variables, however so is color palette, text and imagery, paper choice, layout, format and even schedule. Below is a list of questions addressing machinability for direct mail. I’ll be posting in the future about envelope choice, tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most out of your DM investment.

Is one fold better than another at getting the most into a standard letter envelope?

Not really. There are always different configurations for folding paper that can get a very large amount of information into a compact size. When designing for folded materials, what is most important is to focus on the organization and reveal of the content so that it does not confuse the recipient, and the placement of critical marketing messages. I always suggest that you mock up your layout and hand it to a few people to make sure the message is properly communicated. If your small test group doesn’t get it, your mailing audience won’t get it, either, and you should rework your layout and test again.

What are the most effective machinable folds for direct mail?

The key to successful machine production for direct mail is closed edges. Perfect example – the accordion fold is notoriously problematic for both self-mailing and for auto-inserting. The trouble is caused by the format—accordions don’t have a closed edge. The open sides make it very difficult, if not impossible, to auto insert, and if it’s self-mailing it’ll need four tabs to seal both sides. Expensive and unattractive. However, if you choose a wrapped accordion (see illustration), you get the accordion experience you’re looking for with its pull-out panels, but you also get a closed edge, which changes the tab requirement and offers a closed edge for inserting. So, sometimes you can get what you want with a little creativity.

How important is machinability for direct mail?

I’ll answer a question with a question: How important is it that you don’t throw money away? I see it all the time—a really great design built in a format that instantly adds a .20 per piece non-machinable surcharge to the mailing budget. Why???? I have samples in my collection that miss USPS aspect ratio by 1/8 inch. It’s silly. What a mindless and costly mistake. In my opinion, there are two things to consider when talking about machine production—machinability of the fold and machinability for mailing. Unless you don’t care at all about the budget, ideally, you should aim for a maximum of one of the two options, but never both. For example, if you’re printing a fairly short run, you may choose a unique folding style that has to be hand folded, but you should try to produce it in a format that is within USPS aspect ratio. Or, similar scenario, design a machinable fold in a square format if you must, however, your most efficient solution will always be machinable fold in a machinable mail format.

Editors Note:  You can find more ideas from Trish at the foldfactory 3-D sample library and watch short videos of hundreds of folding ideas that will be sure to add some variety to the everyday.