Dynamark Graphics Group

Print Grows Trees

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:51:25 +0000

Renew Your Ideas About Print

Print on paper gives landowners a reason to grow trees. More than half of all U.S. forestland is owned privately. Private landowners decide the fate of these forests. Many require an income from their land, and when a working forest cannot make money, the land is often put to another use. Research shows that 55 million acres of private U.S. forests will be sold or transferred in the next five years. With no financial incentive to grow trees, will these forests be converted permanently to other uses?

QC-May 2012

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:21:43 +0000

See how savvy you are with our Dynamark Quiz.
Which American president gave us the Maxwell House coffee slogan?
A.   Abraham Lincoln
B.   Grover Cleveland
C.   Woodrow Wilson
D.   Theodore Roosevelt

Answer: D. Teddy Roosevelt visited the real-life Maxwell House hotel in New Orleans and commented that its coffee was “good to the last drop!”

Brand Promotion 101

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:48:27 +0000

Today’s business world is a highly competitive marketplace, but with the right promotional product you can help your customers remember you over the competition. A study conducted by Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) revealed that 91% of people had at least one promotional product in their kitchen and 74% had at least one in their work area.
At Dynamark Printing, we can help you integrate a promotional product into a complete direct marketing campaign. You might also consider using them for:
•   Customer goodwill and retention
•   Trade shows
•   Employee relations
•   Brand awareness
•   Public relations
•   New customer/account generation
•   Not-for-profit programs
•   Internal promotions
•   New product/service introductions
Whatever your marketing goals, let us show you how you can generate new customers—and all the sales that go with them over the lifetime of their loyalty— just from the impression made with a promotional product.

The Enduring Effectiveness of Promotional Products

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:45:17 +0000

For more than 200 years, promotional products have integrated their way into daily life, serving not only as useful tools, but as powerful, long-lasting advertising. But how do recipients feel about receiving promotional products? What purpose do they think such items serve? What actions do they take? These are questions every advertiser should know and understand, as the answers can have a significant impact on their ROI. In an effort to answer some of these questions, the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) conducted a study fielded by MarketTools Inc. When respondents were asked to think of a promotional product they’d received in the past two years and to recall the specific product, advertiser and message, a whopping 76.2% were able to remember all three key pieces of information. The study also found that, if free promotional products were being handed out by an advertiser at an event, mall or tradeshow, 23% of respondents would pick up the item no matter what it was, and 69% would pick it up only if they found it to be useful. Additionally, 48% of respondents reported that they would like to receive promotional products more often, and 38% felt that they do indeed serve as a constant reminder of the advertiser. Businesses are continually challenged to find new ways to cut through the clutter. According to this PPAI survey, promotional products are a great way to not only reach your target audiences, but more importantly, to resonate with them.

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