Recently we have seen several debates, both online and off, about whether newsletters are still an effective marketing tool. Quite a few online marketing “experts” have stated that newsletters have become largely useless, and there now exist much more effective marketing tools for reaching your current and potential customers. To quote a recently famous college football commentator: “Not so fast, my friends!”

In the fast paced, ever-changing world of marketing, people are often looking for the newest, latest and supposedly greatest idea for reaching people that no one has ever tried. Newsletters quickly get dismissed for being too time consuming to write and put together when they are destined for the trash bin (hard copies) or spam folders (email copy).

While this may be true for some newsletters, at Print It Plus we have found through the years that our bi-monthly newsletter still gets read by a sizable number of recipients, and we still get a consistent number of responses to either our call to action, a comment on our marketing tips and advice, or someone complimenting our “Recipe of the Month”.

How can you still find consistent value in creating and sending out a monthly newsletter?

No matter the industry your business operates in, it is imperative to connect online and offline marketing techniques. Many entrepreneurs have found that the better they market themselves offline, the more well-known they become online, and vice versa. For now, let's take a closer look at how you can connect your online and offline marketing campaigns to improve lead generation and increase your sales revenue.

One of the traps that even seasoned marketing veterans often fall into involves crafting collateral that has far too much information for its own good. Marketing messages start out simple enough, but as brands continue to grow and evolve, the marketing messages do the same until it can be difficult to remember what that short, sweet, actionable idea was in the first place.

Your brand is a lot more than just a name or a logo. It's the feeling that someone gets when they come into contact, any contact, with your organization. In fact, the thing that really increases engagement and drives loyalty isn't your products or services (though, to be fair, they do help quite a bit) - it's this idea of the larger brand itself.

Because someone could potentially have that experience with your brand, the idea of brand continuity could not be more important. Regardless of how someone interacts with your brand, it should all feel like it's naturally coming from the same place at all times. To truly master the idea of using continuity to strengthen your branding efforts, there are a few key things you'll need to keep in mind.

Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is a service offered by the U.S. Postal Service which allows individuals and businesses to target postcard mailing pieces to specific neighborhoods. EDDM campaigns offer an opportunity for significant branding and sales success for your business IF you have a good plan for making it happen.

In order to spend those hard-earned dollars that you have allocated toward EDDM marketing successfully requires a plan. The key is to do your campaigns right, from the planning stage right through the client service after the mailers have all arrived at their destinations. You need to choose the knowledgeable, award-winning team at Print It Plus to work with you and your business from beginning to end.

At Print It Plus we have over 30 years of experience with successful direct mail marketing and EDDM campaigns. We will help you strategize, design and execute an EDDM campaign that brings you the best results possible.

If you think that you can comfortably stop nurturing your leads as soon as they make that ever-important sale, you're only seeing one small part of a much larger and more important picture. The fact of the matter is that you can NEVER nurture your leads too much for a variety of important reasons.

For years, marketers have been looking for better ways to achieve cross-media marketing. In other words, they’ve been searching for solutions that let them enjoy the benefits of both print and digital channels. Many have turned to QR codes to do precisely that. By including a QR code on a piece of print marketing, you can deliver the same message in the same way, but with a mechanism that varies depending on the preferences of the user.

A new year always brings with it a variety of different changes, and it seems that 2017 will be no exception, as far as the United States Postal Service is concerned. Anyone who relies on the USPS for their direct mail marketing activities would do well to sit up and take notice, especially with regards to the price change information and other news that has recently been announced.

As a full-service printing, marketing and advertising company, we at Print It Plus are often asked what the highest Return On Investment is for the different types of products and services that we offer. The truth is that each and every situation is unique. However, we do share with you our knowledgeable advice based upon our extensive experience, built up over almost 30 years in this business.

Storytelling is a time-honored tradition which began before humanity had the ability to create long-lasting printed documents. The first stories were a way of passing on an oral tradition and history of various cultures around the world. There is still a storytelling tradition in many cultures, although as communities spread out, storytelling has moved to written, printed, and now digital methods of recording the tales. Oral traditions created a rich history for ancient cultures that gave rise to much of what we call myths and legends today, a blend of history and religion which gave purpose to people who lived short and often harsh lives.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when operating a business in today's digital age is that EVERY interaction you have with a customer, regardless of how private you think it may be, is a public relations disaster waiting to happen. The internet has brought us together as a society like never before, and this brings with it both its positives and its negatives for organizations everywhere. If someone has a great interaction with your business on the internet, they can easily tell all their friends and family members about it with a quick tweet or Facebook post. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true - even a negative interaction with your customer service department on the telephone can quickly balloon into a PR nightmare in a matter of hours if you're not careful.

Make no mistake: the data revolution is upon us and has, perhaps, affected no industry more than the wonderful world of marketing. Your average marketer now has access to huge volumes of information about who their customers are, how they're behaving, what their thoughts are on certain issues and more - all of which can quickly prove overwhelming. It's important to look at the big data phenomenon for what it is, however: an opportunity. It's a very real chance that marketers have to realign their efforts and create the type of powerful customer experience that creates a loyal army of brand advocates.

It's ironic, really. The lists that we struggle to be removed from are also the same lists our companies strive to obtain. The truth is, for many businesses, targeted mailing lists are the bread and butter of their marketing efforts. Being able to create niche-marketing materials and then putting those materials into the right hands is essential to a company’s survival.

Not all mailing lists are created equal, though. Understanding the different types of mailing lists is critical in maximizing the return on your investment of content and quality marketing materials.