IN THIS ISSUE
Effective Direct Mail
Technical Stuff
A Look at Advertising
About Us
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ARCHETYPE, INC.
919.835.0450 phone
919.835.9760 fax
ewfx@mindspring.com
1615 Sunrise Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27608
We provide graphic design, writing, marketing consulting, and other related services to businesses and nonprofits. We can design any type of printed piece or a website, as well as write your marketing plan, news release, or grant proposal. Let us put our 20 years of combined experience to work
for you.
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THRIVE
An Ezine From ARCHETYPE, Inc
Volume 4, Issue 2, October 2004
Dear Friends,
Let’s talk shop. Marketing is not an expense--it’s an investment. Effective marketing is essential to attracting new customers and retaining current ones, projecting a professional image, and increasing profits (or support, if you’re a nonprofit). Success is all about making a positive, lasting impression on the people who make up your target market so that relationships can develop. We hope that you find the information presented in this ezine to be helpful as you promote your business or nonprofit.
We'd like to extend a special thank-you to our newest clients: City of Raleigh; Habitat for Humanity of Durham; IBD Insurance Services, Inc.; Linda Powers, Painter/ Sculptor; Meals on Wheels of Wake County; NARAL; North Carolina Council of Churches; Ragsdale Liggett; Tammy Lynn Center for Developmental Disabilities; Triangle United Way; Visionaire Marketing; WAG Pet Boutique; Woodland Place Management; and York Simpson Underwood Realty.
Contact us today at ewfx@mindspring.com or 919.835.0450 to request a free estimate on an upcoming project. If you're already working with us, we appreciate your giving us the opportunity to help you achieve your goals.
Please let us know if you have any trouble viewing this Ezine.
Take care and happy marketing!
Tom and Elizabeth Forsythe, Owners
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To mail or not to mail:
how to conduct an effective direct mail campaign
For decades, most people (graphic designers especially) have viewed direct mail pieces as inferior to other forms of print media. The design of most direct mailers was garish and busy, and companies indiscriminately mailed confusing, multi-piece packages to prospects they knew nothing about. Today some of the most dazzling print design comes to you via snail mail. Many companies and nonprofits find that direct mail campaigns, executed correctly, are extremely profitable. No other sales vehicle is as flexible in terms of size or gives you a better opportunity to break through the clutter and noise with an innovative piece that speaks directly to your target market.
Direct mail works
Over 40% of the mail that a typical consumer receives is direct mail. Though we call it junk mail, it persists because it’s effective. According to the Direct Marketing Association, consumer direct mail sales in 2001 in the United States topped $1 trillion--an amount 10 times greater than the revenues from the American fast food industry. Direct mail works because it targets consumers who are likely prospects and speaks to them in a personal way at their home or place of business. When done properly, a mailing can pay for itself many times over. The Direct Marketing Association estimates that direct mail sales revenue will grow 9.2% between 2000–2005, while the overall US economy is expected to grow 1.3% during the same period.
Contrary to some predictions, the Internet did not kill direct mail. Combining snail mail tactics with e-commerce can be extremely effective. For example, a direct mail piece can drive traffic to your website, where a sales transaction can take place. You want your piece to grab the attention of recipients, get them interested in your product or service (or cause), stimulate desire, and provide them with the means to take action.
Getting started
Coordinating an effective direct mail campaign involves a number of steps. You’ll need to consider how to compile or secure your list (by far the single most important element with the exception of the offer itself), postal requirements, the weight of your package, and how the elements of the package will be folded, collated, inserted, and addressed. You must choose between an envelope package and a self-mailer such as a postcard (many advantages but not always appropriate).
You also have to make decisions such as: hand addressing or not, stamp or bulk mail indicia, personal notes or not, and how to print each piece (offset, digital, photocopier, DocuTech, laser printer, or letterpress). You’ll need to consider carefully how prospects will respond to your offer and provide them with the tools they need (such as a response card and envelope). You’ll want to estimate the costs for each stage: writing, photography/illustration, design/layout, printing, mail house services, and postage. And, it’s always a good idea to establish a realistic production schedule and decide who’s responsible for which aspects of the project.
The offer
As mentioned above, the offer itself is the single most important element of any direct mail effort, and it deserves much thought. You might want to try tailoring one of the following offers for use in your next direct mail piece:
Become a member
Get a free gift
We guarantee your satisfaction
Buy X and get Y
Take advantage of free information
Get a discount, samples, a free trial, or special financing
And, remember to let the offer lead the way; don’t bury it in paragraph six of your letter.
And last, but certainly not least: your target market
If you try to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one. Your target market can never be “the general public” or “everyone who owns a car/eats out/wears clothes/has a pet.” You must define your market, learn everything you can about the people who make up that market, and write and design your piece to appeal to them. Know exactly want you want prospects to do when they receive your mailing. Remember to include a call to action and make it extremely easy for prospects to follow through.
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technical stuff
It helps to know the lingo when dealing with graphic design, copy editing, and printing. Below are some commonly used terms.
1. Digital Images: You can obtain digital images from a variety of sources: by scanning hard copy prints, using a digital camera, or creating images with Imaging software like Photoshop or illustration software like Adobe Illustrator.
2. Pixel: A basic unit of digital imaging in electronic imaging. A digital photo is made up of a mosaic of units (or pixels) of the same same size but of various shades and colors.
3.Raster Image: Images that use a grid of colors known as pixels to represent images. A raster is the most common electronic medium for continuos tone images such as photographs or digital paintings because they can represent subtle gradations of shades and colors. The rule of thumb for raster images that will be used for offset printing is that they should be 300 DPI (see "Image Resolution" below) at the actual size at which they will be printed. Increasing the dimensions of a 300 DPI raster image beyond 100% will most likely produce a rough and "jaggedy" image in the final printed piece.
4. Vector Image: Vector graphics are made up of lines and curves defined by mathematical objects called vectors. Vectors are most common medium for digital illustrations and logo creation because you can easily resize this type of image without losing the quality of the graphic.
5. Image Resolution: Refers to the number of pixels displayed per unit of printed length in an image. In offset printing, resolution is usually measured in dots per inch (DPI). In the digital world, it is usually measured in pixels per inch (PPI).
6. High Resolution Image: These images usually reproduce in more detail and with subtler color transitions. High res images contain more, and therefore smaller, pixels then low resolution images. For offset printing, a photo at 300 DPI is consider high resolution.
7. Low Resolution Image: Images used for web sites are usually low resolution files. Seventy-two PPI is a good resolution for images that will be used on the web because they look sharp on a computer screen. They require less memory than high res images and therefore speed the loading time for viewers.
8. Pixilation: Using a low resolution for a printed image will produce a pixilated image. This means that the image will appear rough with large coarse-looking pixels. Photos taken from websites are usually 72 PPI images and will pixilate when printed.
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A Look at Advertising
Thinking about placing an ad for your product, service, or organization? There are innumerable ways to go about creating an advertisement. You can keep it simple and use your logo and some attractive photos of your product or photos related to your service . . . or you can dig deeper and create a concept that relays a simple and memorable truth about what you’re trying to sell. Let’s examine some of the most successful advertising campaigns in history and dissect the components that made them so successful.
First, a little history. Advertising has been a part of people’s lives for thousands of years. Crude ads appeared as inscriptions in Egyptian tombs around 3,000 B.C. The Greeks engraved theatre ads in stone about 500 B.C., and people painted signs on the white lime walls of ancient Rome and Pompeii.
Print ads came into being when Gutenberg’s invented moveable type printing in 1454. In the late fifteenth century, William Caxton designed the first ads in English for a prayer book. The first magazine ads appeared in the 1600s and soon after, in France, people began attaching simple bills to the posts that lined the roadside and protected pedestrians from traffic. These bills became known as posters. In the 1880s, lithography made printing cheaper and faster, and the mass production of illustrated color posters became viable, fueling a poster boom.
Colorful posters were just the beginning. Population growth and increased prosperity in the eighteenth century gave birth to both a consumer society and a demand for advertising. In 1886, Pears Soap Company paid Sir John Everett Millais 2,300 pounds for one of his paintings. Titled “Bubbles,” this classic Victorian painting of Millais’ young grandson was used in soap ads, creating a marriage between art and commerce that outraged the art world but proved to be extremely effective in getting the public’s attention--and selling soap.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, companies began employing artists to work to a specific brief and produce more integrated and targeted campaigns. Today, designers create ads for every product and service imaginable, and these ads have become an important part of our culture. To understand what was valuable to a group of people at a specific point in time or know what a certain culture aspires to, we need only to take a quick look at the advertising of the day. For better or worse, advertising is a reflection of who we are and what we value.
Persistence, persistence, persistence
Order a Coca-Cola and most waiters around the world will know exactly what you want. Almost every person alive today has seen the flowing script of the Coca-Cola logo. An astute businessman named Asa Candler purchased the rights to Coca Cola for $2,300 in 1888. Candler was a great believer in the importance of advertising. He began promoting the Coca Cola brand on calendars, trays, glasses, fans, wallets, pocketknives, playing cards, clocks, menus, and bookmarks, as well as in magazine ads. By 1895, people drank Coca-Cola in every state in the country. By 1908, the Coca-Cola logo decorated 2.5 million square feet of building facades.
The obvious lesson here is that persistence pays off. Marketing in some form is essential to your success whether you’re involved with a business or a nonprofit, and marketing usually includes some type of advertising. If you have reason to believe that advertising would be an effective way to market your product, service, or cause, research possible outlets and commit to a schedule that you can afford. Remember: don’t scrimp on your ads. It’s often wiser to run a well-designed ad frequently in the appropriate publications and make only a few boxes of product then it is to fill your store room with product and have only enough cash left over to put up some photocopied flyers on telephone polls.
Make it fit
When you are working on developing and promoting your brand, keep returning to the essential elements of your product, service, or cause and what sets you apart. Try to ensure that any advertising slogan fits tightly with your product or service. Kit Kat is a powerful example of a good fit between product and tagline. The brand, owned by Nestle, has been around since the 1930s, and the slogan is--you already know it, don’t you?--“Have a break; have a Kit Kat.”
The word “break” reinforces the crisp, “snappable” nature of the chocolate cookie, and it also associates the treat with a well-earned break from any type of drudgery. The company has used the slogan in numerous ways, often with a new slant on the word “break.” Remember the “Gimme a break, gimme a break” jingle? It helped sell a lot of Kit Kat bars. Today Kit Kat is the UK’s best-selling confectionery brand.
“The best advertising comes out of the product--a little truth about the product,” said creative director Billy Malwinney. “The advertising should build a bridge between the message and the audience. Creatives must keep going back to the product to make sure that the idea isn’t stuck on with a bit of spit. If you’re putting two things together, they must fit firmly as in: break and Kit Kat.”
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About the Owners of ARCHETYPE
Tom Forsythe is the graphic designer, and Elizabeth Forsythe is the writer and project coordinator. Since 1998, we have worked with over 100 businesses and nonprofits of all sizes, and we’d like to add you to our list of happy clients. For more information on our credentials, see the “About Us” page of our website.
You may reprint the information contained in THRIVE in your newsletter or other publication. Please e-mail Elizabeth to obtain permission.
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Why should you choose ARCHETYPE for your marketing needs?
1. You will save money. Unlike large firms with a huge overhead, we deliver top quality work for reasonable fees.
2. You will get your project on time. Because we are small, we can turn on a dime. We provide quick turnarounds, and we always meet our deadlines.
3. You will get our full attention. When you choose ARCHETYPE, you work directly with the two people who bring your project to fruition.
4. You have access to a wide range of services, and you pay for only the services that you need. We offer graphic design and layout; writing, editing, and proofing; print management and project coordination; marketing consultation; public relations/media services, traditional media illustration; photography; and website design.
5. You get the benefit of experience. Together we have over 20 years of real-world experience in creating marketing materials that produce results. |
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