As a final act of closure on the holiday weekend, I re-traced the July 4th parade route on my morning run. As I carefully dodged candy wrappers, leaflets, and other giveaway items on the newly swag-encrusted streets (an unseasonal rain had left all of these promos fused to the ground) I thought of how parades can be useful to marketers.

First, they are great ways to support your community and country. Second, they are an OK local mass media tool — emphasis on the OK and the local. Finally, they can be useful cautionary tales because none of your other marketing efforts should resemble your parade strategy at all.

Parade strategy is fine for an actual parade. You see, a parade is a large untargeted mass of people. Buy some huge bags of candy, maybe run some fliers at the copy center, and you are destined for parade greatness. That is an acceptable investment for something that you should largely chalk up to good will and community outreach.

Again, none of your other efforts should look like a parade. Unlike a parade which pulls in large, seemingly random samples of people from all walks of life, chances are you can find a targeted slice of customers or potential customers to talk to. Rather than running general overview brochures on Astrobrights by the hundreds for papering the streets you should know your audience well enough to produce a small, powerful piece tailor-made to position your solution before this target. It sounds simple but the lines can get blurred such as sending a generic postcard to chunks of the phone book or sending an email blast when you should be launching a targeted email campaign.

The holiday is over. Make sure your marketing is back off the parade route.

Photo credit by Michael @ NW Lens via Flickr

“You’ve got to see this,” said my friend and colleague Don as he slid one of the most engaging pieces of direct mail that I’ve seen in a long time across the table … Hear my quick take in the video above. Here is the PURL (Personalized URL) used in the campaign – www.AcceptTheInvitation.com/DonaldCarstensen. An interesting takeaway? With campaigns like this, direct snail mail is almost becoming a boutique media for very small personal campaigns.

Today Business Week had a great article on the success of the tried and true email newsletter. While definitely not the sexiest form of new media (nor the newest), many of our clients see continued success with email newsletters. Here are our 8 reasons why email marketing is an effective way for getting your brand in front of your customers.

Email Marketing Is …

1. Personal — Email newsletters are delivered directly to customers’ inboxes. When they sign up for your email program, they demonstrate their willingness as a consumer to enter into a very personal relationship with you.
2. Permission-based — As the Business Week article points out, it is much more personal to grant a company permission to send regular email updates than it is to click through and passively read a blog or fan a business on Facebook.
3. Relevant — The best commercial emails touch on timely issues that are relevant to customers. There is no bigger predictor of email success than relevance to the reader.
4. Targeted — You can be even more relevant to your readers by segmenting your list and delivering targeted messages.
5. Regular — After you set a scheduled pattern and provided you pay close attention to items 3 and 4, your emails will become an anticipated part of your customers’ routines. It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so I get my e-newsletter from …
6. Trust-Building — Because of its personal nature, email marketing provides you with an opportunity to build trust. If this trust is abused you risk damaging the relationship — both online and off. There are many ways of losing a customer’s trust via email such as mailing too much, using too hard a sell, not delivering relevant, targeted messages and more. Be careful.
7. Cost Effective — A less touchy-feely reason but it’s true. Email can be as effective as direct mail without the cost of printing and postage.
8. Measurable — Again, a dollars-and-cents reason but few other forms of media can compete with email marketing on its level of insight and accountability. As a business, you get real-time results on opens, clicks, bounces, and opt-outs.

Finally, I’d like to say a quick note on sending permission-based email rather than blasting. I dislike this dated phrase mostly because it flies in the face of email marketing’s elder cousin, direct mail. You don’t blast something at some general population and hope for a response. You send a targeted message directly to a relevant audience. Oh, and you can measure it. Heck, that’s direct marketing in a nutshell. Blasting uses junk mailer tactics to attack users’ inboxes. In the end, that’s where you end up when you abuse this special relationship — in spam folders wondering why you have more customers opting out of your program than you have opting in.

In times of economic hardship, many companies’ sole direct marketing expenditure is email. Email is modern direct marketing. When used wisely, email is an incredibly effective tool for keeping your brand in front of customers on a consistent basis. When cultivated and maintained, your email list will become an invaluable asset to your business as your customers will eagerly await seeing your brand in their inboxes.

Photo credit: husin.sani via Flickr

In today’s world, you can’t afford to wait for the supplies you need. Iowa Spring, a leading manufacturer of custom springs, knows this. For over 30 years they have served the garage door industry. As noted, timing of supplies is key. That’s why Iowa Spring created their Quick Ship program that guarantees shipping times based on the size and weight of your order. Iowa Spring enlisted Westergaard to create a direct mail campaign targeting garage door dealers that would feature multiple drops over the course of three months. Our first step in packaging a program like this is to anchor it with a visual identity (above). Next we came up with two very different creatives. (more…)

If you haven’t seen this already, check out this hilarious take from Project Cartoon. Jaded or frighteningly realistic? You be the judge.

This site is also a fun example of letting users under the hood to play around. If you click on the ‘Create‘ link you can modify the ‘toon and save it to a unique url that you can give to your friends who in turn will send it to their friends and … I guess it’s also an example of viral marketing. The real kicker? The cartoon’s content itself isn’t original to the site. It’s a pretty prevalent cartoon. What’s original here (beyond the funky Simpsons-esque design) is that it’s user based and can truly grow like an open source project. The cartoonist is even adding new cells from users to subsequent versions.