The ABCs of Signage
Signs, or signage, are so commonplace that their importance can be taken for granted. The International Sign Association (ISA) published a study indicating that when a sign was added on a previously blank side of a building, sales increased anywhere between 2.5% and 7.1%. Most small business owners know they need signage, but too many think of them as merely a marker identifying the business –certainly not a powerful marketing tool. The fact is, when designed effectively, a sign can be a part of a solid integrated marketing strategy that...
read moreTell Me What You Want
(What You Really, Really Want) Do you know what your customers really want? Gathering customer feedback can help you: • Gain a better understanding of why customers do business with you • Increase your customer retention and loyalty • Quickly solve customer challenges before they become major problems • Develop new products and services that generate additional customer purchases According to Kyle LaMalfa, best practices director and loyalty expert for Allegiance, a company that specializes in employee and...
read moreFuel Your Next Promotion
Too many small businesses shy away from data management practices, usually because they don’t think they are big enough and/or they don’t know how to get started. The truth is, small companies can benefit greatly from keeping their customer data clean and implementing some simple controls to ensure ongoing data quality. At Dynamark Printing, our list hygiene services ensure the data you are working with is as clean as possible. Not only can we append your mailing list with any missing data, we can save you money by improving deliverability...
read more5 Ways to Balance Multiple Hats
If you’re like most small business owners, the success of your business depends on your ability to wear multiple hats to keep your business operating. This can sometimes overwhelm even the most capable entrepreneur. Nellie Akalp, CEO of CorpNet, offers these suggestions for managing your multiple responsibilities: 1. Identify your various responsibilities—both income-generating and operational—and set clear goals for each. 2. Make time to work on your business. It’s easy to get lost in the daily grind. Be sure to dedicate time each...
read moreOne-to-One Marketing
One-to-one marketing, also known as personalized marketing, involves incorporating a recipient’s personal data, such as name, address, or last purchased item into a brochure, direct mail postcard or flyer, and/or embedded in an email and developed into a personalized URL and web page/microsite. While the degree of personalization is highly dependent on the amount of data and information an organization has about its target audiences, one-to-one marketing has been shown to greatly increase response rates. At Dynamark Printing, we can help you...
read moreDesign is the Key
The purpose of design is to provide a visual illustration of a specific message, but certain fundamentals must be considered for the message to be conveyed effectively. For instance, who makes up the audience that will see the end design? Are they young or old? Consumers or business professionals? These and other characteristics must be taken into account when choosing colors, images and other design elements. The simple rule of “less is more” certainly applies to design. While there are many captivating images that can convey a message,...
read moreBundled Communications
If your company is moving toward customer experience-based employee incentives, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Developing an effective compensation system that links customer satisfaction to employee rewards requires a clear understanding of what your customers expect, what “satisfaction” means to them, and how that affects your bottom line. At Dynamark, we can help you develop and implement an email survey strategy to determine how well your company is meeting customer expectations. In addition to designing an email template that...
read moreNot Over-Write It
Why are some articles fun to read while others are impossible to get through? Unless you are writing a Master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertation, your writing should not be overly formal or stuffy. Rather, it should be professional and informative with a relatively friendly tone. Whether you are writing a blog post, website copy, a sales letter or a brochure, if your writing turns people off, you can bet they won’t be doing business with you any time soon. To keep your writing less formal, sit down with a colleague and tape record yourself...
read moreTest … Test … Test
Whether you use direct mail, email or both, testing and refinement can help to improve the effectiveness of your marketing. By varying or testing elements of a direct mail campaign — such as the mailing list, design, copy, call to action or response mechanism — over multiple mailings, you can continually hone your marketing and improve your response rates. Generally speaking, there are three direct mail testing and refinement processes: • Baselining. Establishing baseline response rates allows you to set expectations for...
read moreMaking Sense of It All
Managers can’t take advantage of business opportunities unless they see them clearly. In today’s fast-paced, information-overloaded environment, making information actionable means making it fit for use; in other words, making it meaningful in the context of the decisions at hand and organized in such a way as to get its meaning across quickly. According to Jane Linder and Drew Phelps of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, the best way to make information actionable is to design it to communicate visually. When a clutter of raw...
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