The dotted line is a powerful thing. It is one of those secret weapons that marketers use to draw attention to a specific part of the communication. It is most commonly used to highlight an offer or a call-to-action.

What was once used as a directional vehicle, dotted lines were put in to signal to the customer that it was a coupon to cut out. In fact, in some cases where marketers  had zero confidence in customer intelligence, they would even throw in a little icon of a scissor.

Where production budgets allow, we also add a perforation around the coupon to make it even easier to tear out. In these cases, we still print the dotted line to call attention to the coupon. Read more…

Here’s a quick tip: send your customers a birthday card. This is a great excuse to communicate to your customer, give them a surprise offer with an exclusive type of message and to capture data. Let’s break it down real quick.

Add a field in your online registration form for birthday. Don’t make it a mandatory field. Make sure you leave the field open for year of birth but I have found success in leaving that as a separate line. That way people who want to give their day and month but not their year will not feel like it is an all-or-nothing scenario.

2 weeks before their birthday, drop a birthday card with a coupon or offer in the mail. The recipient will be touched by the sentiment and you will have an additional means of driving sales. Read more…

Acquiring customers are tricky. Acquiring them around the holidays is even trickier. The reality is you may have a strong marketing message or a phenomenal offer but if you can’t get it read or seen you are in big trouble. And the holidays are one of the most challenging times to breakthrough to a potential customer.

The Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukah seasons are filled with vacations, parties, and unfocused people. How do you prepare for the endless “out of the office” email bounce backs and piles of unread mail on your prospect’s desks? And couple that with the added complexity of trying to spend your marketing budget before the end of the year and you can get conflicted. With some careful planning you can navigate this tricky time on the sales calendar. Read more…

The 80/20 Rule is something that every direct marketer knows (or at least should know). The basic principle is this: 20% of your customers represent 80% of your sales.

According to Wikipedia:

“The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.”

Ok. So what? Why do we need to know this? In my experience over 10 years of creating direct marketing programs I have never come across a budget that I thought was enough. It is no big surprise. Marketers know what captures attention, drives action, and produces results. It tends to be a scenario like: a dimensional piece to break the clutter with an offer that is too amazing to pass up with a response device that is incredibly personalized all sent to a list made up of perfect leads. That may be every marketers hope for a perfect campaign but they all add up to moolah and let’s face it, not gonna happen. Read more…

One very important factor to consider when producing communication pieces is how the reader will view the messaging and in what order. Frequently, there is a specific order to the content and it is important to lead the viewer through it appropriately.

Creating communication vehicles in a 3-panel format has many advantages:

- Sometimes there is simply too much content for a 2 panel mailer but not enough for a 2 signature 8-pager.
- A 3-panel mailer that is barrel folded creates a nice contained self-mailer that requires minimum glue or wafer sealing to stay intact in the mail.
- A 3-panel mailer requires only folding not binding
- Finally, a 3-panel mailer gives the opportunity for 2 viewer reveals: one partial 2 page spread and then a final 3 page full spread.

But while an opportunity to produce a piece with multiple reveals can be useful, it can also be confusing. In this diagram, I have represented all 6 pages of a 3-panel mailer and have organized them by viewer’s spreads.

Read more…