We’re ringing in the new year by sharing a little secret with our clients and friends. Johnson Direct will officially relaunch our brand identity within the weeks to come. Our new name and new look will not change our furious focus on multichannel, measurable marketing.

And, don’t forget, we’ve moved our main office to a new metro-Milwaukee address: 250 Bishops Way, Suite 203, Brookfield, WI 53005.

Stay tuned for more exciting news in 2015!

The holidays give us a chance to express our gratitude… Choose from 3 special video messages, or enjoy them all. CHEER for your favorite with a “like” or a comment below.

In the new year, we’ll announce on our blog which group took the lead in our friendly Season’s Greeting contest. Stay tuned!

Again, Happy Holidays and lots of good cheer from your friends at Johnson Direct!

Direct mail as an effective medium has been declared dead more times than Brett Favre retired from professional football.

Yes, advertising mail volume has decreased. Around 85 billion pieces are sent through the USPS yearly. However, consider that 167 billion emails are sent daily.

How is this GOOD NEWS for direct mail?

While the decreased mail volume is bad for the USPS, it’s a good sign for recipients and users, because it means better targeting is being employed. It means less clutter in the mailbox, thus your offering is more likely to be seen. It means you should use, or again consider using direct mail in your marketing mix.

Here are the five things you’ll need to keep in mind as you plan to integrate direct mail into your 2015 marketing initiatives.

Read TOP 5 TIPS: DIRECT MAIL CHECKLIST FOR 2015 by Grant A Johnson, published by Chief Marketer.

2014 MarCom Gold Award Winner:
The BEACON® Advanced Metering Analytics
Product Launch

How did this 3D mailer play a role in earning Badger Meter this prestigious award (not to mention generating sales leads from many intrigued prospects)? Take a look!

CONGRATULATIONS, BADGER METER! Badger Meter’s BEACON Advanced Metering Analytics Product Launch has won a 2014 MarCom Gold Award in the “149c. Product Launch ( $150)” category. The MarCom Awards honor excellence in marketing and communications.

According to Badger Meter, a key marketing component for the product launch was the 3D (three dimensional) direct mail package. “It served to energize and focus the our salespeople to go pitch BEACON,” said Judson Luke, Integrated Marketing Services Manager, Badger Meter.

As part of its product launch, Badger Meter asked Johnson Direct (JD) to develop a direct marketing campaign. An excellent tool for triggering response, direct mail helps to fuel the lead generation process. The project  included creative development of a high-impact, three-dimensional package that demands the attention of target prospects, effectively communicates product innovations and benefits and integrates with other BEACON marketing collalteral. Badger Meter also developed a landing page to correspond with the direct mail package.

The MarCom Awards is administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals. The organization consists of several thousand creative professionals and oversees awards and recognition programs, provides judges, and sets standards for excellence. Judges are industry professionals who look for companies and individuals whose talent exceeds a high standard of excellence and whose work serves as a benchmark for the industry.

Never underestimate the power of a dimensional mailer to generate high quality leads for your sales funnel. Call our new business hotline at 262.432.0185 to talk directly to a direct mail pro.

But beware…hitting fast forward to the design stage creates a lot of risk for your brand, your business and marketing plans and organization as a whole. It doesn’t take into consideration the invaluable research and strategy that’s required to create a powerful user experience and the bottom line results to which your website should be a significant contributor.

So where SHOULD you begin?

Great question! In this article, you’ll find the answer and several ways the wireframe method will help you avoid the perils of premature design.

If you are embarking on a website refresh or building a new site from scratch, wireframes are a critical tool to streamline the design and development process. Whether you’re developing the site with internal or external resources, your web team’s process should not overlook the importance of wireframing.

Definition of wireframe:

A skeletal model in which only lines and vertices are represented, displaying the functional elements of a website or page, typically used for planning a site’s structure and functionality.

Devoid of design, color, fonts or styles, logos or images, wireframes are simple black and white layouts that outline the elements of a page, their size, where they are placed, site features, calls to action and navigation for your site.

First Things First

The wireframing initiative follows a thorough research and strategy phase that involves these activities and deliverables:

ACTIVITIES

• Stakeholder/Management Audit
• Client Knowledge Transfer
• Website Analytics Review
• Primary/Secondary Research
• Competitive Analysis

DELIVERABLES

• Scope of Work
• Technical & Design Requirements
• Tech Recommendations
• Information Architecture
• Project Timeline

The Research & Strategy phase deliverables are essential to the proactive, user-focused thought process that is a must-have for wireframe development.

Wireframing your website’s home page and primary landing pages will ensure success in many ways. Here are three:

1. Information hierarchy 

Your site map will feed the development of a wireframe that visually displays how your users will navigate the site. Because the wireframe is a skeleton without “skin” or any design or color, your decision making team will have no distractions and can easily determine whether the location of content – from the logo and masthead to the footer – makes sense for your organization and more importantly, your users.

2. Content placement

The two-dimensional illustration of your site’s interface will specifically dictate the prioritization of content and where it appears on a page. In addition, the wireframe will demonstrate the proposed functionality and the behaviors you intend your users to take.

3. Calls to action

Again, that naked wireframe, sans style and distracting design, will reveal what and where your call outs for user interaction will adorn your page. You’ll quickly be able to gauge whether your CTAs (calls to action) are prominently displayed and are pointing your users in the right direction.

Case In Point

The wireframing phase helped us establish parameters and set expectations for our client, Interfaith Older Adult Programs, in renovating their online presence. Interfaith decided to redesign its website to make it easier for its target audiences to find what they need from them. Felice Green, marketing director, Interfaith, said, “Whether you’re an older adult looking for a little extra help, a family caregiver looking for resources, or a volunteer looking to make a difference in your community, our goal is to put all the info you need right at your fingertips.”

Here are just a few reactions from key stakeholders following the launch of the new website:

I quickly “drove” through a number of these pages and it all looks terrific! I’m VERY impressed and can certainly see how much time and energy went in to providing solid info in a great format. –Chris

Wow!!!  Outstanding effort! I’m really impressed with the easy flow and navigation. Excellent job. –William

The new website is meeting Interfaith’s expectations, according to Google Analytics. Users are swiftly getting into key pages within the site from the home page and exploring integral program pages that were buried in the previous site. The wireframe helped ensure we met and exceeded this client’s expectations.

The JD headquarters is moving!

Autumn colors and cool temps aren’t the only big changes October is bringing – Johnson Direct is relocating to our new company headquarters at 250 Bishops Way, Suite 203, Brookfield, WI 53005 at the end of the month.

If you’ve sent us any correspondence in the past, you’ll notice that the only change to this address is the street name. Coincidentally, our building number, suite number and ZIP code remain exactly the same!

We’re excited to take over this new space that will foster many hours of strategic planning and creative brainstorming for our clients’ marketing endeavors. We’ll invite you to stop in once we get settled so you can get a behind-the-scenes look at where all the work happens. As always, we look forward to continuing to solve your challenges through our unique Direct Branding approach!

Please remember to update your address book! The new address will be effective October 24th.

Look no further.

Read The White Paper: Guidance For Creating This Coveted Content to put yourself on the right track. It includes a checklist to help you understand how to proactively prepare for the development of a white paper.

Need more inspiration? We’re happy to share a couple of white papers we recently created and published as part of a client’s content marketing program. Request your PDF copies of these white paper samples.

There are more than a dozen instances when a B2B or B2C welcome email is more than appropriate, including:

• New member
• New enrollment
• Joins club or program
• Subscribes to list
• First-time user
• New registrant
• New customer
• And many others…

CASE IN POINT

An association created a new member program to help its fresh recruits get acclimated quickly to the organization’s many, many online resources and tools. The program included a customized new member microsite where newbies can choose one or more goals for their first year and see the tasks that will help them track their progress and ultimately complete their goal(s).

Its inaugural month for the new welcome email (sent weekly to new recruits) earned an average unique open rate of 66.5%! The average unique clickthrough rate was 12%, delivering highly motivated newbies to the campaign’s microsite. Approximately 140 new members visited the new members-only microsite in the first month and nearly 40% of them selected one or more goals to achieve during their first year of membership.

This isn’t the only Welcome Email success story in our portfolio. Equally impressive results were earned for a welcome email campaign executed for a non-profit veteran organization. Take a look at that campaign. Or, contact us to find out how we can help you create your own Welcome Email program.

EMAIL MARKETING GUIDANCE

If this blog post doesn’t inspire you to employ an email marketing program to welcome or nurture your new customers, maybe one or more of these articles will:

EMAIL WON’T BE PIGEONHOLED! EMAIL’S VERSATILE ROLE IN THE MARKETING MIX

ONGOING EMAIL MARKETING PROGRAM

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM AN EMAIL MARKETING AUDIT

IGNORING ONGOING EMAIL MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES?

Over the last ten years, the variety of ways marketers engage and communicate with their target audiences has exploded. Tactics and tools that were once considered “cutting-edge” are now quickly becoming obsolete, and advances in digital and social media are introducing new approaches and complexities on a daily basis.

So how can we, as marketers, adopt these new realities and successfully communicate with our target audiences? 

In today’s multi-channel world, competition for audience attention is at an all-time high. Overcoming this  challenge means changing the way we interact with and engage our target audiences – applying the fundamental principles of Think, Feel and Do.

THINK. Utilize data and analytics to build deep, meaningful insights. 

Integrate data about what customers are doing with an understanding of why they are doing it – it’s these insights into consumer’s needs that are critical for developing and improving the targeting of your messages. 

FEEL. Understand your consumers’ basic drives to drive engagement and influence brand perception.

Engage and inspire your target audience by satisfying all three elements of brand purpose:

DO. Design a “Total Experience” for your customer across multiple channels and touchpoints.

It’s no longer enough to simply leverage what you know about your target audience to personalize offerings– today’s marketers need to take this one step further to provide a “total experience” across multiple physical and digital touchpoints.

Everything from targeted communication and branded content, to interactive offerings and product packaging should be grounded in data and carefully designed to create the desired “experience” a customer has with your brand.

Source: Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, and Keith Weed, (2014, July-August). The Ultimate Marketing Machine, Harvard Business Review, 55-63.