Garver Quarterly Newsletter

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Garver produces a quarterly newsletter, IQ (Infrastructure Quarterly), for its clients and prospects. In response to increasing production costs and providing customers and prospects with more interactive content, Garver created an online version of their newsletter. A multi-touch campaign incorporating print and email was developed to announce the new IQ digital edition to readers. It drove recipients to a personalized URL where they were asked to complete an online survey determining the delivery preferences (print or digital) of recipients and to find out which topic areas interested readers the most. Garver achieved a 12% response rate. They also discovered 78.3% of the readership was interested in receiving the new digital version.garver_newsletter2

 

Garver Engineering Trade Show Success!

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Garver is a multi-disciplined engineering, planning and environmental services firm. Garver utilizes exposure through industry trade shows targeting government, municipal, transportation and energy-related entities as a primary marketing channel. They wanted to improve trade show presence, increase awareness of the company’s services, drive traffic to the booth, social media outlets and hone in focus on qualified leads.

CustomXM developed a cross-media campaign utilizing email blasts and postcards personalized to each attendee. The communication encouraged recipients to follow Garver on social media outlets, and enter an iPad giveaway contest via a personalized website. Printed cards with a generic URL and QR Code were distributed at the show allowing attendees to register while visiting the Garver booth. Once in the website, they were asked to give general contact information, as well as potential interest in Garver’s engineering services, to which 28% of survey respondents indicated they did in fact have a need for the services.

“We are so excited to see that we have people who are in need of an engineer and are interested in knowing more about us, and we know that BEFORE the tradeshow. This is so awesome!” says Garver’s Kerrie Diaz

Overall, the campaigns drove a 29% response rate and increased traffic to their booth by 10 to 50% from the previous year. At one show, it was publicly announced that more attendees than ever before had stayed through to the end of the conference, credit was given to Garver’s iPad giveaway winner announcement.

“We’ve had a really positive response to this campaign from both our people here [at Garver] and visitors to our booth!” added representative Alan Watsongarver_tradeshow_2

 

Lyon College

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Lyon College, a small liberal arts college in Batesville, Arkansas, wanted to gain the attention of prospective students. CustomXM sent postcards to high school seniors encouraging them to visit a personalized URL to enter for a chance to win an iPad and, once there, complete an online survey about their academic and extracurricular interests. A subsequent direct mail piece was personalized based on those responses to the survey. This piece also included an augmented reality “trigger,” which engaged students with an entertaining video about the school, giving them insight to part of Lyon’s campus and community.

The message in all the touchpoints was crafted to highlight the key differentiators of Lyon College including a small student to faculty ratio, close proximity to the Ozark Mountains, numerous outdoor activities, availability of financial aid and recognition from publications such as U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review.

Lyon College saw a 76% increase in applications compared to the previous year. They also saw a 50% increase in qualified applicants compared to the prior year. Additionally, Lyon was able to cut the direct marketing budget by 30% by withholding certain direct mail pieces sent in previous years in favor of fewer, more targeted and personalized pieces.

Dixie Cafe increases customer database

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Dixie Café is a restaurant chain with 23 locations throughout the mid-south and corporate offices in Little Rock, Arkansas. The chain promotes an image of a “down-home” family style restaurant with a southern theme. Their demographic is family centric with a large percentage of senior citizens.Dixie Cafe was interested in understanding their guests’ habits, including the media and news sources they engaged with. They would use this information to help focus future media campaigns. They also sought to create a customer loyalty campaign by awarding loyal customers with free menu items and coupons.

The solution was to gather valuable “opt-in” data from the customer (name and email address) to create a database for future marketing efforts. Branded cards were distributed by the server with the patrons’ checks.  The card directed the customer to the website with the lure of being eligible for a prize, once there the patron filled out a survey. Upon filling out the information, an email is sent to the customer with a coupon embedded in the email for redemption at the restaurant. Dixie Café also included a coupon on the card itself for patrons who could not access the internet.

“Over the course of this three month program, we added over 2,000 email addresses to our database. Our previous email program only added about 2,500 in two years.” Danny Troillett, Director of Marketing and Guest Relations

 

ABC Financial Services

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ABC Financial Services is the national leader in club management solutions for the health and fitness industry. Since 1981, ABC Financial Services has helped club owners nationwide improve their bottom-line profit. The mission of ABC Financial Services is to provide clubs with a “turn-key” approach to all of a club’s management needs.

Using our online tools, one-to-one marketing techniques and variable data printing, CustomXM has helped ABC increase the marketing services they offer to their member clubs. From direct-mail postcards, to renewal letters, to a successful customized coupon program, CustomXM has utilized its web-to-print tools to allow ABC to generate thousands of “customized” pieces in an automated, user-friendly fashion.

“The Technology that CustomXM brought to the table has allowed us to broaden the marketing tools we can deliver to our customers, and our turnaround time is much faster now. CustomXM went the extra mile to learn our business and understand our customers” Paul Schaller, President

Creating Value for Beef O’Bradys Customers

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Beef “O” Brady’s is a national restaurant franchise that is based on the concept of providing a neighborhood pub where friends and family can gather to enjoy good food and televised sports in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere. Our client is a franchisee located in Maumelle, AR in a thriving commercial area.

Beef “O” Brady’s was searching for a cost-effective way to create a “value experience” for the customer to increase customer loyalty, easily obtain customer satisfaction feedback gather valuable”opt-in” data from the customer (i.e. name, address, city, state and email address) to create a database for future marketing efforts, and promote new products offerings via the coupon give-a-ways.

Cards containing a unique URL and login password were distributed to patrons by the restaurant’s servers. The game cards directed the customers to the branded website where they were instructed to complete a questionnaire in order to be eligible for their prize. Upon completion, an email containing the “prize” coupon was automatically sent to the customer. The restaurant owner received immediate email notifications of these visits.

The program was a smashing success with over 27% of the recipients responding to the online inquiry. The restaurant owner immediately gained valuable insight about her business. The data allowed her to determine levels of customer satisfaction, frequency of customer visits, most and least popular aspects of the restaurant, and additional demographic and individual customer contact information to be used in future restaurant promotions. The owner described the program as a valuable and affordable tool for marketing and managing her establishment.

Arkansas Department of Human Services

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The Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS) was participating in the  Arkansas Early Childhood Association Conference. Their goal was to introduce “Better Beginnings,” a new Quality Rating Improvement System for childcare providers. They wanted a campaign that would drive conference attendees to the DHS booth, introduce the new childcare rating system and educate attendees about online resources available to assist them in meeting federal standards for childcare providers. They needed to gather valuable data about the attendees’ knowledge and raise awareness of the new regulations through the list of survey questions.

Utilizing CustomXM’s interactive tools, attendees of the conference were given printed cards encouraging them to visit the DHS booth and access a survey via either a unique URL or a QR code. 900 cards were printed and handed out to attendees. 282 people visited the booth and completed the survey, which resulted in a 31.3% response rate from the survey of attendees. DHS learned that there was a great need to educate childcare givers.

Arkansas Democrat Gazette uses pURLS to up subscriptions

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The Arkansas Democrat Gazette is a daily newspaper reaching more than 600,000 people throughout the state. It is the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River.

The newspaper was losing approximately 3,500 subscriptions per month. They were looking for a strategy to encourage these former subscribers to come back to the paper and renew their subscriptions. Their previous efforts at static direct mail were returning less than a 1% success rate.

Utilizing CustomXM’s integrated cross-media campaign tools, postcards with PURLs (Personalized URLs) were sent to a database of dropped subscribers, encouraging them to go to a microsite where they could register for a grand prize and re-subscribe.

The campaign ran for three months. A response was considered someone who renewed their subscription.

  • July 2010 – 1.5% response rate
  • August 2010 – 2.0% response rate
  • September 2010 – 2.0% response rate

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was very happy with results, especially considering the difficult audience that was being targeted – people who had already said “no” to the paper

What’s The Buzz? Join us for Lunch to Find Out.

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Over the past couple of years, through our popular quarterly Lunch & Learn programs, we have tried to present new marketing tips, tricks and techniques.  Our goals are to continue to help you add more arrows to your quiver to enable you to make your marketing efforts, and the measurement of those efforts, more effective.

Our next Lunch & Learn on Thursday, November 29, takes a slightly different approach.  With the variety of marketing channels available, it becomes critical for successful marketing professionals to focus on the necessary tasks to support the organization’s marketing goals.  In addition to the tools, it is also necessary to incorporate not just a project management tool, but a marketing management tool.  Marketers must be able to effectively focus on how to create, store and distribute marketing content in ways that not only save money, but maximize resources while producing higher returns on marketing investment. And that’s exactly what our next Lunch & Learn will showcase.

Jon Davis, COO of lee|Stafford, will present marketing success stories that utilized their Beehive Protocol software.  The Beehive Software solution empowers marketers to support multiple campaigns, channels and activities – both online and offline.  In short, it provides ways to help marketers – Organize, Communicate, Respond, Track, Adjust and Improve.

Jon is a veteran of the medical device and healthcare industries.  He has been instrumental in the development of patient communication efforts and in thousands of product launches that represent billions of dollars in sales for his clients, all using the BeeHive Protocol proprietary software that he helped develop.

Please join us for lunch as Jon introduces this concept of how to available software allows you to maximize your quick response marketing needs in compelling case study examples.

And if that is not incentive enough, one lucky attendee will win a new iPad Mini!

I look forward to seeing you on the 29th!  Register here.

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Paul Strack, CustomXM

@pstrack

A Printer Looks at Fifty

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(With apologies to Jimmy Buffet.)

Mother, mother offset

I have heard your call,

Recognized the smell of your ink

Since I was three feet tall.  You’ve seen it all,

You’ve seen it all.

~~~~~

Watched the men who ran you,

Switch from film to plate.

And in your rollers you held the treasure

We thought would never outdate.  You printed dreams,

You printed dreams.

Yes, I am a printer

Six hundred years too late

The presses don’t thunder, it causes me to wonder

I’m an over fifty victim of fate; arriving too late.

Hell, I’m not too late.

~~~~~

I’ve done a little cross media,

I’ve run my share of stock

I made enough money to Google Miami

But I pissed it away so fast, never meant to last

Never meant to last.

~~~~~

I have been marketing now for over 6 years,

I passed out QR codes and measured till in tears

But I’ve got to keep preachin’, got to keep teachin’

I’ll Lunch and Learn, again.  I’ll invite friends.

Engagement never ends.

~~~~~

I go for younger gadgets

Tried several for a while,

Sure they confuse me and often they lose me

And yet they still make me smile.

It just takes a while, just takes a while.

~~~~~

Mother, mother offset,

After all these years I’ve found

My occupational hazard being

My occupation’s just not around

There’s a movement aground.  Gonna head downtown.

~~~~~

There’s a movement aground.

I may just head downtown.

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Paul Strack, CustomXM

@pstrack