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Letterhead stationery is a must-have communication and branding tool for many businesses, so why miss the opportunity for direct sales? It is all about branding, right? At least, that’s how it is designed and deployed; however, letterhead stationery can actually be a powerful sales tool with a few easy tweaks. Here’s how you can turn your letterhead stationery into a sales tool that not only brands your company, but lands direct sales.

Call to action

Including a call to action on your letterhead stationery can motivate customers to purchase new products and services. A photography company might include a line on its letterhead such as: “Get your next catalogue photography 20 percent off if you schedule by October 28.” This offer/call to action combination will get direct-mail companies to take advantage of the discount and fill up your bookings early.

VIP Coupon

Turn part of your letterhead stationery into a VIP coupon for your best customers. You could take the bottom four inches to thank your customers for their loyalty and to offer something free or discounted in return. This is a great way to give customers a “first look” at a new product or service that you’re going to be promoting. Your customers will feel valued because you want them to try it first, and you’ll get sales if it is as good as billed.

Backside flyer

Recycling 101 says to never throw something away if it can be reused. The backside of letterhead stationery is often overlooked as an excellent marketing tool. For nonsensitive communication, place a flyer advertisement on the back of your letterhead and tell your customers that as part of your green agenda you’re asking them to hang it up where employees can see it. This is a way to get double the mileage out of your eco-friendly efforts since your letterhead stationery gets recycled twice: once when hung, then again when the promotion ends and it is tossed in the recycling bin.

Add value

Another great way to turn your stationery into a sales tool is to add value to it. Design a panel (or even the back) as a guide about a hot industry topic. End with a call to action that motivates your customers to call you for a prescribed solution.

Alternatively, you could turn the back (or a panel) of your letterhead stationery into a conversion chart, resource list or other helpful guides your customers are likely to pin up on the wall or tape to the desk for easy reference. This won’t lead to direct sales, but it will help brand your company by increasing your letterhead’s longevity.

No matter how you employ your letterhead stationery as a sales tool, you will be more successful if your paper feels strong and prestigious. Good choices are 100gsm white wove and premium bond papers. For a more dramatic effect, add a dazzling foil stamp or die cut.

Finally, by adapting your letterhead to land more sales, you’ll double up on your marketing efforts, slash costs and yield a large return on investment.

Combining Print Marketing and Social Media

Combining social media and print marketing in an integrated campaign strategy is a powerful way to market your products and services. While some would have you believe that social media and print marketing are too different to work together, savvy marketers know that harnessing the power of one can dramatically increase the success rate of the other. There are several ways to boost both your social media and print marketing campaigns in combination, as revealed by the following tips and ideas.

Print marketing to social media

Everyone knows by now that a powerful Facebook presence can pay off huge dividends, but how do you build your fan base to the point where your campaigns are profitable that is, when you can essentially advertise on Facebook for free? Many marketers do not stray from web-based marketing, but while web marketing has benefits it is important to remember that just about all of your competitors are taking the same measures. This decreases your ability to stand out from the crowd and naturally drives ad rates.

Instead of trying to compete head-to-head (or in addition to doing so), get fans on your Facebook or other social media page with a print marketing campaign. You can do this efficiently and economically with a simple, yet strategic, direct-mail postcard campaign The benefit here is that you can reach a highly targeted demographic audience with a controlled message one-on-one, and probably with zero interference from competitors. Postcard-to-web remains proven as one of the most successful ways to market, and with the right incentive (say, free product to the 1,000^th fan?) and list you’re bound to increase your fan base.

Posters, flyers, large-format vinyl banners and other print marketing strategies can also help you drive fans to your page either separate from or in conjunction with your direct-mail postcard campaign. Remember that print marketing lends credibility to your brand. After all, anyone can put up a Facebook page for free; but not everyone has the perceived budget to direct mail the market. If you do, you legitimize yourself and begin to earn trust.

Social media to print marketing

For all its benefits, the online environment provides plenty of distractions. Nothing is worse than when your ad is buried between two competitors’. In contrast, print marketing is read one-on-one and can captivate attention far easier. Most people read their mail alone, increasing opportunities for customer engagement. You might, for example, find that it is easy to convince customers to click a link requesting more information; but difficult for them to read your material online.

To combat this, you could use your social media page as a sign-up form to receive a free information kit via post. This strategy has two major benefits. First, you pre-qualify all leads because they have to take action to express interest, therefore you can fine-tune your pitch and earn a better response rate. Second, your overall investment is diminished because you only send your direct-mail kit to pre-qualified leads. Thus, you spend less money and send fewer information kits but receive a better response rate and increased return on investment. You are, in essence, creating an opt-in mailing list a powerful tool in any marketer’s arsenal.

As you can see, combining social media and print marketing can help you earn far better results than just doing one alone. You can even create campaigns or contests where customers enter through social media, then have to receive a postcard with a special code to enter on your site to receive an incentive. Such highly engaging campaigns will help you weed out the non-buyers from the buyers, identify broken links and bridge the gaps to turn those non-buyers into buyers with future campaigns. Be creative, don’t be afraid to break the mold, differentiate yourself from the competition and achieve success by combining social media and print marketing!

Flyers Are Powerful Marketing Tools

Flyers are powerful marketing tools, no doubt about it. But how do you print a high-quality flyers so you can bring in the premium clientele? The answer is to choose the right flyer printing company. Here’s what you need to know about printing flyers without sacrificing quality so you can run a campaign that looks like a million bucks.

Choose the right paper stocks

Cheap flyers can be printed on premium paper stocks, despite the premium connotation. Quality paper denotes a quality company that sells quality products and services. Compared to store-bought papers, you can get exceptional quality from 130gsm paper stock with glossy sheen on both sides and print cheap flyers that look exceedingly professional.

Quality,may depend of the type printing

The quality of your ink in combination with your paper stock can make or break even the best flyer design. Litho printed flyers are more vibrant than digital print flyers. They lend deep, rich colors to your artwork. Best of all, Lithoprint is ideal for all sizes of flyers; so you can have the best of both economy and aesthetics when you print your flyers with them.

Custom sizing

Flyer pricing depend on the flyer size, and when you have the option of choosing sizes between A6 and A4 size, you have full control of how large you want your flyer to be and how much you want to spend on them. The quantity of your flyer would determine the pricing for various flyer size options – you’ll probably be surprised to learn that you can print rather large flyers without breaking the bank.

Flyers can still be die cut

One of the advantages flyers have over other marketing mediums is the ease at which they can be die cut into prefabricated or custom shapes. Die-cut flyers have more influence and eye-capturing prowess, so the fact that you can shape up your pitch and still print cheap flyers is a boon to many small businesses with limited marketing budgets who are trying to compete with larger corporations. Cheap Flyer printing simply levels the playing field.

Quantity counts

When it comes to cheap flyers, quantity counts – but that isn’t to say that the fewer you print, the cheaper your flyers will be. On the contrary, you should think of flyer printing return on investment in terms of cost-per-customer: How much does it cost to reach one customer? The more flyers you print per run, the cheaper your price per piece, and thus the cheaper your investment per customer becomes. When you land a sale, your return on investment for that sale is higher. So, you can print 5,000 flyers less than 90, which comes to about 0.02p per flyer. But you could also print 10,000 flyers for about 120, which comes to about 0.012p per flyer. Either way, those are cheap flyers!

Print Video – Business Card Strategy

Your business card is probably the most important tool that you require to introduce your business, marketing and advertising your product and services. Find out more about business card strategy in this video. Click on the image to view,

Branding Your Business with Printed Marketing Materials

You have the company message, the colors, the fonts, the logo, the emotions and the target audience. The question is how to apply all of these things into a successful branded marketing campaign. Printed marketing materials are the backbone of any branding effort, because it’s the best way to put your company right in front of your ideal customers.

The following are a few tried-and-true ideas you can incorporate when branding your business with printed marketing materials:

Corporate identity package

The corporate identity package is first on our list because it’s often the first thing people think of when they think of branding. Corporate identity packages lack the luster of other branding efforts, but they offer massive repetition that is crucial to a successful campaign. A solid corporate identity package includes business cards, letterhead, envelopes, brochures and presentation folders. The beauty of the corporate identity package is that every single piece of correspondence you issue to customers carries your company’s image and reinforces your message.

Direct mail

Direct-mail campaigns place your message in the best place possible right in your customers hands. Direct mail can be anything from simple postcards and flyers to 80-page catalogs and multi-piece sales letter packages. Powerful branding that keeps your company on the top of customers minds can be achieved through direct-mail repetition; just because a prospect doesn’t respond to your first direct-mail piece doesn’t mean that that mailing won’t later act as a reinforces for subsequent mailings. In short, the more often you mail (without going overboard), greater potential for a good response rate exists for each subsequent mailing.

Press releases

Press releases should be printed on company letterhead and distributed to the media. Press releases are powerful branding tools, because, if your news is printed, you gain unbiased third-party validation and the potential to reach customers you didn’t know you could have.

Point-of-sale displays

Simple take-away POS displays such as a coupon book, brochure or even a menu can boost your branding efforts, because they are voluntarily picked up and taken home. Another way to use POS is to sponsor a charity via a retail outlet that asks customers for a small donation, which results in their names being placed on die-cut shapes and taped to the wall for all to see. All you have to do is provide the printed cutouts and add your company’s name and logo to a portion of it. Your brand will not only be prominent, it demonstrates that your company has compassion and goodwill, which can be a boon to attracting new business.

Stickers

Stickers offer the most fun branding opportunities, and perhaps the most creative. You can affix custom-made stickers to anything notebooks, car bumpers, restroom stalls, floors, walls, windows, mirrors, filing cabinets you name it, you can stick it! If you can come up with an appealing sticker design that customers will want to keep, all the better. Sometimes companies even hand out stickers to children at parades with a cute saying and their logo or company name beneath it.

Calendars

Want others to look at you every day, all year long? Distribute free calendars to your customers. This is one of the easiest and most effective branding strategies simply because calendars have intrinsic value people like to stay organized.

Banners

Event sponsorship through banners is a great way to get your image in front of hundreds or thousands of potential customers at one time. This could be a rock show, a festival, a sports event or any other event where your target audience gathers.

When developing a branded marketing campaign, it is imperative not to skimp on materials. This is true with all branded printing materials since your customers will equate the quality of your promotional pieces to the quality of your company. Make sure you use a printer such as Print Magic that offers the best paper grades, inks, finishes and state-of-the-art printing presses so your company leaves the very best impression.

Five Ways to Make Your Business Flyers Effective

Business flyers are some of the most important and most powerful marketing tools for many businesses. Business flyers are diverse: You can hang them anywhere from public locations to targeted niche gathering spots, send them direct mail, place them on windshields, distribute from counters, hand them out directly, pack them in sales letters, have them as trade show handouts, and more. But business flyer distribution is the easy part you have to make business flyers that command attention in order to get the most bang for the marketing buck.

Special sales

If your business flyers are promoting a special sale, you should make your sale discount figure big and bold so it can be seen and understood from afar. This will draw customers eyes to your discount (use dollar signs and percentage symbols), and use creative flair to couple your sales discount figure with your product offering. You might, for example, create a collage of your products inside it.

Odd images

An odd, humorous or out of place image is a great way to command attention for your business flyers. Think of ways to make your odd images relevant to both your customers and to your products and services. Not only will customers take notice of your business flyers, they’ll remember them and if your images are good enough, they’ll tell friends about them, doubling or tripling your business flyer’s reach.

Bright, bold contrast

One of the easiest techniques for commanding attention for your business flyers is to design them with bright, bold, contrasting colors. Yellow text on black, hot pink and fluorescent green, bright blue and orange all of these color combinations are bright, bold and contrasting. They can’t be missed by potential customers strolling down the sidewalk, sitting in a cafe or driving down the street.

Environment

Another great way to command attention for your business flyers is to create a design that works within your environment. You might, for example, design a flyer that looks like a window on a brick wall and place it, naturally, on a brick wall and have your company mascot hanging outside of it, announcing a special deal. You can also contrast with your surroundings, putting things where they should not be or casting a surreal glow to the world around your customers. Such unexpected business flyer designs will undoubtedly be noticed.

Five Direct Mailers Every Business Should Use

Every business needs to have both an online and a print advertising and marketing presence. But in this day and age of the Internet, some businesses fail to utilize all of the potential methods of direct mailers that’s so essential to business success.

Direct mailers are some of the most powerful marketing tools, and they have benefits online advertising can’t match. For one, they allow you to be one-on-one with customers without interruption. They are not intrusive. They also allow for better targeting based on demographics most online marketing mediums can’t touch. You can literally grow to be a multi-million dollar business on direct mailers alone, when you know how to take advantage of their power. The following five direct mailers should be used by all businesses.

1.Postcards

Perhaps the most versatile direct mailers available, postcards are also some of the most effective and cost-efficient. Postcards are incredibly cheap to develop, print and mail; and can be used in a variety of ways to generate interest for your products and services: as coupons, VIP passes, mini-newsletters, mini-catalogs, web promotions, discount notices and more. They can also be tracked via redemption coupons and codes.

2.Catalogs

Many top companies use direct-mail catalogs even though they have a strong web presence. These catalogs arrive in consumers homes as tangible, physical objects to browse and peruse at their leisure. There’s nothing like the feel of a hefty catalog filled with superb products with the descriptions and prices located next to each item. People still delight in flipping through the pages, and business will definitely increase via these mail-order sales and the online orders they spawn.

3.Newsletters

Every business should mail out a regular newsletter, usually on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis, to keep all of their loyal and new customers informed of all of the latest updates and recent developments that are going on with the business. Your newsletter should have short articles and stories based around the benefits that the consumer can derive from continuing to patronize the particular business but it shouldn’t be a rolling advertisement. Provide customer value and highlight happy customers for maximum potency.

4.Response cards

Response cards are a great way to learn more about your customers and collect new names for your mailing list. Create a short survey and have customers return it with a discount coupon, or offer customers and a friend a great discount or other special incentive for filling out your response card. Collect names and contact information so you can keep sending targeted mailings to the first customer, a proven responder, and the second customer, a new name you can market to.

5.Sales letters

These direct mailers need to be mailed out on a mandatory basis to every consumer and potential consumer on your mailing list. They should make a direct statement of facts and helpful information as well as offer the consumer the chance to purchase something special from the company’s inventory. Sales letters allow your friendly personality shine through and therefore allow you to showcase the unique aspects of your business.