As a brick-and-mortar location, you know how important it is to engage your customers in every way possible. Even if you are already sending direct mail, blasting emails, and advertising on social media, there may be a channel you have overlooked—your location. Your store, office, or café can be the perfect place to advertise and grab attention using wide-format graphics. Let’s look at just a few ways wide-format graphics can be used to market and differentiate your business.

Retail: Besides bright, attention-getting signage and displays, consider advertising your next in-store promotion with custom murals or giant window graphics. Use floor graphics to create a trail of leaves that helps customers navigate to the latest fashion arrivals or a path of dollar signs that help them find the clearance section.

Medical offices: Any medical treatment can be scary, especially for kids. Transform your waiting room into a tropical jungle or undersea adventure that will make kids laugh and giggle as they wait. You can also use wide-format graphics for essential communications, such as blood drive announcements, disease prevention and treatment illustrations, floor plans, and evacuation route maps.

Salons and cafés: Say you’re a small salon competing with larger retail chains. Imagine having your shop’s interior filled with branded graphics and unique artwork. Suddenly, you look like a wildly successful high-end boutique.

Restaurants: What makes a passerby hungrier than a giant window graphic of a mouth-watering sandwich or piece of pizza? Don’t just say, “We have great food!” Show it. Get the customers’ mouths watering from across the street.

Mobile graphics: Take your advertising on the road. Wrap your company vehicles in branded graphics that tell your story every time you pull your car out of the parking lot. Gain exposure to people who might not have known about you any other way.

Your best customers are current customers, so get your messages in front of them where they are most connected to you — on-site with you.

Ever wondered why that beautifully printed holiday direct mail piece or creatively designed email blast didn’t work as well as you’d hoped? Was it the messaging? The list? The headline or subject line? Maybe it wasn’t any of these, or you’re just starting too late.

According to ShopKick, consumers are shopping for the holiday season earlier than ever. Nearly one-quarter (22%) say they plan to shop earlier this year than last, with 25% expecting to do most of their shopping before Thanksgiving. Ten percent plan to do their shopping before Halloween.

But this is nothing new. The trend toward increasingly early holiday shopping has been around for a while. In 2020, for example, 59% of holiday shoppers had started making holiday purchases in early November, a 21% increase from one decade ago. Now that trend continues.

With more and more holiday sales coming earlier in the year, you need to get your holiday mailings out earlier, too. This doesn’t necessarily mean starting your deals and discounts early, but you should start investing in brand building, introducing new products, and beginning to plant ideas in your shoppers’ heads. For example, if you sell children’s toys, start positioning your new game as the must-have toy of the year in October. This way, when Christmas shopping comes, you’re already in shoppers’ minds, long before the frenzied shopping starts.

If you’re used to getting your marketing cranked up later in the year, you might want to start a whole month earlier than usual. Come up with a variety of messaging for each stage of the shopping season, from early brand-building to frantic final days. Build your messaging over time to build anticipation, then excitement, and finally a sense of urgency, so shoppers are afraid to miss out.

Need help? Talk to us about setting a realistic marketing schedule for your holiday promotions. You might need to give yourself more time than you think.

What is your best strategy for managing your marketing budget in times of economic uncertainty? Is it to put your mailings on hold until things get better, or is it to get creative and take advantage of existing opportunities?

Our experience is that, even when the economy tightens, businesses get creative with their marketing and still get great results. Here are some easy ways to save money and grow your business simultaneously.

1. Use lighter-weight paper. Paper supplies are fluctuating these days, but if you can find a comparable stock that is lighter in weight, you’ll not only pay less, but you’ll save money on postage, too.

2. Take advantage of USPS postal discounts. Every year, the USPS comes out with an Emerging and Advanced Technology promotion. By incorporating technologies such as QR Codes and augmented reality (AR), the USPS allows you to send mailings for a fraction of the cost of traditional mailings.

3. Use house paper. If you want a specific stock — and only that stock — for a particular campaign, we’ll do everything we can to find it for you. But if a good, all-purpose stock will do, most printers (like us) keep a house stock handy that will be a highly economical choice.

4. Send Every Door Direct Mail. The USPS Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) program lets mailers target their mailings by ZIP Code. You mail to addresses only, but you can select ZIP codes by various demographics, such as average household income, percentage of homeowners recipients, and so on. This gives you a targeted mailing at a fraction of the cost of other mailings.

5. Narrow your focus. Instead of mailing to your entire list, try mailing smaller, more targeted runs. Pick a segment that you want to focus on, then develop messaging and offers just for that group. You will mail less but get better results by making that messaging more relevant each time.

Even when times are tough, you can save money and still get great marketing results. Contact us to learn more about each of these options.

Who are your best customers? They are the ones you already have. Your existing customers know and value their relationship with your company, so one of the best uses of your marketing budget is to cross-sell products to them. Cross-selling, or selling a different product or service to the same customer, can be highly profitable because it deepens the customer relationship and gives you a host of additional products to upsell the customer over time.

Here are some tips for the best results.

1. Know what they already own (and don’t).

There’s nothing more annoying than shopping online for a new rug, purchasing a rug, and then having ads for rugs continue to pop up in your email and social media feeds for weeks after you’ve already bought one. The same principle holds for direct mail and email marketing. Don’t try to sell your customers products they already have or ancillary products for those they do not. If you track sales history, tap into that. If you don’t, let us help you use data-gathering techniques to learn who your customers are and what products are most relevant to them.

2. Get your timing right.

Knowing your customers also means knowing when they are most likely to make specific purchases. For example, one study in the airline industry found that nearly two-thirds of customers were most likely to purchase ancillary products, such as travel insurance or tour guides, at the time they booked a trip rather than sometime afterward (such as during the check-in process or their stay). This information can be beneficial to travel agents, who can then put the most effort into marketing their ancillary services when travelers are most likely to buy. Know the timing of purchases in your product categories and consider that when crafting your campaigns.

3. Be consistent across channels.

Not every customer likes to make purchases the same way. One might respond to direct mail. Another might react to email or social media commerce. Regardless of channel, ensure that your cross-sell communications are consistent across all of them. You don’t want one cross-sell to appear in their email inbox and another in their mailbox. In terms of the visual imagery, color palettes, and marketing verbiage, maintain a consistent brand image no matter which channel they use. 

Cross-selling is essential for marketers to maximize their marketing budgets and reap the best ROI. Why not let us help you design your next cross-selling campaign?

Want to know what’s new and cool in Adobe Creative Cloud 2022? Who better to ask than a Certified Adobe Design Master and Instructor? Writing in Yes! I’m a Designer; Martin Perhiniak, once voted one of the top 10 Adobe instructors globally, shares his favorite features of Adobe’s latest update.

Photoshop 2022

• Two new neural filters: Photoshop can take your landscapes and change their color or season with the Landscape Mixer Neural Filter. Take a morning summer desertscape and turn it into a nighttime winter scene. With the Harmonization Neural Filter, you can sync the color values between layers, making it easier to create realistic composites.
• Object finder feature: Using AI, Photoshop can recognize the most important objects in your images, even on different layers, allowing you to make selections more quickly.
• Collaborative workspaces: Place all your content across supported Creative Cloud apps in one space, allowing for collaboration with others, whether inside your company or an outside firm.

Illustrator 2022

• Real-time drawing and editing option: It is easier than ever to use the new 3D and materials panel.
• Auto-font activation: Adobe Illustrator activates fonts used in the document automatically. What a time saver!
• Support for HEIF and WebP image files: Now import these files directly into Illustrator.

InDesign 2022

For InDesign, Perhiniak listed a single feature: Capture. Designers can extract fonts, color themes, and shapes from images and save them in your documents using this feature. Captured fonts can be saved and used as character or paragraph styles.

iPad Updates

• Updates to Photoshop for iPad include camera RAW editing, smart objects, and dodge and burn tools.
• Updates to Illustrator for iPad include “transform as shape,” blend tool, and image trace with the ability to vectorize.

Haven’t yet updated to Adobe Creative Cloud 2022? What are you waiting for? Infinite creativity awaits!

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced something many of us already knew—how much we love direct mail. As the world locked down and people spent more time at home, we felt how much we looked forward to what came in the mailbox in a fresh, more personal way. We already loved print. The pandemic just made us appreciate it more.

Now, marketing experts are talking about the benefits of keeping print in the mix. We just can’t do without it. Here are four of those reasons. If you could add another to this list, what would it be? We know you have one!

1. Print is personal. Sure, email is a quick and easy way to communicate, but when something comes in the mail, it just feels different. It feels more personal and expresses value to the person receiving it.

2. Print is credible. Digital marketing in all forms is relatively inexpensive, and recipients know it. There is something about putting a brochure, a physical coupon, or a direct mail piece into their hands. It carries weight. They take it more seriously.

3. All generations love print. We might expect print to be appreciated primarily by older generations who grew up without digital marketing, but the opposite is true. Studies consistently show that Generation Z and Millennials, who grew up in the world of digital media, are highly attracted to print. We might also point to the resurrection of print catalogs, especially during holiday seasons, after retailers saw lagging sales with digital-only marketing.

4. Print keeps your focus. Readers get easily distracted using digital media, losing focus on the message. Whether it’s college students doing their studies, a casual reader at home on the couch, or a recipient reading a piece of targeted direct mail, neuroscience studies reinforce what we instinctively already knew—print holds the attention and promotes recall more than digital media.

Digital media have their place in a well-crafted multichannel marketing campaign, but they don’t replace print. Want results? Keep print in the mix!

Personalization is everywhere. From grocery store receipts to Amazon recommendations to direct mail pieces that arrive in the mailbox, companies are personalizing their communications to address their customers’ individual needs and habits. But is it vital? If you’ve got a great product, isn’t that enough?

To answer this question, let’s look at the psychology behind personalization.

Personalized communications make your customers feel that you care about them. For example, talking to someone by name takes more time and effort (“Hi, Jane! We have a special offer just for you!”). Not every marketing communication does that, especially in print. The extra effort gets noticed.

Second, if you take the time to gather the recipient’s needs and wants, that gets noticed, too. Irrelevant marketing communications make someone feel like a number. On the other hand, when you communicate information that reflects their interests and needs, what you are saying is, “You are unique.” This makes people feel noticed and valued.

When customers feel noticed and valued, they are more likely to respond. That’s why personalized campaigns get better results. One study, for example, found the following lift for personalized over static mailing campaigns:

• Lead generation: 6.9%
• Direct orders: 6.2%
• Traffic generation: 14.7%

Once you acquire a customer based on personalized communication, if you treat them right, they are more likely to remain a customer over time. This has a significant impact on your profitability, too. Did you know that, on average, a repeat customer is worth 10x more over the life of a business relationship than their initial purchase?

Relationships are worth investing in, and business relationships are no exception. You have to take different steps to personalize your documents than you do for static campaigns, but don’t be intimidated. It doesn’t need to be complicated. We are here to help. Talk to us about going from static marketing communications to making it personal.