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Almost sounds utopian but highly achievable. But yet small businesses still use scattergun approaches to marketing, in the hope of a big return. 

What happens when you get something which isn’t relevant to you, you ignore it. If it’s impersonal it too gets ignored. So why the ignorance or your potential customers and customers? Are you just being lazy? Would you respond if someone shouted “Oi! You!” In the street – not likely.

The levels of message absorption in marketing materials are on a downward slide. Due to the high volumes of digital content, people just cannot remember it. Or it just doesn’t strike an accord with them. You want a meaningful customer journey; however, the use of selected channels doesn’t reap the return. Blasting out messages which just don’t get seen or heard seems to be a small given factor in some cases. Looking at our digital profiles, we get plenty of hits, however, the conversion to actual clients is nothing to write home about.

Business is about relationships. No one starts a meaning relationship digitally, how many online dating swipes, either way, dismissing without any validated reason. It’s about reputation, trust and referral. People like people like themselves, commonality, humanity is at the heart of all of us. So why do we try to start a meaningful relationship with so little engagement?

As printers, we haven’t forgotten the power of physicality in marketing. We do networking, we regularly call and chat with people (yes on the phone, not a chat-box), and we aim to inspire our audience with the physical presence print offers. We know we gain clients when it’s a proper relationship. (Proper might have something to do with us being based in Yorkshire) A large percentage of our work comes from referral, we wouldn’t have household names like The Scouts, Barnardos and other prominent charities in our portfolio, if it wasn’t for recommendation by people. How do we do it? Storytelling is the key, it’s the difference we make, the added value of our actions (which don’t necessarily appear as an item on a line on an invoice), how we do business which makes the difference.

This June, we did another release of our House Newsletter, which focused on direct mail and what it can do and offer, it went to a very selective list of people – so focussed, either existing customers of people we’d like to work with. It links with all our other marketing channels, so it builds our story. To be fair, it is an entry-level functional item of direct mail, personalised on every piece within it, so ticks the box of being direct and personal. We added a small twist, a little piece of Yorkshire, with some Yorkshire Values.

My next question is would you be hospitable to all of your customers? I think we all would say yes. So we only did a list of about 100 names, print and production costs came in around the price of a good cup of barista coffee for each piece. (Of course creative and artwork costs do vary, so depends how you view it.) For reference, I also did the number crunching on double the volume and it came in around 65-75% of the price of your barista coffee. All this including the postage, using Royal Mail Barcoded Mail solutions.

In the commissioning process, we dummied and tested different paper stocks for weight and performance. Included and tested different insertion items for weight and Royal Mail compliance. This ensured we remained in Letter, Band One for postage purposes, so controlling the budget.

If you need to be proper and stand out, demonstrate your values, show you’re real and trust-worthy, we can tailor direct mail solutions to fit. We can suggest ideas to get you remembered for the right reasons too. We are well aware that opportunities for face to face business development could be limited in the foreseeable future. Creating a memorable engagement will become paramount.