Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Marketing. Web-to-Print. Warehouse Management.
Marketing Tips for Mail and Fulfillment Service Providers
Posted by 
on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 
at 12:32 PM 
in 
In just a few days, my beloved New England Patriots will be facing the New York Giants in the Super Bowl. And while I will certainly be rooting heavily against New York in that game, that certainly will not stop me from heading to that State in order to meet with some mail and fulfillment service providers!
On Wednesday, February 1st, I will be speaking at a meeting of the Mailing and Fulfillment Service Association (MFSA) New York Chapter.
Presentation Overview
The presentation that I will be delivering is titled “How You Can Improve Your Own Marketing Efforts”.
I will focus on providing actionable items and intelligence that service providers can use to reach more prospects and generate more leads. Some of the main topics that will be covered include:
- Creating a marketing strategy and plan
- How to incorporate online marketing and content marketing into your effort
- Ideas for executing multi-channel marketing campaigns
- Ways to use social media and mobile marketing in your business
If you are in the New York area, I hope to see you there!
Event Details
When: Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Where: Club 101, 101 Park Avenue, (40th St), New York, NY
5:30 – Cocktail Reception
6:15 – Dinner
7:00 – Program
Need more information? Please visit the MFSA New York Chapter’s website >>
P.S. Go Patriots!
Tags Make Money on Mobile
Are you looking to grow your business in 2012? The answer is “of course”, right! One way that service provider and marketing agencies will be looking to do that is through mobile marketing solutions. As the number of smartphone and tablet owners continues to rise, companies will seek to increase the money they spend to reach that audience.
If you are looking to get a piece of that growing pool of money, we have a product and program that can help.
Watch this two-minute video for an overview of what iFlyMobi’s White Label Program can do for you:
P.S. If you’d like more information on the White Label program, click here >>
Is There an Easy Button?
Jennifer Matt recently wrote an excellent post on The Web and Print blog titled “How Easy is Printing?”
If you haven’t read it, I’d definitely encourage you to take a moment to do so. Not only is it entertaining, but it’s inspiring as well.
The main point of the post is that to encourage people to print more things, companies need to make it easy for them to do so. While this certainly includes external processes (how hard is it for someone to order printing from your company), it also applies to internal processes.
Jennifer asks this question: “Do your systems require you to piece together data from various systems to give the customer a complete picture?”
Yes, if a printer needs to log-in and pull data from multiple systems in order to give timely answers and reports to a client, then that can certainly be considered a hassle among the printer’s staff. If it’s not easy for them to do their job, most likely the customer will not think that it’s not easy to do business with that printer.
The Sales Hat is Coming On
If that’s the situation that you find your print shop in today, here comes a sales pitch.
interlinkONE’s integrated, multi-channel marketing software is designed to eliminate the need for a printer to invest in multiple point solutions. Our ilinkONE Version 8 software is designed to allow you to build, manage, execute, and measure marketing efforts across a variety of channels — including print, email, web, social networks, mobile, and more.
It enables printers to easily generate and provide reports to clients that give them a full report on their activity — from landing page hits, to leads, to inventory counts, to popular products ordered, and more.
Time for a Demo
If you’re interested in learning more, I’d love for you take a moment and register for a demo of our solutions.
Business Growth with Customer Intelligence
“The customer is now in control”.
While I will not attribute that quote to anyone specifically, it has absolutely been said at marketing conferences, printed in marketing books, and tweeted via social network sites countless times recently. But more importantly, it is a phrase that is being fulfilled by directly impacting how marketing departments operate on a daily basis.
This creates an opportunity for service providers — whether they offer print, mail, fulfillment, or other marketing services — to grow their business.
How so?
Notice the chart below. It was recently published by Forrester in their “Marketing Technology Adoption 2011” report.
Now, I only included the top 5 answers to this question that were provided by Marketing/Customer Intelligence folks.
But here’s where I think that there is a tremendous opportunity for service providers:
Many of those companies have made hardware and software investments so that they can help their clients with additional marketing services (or simply improve the success of the existing efforts that they are involved with).
However, they may be struggling with how exactly they can make money from those investments. It may be challenging to change the conversations that they typically have with customers and prospects. How do they transition from simply talking about the print or mail specifications of the piece that they could create to talking about terms such as “multi-channel”, “personalization”, “cross-media”, and more?
Well, I think that the results found in this Forrester report/chart can certainly help with that. The top 5 answers to the question posed in the image below can all be converted into conversation starters for service providers.
From this Chart to a Conversation Starter
These are just a couple of samples:
“Did you know that along with helping you create and distribute powerful printed materials, we can also help to drive the recipients online and create an easy-to-use experience for them to learn about your event/product/service?”
“I know that we have been your printer for a long time. But the world of marketing and communications have absolutely been shifting. You may be rightfully scared of how you can use emerging and new channels. Well, we can help! We can guide you through the best practices so that you can embrace channels such as social media and mobile marketing, and integrate them with traditional channels.”
“We are more than happy to help you print and mail these materials to promote your seminar. But I have a question for you — do you know which channels worked the best last time you ran a seminar? If not, we can absolutely help you measure these activities and others this time.”
Creating Print Business from a Smartphone
Smartphones continue to make it easy for people to create and share content. Whether it’s text, pictures, videos, or songs, people are distributing that content to other mobile phones or via social media sites.
This dramatic increase in content creation can also create business opportunities for print, mail, and fulfillment services providers.
Click here to watch the video where we discuss this a bit further >>
