Manager, Online Services

When we think about the hottest trends in marketing, we think about mobile. When we think about mobile, we think about QR codes, those checkerboard-like squares that, when scanned with a smartphone, take users directly to a website. QR codes can be static or take consumers to personalized URLs.

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One of the most common mistakes companies make is to equate customer satisfaction to customer loyalty. A company that fails to recognize this fact risks finding its most satisfied customers switching to the competition. In a recent customer satisfaction study of 10 major industries, an average of 72% of the respondents indicated that they were highly satisfied with the products or services received. Yet 88% of the customers surveyed also said that they were very willing to switch providers for any reason!

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Many perennial graphic production problems — missing fonts or image files, for example — have traditionally plagued designers who submit print files as native application files, such as QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. One solution has been to submit jobs in PDF format, but you no doubt know from experience that PDF isn’t always foolproof. However, there are some simple steps you can take to ensure that the PDF files you send to Printhink are as trouble-free as possible.

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More and more, we are hearing about 1:1 printing or “print personalization” (using printed pieces, often with four-color text and graphics, to talk directly to recipients based on name, gender, past purchase history or other information) to achieve higher response rates and better return on investment (ROI).

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Marketing specialists are not short on tips for boosting direct mail response rates. A quick online search turns up such ideas as effective copywriting, targeted or one-to-one marketing, data mining, list management and so on. While these are valuable ideas, marketers tend to give short shrift to the physical aspects of the printed piece itself. One especially underutilized technique is the creative use of postpress or finishing options to add additional decorative enhancements to a printed piece. Think of finishing as the icing on the cake.

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In the beginning of desktop publishing, Adobe created PostScript fonts. And designers said, “These are beautiful.” But then Apple said, we don’t want to license PostScript from Adobe, and TrueType was born.

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A recent brochure from the Printing Industries of America’s Digital Printing Council, “Print: The Multi-Medium,” touts the benefits of digital printing, including 1:1 personalized printing (also called variable data printing or VDP). In the brochure, the Digital Printing Council passes along the following claim:

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Did you know that you can increase the precision of your marketing efforts for free? 1:1 personalization is all about data, and the smarter you use your data, the more effective your campaigns will be. But if you are paying someone to append your database or do the data mining for you, you will pay for every little increase in knowledge. These efforts can be highly valuable, but if there are steps you can take on your own, at no charge, why not take advantage of them?

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The three-fold brochure and other folded pieces contain several traps for the unwary. This article will guide you around common folding pitfalls and towards the gold at the end of the rainbow: three-fold brochures that look and fold perfectly.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” However, consistency in graphic design is hardly foolish; in fact, it’s downright wise.

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You may not have thought much about grades since you left school and your quest for that elusive "A." But it pays to think about grades when you are selecting paper for a project. The grade of paper you select affects how the ink appears in your printed piece. Paper grade actually is a general term that depends on context. It may refer to the category, class, rating, or finish of the paper.

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Adobe InDesign offers you a series of layout tools to ensure that your document contains a consistent visual structure. When used together, InDesign's page guides, baseline grids and document grids ensure that your document looks professional and clean no matter what kind of design you are creating.

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If you are a marketer, you probably share a lot in common with a magician. Your budget is continually being squeezed. Yet, you are always being asked to do more with less. What are you supposed to do? Pull results out of your hat?

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What goes up must come down. Like everything else, the economy is cyclical, but no matter what the current economic conditions might be, it’s important to keep marketing your business. In fact, a little glimpse at history shows that even during the Great Depression, some companies thrived. While other companies were cutting spending, a few businesses, such as Camel and Chevrolet took the opportunity to use aggressive marketing tactics to grab market share from their competitors. It’s proof that the key to long-term success in any economy is to get in front of your target audience and stay there.

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Intuitively you know that minding the details of your business is a surefire way to retain current clients and attract new ones, but often you are too busy tending to the big picture to deal with the little things. Even “hands on” managers have to create enough distance from routine operations to maintain perspective on the many forces shaping the organization, balancing the needs of investors, employees and customers while anticipating and responding to changes in your industry and competitive environment.

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Throughout the history of printing, previous generations have always looked upon new generations of typographic technology with scorn. Thanks to Microsoft Word and other commonly used desktop applications, most computer users are conversant in the fundamentals of type, even if they only know what a font is. This doesn’t mean that they always practice good typography. For example, there are now Web sites dedicated to wiping Comic Sans off the face of the Earth. See, for example, www.BanComicSans.com.

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In casual conversation, the word “profiling” often has a negative connotation, but in marketing, it is a driving force behind success. Building a customer profile helps you understand your customers’ attitudes, interests and preferences, and tailor your marketing to these and other factors relevant to their buying behavior.

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If you are doing any kind of geographic-based direct marketing, you may want to consider a new program from the United States Postal Service, or the current Unaddressed Admail Product from Canada Post. The new USPS program is called Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM). This program and the Canada Post UA program allow you to reach every customer in specific neighborhoods even without needing to have their names or addresses. Best of all, what’s the cost? As little as 14.2 cents per piece on postage in the US and 14.8 cents in Canada.

Sound too good to be true? There are a few requirements, but overall, this is a great deal.

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Whether you’re creating flyers, brochures, or direct mail, at some point, you’ll need to fold something. When you do, it’s easy to default to the basic half-fold or letter fold, but customers see those folds all the time. They don’t stand out. Why go vanilla? Spice it up with some unusual folds that spark interest and make people want to reach out and handle the piece.

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One of the hottest topics in print these days is the use of quick response (QR) codes. When scanned with a smartphone, these codes take people directly to the Web. This gives smartphone users an immediate way to respond to your marketing pieces, even if they aren’t at home or in the office. It also increases the relevance of your print materials in the lives of today’s busy mobile consumers.

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