We ARE! The 61 Percent!

January 26th, 2012

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – January, 2012

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Protesters

In a recent study, 61% of marketers said their two biggest challenges were producing quality content that engaged their readers and creating enough of it. That’s no surprise. We hear that all the time from our clients. The most frustrating thing is that we also hear the same thing from our prospects!

OK, just to be clear here – we create content for companies that need articles for newsletters, blogs, web sites, trade show collateral, and more. We are branching out into other industries, but many of our prospects are in the document industry where we have over 30 years of experience. So the relevancy part shouldn’t really be an issue.

We’re pretty much the solution for the 61 percenters!

However, there are some companies who really want to create their own content. If you’re one of them, I’ve put together 4 quick tips to help you write pieces that will keep your content relevant and engaging.

Be clear about your objectives
Do you want to entice prospects to visit your web site, schedule a demo, find out more about your products and services, or add their names to your mailing list? If you have only a vague idea like “make more sales” you need to refine your understanding of process prospects go through to become buyers.

Speak to your audience
Who is going to read your material? Corporate executives, financial people, operations folks, middle management? This is important so that you can choose topics that are important to your audience and use language that is appropriate for that group. Using a bunch of acronyms and geek speak to communicate with a CFO if probably a mistake.

Craft strong headlines or subject lines
I can’t tell you how many emails I get with a subject line that contains some variation of “Company X Newsletter for June”. Those don’t exactly spark my enthusiasm for reading the content. Issues, questions, and statements make for good for headlines and subject lines. I rarely start a writing project with the headline, but write it after I’ve finished the article. That way I’ll be sure the headline is consistent with the content. Don’t bait and switch!

Design for easy consumption
This has become even more important as more people use mobile devices. Try using short sentences, write in an active voice, and avoid long blocks of text. I use all kinds of things to break up my content into pieces that are easily scanned like sub-headings, bullets, text boxes, side bars, and embedded quotes. And please keep the length of the content appropriate for the intended purpose and distribution channel. We try to keep newsletter articles in the 500-750 word length for example.

There are plenty more aspects of creating quality content, but following these four suggestions can be a pretty good start. If you find yourself getting stuck or you just can’t keep up with the demand, give us a call. We’ll lift you out of that 61 percent!

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You’re Probably Missing Some Money

January 26th, 2012

Worried man with moneyFrom the Practical Stuff Newsletter – January, 2012

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Are you making money on every job you run in your shop? Before you answer, think about whether you are positive you’ve accounted for all the expenses associated with each job from the time it’s estimated until it is billed. There may be some parts of the workflow that are costing more than you planned.

Here are some examples:

• A sub-standard perforation in some customer-supplied paper causes printers to jam or pages to tear. These events lead to longer production times and manual operations to handle an excessive number of reprints.

• Jobs sometimes sit on a cart and get forgotten. At the end of the day you realize the driver from the presort house has come and gone so you meter the mail at full rate and make an extra trip to the post office to meet service level agreements.

• You based your postage quotes on 5-digit presort qualification but over time your customer’s mail volume has dwindled. You’re now paying 3-digit rates most of the time. Invoicing has never been updated.

• Jobs that were quoted based on machine inserting consistently include high page-count items. Inserter operators just walk them over to the manual inserting crew. No billing adjustment is made.

• Shoddy material causes inserter operators to slow the machine to avoid excessive jams. Labor for this portion of the workflow is 150% of the budgeted amount.

• Your estimating software is an Excel spreadsheet. Job steps sometimes don’t get included in the estimate – so they don’t get billed.

• You found a job jacket from six months ago in the warehouse behind a case of envelopes. The job got finished but never billed. How many other cases are there like this?

There are lots of small incidents that can happen during a work day that can increase your costs or cause you to under bill. You’ve probably built a cushion into the pricing to cover an occasional operational problem. But if you have chronic issues on repetitive jobs it can eat away at your profitability. Unless you have a workflow system that captures costs you may never know.

Inefficient manual workflows
Many shops I’ve visited spend lots of time doing things like keying information generated by one software system into another or running sequential processes over and over again. Estimates, order entry, job scheduling, postage deposits, inventory, and billing are all separate processes. Job cost data is randomly captured and rarely reviewed.

Besides being error-prone and inefficient, the scattering of information across an assemblage of spreadsheets, accounting software, and word processing systems makes analyzing profitability at the job level nearly impossible.

Fixing the problems
There are software solutions that help shops get a grasp on what is going on in document operations, how much it costs, and where changes need to be made. Installing one of these tools can streamline your workflow and collect all the relevant data in a single database. From there, you can run reports that will help you see where pricing needs to be adjusted.

These tools may also include some rules administration functionality that prevent costly quoting mistakes or they can issue alerts when something isn’t going as planned.

Identifying trouble spots and recommending solutions is one of our most-requested services. It often requires the objectivity of an outside expert to recognize the best opportunities to improve operational workflows. Please call us if you suspect you have profitability leaks that are hidden from view.

In an extremely competitive marketplace, small advantages can make a difference. Using available technology to make sure that every job is profitable may be just what you need to survive a rough patch or grow your business.

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Buyer Personas: Useful Information or Marketing Geek Speak?

December 29th, 2011

From the Customer Retention NOW! newsletter – December, 2011group of businesspeople

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If you shudder every time you think about some of the popular marketing lingo that gets thrown around these days, you’re not alone. Brand equity, content channels, CTR, effective frequency, symbiotic marketing, page views, permission marketing, drip campaigns, double opt-in, lead nurturing, viral marketing… the list goes on and on.

One term that used to really get me worried was “buyer persona”. It sounded like something that was part science and part psychological voodoo. I thought that trying to sell by taking advantage of a “persona” was one step away from subliminal advertising.

But it’s not like that at all. And, surprisingly, it’s not that hard to identify the personas of your customers and then use that information to improve the way you communicate with them. I found there are some distinct advantages to this approach – some I anticipated and some that I didn’t. If you take the time to consider your own buyer personas you might recognize similar benefits.

I’ve written a short guide that will lead you through the steps you need to take to get a handle on how your customers and prospects differ from one another. This guide will not only show you what to do, but will also give you some ideas about how to use what you’ve learned.

Download the Buyer Persona Development Guide.

Inexpensive and do-able
The first thing you need to realize is that you’ve already got everything you need to develop buyer personas (or “profiles” if that term is more comfortable for you). Do not go out and spend money on large-scale surveys, telemarketers, or outside lists. You don’t need those things – at least not to get started – and you’ll only make the process more complicated than it needs to be.

Next, put aside all your anxieties and insecurities about doing a controlled scientific analysis. Yes, there are companies that will happily charge you large sums of money to conduct this kind of study in a standardized and documented environment. You may decide that’s what you need at some point. But why not start with something a lot simpler, even if it does involve some intuitiveness in place of cold hard analytics?

Finally, be willing to be just a little creative. One of the steps I recommend involves inventing some facts and generalizations about each of your buyer personas. This is pure fiction, so let your mind wander. You won’t be acting on any of these generalizations directly but it really helps – especially months down the line when you are considering content and campaigns. By then the details of your buyer persona development project may be a little fuzzy. Imagining the personas as real individuals definitely makes these processes easier.

I’m always here to help, so if you get stuck just let me know. I’m also interested in hearing how you thought your project went or how you applied the Buyer Persona Development Guide to fit your particular situation. Just drop me an email to tell me about it. I’d love to hear from you.

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Document Operations Strategies: 2012

December 27th, 2011

From the Practical Stuff newsletter – December, 2011

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This is the time of year that I normally write about strategies to be considered by document print and mail operations for the coming year. There are usually some trends I’ve been watching. Most years I can make some educated guesses about best practices that will help our clients and other newsletter subscribers be more successful over the next 12 months.

This year that’s going to be tough to do.

The only trend I can honestly see for sure is one of continued uncertainty. And most of it is not our fault! Like practically every other industry you could name, the document industry is at the mercy of events that are far beyond our control.

In the United States, we’ve got a federal government that doesn’t seem to be able to function for the benefit of the citizens. There are extreme political influences that are skewing the judgment of elected officials to the point that even simple decisions are in danger, for fear of giving an advantage to the other side or losing votes in an election year.

The most obvious victims of government gamesmanship in our industry are the US Postal Service along with the companies and individuals who are directly affected by how the USPS is structured and how people use it. There will probably be continued ideas, plans, predictions and threats flying around in 2012. Maybe there will be some significant movement on funding, service standards, and facilities before the elections in November. Maybe not.

Worldwide, there’s the economy, social unrest, big money influences, and power struggles that will undoubtedly have an effect on our businesses in 2012.

So what do we do?

My advice is to stay as informed as possible and make adjustments when necessary.

All that being said, I do think we should be cautious about holding onto long-standing practices and philosophies that may not be as relevant in 2012 and beyond. Like it or not, the way humans communicate with one another is changing. We need to recognize what is not working so well anymore and create new approaches.

As they relate to the document business (or the communications business if you prefer), here are a few idle thoughts about the coming year. You can wash these down with your eggnog…

Communication Channels
Physical documents will continue to play a part. But there’s no way that anyone can rely upon only printed materials anymore. Expect printed documents to play a smaller part.

Be open to using a combination of methods to communicate with customers. Concentrate on finding ways of coordinating all those little snippets of conversations and indicators that are scattered across multiple platforms into a comprehensive customer profile and communication history.

Personalization
One-size-fits-all no longer meets the expectations of customers. They want to be treated like individuals and they want to communicate on a schedule they prescribe. This means going beyond the simple practice of plugging variable data fields into documents. For an industry built on high-volume batch processing, this is a new direction.

Accuracy
As communications become more individualized and on-demand, accuracy is becoming more important than ever. And privacy is a huge concern. If you’re in the business of creating or distributing documents, 2012 is the year to assess your document integrity processes and risk of violating customer privacy.

Volume-Based Decisions
As print and mail volumes decrease, decisions about investments in hardware, software, and facilities to support document production are going to be questioned. Interest in consolidating or outsourcing some of these functions may be high on the list of cost-cutting measures considered by finance managers. Managers of in-house operations that believe their departments may be in jeopardy will want to have current facts, figures, and justifications for maintaining an in-house capability within easy reach. They should also be ready to suggest strategies that lower their costs or increase their value to their companies.

2012 may be another distressing year for the document industry. But it is sure to be interesting!

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Like your search engine ranking? Better Keep Publishing!

November 28th, 2011

Magnifying glass manI talk to a lot of companies who try all kinds of things to get their products and services noticed. Since most of the organizations we support with our writing services are small to medium-sized, it’s sometimes a difficult task for them. They just don’t have the money to spend on advertising. That lack of budget frequently extends to any kind of paid search strategy. So they rely on organic search results to boost their search engine ranking with industry keywords.

Nothing wrong with that. We’ve been doing it for years. In fact, the clients for whom we create articles and other content published on web sites, blogs and other outlets benefit greatly from the exposure enabled by these items. The search engines notice our customer’s URL’s posted in various places across the internet and bump listings for those companies higher in the search results lists.

Google Rewards Frequency
Recently, Google revised their quality standards for content. They are always changing their scoring criteria, but this last move will have a positive effect on those that publish regularly and punish those who do not. The new algorithm places more of an emphasis on fresh content.

We’ve always recommended that you set a reasonably-attainable publishing schedule and then stick to it. But now it seems more important than ever.

Consistently creating high-quality informational content that your customers and prospects will value is no small feat. Just take a look at the web sites of some vendors in your industry and you’ll notice quite a few that may have started out blogging every week, sending out monthly newsletters, adding news items to their web sites, or posting on social media. Eventually the publishing intervals become longer and longer. Sometimes publishing stops altogether, resulting in embarrassingly outdated material. This is especially true for smaller organizations who don’t have dedicated writers on staff.

Take a look at your own site with an objective eye and you might even find the same situation. It’s one of those things that can happen relatively unnoticed while you’re out there attending to daily business challenges.

Emerging from a dormant condition or increasing your content creating efforts may seem daunting. Who will write all that content, who will edit it, what will you write about?

It should come as no surprise that Print/Mail Consultants can handle those challenges for you through our Writing Services offerings (see the video below for a short overview). But if you want to tackle the burden of creating more content, more often, on your own, here are three hints that may make your efforts more constructive.

Plan your topics - This makes a big difference in getting over a dilemma that handcuffs so many writers. I make notes whenever I think of a possible topic and then refer to that list frequently at writing time.

Get others involved - If you’re the person who usually writes all the content for the company, go find some help. Look in customer service, technical support, or sales for people who can contribute something every once in a while.

Be accountable- Making a promise does wonders for motivation. I’ve made commitments to magazine editors and I’ve never missed a deadline. It’s been close at times, but I know they are counting on my column or article. Letting them down is not an option.

If you need more inspiration from time to time, don’t forget about our 90-Second Content Marketing Lessons. I record a new lesson every month and post the links on Twitter and Linked In. Who knows? One of those short tips may be just what you need to get your content-creation machine back on track!

Unless your product or company is a household name, you’d better show up on the first page or two of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search results. If prospects search for key words related to your business and only your competitors are listed, you may never even get a chance to present your solution. Consistently publishing and distributing content is one way to accomplish this objective without paying for it directly.

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Sweet Deal: Second Ounce Free

November 14th, 2011

By now you’ve probably heard about the postage increase slated for January 22, 2012. The increase was expected – part of the annual USPS process that allows for pricing adjustments within the limits specified under current law. According to the announcement, the rate increases will average 2.1%.

As in the past, different classifications of mail will experience varying degrees of rate changes. Some will go up more than 2.1%, others less.

Free Postage! Will You Be Ready?
One item that transactional mailers should celebrate is a change in First Class Presort. Beginning January 22, the second ounce on this kind of mail will be free. Yes, FREE! This change can open up lots of possibilities for transactional mailers who may have been thinking about adding promotional or educational content to their statements or bills. If you’ve been looking for a way to satisfy the marketing department’s requirements without adding pages that would push mail into the more expensive two-ounce tier, this new development may be an opportunity.

Adding an extra page to handle the transpromo, cross-channel, or transeducational material means you don’t have to compromise the transactional portions of the document by reducing font sizes or skimping on the white space. Even companies that use composition software that does not support white space management can take advantage of the free second ounce. They can generate transactional documents along with advertising, notifications, or educational content pages without paying extra postage.

Pick Your Benefit – But Think it Through
There are other benefits as well. Opportunities are related to householding, distribution frequency, material modifications, and paid advertising. The USPS “two for one” program could be a source of significant cost savings or product improvements. It all depends on your particular operation, workflow, and documents. At Print/Mail Consultants we’ll be working with our clients to help them evaluate options and point out areas where they can take advantage of this program. I suggest you do the same.

I can also think of dozens of decisions that might negatively impact productivity and quality in a shop that wants to maximize the free postage benefit. One must understand the limits before inviting organizations like marketing or advertising sales to freely add weight to your envelopes.

Adding to your page count or making any of the other changes that can add volume or weight to your mail pieces requires a careful analysis of the document workflow. Do your performance commitments allow for enough time to print those extra pages? Will you be able to get them all inserted in time? Will thicker envelopes result in more jams and reprints? The ramifications could be far-ranging.

We’ll be helping our clients avoid the pitfalls, too.

Almost every mailer can benefit from this new pricing from the USPS. Start making plans now. The sooner you implement the changes that make sense for you, the sooner your benefits will start to accumulate.

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Confused Customers = Poor Results

October 13th, 2011

Are you confusing your customers? Not on purpose of course, but is it possible that your messages and communications across various communication channels are inconsistent? Failure to pay attention to how your messages work together can lead to wandering and misguided customers and prospects. Not exactly the best way to attract new business and maintain customer loyalty!

I just put together a new presentation for commercial printers that included ideas about ways to forge stronger customer relationships. Part of that presentation included several examples from companies that were using direct mail to promote certain products or aspects of their companies. We saw many cases where the printed material didn’t match up. The additional content that customers saw when they scanned the QR code on the document was often entirely unrelated.

In some instances, customer acquisition mailings referred prospects to web landing pages that focused on services that were available only to existing customers. And several marketers seemed to think that sending prospects to their home page (that didn’t even mention the offer in the mail piece) was the way to go.

Important Concepts – Regardless of the Channel
This lack of relevance and consistency isn’t limited to direct mail elements. The same things happen with email blasts, ads, and newsletters. Maybe you’ve had this experience: An email or an ad got your attention and you clicked through to find out more – then spent a considerable amount of time looking for references to the offer or item that piqued your interest. How long did you continue to search? If they can’t find it quickly, most customers give up before ever locating the material.

There’s nothing wrong with using your company home page as the default landing site if the purpose of your direct mail or emailed message is simply to build brand awareness. The tactic can deliver long term results. But it’s been our experience that customers and prospects usually need a more specific reason to click through. Providing that reason is your first objective. Effectively handling customers after they take the desired action is quite another.

Guiding Customers Toward Your Objectives
You’ve got only a short time to grab the reader’s attention. The path to the content that enticed customers to come to your site should be immediately obvious from the home page. If it’s not, you’re better off utilizing a landing page that is specific to the offer or the content described in your outbound message. An added bonus from this approach are visitor metrics that you can attribute to a specific campaign, version, ad, etc. These statistics are harder to develop if you use the same landing page every time.

The other mistake we see a lot is failing to identify a clear call to action. If a prospect has taken the time to scan your QR code, or clicked through on a link to your landing page, they demand your attention. These individuals are more important, at least at that point in time, than the rest of the people on your distribution list that didn’t respond to your message at all.

Your marketing strategy worked! Be sure you take advantage by collecting a new bit of information from those who respond or by giving them ample opportunities to continue the conversation that they decided to start. They took you up on your offer of additional content, so their level of interest is fairly high.

This action on your part doesn’t necessarily have to happen only on the landing page. It may make sense to move certain customers or prospects into a pre-defined sequence of follow-up messages based upon the new knowledge you just acquired about their areas of interest.

Tracking Individuals
Linking individual customers to specific follow-up sequences naturally requires some sort of customer identification. This may be accomplished by collecting the information, such as an email address, on the landing page. Companies who ask for customer information before granting access to white papers or other resources employ this approach. Or you may utilize technologies such as PURLS to link the original outbound messages to customers. This too enables the marketer to track and record individual customer actions.

Not everyone will be ready to monitor the activity of individual customers or alter subsequent message strategy at such a fine level of detail. That’s perfectly OK. Just be sure that no matter what, your messages, particularly those that are linked together in some way, are consistent, achieve your campaign objectives, and deliver on the promises made to the customers.

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Print and Mail – A Risky Business

October 8th, 2011

GlovesDiceRoll

Have you thought about privacy and security lately? It’s worthwhile to periodically review how your document workflow protects the private information that may be flowing through your shop. Over time, new jobs come in and documents can change. Government regulations can change too. These events can render long-standing security procedures inadequate or obsolete. Revising the procedures to meet the current needs is a simple way to avoid the disaster that a privacy violation can become.

And there’s always the human factor to consider. We’ve seen it happen over and over in different print/mail operations – after months of never detecting an error the employees start taking short cuts with quality control. Oh, the sign-offs may still get done, but the processes meant to prevent the accidental disclosure of private information aren’t faithfully followed. Unless there is repetitive reinforcement by management, including some in-person observation and double-checking, mistakes that should have been caught make it out the door.

At Risk: Your company, your department, and you
The exposure to risk is fairly high considering the volume of mail generated by most of our clients. A single mistake that results in a mail recipient getting access to private information belonging to another customer can spark a firestorm of knee-jerk reactions from executive management and other consequences. And a misguided employee who tries to use protected information for his own benefit can set off a public relations nightmare.

Certainly mistakes can happen. And it’s pretty hard to keep a trusted employee from taking advantage of whatever weakness he can find in your data and document workflow if he really wants to. But not having preventative measures and training established, or not following the procedures as prescribed can make things even worse.

Besides the ethical and legal difficulties an organization and its management might encounter as the result of a privacy breach, there are other considerations as well. If you are an outsource service provider a perceived lack of oversight could lead to the loss of business – not only from the affected customer but from others as well. And for in-plant operations who are always justifying their value to corporate financial people that want to outsource their work, a preventable security problem could become an indefensible incident. Jobs will be lost – maybe even yours.

Many shops have adopted automated solutions that take human error and inattention out of the equation. Elements of an automated document factory (ADF) can look at every printed document and every mail piece, stopping the operation and issuing alerts should something seem unusual. But not everyone has those capabilities. Budget constraints may have prevented operations managers from investing in all the technology that is necessary to prevent errors or detect them when they occur at any place in the workflow. They may have integrity controls on the inserters, for example, but not on the printers or at the hand work stations. Or they may not have automated reprint capabilities, leaving them exposed to uncatchable errors in a manually-intensive process. Perhaps surprisingly, there are still plenty of shops that rely on the clipboard and batch-balancing approach to quality control.

Here’s a secret – follow the procedures
You work with what you’ve got. You set up procedures within your means to at least catch errors before the mail leaves your facility. But mistakes can still happen. Usually, they could have been prevented.

In over three decades of working in print and mail operations I have witnessed exactly one operational mistake that couldn’t have been caught by any of the existing procedures in the shop. That was a fluke that couldn’t be duplicated and remains unexplained to this day. All the rest of the errors that made it into the mail would have been prevented or caught had procedure been followed.

Schedule reviews
Reinforcing the rules, regularly examining the processes for vulnerabilities, and employee training are necessary to ensure that operator and supervisor procedures are taken seriously and performed as specified. I have even been known to purposely generate catchable errors when I suspected that the staff was slacking. Serving the same purpose as a pop quiz in high school, intentionally testing the system can keep the group on their toes and paying attention.

We recommend re-visiting your quality control, security, and privacy rules twice a year. Set a reminder in your calendar and really do it. If the review is not taken seriously by management, the staff won’t be as vigilant as you’d like. Experiencing the painful fallout from a privacy violation just once will make you sorry the steps that could have prevented it were not taken.

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Raise Postage

September 29th, 2011

I was reading an article today written by a marketing person who was advocating higher postage prices. His point was that direct mail is one of the most effective channels he uses. Even if the price of postage went up, he’d still advocate using mail. And if increasing the price would help the USPS survive the financial crisis then that was OK with him.

The article was posted on a site frequented by entrepreneurs and small business people. So you can imagine the comments. Few of the commenters seemed to really understand the part of that the Postal Service plays in the conduct of business in America, and only a couple had a grasp of the financial impact of the Postal Reorganization Act. Quite a few suggested we didn’t need the Postal Service anymore. There were plenty of gripes about junk mail.

It’s interesting that those who find little use for the Postal Service have such strong opinions about shutting it down completely or believe so firmly in privatization. They often point to profitable delivery companies such as UPS or FedEx as examples of how it’s not difficult to make money delivering letters and packages.

By law, the US Postal Service is required to deliver to all the addresses in the USA. Private companies don’t have that mandate. Today, if it costs too much for FedEx to drive their truck out to some remote location, guess who gets the package for that “last mile” delivery? The USPS! If private companies were to take over mail delivery, service to rural locations would suffer, the rates would be substantially higher, and location/distance-based postage would become more complex. More companies would curtail or abandon mail as a communication channel. At some point even the private delivery companies may decide it’s not worth the trouble.

If you don’t deposit pieces into the mail stream, the Postal Service costs you nothing. Recipients don’t pay for delivery and neither do taxpayers. Mail – even direct mail advertising – can be useful and welcomed if it is targeted and relevant. More mailers are changing their ways. They are mailing fewer pieces, but investing more in data analytics, segmentation, and personalization to elicit better response rates. There are still lots of spray and pray operators, but eventually those will change.

There are lots of problems with the USPS. They built a system that now has excess capacity, negotiated some labor contracts that make it difficult to effect necessary changes, and are saddled with some big obligations that have resulted in billions of dollars per year flowing to the government and to pre-paid benefit programs for future employees. Every time they propose closing a facility, the local politicians try to block the efforts. No one wants to lose jobs in their district or inconvenience their constituents.

Clearly there will be changes in the future. Postage increases are probably going to be part of the plan. Organizations that rely on the mail to do business will accept reasonable rate hikes if they will stabilize the system and ensure an accurate and reliable Postal Service going forward. Savvy direct mail marketers can offset postage increases by mailing fewer, but more effective pieces. Sure, lower volume will have an effect on labor, equipment, and facilities requirements. But that’s going to happen anyway. Better to have some degree of control I think.

Consumers who mail five envelopes a month may gripe about higher prices for stamps. But even a huge 20% price increase only costs these low-volume mailers $6.00 a year (zero if they buy Forever stamps before the increase is effective). I wish my annual costs for gasoline, insurance, or electricity only went up by $6.00 a year!

So what about higher postage prices? As long as they are reasonable, I think postage increases for direct mail is OK. It will still be a good deal.

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Do’s & Don’ts of B2B Newsletters

September 8th, 2011

I’ve been looking closely at the newsletters I receive in my email and noticing some strategies that make the publications more effective… and some that detract from the purpose. We’re always looking for ways to improve the B2B communications our clients have asked us to handle for them, so it helps to pay attention to what others are doing.

If you are thinking about starting up a newsletter on your own and you are not sure how to proceed, here are some thoughts and personal observations that might be helpful.

1. Focus on the challenges and interests of your audience
I can’t stress this strongly enough. In a B2B environment your newsletter subscribers are future buyers of your products. The sales cycles may be very long. For many in the document industry, the time between repeat sales to the same customer can be years. So to keep the interest level high, avoid the mistake of talking only about your product’s features and benefits. After reading a few issues, your customers are going to understand all they need to know about your product. Without an expectation of reading something new and useful in each issue customers and prospects will stop reading the newsletters. Every issue should have some items that zero in on your customer’s perspective.

2. Proofread and test
Misspelled words, broken links, bad grammar, and poor design choices detract from your message. They also communicate a lack of professionalism and question your ability to pay attention to details. These are definitely not the impressions you want your customers to have about your company. I’ve seen content that was pretty good, but really hard to ingest because of poor organization or simply because the newsletter designer chose an unusual font or neglected to provide sufficient contrast between the text and the background.

3. Be brief
This is a challenge for many of us. We know the material very well and we want to share it. But I suspect that newsletter articles of 1500 words don’t get read very often. As consumers of content we have become accustomed to rapid-fire stories and headlines. If your reader doesn’t have time to read long articles when he opens your email, chances are slim that he will return later. For topics where I have extra volume I’ll look for ways to break it into separate parts, or I’ll make additional content available for download from the web site.

Also keep in mind that there are a number of people who may read your e-newsletter on a smart phone. Overly long articles result in lots of scrolling or eyestrain on these small screens.

4. Be original
There are differences of opinion among content marketing experts. Some are dead set against using anyone else’s content. They believe everything in your newsletter should be written by you – from scratch. Others think it is perfectly OK for your newsletter to be a collection of links to articles in other publications. My position is somewhere in the middle. I think original content is the most impactful. You should strive to create content yourselves or have someone write it for you.

But not everyone has the time or the talent to produce brand-new material every time. I’m fine with using links to other content as long as you put your own spin on it. Tell the reader why you liked the article or direct their attention to parts you think are particularly important. This is much more effective and it indicates you’ve put some thought into how your newsletter can be useful to your audience.

5. Use graphics, bullets, and headings
Graphical enhancements make the pieces easier to read. Most busy businesspeople will scan a page before deciding to invest their time to read it. Pictures, charts, headings, and bullets stand out and quickly communicate what the article is about. You can also use color or fonts to call attention to certain portions of the articles.

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