Getting the Word Out – Green Messaging for Small Printers
By Gail Nickel-Kailing on February 26th, 2009
The 24,000 of you who own and run small printing operations of less than 20 employees have to wear many hats, including that of Marketing Manager.
Getting your green marketing message out doesn’t have to be complicated. If you are looking to take advantage of email marketing’s reach and low cost, here are some pointers from MarketingProfs.
Kara Trivunovic, The Email Advisor, and Andrew Osterday, Premiere Global Services, offer insight and have prepared the list that follows. They note:
Email is a medium for economically and effectively marketing your small business. But most everything out there that provides guidelines, best-practices, and advice on the application of the channel to your marketing efforts are largely geared toward bigger businesses.
And it can be difficult for those who plan and build email marketing plans and strategies for bigger organizations to step back and reflect on the days when office politics didn’t exist and they had to do it all themselves…
Until now, that is, because here are 10 tips you can leverage and implement easily and quickly – while still having a positive influence on your bottom line – without having to worry yourself with multivariate testing, dynamic content development, and data integration.
Here are ten simple steps you can take to launch your email marketing program:
- Be yourself
- Start small
- Don’t over-promise
- Find a vendor
- Use what you know
- Stay compliant… CAN-SPAM is real
- Drive subscriptions
- Offer an incentive
- Track your results
- Now do it!
Read the entire piece and get all the detail behind those 10 tips. The good news is that it’s not as hard as you think! Mix your direct mail and your direct email into cross media marketing programs and you’re off to the races!
6 Responses to “Getting the Word Out – Green Messaging for Small Printers”
By Andrew Osterday on Feb 26, 2009 | Reply
Thanks so much for brining our helpful tips to a new audience. “Green” is good for the environment, but it’s even better for your business!
By Kara Trivunovic on Feb 26, 2009 | Reply
We firmly believe that the small business owner can benefit greatly from email marketing efforts – especially when done properly. And you are right, it isn’t as hard as one may think. Thanks for spreading the word!
By Melanie Turner on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply
I work for a small sustainable company, and we constantly struggle with people finding out about us. We don’t have a huge marketing budget, so emailing is a great way to “spread the word”. Not only is it cost effective, but emailing (versus printing direct mail postcards that get tossed in the trash) is a much greener practice…and isn’t that what we’re going for?
By Loretta Puckrin on Feb 27, 2009 | Reply
E-mail can be a powerful tool BUT you are in the printing industry. If you can’t design a powerful printed piece for yourself and the costs of internal printing are cost prohibitive – then what are you really offering your clients. Use e-mail by all means but use it as a part of a print based marketing package – or get out of printing. if you don’t believe in the power of print then you can’t sell it.
By Howie Fenton on Mar 1, 2009 | Reply
There are many things that printers of all sizes can do to print more Green. But one thing that is a questionable are the “Sinful Practices of Greenwashing” which means saying your Green while not really acting Green. This article talks about real and fake approaches to becoming a Greener Printer.
http://www.napl.org/documents/Ways_to_Go_Green.pdf
By Melanie Turner on Mar 2, 2009 | Reply
I certainly believe in the power of print, but I believe in smart printing when it comes to marketing efforts. I realize that you don’t have the knowledge of the company I work for, but we are VERY small and we need to be smart with every minute & dollar spent on advertising/marketing. No matter how flashy/powerful a design we have on a direct mail piece, the majority will be tossed in the trash. That is just not a wise investment of our resources nor does it coincide with our sustainable corporate culture.
We do have printed marketing materials that reach our customers in other ways than direct mail. We strongly believe in what we’re doing & how we do it; we just have to get to the next level on a very thin budget.