Dynamark Graphics Group

Bundled Communications

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:41:13 +0000

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 reflects your brand image, we can help you manage your email lists, develop a schedule and send your email surveys on time. We can even help you monitor the responses and analyze the data.

Along with regularly gauging your customers’ satisfaction, you’ll also need to rethink the training and tools your employees receive. Dynamark can help there too, by producing your training materials quickly and cost-effectively. We can also produce the tools your customer-facing employees need — such as motivational posters, procedure guides and more — to help them maximize customer experience at every opportunity.

Rewarding the Right Behavior

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:33:04 +0000

Despite the growing recognition that customer experience matters, most employee compensation programs continue to be based on revenue targets. Andrew McInnes, customer experience analyst at Forrester Research, believes that as more companies acknowledge the effect that customer experience has on their bottom lines, they will begin to add customer feedback scores to their incentive structures along with the more traditional business performance metrics.

According to McInnes, the process of establishing customer experience-based employee incentives has to start with building awareness of the reasons why customer experience is important. For example, employees need to understand that positive customer experience can result in an increased share of wallet and repeat business. They also need to realize that repeated negative interactions can cause that same customer to take his or her business elsewhere.

Obviously, companies will need to track and measure customer satisfaction in order to identify key performance indicators. To ensure that the right things are being measured, companies should conduct qualitative research to identify key measures or attributes of what’s important to customers. McInnes recommends that managers clearly explain the metrics that employees are responsible for, how those metrics relate to their jobs, and how employees can impact key measures through their daily work. After all, if employees don’t agree that the measures are valid and accurate, the program could fail to yield the desired operational and behavioral changes.

How does using paper lead to more trees?

admin — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:34:37 +0000

If America’s private landowners can’t make money as tree farmers, many will turn to other income sources for the land. The U.S. could lose 44 million acres of forest to development in the next 30 years.
What can be done?

Understand Forest Ownership

Land provides social, recreational and financial benefits. It can generate revenue for owners in many ways — one of the most environmentally friendly is by growing trees. Because 70 percent of U.S. forestland is privately owned, it is imperative that both the social and economic incentives to continue growing trees outweigh the financial rewards of sacrificing forests to development.

See the Forest and the trees

Have you heard someone suggest that by using less paper you can “save a tree”? The fact is, that when the demand for paper declines, tree farming also declines, taking all of the important ecological impacts like clean water and wildlife habitat right along with it. So if you decide to decrease your use of paper, don’t think you’re going to “save a tree.” The reality is that decreasing paper use may well cause a forest somewhere to be replaced by development.

The future of our forests depends on slowing the conversion of these precious resources and by managing them sustainably to ensure their economic, social and environmental benefits for generations to come. That means we’ve got to provide not only the financial incentive but also the education and tools for responsible forest management.

Not Over-Write It

admin — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:17:34 +0000

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 explaining why your products and/or services are the best and what it is you are offering. Transcribe the tape and you will have an excellent rough draft.
Next, edit the rough draft, keeping your sentences short and punchy. Be sure to vary sentences to make your writing more interesting. The more you keep your readers reading, the more likely you will be to make a sale.

Leveraging Customer Insight for More Targeted Communications

admin — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:12:30 +0000

Staying relevant, valued and connected to customers — in other words, deepening the engagement — has become the number one challenge for marketers according to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, Routes to Revenue.
In the report, marketers identified tactics and strategies that they feel are critical to deepening engagement. Nearly 60 percent said they intend to improve customer segmentation, profiling and targeting, while 30 percent reported that they were embracing more personalized, multichannel communications across all customer touch points.
Tailoring and targeting communications on an individual level to improve marketing campaign response can be accomplished fairly easily by using mass-customization technologies in print and digital channels. The problem is that the ability to tailor and target depends largely on a company’s ability to understand its customers across the entire relationship lifecycle. This understanding in turn requires continuous tracking of purchasing activity, buying intention, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities as well as a strong commitment to customer data integration (CDI).
The conclusion of the report is that marketers must start now – regardless of current levels of CDI – to better leverage customer insight and to better understand messaging and content preferences. Only then can they deliver more compelling, relevant and actionable communications at the right place, at the right time and through the most preferred format or channel of communication that will influence behavior and trigger purchases.

QC- May 2011

admin — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:21:40 +0000

Colgate faced a significant obstacle when marketing toothpaste in Spanish-speaking countries.

Colgate translates into the command:
A. Go hang yourself
B. Take a hike
C. Stand on your head
D. Jump off a bridge

QC Answer: A. Go hang yourself

Is it worth printing?

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:33:06 +0000

PRINT NOT ONLY PAYS OFF — it pays back to the environment. It’s true. When you use paper, you’re making a contribution to the environment by keeping forests growing and responsibly managed. These are facts that are worth repeating.

• Roughly 600 million trees are planted every year by the paper and forest products industry, surpassing the amount harvested.

• Improved forest management, regeneration of forest areas and selective tree harvesting have resulted in a net uptake (sequestration) of carbon from 1990 to 2005. This is because older, un-managed forests lose their ability to sequester carbon.

• Many climate experts believe that the responsible management of forests offers one of the least expensive and best ways to fight against climate change.

• The paper and forest products industry is one of the largest users of low-carbon energy in the world. Nearly 60 percent of the energy used to make paper in the U.S. comes from carbon-neutral renewable resources and is produced on site at mills.

• Nearly 60 percent of all paper in the U.S. is recycled. In comparison, less than 20 percent of U.S. electronic devices are recycled.

• Of the wood extracted from the world’s forests, 53 percent is used for energy production, 28 percent is used by lumber mills and only 11 percent is used directly by the paper industry.

DOWN TO EARTH INSIGHT
The facts support printing as a responsible way to maximize your marketing budget when correctly targeted. The industry is accountable for its actions and has steadily improved its environmental footprint over the years. When the demand for paper diminishes, it contributes to our forestlands being sold for other crops or for development purposes. Using paper helps give landowners an incentive for growing and responsibly managing forests. It’s worth printing.

Test … Test … Test

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:54:59 +0000

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 improvement.

• A/B Testing. This refers to the process of changing one element at a time to gauge the results. This is usually done with a small subset of your mailing list so that you can apply the benefits learned during A/B testing to the rest of your list, leading to a more cost-effective campaign.

• Multi-Variate Testing. This testing method is often used for multiple, large mailings and refers to the process of changing multiple elements of a campaign at the same time.

At Dynamark, we can help you improve your marketing through direct mail testing and refinement. Call us when you’re ready for your next big campaign.

Becoming a Better Listener

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:49:02 +0000

A good listener not only hears what is being said, but listens, responds and acts accordingly. People who are considered good listeners are sought out by colleagues and friends. Likewise, companies that are considered good listeners are rewarded by a higher level of customer loyalty.

According to Forrester Research, despite the widespread use of customer feedback programs, fewer than a third of firms contacted closely monitor the quality of their interactions with target customers or systematically incorporate customer needs into decision-making processes. In other words, companies are hearing what their customers are saying, but they are not really listening. What’s worse, they are not acting on the insights collected.

Listening to the voices of the customers should not be only the job of customer service or marketing; it needs to be the responsibility of everyone at all levels of the organization. In fact, managers across all departments must use the information to prioritize actions that need to be taken. According to Melissa Wozniak, market research and product development manager for Texans Credit Union, “Employee attitudes, prices, products and services all combine to provide a single satisfactory experience.”

More importantly, customers don’t want their feedback acted on months from now; they want to see changes made swiftly. Tools such as conversation mining and social media monitoring allow for real-time customer insight, but not real-time response. After all, combing through qualitative information, distilling out real issues and prioritizing actions take time. However, the companies that make these activities a priority will be the ones who win in the end.

QC – January 2011

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:06:28 +0000

Which US president declared Christmas a national holiday?

A. Ulysses S. Grant
B. Grover Cleveland
C. Theodore Roosevelt
D. Woodrow Wilson

A. President Ulysses S. Grant declared Christmas a legal holiday in 1870.