Marketing Tips for Mailing and Fulfillment Service Providers
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I recently had the chance to speak at the 2012 MFSA Southwest Conference in Fort Worth, Texas.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to the conference organizers for having me down and to all of the attendees for making me feel loved. I mean it! I really appreciated it. There was a great camaraderie throughout the conference.
Throughout my presentation, I discussed the convergence of traditonal forms of marketing — including print, mail, and fulfillment — with online marketing, social media, and mobile.
I presented strategies, tips, and tools that service providers can use to effectively sell, build, manage, execute, and measure multi-channel marketing solutions.
Below are the slides that I used for my presentation. I hope that you find them helpful!
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Tags Mailing and Fulfillment in a Multi-Channel World
From May 12th through the 15th, I will have the opportunity to attend and participate in the 2012 MFSA Southwest Chapter Conference.
interlinkONE has been a Gold Partner of MFSA on a national level for a number of years, and we are always happy when we get the chance to interact with members on a regional level.
During the conference, I will be delivering a one-hour presentation that is titled “Multi-Channel Marketing for the Mailing and Fulfillment Services Provider“. The presentation will cover a variety of topics, including:
- Challenges Faced by Service Providers in Today’s World of Marketing and Communications
- Selling Multi-Channel Marketing Solutions
- Best Practices for Managing, Executing, and Measuring Marketing Campaigns
- Emerging Technologies and Getting Ready for What’s Next
The 2012 MFSA Southwest Chapter Conference is being held Worthington Renaissance Hotel in Fort Worth Texas from April 12th – 15th.
I hope to see you there!
For more information about the conference, please click here >>
Business Lessons for the Mailing & Fulfillment Industries… from Tom Hanks and Wilson
The MFSA Mid-Winter Conference was held in Phoenix this past February, at the beautiful Arizona Grand Resort. As you might expect, the folks back at the interlinkONE office in Boston certainly gave me their share of teasing as they (incorrectly, I might add) believed I spent most of time there in the sun.
However, I must admit that to spent time during the conference watching a movie! This happened during one of the keynote sessions.
The presenter was Wayne Peterson of the Black Canyon Consulting Group and the title of his presentation was “Navigating In a Life Raft”. He prefaced each of the main points in his presentation with scenes from the movie “Castaway“.
In addition to entertaining us with clips of Tom Hanks’ exceptional acting job, Wayne provided 5 lessons that business leaders in the mail, fulfillment, and print service providers can follow in these changing times in the world of marketing and communications.
Step 1: Assess where you are now
Times are less-than-ideal for many folks that primarily provide traditional marketing services, which certainly includes mail, print, and fulfillment. In the case of Tom Hanks, he had survived a horrific plane crash but was stranded.
Wayne encouraged all attendees to avoid standing still, but rather, to take a hard and honest look at their situation. This includes revenue, trends, resources, technology, customers, and more.
Step 2: Define a Strategy
Once you’ve assessed what you have, you need to make a strategy to guide your next moves. According to Wayne, a strategy should consist of three things:
- Diagnosis — a statement of the problem and challenge. It should be a simple, distiller description of what really matters.
- Treatment Plan: what is needed to deal with that diagnosis
- Prescriptions: specific actions needed to start implementing that treatment
Step 3: Build up your Brand
For companies that make their living providing services to other businesses, one thing often gets lost in the shuffle is this: taking the time to service and build up your own company!
One major aspect of this involves taking positive steps to improve and increase brand awareness and recognition.
In the case of Tom Hanks and Castaway, the “brand” that he defined and built up was Wilson.
As a service provider, your brand is quite heavily defined your customer’s perception. To help control that, a company must deliver on their brand promise. In order to motivate one’s customers, a brand promise should:
- Convey a compelling benefit
- Be authentic and credible
- It must be able to be kept, every time.
Step 4: Go to Market
This step is much easier said than done. And often, it takes multiple attempts. In “Castaway”, Tom Hanks ran through multiple attempts and variations as he looked for ways to find rescue.
Going to market involves taking a look at your strategy and brand promise, and then choosing how to take that value to find new customers or new business from existing ones.
For many service providers, this may require changing the resources or process that guides their Sales team. Reps may need to adjust from selling commodities to selling solutions.
That may not be an easy transition, but one that can reap extraordinary benefits.
Step 5: Create a Compelling Customer Experience
In today’s multi-channel world, a customer’s perception of one’s business is defined by ever touch-point that they experience with us. Thus, we must be willing to analyze everything we do — from invoices, to phone reception, to email signatures, to website content, to collateral, and more.
Those items must align with the goals and values that we want our company to reach and be known for.
In Castaway, Tom Hanks’ character works for FedEx. They have long been known for having a brand promise that a package will be delivered! Near the end of the movie, there is a powerful scene where Tom Hanks delivers one of the packages that was originally on his plane to the destination mailing address.
Now that’s a way to deliver on a promise!
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I must say that this was certainly one of the more unique presentations that I have ever seen at a conference. And while I did use a few of my hand-written notes to help create this blog post, many of the points are still clearly in my head more than a couple of weeks since my trip to Phoenix.
CEO John Foley Wins the L.U. “Luke” Kaiser Educational Award
On behalf of all of the employees at interlinkONE, we would like to send a special shout of congratulations to our CEO, John Foley, Jr.
At the 2011 MFSA Annual Conference, John received the L.U. “Luke” Kaiser Educational Award.
Here is a description of the award from the MFSA website:
This award is given in the name of Luke Kaiser, a true industry pioneer, who founded the Premier Company, Houston, Texas. Mr. Kaiser was a great believer in the value of education as evidenced by his membership in 12 industry trade associations. The Kaiser award, established in 1978, is given to that person in MFSA who has contributed the most to the advancement of betterment of education pertaining to our industry. It may also be given to a student who attended one of MFSA’s technical training seminars, and, as a consequence, exhibits a high degree of competence.
A number of pictures and videos were taken at the Conference during the Awards gala. There is even a rumor that John’s acceptance speech is on video! If that turns out to be true and we receive permission to post it, we promise that we will share it with you.
Mailing, Fulfillment, and Multi-Channel
From June 15th to the 18th, interlinkONE will be exhibiting at the 2011 MFSA Annual Conference.
While I won’t be there personally, two interlinkONE legends — John Foley, Jr. and Karen Sheehey will absolutely be in attendance!
Here is a quick video regarding some of the things that they’ll be talking about — including mail, fulfillment, and multi-channel marketing:
