Perhaps like many of you, I spent a relaxing labor day outside with family and a hot barbecue. It was especially relaxing, in fact, because my wife spent much of the afternoon showing off our new daughter to friends and relatives. That left me free to eat my burger in peace and chat with my brother. He was not so lucky. He had to eat, talk with me and keep his three year old busy. It was actually sort of amusing watching him pick various toys up and try to get his son interested long enough to take a bite of his lunch or finish a sentence. I did some rough calculations in my head and estimated his son’s attention span at about 20 seconds, which is probably not that much shorter than the average adult. I suppose we just hide it better.

Marketing 101 teaches us that your message needs to be clear and focused. Of course, it also needs to be relevant and compelling. Interestingly, this fundamental rule applies to online mediums as well as offline. For example, landing pages are a great way to convert prospects. They are usually only one page and offer the visitor only one option.

Your print efforts need to be the same way. Whether you’re doing an elaborate mailer with multiple components, or a magazine insert, your goal should be to deliver one message and request one action from the reader/recipient.

A very large part of our business is our high impact direct mail pieces. When clients see a really cool design or an elaborate mailer, the temptation is often to pack it with as much as possible. Most of our mailers work best with beautiful graphics, a compelling offer and a focused message.

Recently, I received a packet at home that was in a large thick mailer and included at least ten different pieces inside. There was a letter, a few buckslips, a large cardboard thingy and a few other inserts. The package was from a baby magazine and they were trying to get me interested in all sorts of different services. They had something that talked about insurance, something that spoke about the importance of saving for college and the big cardboard thingy had a picture of a happy baby sitting in his diaper. I left it on the table for my wife to look through, but after a few days it just became part of the clutter and eventually ended up in the trash. I wonder if it would have been a more effective mailer if they had sent one wave to promote their insurance product, one about college savings, and one about cute babies in diapers. At least then I would have paid more attention to a single message and the three year old inside me may have acted on it. Instead, it just became part of the clutter.

As you evaluate the creative for your campaign just be sure that every component is supporting a single message and a call to action. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing; a fancy mailer, a print ad, or an online campaign, the same rules apply. This BMW magazine insert is a great example of keeping a message focused. The client had lots of space to add creative, but instead the point is very clear. The entire two-sided magazine insert is devoted to tires.

It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; it could be insurance or automotive, I guarantee you that many of your prospects are three year olds secretly walking around in adult bodies.

It’s unbelievable to me how fast this summer went by. It seems like only last week I was reading all of the graduation stories in the local paper. But alas, fall is upon us. The temperature is cooler and there are even trees starting to turn yellow and brown.  Oddly enough, the premature-coloring is from the lack of rainfall in the region and not the changing season. For those of you in the warmer regions of the country check out this amazing video on the changing seasons.

The new season is a good time to get reenergized about your marketing. Many BtoB marketers put programs on hold during the summer because too many people are sitting on the beach or driving their R/V’s across the country. But now the kids are going back to school and vacations are over, so there are no excuses.

I think there must be some psychological transformation that goes on inside us when the seasons change. Sort of like spring fever, but instead of slacking off, we feel like getting things done. For me it’s evident in the marketing and creative meetings. People want to get going on projects that have remained stagnant through the summer. Or, start working on initiatives that are just ideas and not reality.

From a sales perspective, now is a great time to dust off your database and start to reconnect with your clients and prospects. Think about an approach you haven’t tried before. Try something new, something fresh, something unexpected. Gosh, I love that word, “unexpected”. I suppose it has a negative connotation for most, but in marketing it can be the silver bullet your campaign needs.

We’re all about the unexpected here. Our entire business was founded on the idea of marketing to your prospects in an unexpected and exciting way. After all, who expects something to pop-open and jump out at them when they open a seemingly innocent looking envelope? Who expects to find a huge poster-sized picture automatically fold open as they leisurely thumb through a magazine?

Since I have been with Structural Graphics the unexpected has taken on a whole new meaning. It’s no longer the strange phone call you get from a sibling in the middle of the night; or a messy surprise that falls from the sky and hits you on the head as you walk in the park. The unexpected is now cool, exciting, different and fun.

So this Fall, as the leaves start to pile up on the ground and the day light fades earlier and earlier into the western sky, it will all be very expected. It’s been happening for billions of years. Similarly, as long as there has been marketing, people have come to expect the normal, the predictable and the average.  What a great season to be the unexpected.

As I strolled past the food court of our local mall, tempted by the smell of pretzels and bad Chinese food, I noticed a tall black witch standing in the window of one of the stores. Her arm was propped up by a wire and she was pointing in my direction with an ugly grin on her face. She held a sign in the other hand that read, “Lowest Prices on Halloween Costumes”.

Halloween? It’s August and last time I checked Halloween was at the end of October. I peered in the window and noticed a handful of shoppers sifting through costumes and decorations. The whole scene just didn’t seem right. I was standing there in shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops, staring at Halloween junk. I guess these store owners need to order their inventory months in advance. That means the suppliers are cranking our fake wax lips and rubber masks while holiday music is still playing on the radio.

It got me thinking that even with all of the technology at our disposal, lead times are still pretty long. Information can travel instantly around the globe. Packages can travel in a day or so to any corner of the Earth. Even with digital printing, electronic proofs and email, things still take time.

A couple of years ago Structural Graphics initiated a major review of its workflow. Every department and process was evaluated with the goal of improving our customer’s experience. We talked to our vendors, or customers and our employees to come up with better processes and new ways of doing things. The result was better communication with our customers, a smoother production process and of course, shorter lead times. But that’s not all we did.

We’re in a unique business. All of our dimensional projects are different in some way. Perhaps a customer needs a fairly standard box, but hey, can it whistle when someone opens it? Or maybe they’re just doing a nice magazine insert, but need an actual video to play right on the flat page! Yeah, we can do that. Then there is the client that needs all the bells and whistles, but needed it yesterday. Extremely tight deadlines are the reality of today’s world so we had to find a way to service these clients too.

This past year we launched RocketShip Solutions™. It was the culmination of months of effort trying to create a streamlined production process for our most popular designs. As a result we can now offer a large variety of high-impact dimensional solutions that can be produced and shipped in as little as a week! Furthermore, you have many different fulfillment and mailing options so you won’t be squeezed into a one-size-fits-all solution.  We’re really excited about the launch of this program and it has already proven to be a success for our customers.

Not everything needs to take a lot of time. You can have your high-impact cake and eat it too. Oh, and of course, you can also get your kids their Halloween costumes three months early.

It’s always been a challenge for marketers to find ways to stay top of mind with their customers and prospects. It’s even harder when your company offers services where the customer’s need is intermittent or unpredictable. This is the challenge our business faces every day. The question is; how can we be visible when the customer has a need?

Obviously you can’t mail or call all of your customers or prospects each week to find out if they need anything. Well, you probably could but you would get a lot of hate mail. You need to be confident that when the need arises your customers can find you.

One way to do this is with a high-impact mailer. Your prospects are getting dozens if not hundreds of envelopes and letters every day and most of them suffer a swift death in the recycling bin. But what if you sent them a small package that pops open? One of my favorite pieces here at Structural Graphics is our Book-Cube™. It never fails to surprise the recipient, even when they know it’s coming.

The Book-Cube is just one of the many high-impact designs we have created through the years. When people approach our booth at trade shows and tell us they received some cool piece that popped-open, or made a sound, or flipped over itself, or broke the rules of traditional mail in some unnatural way, we are delighted. This is the best way we stay top of mind with our prospects and customers.

Of course, there are other things your company should be doing. Sending out a weekly email newsletter is a great way to stay engaged with your database. With the dramatic increase in spam over the years this is much more difficult, but as long as you provide useful content in an consistent manner your email should get read.

The popularity of social networks and online groups has also created an avenue for marketers to communicate with their customers in a consistent and efficient way. This too has its limitations, but is still something you need to be looking at.

The reality for most marketers is that it’s impossible to insure all of your prospects and customers will keep you top of mind when the have a need for your services. But it’s important to communicate with them when they don’t need you, so you’re sure to be around when they do.

If you want your own surprise in the mail shoot me an email and I will personally send you one!

I have a special folder (digital and snail mail) where I collect interesting marketing pieces I receive. Of course, I like to save those that are amusing for one reason or another. The coupons aren’t bad either, but I never seem to use them. How does a nice iced mocha latte for $.99 sound? Oh sorry, that coupon expired last year.

My all time favorites are the personalization gaffes. I don’t mind that you bought or stole a list that didn’t include my name, but for crying out loud, why does your default title have to be so cheesy?

These are the top five most frequently used default-salutations.

#5. Dear Marketing Professional: Believe me I am flattered that you consider me a professional and that you know I am in marketing, that’s impressive data quality.

#4. Dear Professional: Okay, this is a little less impressive because you didn’t know I was in marketing, but heck, you consider me a professional. I thank you for that because I have been called much worse.

#3. Dear Sirs: Okay, I am a male and occasionally someone calls me sir; but I am only one sir, not two or three, so no need to make that salutation plural. I see this frequently for some reason. It makes me wonder under what circumstance this would be correct. Perhaps if me, and a few of my colleagues (who were male) happened to all open the same piece of mail together. In that case, this would be dead on.

#2. Dear Communicator: Well now this is just plain lazy. You don’t know my name so you have to put something. Technically, I do communicate, so you do get points for that. But so do birds and monkeys, so I am not feeling too warm and fuzzy about this one.

#1. Dear Sir or Madam: This is my favorite and the all time most used by spammers and lazy marketers alike. Somehow you got my email or mailing address but you were not supplied with my name or anything else about me that would indicate my gender.  However, you are pretty sure I am either a male or a female. Well, I can’t argue with that logic.

So that’s my top five. I was going to do a top ten but these are really the most frequently used salutations I have seen. I think the moral of the story is, be sure to personalize with a name, at the very least. Besides, if you don’t know my name than the odds are you got my information from a terrible list broker, skimmed it off an article or website, or obtained it through some other unethical manner. Either way, if I am not that important to you, your message isn’t going to be that important to me.

Surely, you have seen some funny salutations in your day. I would encourage you to share them with us below in the comments section.