Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks. Zig Ziglar, 82-year old motivational maverick, salesperson, and author just published his 12^th book,  Find Your Success Code: Born to Win, which features a QR Code® that takes up one third of the front cover.

Ziglar is no doubt pulling out all the stops to hit another home run just as he did nearly four decades ago with See You at the Top, which sold 1.6 million copies and is currently in its 25^th edition.

Like Madonna’s tactic of staying relevant by doing duets with Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Nicki Minaj, or Cee Lo Green, Ziglar is staying relevant by using today’s technology to drive his point home – find your success code. According to Publishing Perspective, QR Codes might become commonplace with publishers.

Vibe Magazine Tries to Push the Needle with QR

Last year, Vibe magazine introduced its first digital magazine, available only via a QR Code on the cover. Though the hip hop magazine had been featuring QR Codes inside for three months, this was the first time it graced the cover. Unfortunately, somebody forgot to test the code, which was without the http:// necessary for most readers to open the link in a browser.

Learn the lesson… TEST, TEST, and then RE-TEST with lots of different phones and in lots of different ways.

Other Uses of QR Beyond the Cover

If you are authoring corporate coffee table books, CEO biographies, company history books or success stories like Steve Jobs, there are many other uses of the emerging technology to consider.

Here are a few starts on how you can leverage QR codes in your publications:

• Use a Twitter QR Code so readers are prompted to follow the author or tweet comments about the publication
• Link to templates or applications for tracking personal improvements (think Self Help)
• Link to a shopping list of ingredients the reader needs (think Recipe book)
• Link to a map and describe the location (travel books)
• Link to an audio file demonstrating pronunciation (think Language guides)
• Link to a video demonstration how to perform what you’re describing (product guides)
• Link to additional content relevant to the article, game, contest (think Facebook)
• Conduct surveys, gather feedback (think readership studies on your corporate magazine)

Obviously as a marketer, uses of QR Codes are endless. If you decide to use them in your materials, here are the five golden rules.

• Provide some instructions to the reader so they know how to use the code
• Drive to mobile friendly content that enhances their learning
• Include the URL in case the reader prefers to gain the information via a computer, not a mobile device
• Add value to the reader by making the additional content relevant
• Track the performance of your codes or what’s the point
• Test the codes before publishing (do we really need to say why you have to test… see the Vibe comments above)

For nine more ideas on how to turn your book or magazine into a multi-media experience, visit Start a Wildfire.  Now take a 15-minute brainstorming coffee break to re-think and re-invent your existing publications and approach, just like Ziglar did.

QR Code® is a registered trademark of DensoWave.

What’s surprising though is most marketers are not personalizing their email campaigns. A Direct Marketing Association analysis shows that today there are more emails arriving in consumers’ inboxes, but that the percentage of emails with personalized content has dropped from 38% to 22%. The email may say “Welcome Peter Prospect,” but the rest of the message is not personalized in any way.

The reason is not laziness, according to Arthur Middleton Hughes of Email Insider. With emails going out several times a week for most businesses, there is not enough time for the creative and/or IT department to put dynamic personal content into the bulk of outgoing emails. Companies love the lift both frequency and personalization give emails, but frequency is easier than personalization so sending more emails wins out.

Some retailers are losing their best customers by sending too many emails. Customers that purchase one item every quarter, don’t want an email every day and probably don’t want one every week. So according to Hughes, frequency can lead to customer churn, which leads marketers back to better segmenting, testing, and full use of their database instead of the temptation of volume and frequency as a crutch.

Helzberg Diamonds’ Get Personal with Email Campaign

Helzberg Diamonds achieved 288% sales lift with a promotional email that spelled a subscriber’s first name using images of Helzberg’s charms. To make the campaign shine, the team animated the charms to swing back and forth on a necklace in the email.

Because of the technical challenges of the campaign, Helzberg checked more than 100 emails to ensure the personalization worked and that it defaulted to the word “friend” if the person’s name was too long or the occasional inappropriate entry in the name field.  (We all have seen “Dirty Dog Smith” on web entry forms and probably even names worse than that.)

The results shined.

• 288% increases in sales (or 3x) compared to the prior week’s email campaign
• 55% higher open rate than Helzberg’s average for promotional emails
• 85% higher clickthrough rate

Because charms jewelry was a strong seller in the past for Helzberg, the team wanted to create an exciting promotion so customer wouldn’t tire of five or six emails about charm bracelets.

Laura Schraeder, Helzberg Diamonds email marketing specialist, said her associates on the campaign joked about sending personalized animations in ever email, but Helzberg is careful to avoid making such technically rich campaigns the new standard.

Any company can refuse to be ignored as long as they remember that the same rules of direct mail apply to email – segment, personalize, and match frequency with buying habits. Don’t flood your customer’s mailbox or email inbox because it meets your needs more than theirs. Show them that you know their name and their needs. Dazzle them with more than just your creative design skill.  Dazzle them with your attention to etiquette and your strong relationship building skills.

Panera Bread Integrates QR Codes into In-Store Promotions

If you’ve waited in line at Panera Bread for a hot Panini lately, chances are you’ve seen the banners with QR Codes® that say, “ My job is to make your Panini perfect.” Scan the code with your QR reader enabled smart phone and you’ll be taken to a non-mobile enabled You Tube channel showcasing their Grilled to be Great videos.

Lesson learned? Cross media marketing is the rage and Panera Bread has its bread baking, sandwich making, and order taking down to a science, but its QR delivery is still a work in progress. Perhaps in the future we’ll see Panera include better call to actions other than “scan to learn more.” And then they’ll graduate to include customer rewards such as coupons on the landing page or even their secret recipe for their addictive green tea.

Saving Trees with Digital Coupons

Donatos Shares Digital Coupons on Pizza Boxes through QR Codes

Donatas, a pizzeria chain with 200 shops in five states, has fully embraced QR Codes and integrated them into its pizza boxes. Rather than printing coupons to continually tape to the box tops, its boxes feature a prominently displayed QR code* in the upper left hand corner that when scanned lead pizza lovers to digital coupons to use the next order.

Donatos is feeding the Midwest and driving customer relationships with QR codes to its pizza boxes.

Grocer Helps Fill Your Cart with QR Promo

Price Chopper, a Kansas City based grocery brand, found out through research that 75 percent of Americans don’t know what they’ll be making for dinner when 4 PM rolls around each and every day. To remedy the situation, the grocery chain created Meal Central – an area in each store where customers can pick up all the ingredients for a quick meal at a reasonable price and scan a QR Code to take home the recipe to prepare the meal.

Meal Central Allows Shoppers to Scan a Recipe to Make for Dinner

Price Chopper is advertising the weekly Meal Central meals in print and radio advertising through in-store banner with QR Codes, email marketing, on its website, and on Facebook.

The Price Chopper’s multi-channel campaign solves four real problems – (1) as a consumer, what can I serve for dinner on a budget without thinking (2) increases in-store sales (3) is measurable (4) creates a valuable archive for consumers to retrieve recipes on the grocer’s website and come to the store with a link the recipe to pick up ingredients.

In our fast moving world, QR codes make good sense to use in retail environments because people don’t want to wait or even to drive home to get the coupon off the refrigerator.

How can your business use QR codes to solve a problem your customers are hungry for a solution and to package it into a multi-channel campaign? Shoot us an email when you’ve built your QR campaign so we can write about your creativity and execution later this year?

QR Code® is a registered trademark of Denso Wave.

Of course these botch bills can be destroyed over the course of many years, but they still cost the government 12 cents a piece to print, which means the Federal Reserve spent about $120 million printing bills with errors that must be pitched.

Cutting Printing Mistakes Can Save a Business Thousands

Once the ink hits the paper, there’s no turning back. Printers site that they lose one to 20 percent of annual sales because of spoilage (projects that get tossed because of typos, misplaced decimal points, and errors that slip into print).  InfoTrends reports that businesses generally toss 31% of all printed material due to errors and obsolescence.

By putting stringent pre-press and proofing processes in place, a company can reduce waste. For example, if a company purchases $2 million in paper each year, saving one copy out of every 100 will yield an annual paper savings of $20,000. Remakes and waste can be measured using the same method.

Switching to print automation drastically reduces errors by removing the human interim step and going straight from database to digital press without the manual need to hand off files (potentially the wrong file).

Slowing down and putting a couple extra proofing passes into your process can mean the difference in tossing millions of brochures instead of gaining millions in new business.

One online business entrepreneur calculated that a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half for Internet based businesses. Not only do sales drop, so does a company’s credibility.

Errors Are a Costly Signs of the Times

We live in a rushed, multi-tasking society. Unless we slow down and concentrate on the moment, we’re very likely to let errors slip through showing up in our print and digital communications.

Finding and correcting errors in public signage across the country turned Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson into national heroes as well as well-known authors. In their book. The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, Deck and Herson unearthed 400 spelling and grammar errors in storefront signage. Mistakes include cappuccino spelled, cappachino and capucino, and shipping spelled with one “p” or dining room spelled with two “n’s.”

The traveling proofreading friends also flagged menus with “crap-stuffed sole” instead of “crab-stuffed sole.”

History Making Typos

While some typos create a stir and fade from memory in short order, some have endured the test of time and even changed history.

Spinach

The iron content of spinach became misrepresented because a decimal was placed to far to the right in an 1870 German study. The typo that endured 140 years in print showed spinach having 10 times the iron content of what was actually in the vegetable.

NASA

NASA’s ill-fated launch of America’s first inner-planetary problem, Mariner 1, was caused by someone who neglected to put a dot over an “R” in the space formula. Because of the error the $80 million space shuttle had to be detonated when it came flying back to earth.

Mizuho Securities

In 1995 Mizuho Securities tried to recruit J-Com Co.  employees to work for them by offering 610,000 yen per share ($5,041). A typo made the offer appear to be significantly below that at one yen per share. It also had offered 41 times the number of J-Com Co. shares actually in existence – the equivalent of trying to sell more then 40 times something you don’t have and being forced to back it up to any dissatisfied customers.

The error resulted in a $225 million loss for Mizuho Securities.

Life Plus Parole

In the 80s a man named Bruce Wayne Morris was convicted of robbing and killing a man. At sentencing the jury had to decide between execution or being imprisoned without parole, which was worded, “Bruce Wayne would not have the possibility of making parole.”

The typo occurred when the “not” was left out of the sentence. Therefore the jury mistakenly thought they had to pick between death and letting Wayne out to roam the streets so they picked death.

It took 10 years of federal appeals to reverse the decision and cost the state of California millions of dollars.

The magnitude of a misplaced decimal, dash, symbol, or word can cost a company dearly. Here are three specific examples where a typo cost companies millions:

• A missing comma and zeros in a lender’s lien changed $93 million to $93,000, causing U.S. insurance company Prudential to lose the difference in 1978.
• A misprinted date caused New York real estate developers to lose tens of millions in revenue.
• A misprinted phone number in an L.L. Bean catalog caused the retailer to pay a six-figure sum to purchase the erroneous phone number — the exact amount was not disclosed — in an effort to avoid losing customers.

Typos in Numbers

While a misspelled world can be embarrassing and reputation damaging, a misplaced number or decimal point can cost you millions and your career. This is why printed pieces disclosing corporate numbers are highly scrutinized and under the supervision of CPAs, attorneys, and security exchange personnel.

Accuracy counts in financials. Can you imagine a management team releasing their annual report with this disclaimer:

“Some of the figures might be wrong, there’s a few decimal points in the wrong place and some of the calculations are off but you’ll get the general idea.”

Beyond annual reports, the printing of coupons, particularly in the gaming industry, is ripe for errors. Some casinos print millions of dollar worth of gaming coupons per month. One misplaced decimal point could shake the foundation of the house. Here are some ways to make sure your corporation’s printed pieces are error free with its words and numbers.

Staffing & Selecting Outside Vendors

Both your internal staff as well as your print and marketing partners must understand your numbers and financials. They must be in the know to spot something in a headline, graph or coupon that doesn’t make sense. The gaming industry, and in most industries, is not a place for amateurs. Screen and stringently test the grammar and spelling among all your employees not just those in your communication area, and never pick a vendor just because of price. Select based on a quality track record.

Security and Quality Assurance

Make sure data security and confidentiality are on your list of requirements for staff and vendors touching your data. Ensure system security measures are in place before transferring, storing, or printing your data.

Make sure your marketing partner has a model of campaign design with built-in quality checks, from conception to execution. If your vendor doesn’t have a plan, or looks to you for a plan, you may need to choose another vendor.

Abandoned carts mean abandoned revenues. Getting someone to almost make a purchase serves no one on the game scorecard of business. Surprisingly only 15% of the top 1000 online retailers are following up with shoppers who don’t complete their transaction.

Part of personalized marketing is knowing what your customer came for and making sure they leave with it.

Why do people abandon carts?

Though there may be many reasons for an online shopper to push the keyboard away and not click “make purchase,” including a crying baby, the most common reasons are:

1.  A poor checkout experience.  The process was too long, complicated, cumbersome, or not inline with an easier experience they’ve grown accustomed to.

2. High shipping charges. By the time shopper gets to the screen with this information, he or she is shocked by the shipping charge and therefore aborts the purchase.

3. Doing their own price check. Some shoppers are looking for the best price and the only way to learn the price is to initiate a purchase. McAfee calls this digital window shopping.

4. They lack trust. Because of media reports of other online retailers having their customer database breached or the fear of identity theft, they fear putting their credit card number into your hands. They are worried about being defrauded on your site.

5. They didn’t see the option they wanted. Perhaps they don’t want to sign up for an account with the retailer to make one purchase this lifetime or perhaps they thought there would be a Pay Pal option. When they don’t see the option of their preference, they abort.

Turning that Cart Around

Abandonment is a lose/lose. The retailer doesn’t make the sale and the customer stays home empty handed. Fortunately, there are ways to decrease shopping cart abandonment and improve the customer experience.

1. Improve the experience. One of the main reasons consumers choose to shop online is the convenience. Ensure the process is easy, convenient, smooth and glitch-free. Place a shopping cart on every page or at the top of each page so finding it is easy.

2. Have reasonable shipping charges. Make sure your shipping charges are in line, or build them into your prices so you can offer free shipping.

3. Earn their trust. Seeing is believing in America and online. Have the best designed site you can afford, which includes a full company name, complete address and phone number, easy-to-find contact us page and form, a complete About Us page with professionally taken photographs. Display trust seals, association seals and any other seals you have permission to use. Also include social media buttons to follow. Showing that your company is present elsewhere on the Net provides social validation to prospects.

4. Provide online help. Provide all the help channels you can muster so your prospects can quickly get their answers and leave with what they came for. FAQs, forums, and live chats will bolster confidence and increase sales.

5. Follow up afterwards. Be one of the minority that follow-up by email or phone with prospects that abandon their carts. Chances are there’s something you can do to gain their business by answering a question or sending them a URL to a page that you can walk them through.

6. Show ‘em before they get there. If they know the payment options you offer and the shipping charges upfront, you’ll decrease abandonment at the end of the purchasing process.

7. Be technically and verbally clear. Make sure you’ve been crystal clear on your business, your product and the steps to checkout. What seems clear to an IT person, most certainly won’t seem clear to a grandmother on her first laptop. And make sure the pages load quickly, the forms are accepted without errors, and, customer doesn’t leave the screen until he or she sees a note that their order has been received.

Recovery of Lost Sales

Cart abandonment is a huge opportunity for Internet retailers. By following the recommendations above you can be on your way to recovering some of the $18 million being lost each year, according to Listrak.

Don’t be among the 22% of businesses that have no idea what their abandonment rate is or how much they are losing. Start by using Listrak’s online shopping cart abandonment calculator to get a grip on the size of the problem.

Then devise a reachback campaign to redirect these dollars back to your company vs. a competitors’ cart. Because unlike digital window shopping, a shopper who has abandoned his or her cart, will most likely return. In analysis of over 160 million transactions, the average time between their first visit to your online store and their return is between 54 minutes and 33 hours.

If you can re-engage these customers in this timeframe, you have a high likelihood of regaining a customer and helping them fill their shopping cart.

However, Chief Marketing Officers are one of the few professionals who must profile people as part of their jobs. Of course they must follow privacy and disclosure laws, but a successful marketing manager can and should profile customers with the intent of selling them appropriate products and services.

Customer profiling in the marketing world is defined as finding new prospects just like your best customers by comparing the demographic profiles of these individuals with your prospect population.

During what I’ll call the lazy years of marketing, marketers might describe who they believed to be their best customers to a list broker and that list broker would sell them a list of prospects based on a few pieces of business or consumer criteria (revenue, location, number of employees or age, income, education).

Fast forward to today and multiple overlays (one option includes 44 different overlay tools of variable data) can be applied to your customer database to pinpoint with laser accuracy what your prime customer profile is and how to duplicate it. Just turn over your customer file to be matched against a comprehensive dataset of U.S. business and/or consumers to create a customized market penetration analysis. The strength of customer profiling lies in its ability to provide up to 28 consumer and 16 business demographic overlays, revealing your true customer.

Using data to drive your business decisions, you can then take your marketing (and your business) to a whole new level and construct marketing models to squeeze even more sales out of your budget.

Healthcare Company Finetunes It Marketing Spend through Profiling and Analysis

A $20 billion healthcare company used analytics to optimize its marketing spend. Client marketing was geared towards direct to consumer advertising, with TV accounting for more than 50% of the budget. The seven-brand portfolio had a high spend-to-sales ratio of 25%, and management wanted to increase efficiency.

Using data sources such as the client’s internal data, financial and government records, models were built to measure sales by marketing tools targeting  to pharmacists and other audiences.

The models found that 13% of sales were due to direct marketing programs, TV commercials, pharmacy displays, and sales calls. However, this was unprofitable relative to the 25% spending-to-sales ratio.

As a result, this healthcare company reduced spending 10% and held the savings to optimize its current budget. The reduced spend scenario increased profits while maintaining sales

How You Can Apply Data and Profiling

Don’t let the analytics or terminology stop you from profiling, analyzing your data and conducting data mining. There are plenty of companies on standby to assist you with creating a snap shot of your best customers and best marketing approach to reach them. The best data is data that is put into use finding more great customers.

So the nonprofits that are continuing to ask, “How can we squeeze out more results and the same budget,” are turning to technology, multi-channel campaigns, and QR Codes® for additional lift.

Organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network are piloting QR Codes® to see if they can achieve better life or market penetration without adding costs. Statistics from Netwit Thinktank say these nonprofits are wise to do so:

• In aggregate, online-acquired donors have much higher cumulative value over the long term than traditional mail-acquired donors.
• Online giving was up 13% in 2011
• It has become increasingly common for new donors to give their first gift online.
• The largest amount given online in 2011 was $260,000

Big Brothers Big Sisters

Big Brothers and Big Sisters in Kansas City is the top matching agency in the country yet they face the same challenge faced by each state – finding enough men to mentor boys. Currently there are more than 600 boys on the Kansas City wait list for a big brother.

To recruit more big brothers it bought “Real Men Mentor” print ads and billboard space included a QR Code® that led to information and an online volunteer application.

To BBBS’s credit, the billboards did not include a QR symbol that someone driving couldn’t scan safely any way.  In the first six weeks of the campaign, Big Brothers Big Sisters received 196 clickthroughs to its application page, according to Kristi Hutchison, BBBS Chief Marketing Officer.

Unfortunately because this is the first time they’ve used QR Codes®, whether the clickthroughs came from emails or QR scans is unknown. Hutchison says call-to-action sources will be closely tracked in the next campaign.

Pancreatic Cancer Action Network

The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PCAN) used an event awareness night at a L.A. Kings game in California as an opportunity to beta test QR effectiveness. So the “Be a Hero” flyer the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network distributed that night included two new calls to action (1) a mobile opt-in via text messaging and (2) a QR Code®.

The PCAN was wise to include some basic scanning instructions on its flyer since only 5% of Americans are using QR Codes®.

The results were about 30 people out of a 1000 opted in via text message, which was a typical response rate. However, the QR Code was scanned more than 200 times – out pulling text messaging. The QR Code® led the curious attendees to a simple page that showed them how to learn more, how to get involved, and how to find a local event they could attend.

Want to see how other nonprofits are using this technology to increase their numbers. Check out How Nonprofits Can Use QR Codes.

Augmented reality is a digital layer over the real world that you can’t see with the naked eye but can see with the camera on your smart phone or computer, according to Vivian Rosenthal, founder of New York City-based AR start-up, GoldRun. Get a glimpse of Rosenthal’s use or AR in this promo (an invisible pop up store) for AirWalk sneakers.

You experience a tiny sampling of AR when you watch a televised football game. The yellow first down lines aren’t painted on the field itself, but inserted digitally to enhance your viewing experience.

A Boeing researcher introduced AR in 1990. By 2008 it was a $6 million industry and expected to grow into a $350 million industry by 2014.

AR is Legalized Steroids for Direct Mail

The movie Avatar used AR in its integrated marketing campaign to launch with Avatar teamed with Coke Zero. Movie buffs could hold their Coke can with the Avatar symbol in front of their webcams and interact with parts of the movie on a “visceral” level.

Don’t be fooled into dismissing AR as all fun and games, it offers an entirely new avenue for engagement and in particular direct mail, according to the February issue of the U.S. Postal Service’s Deliver magazine. The cover and feature article in this issue featured black and white artwork that came to life, movement, and color when you held your smart phone over the graphic after downloading the recommended app.

Taylor, one of the largest direct mail printers in the nation, used AR as the star attraction of its trade booth at the 2011 Direct Marketing Association convention in Boston. Visitors were given a postcard and sent to a special website to unlock the encoded graphics and information. Art Calamari, who manned the booth, said he watched hundreds of attendees share the technology and message with hundreds of other attendees – turning a direct mail print piece into a word of mouth brushfire.

Imagine making your direct mail even more interactive and relevant like some insurance companies have by sending out postcards with agent photos and a neat graphic that changes weekly when scanned just like a rotating billboard. The selling point is helping consumers hold on to that print piece longer as well as being moved further down the sales pipeline as the information changes.

AR is a Magnet for Millennials

Research shows that if the messaging and the experience are not engaging, and do not create brand desire, Millennials may just move on to a competitor. Millennials are defined as those born in the 1980s, whose lives revolve around being constantly connected to technology.

One successful augmented reality iPhone app that attracts Millenials is Le Bar Guide. Using GPS data, the technology locks onto a location serving the popular Belgian beer, Stella Artois, by populating the phone with directional arrows pointing users to the nearest pub that serves it.

Can You Afford Augmented Reality Marketing?

According to Rosenthal, AR campaigns can be as inexpensive as $5,000 and as high as $100,000. She compares costs with full-page magazine print ads, which start at $100,000 in major magazines based on cost per thousand readers or as high as $400,000 for a one-page ad in the coveted Sports Illustrated issue.

As part of a vacation promotion for Snow Mass Ski Slopes, three-dimensional renderings necessary for the AR campaign ran approximately $10,000.

Regardless, the spend definitely can be tied to customer engagement, acquisition, and retention thanks to the measurability of the interactivity and technology.

If the numbers work and the medium directly aligns with your target market, then executing an augmented reality campaign can both bring home the bacon and establish your company as an innovation leader.

Do you see the irony in the movie’s star character Robert Langdon being a symbologist and the possible saving grace for churches today being a QR Code®? Perhaps history does repeat itself.

Recession Causes Churches to Adopt High Tech Donation Practices

According to the Religion News Service, the recession has caused church contributions to drop by $1.2 billion even though membership remains relatively the same.

Unity Temple on the Plaza is run by an old-school board that is willing to try new-school things when it comes to raising income for the church. The board at Unity knew that statistically donations tend to increase about 15% with churches that offer online donations to its congregations or parishioners (through QR links or direct web access).

Unity’s bulletin announcement below simply directed people after the service to its Tech Table to learn how they could make donations quickly and easily by swiping the QR Code® in the bulletin or posted in the temple.

If passing the plate is coming in light on funds, perhaps QR code® swipes will stimulate more generous giving because it’s quicker, easier, and perhaps an electronic way to amp up generosity.  And let’s face it more and more people live a credit or debit card life.

More Ways to Incorporate QR Codes into Your House of Worship (or business)

1.  Save space. Put a QR Code® next to each bulletin item to save space by directing members to links for more information.

2.  Provide a digital bulletin. Put the bulletin info on the website and place QR Codes® on signage leading into the service area. Allow parishioners to access information in the way they desire.

3.  Attract attendees. If your church building has different rooms for different ministries such as AA meetings, put QR Codes® on the signs outside the door that links to info about that ministry, meeting, or specific event schedule.

4.  Attract new members. Use QR or other 2d mobile barcodes on coffee mugs to give first-time visitors or on t-shirts for the youth group wear with text that says “Got God?”

5.  Reinforce the message. Savvy ministers and pastors are linking members and guests to the sermon notes through QR Codes® that lead to a podcast, video, or blog post.

Has your church or temple used integrated marketing, including QR Codes® in its communications or marketing materials? How about in its alternative methods to tithe?  Perhaps you can volunteer to assist them in this new terrain. It can be part of your pro bono contribution to help close the gap on diminishing returns in this recession.

Our fingers are sore from constantly pushing the envelope and tabulating campaign measurement metrics, but that’s what we do best – create measurable results for our clients. We’re even more proud of the fourth and most prestigious Ambit that we took home this year – The Consistent Achiever Award.

Only one Consistent Achiever Award is given each year and we will display this one front and center in our lobby to underscore the consistent results we continue to deliver for our client Assurant Employee Benefits. Each month we automate, print, and distribute catalogs for Assurant with the most complicated variables any VDP printer in the country can produce error-free thanks in part to market automation. We have done so for the past two years and will press on doing so consistently.

Which leads me to a key point I want to make in this blog:  What Sets Winning Companies Apart. From the outside some may see Mail Print as a quiet multi-channel solutions provide or data-driven niche printer. However, that’s not the full story. If you were to tour our office and production facility, you’d see something the equivalent of Santa’s workshop the week of Christmas every day. But what really sets us apart according to a Forbes articles, especially in this economy, is for two decades we have consistently done three things right (1) Kept our eye on growth (2) Pursued new technology and innovation just like adding our HP T200 press this year (3) Turned information into insight.

How are you doing in those areas? Share your comments so we can start a discussion. Until then, join us in raising your coffee mugs in celebration of the Ambit awards we received for consistent results below.

Mail Print Takes Home 4 Ambits

Business Integrated Marketing — Connect Magazine (SILVER AMBIT)

To further establish Mail Print as a thought leader in the direct marketing industry and to demonstrate our belief in the ROI of direct mail, Mail Print launches Connect Magazine. A 16-page print magazine designed to present key information from Mail Print’s existing materials that are easily digestible and helpful to top-level business people. The feature articles are based around direct marketing strategy and innovative marketing approaches. Content encourages clients and prospects to learn more by visiting the Mail Print blog or website.

In 2011, Mail Print attributed $1.3 million in new business and new opportunities to Connect for a return on investment of $41 for every $1 spent on the magazine.

Business Catalogs — Assurant Personalized Benefits Catalog (GOLD AMBIT & CONSISTENT ACHIEVER AWARD)

To solve the problem of generically explaining benefits vs. speaking directly to each employee with information that applied to them, Assurant Employee Benefits needed to move from static benefits materials into personalized insurance catalogs.

Mail Print developed a print automation system that produces flawless, personalized catalogs that customized to the individual’s age, gender, geographical location, and salary — resulting in a simplified selection process for the employee that requires no need for calculations and interpretations to demine their rate. In addition:

• The purchase rate of voluntary benefits rose 5% after implementation.
• Catalogs were produced in 24-hour timeframe vs. 7-10 days.
• As of the end of 2011, more than 180,000 catalogs for more than 1,100 client companies have been produced that are error-free.
• Mail Print saved Assurant Employee benefits over $200,000 by implementing the right process and eliminating wasteful spending.

Fundraising —  Harvester’s Donor Receipt Program (GOLD AMBIT)

Acknowledging 72,000 donations a year with tax-required donor receipts via mail is no small task. Harvesters was spending in excess of a half work week each month trying to stay on top of the endless task, which was marred with duplicate mailings coming from multiple systems and a slow turn of up to three weeks to get in the hands of generous donors.

Mail Print automated the process by uploading the data, de-duping the data and sending out personalized letters with additional donation request within 48 hours. The results were a 54% increase in second-time donations, an 11% response rate, and a return on investment of 1597% with the $688,930 of additional donations brought in.