Margie Dana

Braintree Printing Won’t Leave Me Alone. And That’s a Good Thing.

For the past few years I’ve been getting postcards on a regular basis from one local printing company – Braintree Printing. It’s left a impression on me.

This company is just south of Boston proper. They are a trade printer serving all of New England as well as New York and New Jersey (my home state!). Hoping to learn more about this direct mail campaign, I sent a list of questions to Jim Corliss, the owner.

Here’s what I found out.

Braintree Printing has been mailing postcards to the trade on a monthly basis or so, for the past two or three years. All of the postcards are personalized, which is one reason I love them. They use my name and my company name very effectively. The design (different each time) is big and bold, and the cards are often printed on different stock to make a point about that particular stock. I have one that’s a bumper sticker. Another is printed on 24 pt. board, and the message is all about Braintree’s ability to print on that substrate. The postcards are printed on their Xerox® iGen®4 or their iGen™150, using XMPie software for the personalization. They apply a UV coating offline.

Braintree card 3 The only hard cost for these cards is postage, about $.30 apiece. The company designs, prints and mails their postcards in-house. Jim says they mail about 2500 pieces each time.

Direct mail is not their only marketing channel. The postcards are coordinated with email blasts. I get the emails, too. I think this is a very smart one-two punch.

So, are these postcards and the accompanying emails effective? “People seem to enjoy getting our pieces,” Jim wrote. “We try to keep them simple and try not to be intrusive.” As a recipient, I can tell you they are not intrusive. The cards are fun and colorful. The emails are related and get to the point right away.

Jim says they get a 30% opening rate on the broadcast emails. The company does almost no other advertising, and they don’t have an outside sales force, so Jim feels that most of their sales can be attributed to the postcards and email blasts.

For now, the company will continue sending out their postcards – with accompanying emails – but Jim says they’re always on the lookout for different ways to communicate with their customers. Braintree card 2

There’s something iconic about these postcards that show up in my mail, and there are a few reasons why I think they work as a marketing tool:

1. I get them regularly.

2. I check out each one to see what’s being promoted.

3. They’re not overdone. There’s just enough copy, and the design isn’t “precious.”

4. Each one tells me about a particular product or service the company offers.

5. Accompanying emails reinforce the postcards.

Braintree card 1 When all’s said and done, these postcards are welcome. They’re lighthearted. Each one’s different. They shine a light on Braintree Printing. And most important of all, they keep the company’s name in my mind.

The Only Thing that Distinguishes Your Printing Company

One thing sets you apart.

Almost exclusively, my clients are in the printing industry. When I ask a new client what makes his or her commercial print company special, I hear “Service” a lot. They say this with conviction. But there’s some bristling when I question them on what exactly they mean. I can’t help it; I hear it all the time.

There’s only one thing that makes a printing company different from another, and that’s its people.

Regardless of how fantastic your service is, how magnificent your presses are, how efficient your production workflow may be, how fast you deliver, or how low your prices are – you have competition.

So unless your employees can be in two places at once, they are your aces-in-the-hole.

And because business print buyers (as opposed to consumers) like building lasting relationships with the people at printing companies, printers should find ways to feature their employees.

Start with your sales and service reps. Make their skills and other specialties known. You can do this on your web site, in blogs and in newsletters, on Facebook and your company LinkedIn page, in email marketing efforts, and in direct mail. You could do short videos that feature different team members. Let people know whom they’ll be working with. Impress them.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about industry professionals that got my attention:

A CSR with not one but two degrees from RIT;
A rep who volunteers his time every week playing music at a home for the elderly;
A company owner who has decades of experience working in the paper industry;
A sales manager who used to be prepress manager at other companies, making him a tech/preflight expert;
A prepress specialist who’s earned IDEAlliance’s Mail Pro Certification;
Service reps who are gourmet chefs and who rebuild cars.

Such expertise, or industry experience, adds value to your company’s reputation. Some employees may have deep roots in the industry; others may have outside passions that customers will identify with. Either way, sharing more information about them gives dimension to your company.

Individual sales reps may mention certain skills in their prospecting materials, but what about everyone else in your company? How is word getting out about these jewels in your crown?

Work it. As you develop materials and publish regular content to promote your company and build your community, find ways to feature the one thing that’s truly unique: your people.

This post first appeared on www.piworld.com. I blog for them from time to time.

Why a Printer’s Gallery Page Is So Important

How good is your gallery?

I’ve discovered something interesting about commercial printers’ web sites: often it’s their page of Sample Products, AKA “Gallery,” that is most important.

Here’s why.

If the site copy elsewhere doesn’t make it clear to visitors what you’re really good at, and what types of printing you do, the Gallery Page can tell the story better than any words. And much faster.

This happens frequently. I land on a site and can’t tell what the company’s sweet spot is. Then I move to the Gallery page and think, Oh……NOW I get what they’re about.

I like seeing a variety of products on this page, plus a short description of each image (Chalkboard Printing, Floor Graphics, Posters, Catalogs, Variable Data, etc.). It gives me a good sense of the breadth of your offerings.

Based on this one page, I might decide if you’re a good fit for my business or not.

My hunch is that corporate and agency print customers (including marketers and purchasing pros) will do the same thing – zip on over to your product sample page and decide on the spot if a printer’s a good fit.

So when words fail you, good images won’t.

Shop Around for a Better Experience

Keep your eyes open.

Sometimes it’s the experience that makes the difference between service providers.

That includes doctors, dentists, mechanics, health clubs, hair stylists, and yes, even commercial printers.

I’m not trying to dissuade customers from being loyal. Rather, I hope people recognize the value of testing the waters to see if they could get a better experience elsewhere.

It’s easy to move on if a current provider is not delivering the product or service to your liking. Something negative is propelling you out the door. I’ve switched doctors and other professionals, not because they weren’t qualified, but because of the experience. It was negative enough to make me leave.

I switched primary care physicians once, because my doctor consistently kept me waiting over an hour and never acknowledged it. I switched an eye doctor because the practice was run like an assembly line. I was passed from one eye technician to the next like a hot potato and then hustled out the door so the next spud could be handled.

A customer experience typically means how you treat your customers when they’re interacting with you. It’s what you say and how you say it. It can be subtle, but when it’s negative, it can trigger our search for your replacement.

What if you’ve been dealing with the same service provider forever? You’re comfortable, but (let’s be honest) you have nothing to compare it with. It’s still smart to check out the competition from time to time. This goes for commercial printers. How else will you know if there’s something incredible, or new, or both, that you’ve been missing? What if you could be treated better elsewhere?

Recently I took a few fitness classes at a different club than the one to which I belong.

The dance moves were the same.

The music was the same.

The instructor was the same.

But the experience was totally different. It was a combination of a few things, but taken together, they made the classes refreshing and fun and brand new for me – after all these years. Based on that experience, I joined the club. Experiencing working out in a new environment was a change I didn’t know I needed until I tried it, purely by chance.

So for any print customers reading this post, keep your eyes open. Visit new printers from time to time to see if the experience they can offer you is different in a positive way. Talk to some of their existing customers. Think of it as a test drive. Maybe you’ll find your current provider is still the best choice for you, and it’ll strengthen that relationship. But maybe you’ll uncover something that blows you away for any number of reasons, and you’ll make a switch, or add this printer to your group of providers. That’s what I did with the gym.

Printers reading this post should recognize the importance of customer experience. All things being equal, would your customers say that none of your competitors could beat the great experience you deliver?

Why I Prefer Baking Chocolate Chip Cookies

Though they’re my husband’s favorite cookies bar none, chocolate chips are my go-to cookies to bake for one reason: I don’t have to grease the pans.

Know that I’m a baker. Whether we’re talking cookies, pies, breads, scones, brownies, muffins or the occasional cake (a small family can’t eat through a whole one), I LOVE to bake.

But chocolate chips are my fallback cookies to bake because they save me a few steps. They’re efficient and quick. And I’m a busy person. Frankly, I don’t even like them all that much.

Which brings me to your printing company. If you use a process or a technology that shaves time off of customers’ jobs, well, toot this horn early and often.

Is it a proofing procedure or review process? Is it a production capability or a finishing technique? Do you do things inline that speed up a job’s time-to-market?

Tell your customers. Tell your prospects. Your step-saver may be the sweet solution they’re looking for.

Where Will the Enthusiasm for Print Come from Tomorrow?

Professional print buyers working in businesses and agencies are the print industry’s most powerful influencers, bar none.

These print production specialists, particularly those who are baby boomers, are responsible for keeping print part of the discussion within their organizations.

But they do much more than just keep print in those conversations when marketing considers channels for a campaign, because experienced print buyers tend to have a history in print manufacturing. Many were once employed in commercial printing as sales or service reps. Many are trained as graphic designers. They identify with print.

As someone who’s studied print buyers for over two decades, I know all of this to be true.

Experienced print customers in industries and in agencies are their organizations’ de facto print experts. Their managers and team members, their bean counters and their purchasing agents, all look to them for recommendations. Who should print this job? What’s a fair price? When do we need to find additional print manufacturing expertise? What paper or other substrate will work best? And at the heart of it, why should we print this at all?

Whether you’re a printer reading this post or a print buyer, you recognize these print customers. You serve them or work alongside them or identify as one yourself.

I know many of these “print insiders” personally. And to a person, one quality they share that needs to be acknowledged is their passion for print. They strive daily to share this enthusiasm with their colleagues and to enlighten them about advances in printing technologies.

Imagine how difficult this is today, in our world of Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps, and Pokémon Go.

These experienced print insiders bring an acute appreciation of all-things-print to their roles. They are the keepers of the print flame inside of their organizations. They wield enormous clout in the decision-making process where print is concerned. And if they happen to work in marketing environments, this clout is even more significant.

Here’s what I’m talking about. When a marketing team plans a new campaign and the issue of which channels to use (and why) comes up, print buyers working with them are – best case scenario – more likely to offer ideas, reasons, examples and arguments for print. (If this marketing team includes a print provider in this discussion, so much the better. But in a study I did with John Zarwan, only 16% of brand owners invite printers to the marketing table.)

John Zarwan and I conducted a webinar recently for PRIMIR, on a white paper we developed for them about brand owners and the print purchasing process. While I was speaking, I had a few “a-ha moments,” like this one:

If highly experienced print buying professionals are the primary champions of print for and within their organizations, what happens when they’ve exited the workforce?

Do you think the new wave of entry-level marketers and media staffers will take up the torch of print? How well do colleges and universities cover print as a medium in marketing and media curricula, or even in graphic design programs?

When the baby boomer print buyers retire, will those who fill their positions bring the same enthusiasm and print sensibility to their roles?

This changeover in personnel isn’t about to happen this month or even this year. But as old positions are filled with new marketers, the graphic arts industry stands to lose some of its most stalwart supporters: the print insiders.

Getting ahead of this changeover is what I’d recommend to the print industry. Now’s the time to develop strategies for dealing with a generation of marketers and purchasing professionals who lack print manufacturing knowledge.

How can the industry generate enthusiasm for print, once senior-level print customers take their passion out the door with them when they retire?

How to Promote Printing without Talking about Printing?

Many printers face the dilemma of being labeled as “just printers.” I get it.

I struggle with this. I have been thinking about it for a long time in fact. The general public associates “printing” with a desktop laser or inkjet printer. They’re clueless about commercial printing. This is not going to change.

And those ridiculous marketing messages encouraging us to “save a tree and go paperless” are everywhere. They’re not helping educate people about the medium, the magic, and the value of print.

On top of that, every one of us has a cornucopia of digital means of communication to choose from. We’re all using them. And many are free.

These realities make it difficult to talk about print as the channel of choice for marketers and other businesspeople.

Yet the printing industry has been evolving in ways that laypeople don’t recognize. They don’t even know about it. I think many still believe that commercial printers (if they even know what this means) just run printing presses and do nothing else.

To combat this myth and reflect their own evolution, some printing companies have changed their names. Out with “Printing,” in with “Media” or “Marketing.”

I admit, when this trend started I was skeptical. Today, I think that those printing companies that rebranded themselves were visionaries. Of course they still print, but they do a lot more. They have added marketing expertise, data expertise, full-blown campaign development and management expertise. Not all of them, but many. (You know who you are.)

Recently I did some research about how early in the process a marketer invites a commercial printer to that table. As you might expect, those invitations are few and far between. This has to change for the print industry’s sake. Modern print companies provide campaign solutions and multichannel strategy that are valuable to customers, but if the printer’s not sitting there at that table, how does the information get shared?

I think too many marketers equate printing with manufacturing, and only with manufacturing.

This identity crisis is a major challenge for the print industry. How do you rise above an outdated perception without turning your back on your core business?

I think it has to be done individually, company by company. It requires a carefully planned balance between promoting your print production expertise and services with information about everything else you do. How you describe and define your company matters tremendously, and this includes your online presence and every other type of prospecting material. Photos of most printers’ buildings and presses typically don’t help; they date you and your company.

I don’t have all the answers. As I said, I struggle with this. But it needs to be dealt with.

The Case of the Bad Bobblehead

Whatever it was about the actual David Ortiz bobblehead that was deemed egregious, the upshot was that we Red Sox fans went home without one this past Tuesday night.

Originally, the first 15,000 fans who attended the August 9^th Red Sox-Yankees game were promised a bobblehead made in Big Papi’s likeness. But the Red Sox organization decided that these collectible dolls were unacceptable because they were racially insensitive. We left the game a tad disappointed, although we did beat those Yankees 5-3.

The good news is that the organization had it all under control. When we passed through the gates of Fenway Park, we were each given a baseball-card-size handout that told us how to register online for our Ortiz bobblehead when a new batch was produced.

This was a simple fix for a disappointing problem. The instructions were clear, and I completed the survey in under a minute. I did notice the ubiquitous pre-checked box down at the bottom, indicating that “I’d like to receive news, emails, and updates from the Red Sox organization.” I unchecked it, but they get points for trying.

The icing on the cake is that everyone who attended could register for a bobblehead, which, according to their site, comes to 37,949 lucky ducks. They could have said that only the first 15,000 registrants would get the doll, but that would’ve been pretty frustrating.

In the end, the Red Sox did the right thing. They moved fast after determining the product was unacceptable. They articulated their solution to their customers in clear language. They made it easy for us to register online for our kitschy keepsake. And it will cost them more than a few bucks to ship bobbleheads to as many as 37,949 ticketholders. (Although I imagine the manufacturer will eat this expense.)

Which brings me to your print manufacturing company. How do you handle similar mistakes? If you print a job and then deem it unacceptable, how do you rectify it? How fast do you inform your customer? To what lengths do you go to ensure the customer’s not put out? How do you go above and beyond correcting the mistake?

Hopefully, this is a rarity in your print business. Yet it’s important to remember that customers fully expect you to make amends for your production errors.

How you straighten out a mistake you make is an important measure of a print partner. Customers may not give you three strikes before you’re out of their lineup. One bad one will do the trick.

Two Simple Questions Will Help Your Marketing

Truly, there are lots of things printers should consider when planning their marketing efforts.

To wit: In what industries are most of your customers? Do they work in marketing, purchasing, or creative environments? Are they typically inexperienced or pretty savvy when it comes to print production? Are they mostly designers? Do you sell in a small geographic area – or far and wide? Are they price-driven or quality-driven? And so on.

There’s another way to approach your marketing efforts. It’s not exclusive of all of those other considerations, but it’s something you need to think about:

What do most customers purchase from your company? What would you like them to purchase from your company?

Your answers are noteworthy. Consider the first question. If you do sell a particular product or service to most of your customers (newsletters, promo products, creative consulting, dimensional printing, etc.), then hopefully it’s very profitable for you. It’s what your company’s known for. And if you’re not already promoting this specialty heavily in all channels you use for marketing (including your site), you should.

Your answer to the second question – what do you want customers to purchase – will be more telling if sales for that product or service are slow. Something’s off. Maybe customers and prospects don’t even know about it. You’re clearly not promoting it effectively enough.

Indeed, if you want customers to purchase something that too few of them currently are, you need to address this with your sales team as well as your management team and your marketing specialist. You’ve got work to do.

Things Printers Should Market the Hell Out of

In absolutely no particular order, here are some particular capabilities and strengths that I would market if I were a printer:

G7
Mailing and fulfillment
Rock-star employees
Community support
Data analytics capabilities
Personalized printing smarts
On-staff design expertise
Tangible signs of expansion and growth
Actual and factual differentiators
Being a union printer
Meaningful awards
Large-format capabilities
Specific verticals served

Do it in your enewsletter, your blog, and in sales calls. Do it in your direct mail campaigns, in social posts, and on your web site. Rinse and repeat.

You’re welcome.

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