Shape Crystal Clear Lead Generators with Three Building Blocks

Presidential campaigns are a time when passions run high and candidates jostle for the spotlight.

Avid supporters of each candidate put signs in their yards, wear buttons, or put stickers on their bumpers. Politicians who use simple, repeatable slogans have a higher success rate and a longer shelf life in the public square. Can you finish any of these popular mantras?

• Tippacanoe and __________ (Tyler Too/William Henry Harrison)
• A Chicken in Every Pot and __________ (A Car in Every Garage/Herbert Hoover)
• Happy Days are ________ (Here Again/Franklin Roosevelt)
• I Like ____ (Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower)
• Make America ________ (Great Again/Donald Trump)

A good presidential campaign slogan is memorable, meaningful, and highly quotable. More than a phrase, it builds a heart connection with the dreams and needs of listeners.

And it is often a candidate’s key to victory.

Why Confusion Scares People

Voters and prospective customers aren’t so different.

Both are weighing decisions and navigating information overload, so strong messages should be short and sweet. Customers will not progress when in a fog because no one likes being confused. If you are confused about the rules of the road, you could smash your car. If you are confused about a medication's dosage, you could poison yourself. Feeling uncertain about an idea leaves people feeling vulnerable.

The human brain is designed to experience delight when it understands something and resistance or fear when it doesn’t. This is a basic survival mechanism and a way to logically categorize information. When someone feels uncertain, they naturally move away from situations that confuse them and toward places they feel more in control.

Many companies miss this point and underestimate the emotional weight of precise, repeatable messaging. They overcommunicate, bury the lead, or complicate the storyline.

Lift the Fog and Move Prospects Toward Action

Want to eliminate uncertainty and move your prospects toward action?

From a direct mail postcard to an email drip campaign, here are three basics that every lead generator should include:

1. Pique Curiosity

In the header of your brochure or the beginning of your proposal, pique curiosity with a poignant phrase, like:

• Save $500 a month and buy your next car with cash
• Put a stop to this before it puts a stop to YOU
• Increase your ACT score by 4 points in 4 months
• Own your own little piece of paradise

Strong hooks work to draw people in, press the pain point, paint a compelling future vision, or appeal to the selfish desires of key customers.

2. Preview a Solution

After the hook comes your pitch.

If your lead statement draws them in, the next idea you communicate should answer the “but how?” question.

Like this:

• Save $500 a month and buy your next car with cash . . . with our Freedom Finder Debt Consolidation plan
• Increase your ACT score by 4 points in 4 months . . . with one-to-one Varsity Tutoring
• Own your own little piece of paradise . . . Unlock the world with thousands of hassle-free timeshares

3. Offer a Next Step

Businesses are meant to be transactional, and it’s not pushy to ask for a sale.

Having a “Buy Now” or “Schedule a Call” button on your sell sheet or website helps your customer understand the kind of relationship you are inviting them into. Make your next step to put prospects in the driver’s seat.

By adding clarity to your lead generators, you’ll build customer confidence, make your brand more memorable, and ultimately close more deals.  The better your hooks are, the more successful your sales will be!

Need some fresh ideas? Contact us today to get started! 516-561-1468 or FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ANY OF OUR MARKETING PRODUCTS GO TO:www.printcafeli.com

                Gain Undying Loyalty by Building a Company Customers Love

Every person has go-to brands for the things they buy – from their car and their phone to their coffee, cosmetics, or slippers.

And behind every brand is a company people know and love. When you want to attract people to your brand, it starts with building the personality of your business. Successful companies give people hope or a vision: their brands represent a cultivation of we could be.

Whether this is honest and pure or fun and funky, the brands we champion are an expression of our better selves.

Unique in a Sea of Monotony

Lululemon is a global sportswear powerhouse with a meteoric rise to success.

Founded in 2000, the company bounded into a crowded market and built a niche as a “lifestyle” fitness brand, offering clothes that perform excellently in the gym while looking great outside of it.

Lululemon knows that, beyond upgrading their health and hygiene habits, maturing women are ready to spend more on their wardrobes. And brand evangelists (the ‘Luluheads’) rave about clothes that flatter the figure, add color and sass, and hold their shape after 1,000 washes. Lulu’s target customer is a 32-year-old woman who has “figured it out” after graduating from the unhealthy lifestyle choices of her twenties, and Lulu inspires women to connect with their best selves using taglines like “Be You with Lulu” and “Slimming Silhouettes is Lululemon.”

While Lululemon’s outrageously priced clothes seem like an impossible sell, they are anything but. Instead, they make women feel proud to show up at the gym and allow sweaty moms to look cool at the grocery store. And that psychology works.

After all, it’s not men women are trying to impress – it’s other women.

Designing Your Customer Experience

Moving beyond strong marketing, customer experience is where the rubber meets the road.

Clients that adore your services should feel that doing business with you is like coming home. Here are three ways to make that happen.

1. Craft Excellent First Encounters

If you want to develop a strong bond with clients, a great first experience is key.

Consumer Reports surveys show that nearly 91 percent of customers will not return if a company botches the initial encounter, and two-thirds of people will walk out of a store when they feel the service is subpar.

While those statistics sound scary, the opposite is also true: top-notch companies are highly successful in customer care. Recent data shows that 81 percent of companies with excellent service records are outperforming their competition.

2. Offer Self Help Options

While five-star personal service seems like the gold standard in sales, that may be changing. Today 40 percent of consumers say they prefer “no-frills” self-service over tangible human contact, so smart companies should add simple DIY options.

How? Educational content such as newsletters, tutorial videos, or “how-to” tip sheets might be a good option for some. Perhaps live chat support, FAQ pages, or express product lines will bring convenience your clients appreciate. Web-based service portals may allow you to personally interact with customers while offering the flexibility and privacy they desire.

3. Prioritize Quality Over Speed

When you DO have personal contact with clients, slowing down can be the best approach.

According to Gallup’s research, the service is defined as “courteous, willing, and helpful.” (In contrast, customers who received “speedy” service were just six times more likely to be engaged.)

Making Brand Admiration a Reality

When people love a company, they’ll go out of their way to recommend it to friends.

They take pride in its products, purchase more frequently, and give it a second chance when mistakes occur. By building a business that customers love, your reputation will thrive, and your sales will too.

Need some fresh ideas? Contact us today to get started! 516-561-1468 or FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ANY OF OUR MARKETING PRODUCTS GO TO: www.printcafeli.com

                 Stand Tall with 6 Sharp Embossing Techniques

Have you ever run your hand over an antique, textured wallpaper?

With its authentic sense of depth and detail, you almost can’t help but touch it. The raised relief is as appealing to your imagination as it is to your fingertips.

Embossing has a similar effect. Embossing and debossing are two print techniques used to add texture to a design. An embossed pattern is raised against the background, while a debossed pattern is sunken into the material's surface (but might protrude somewhat on the reverse side). These popular finishing techniques – used for business cards, menus, invitations, foil stickers, notepads, and more – are ideal for bringing a fresh, contemporary look.

Take Center Stage

Embossing elevates your design from the background and can be used to create geometric patterns, add borders, or produce a custom seal for product packaging.

The texture and sculptural quality that embossing creates makes for a memorable user experience. Add elegance and stateliness to your next project with one of these beautiful techniques:

1. Blind Embossing

Blind embossing uses custom-made dies to create a raised surface according to the design.

Blind embossing refers to a stamped design without metallic leaf or ink (like plain textured letters with a page), giving a base-relief effect. One way to make blind embossing stand out even more is to use textured paper. Since the area around the embossing will be pressed smooth, this creates more of a contrast.

2. Combination Embossing

As its name suggests, this type of die combines multiple effects (like embossing and foil stamping) into one process.

The combination die has a cutting edge around the perimeter to cleanly break the excess foil away from the embossed area. Given the unbeatable finish and fine detail of this element, it is a natural choice when printing elegant crests, fancy logos, or intricate type for business cards, letterheads,

3. Single-Level Embossing

This process uses a die that changes the surface of the paper at only one level.

Since the die needed for this kind of embossing is simple, it is the most affordable embossing option.

4. Multi-Level Embossing

This process uses a die with several distinct levels to create a sculptured impression or a more detailed texture.

Multi-level embossing kicks things up a notch by changing the surface of the paper at several planes. This makes the technique popular for multi-dimensional shapes, landscapes, or images with unique details (such as leaves or feathers).

5. Sculptured Die

This kind of die requires custom hand tooling to create levels and details for an emboss that resembles a bas-relief sculpture, a figure that is raised a few inches from a flat background to give a three-dimensional effect.

Like a piece of metal leaping off the paper, the effect is striking and lifelike. While sculptured embossing is more expensive, it is absolutely gorgeous for creating custom pictures, shapes, 3D logos, faces, animals, or landscapes.  

Because this die requires someone to create it by hand – usually based on an image provided – this method is more expensive.

6. Bevel-Edge Dies

Want to add sophistication to your project?

Beveled dies bring a softened, refined look to your shapes and letters, adding a curve or edge to each character (typically at 30 to 60 degrees). The broader the angle, the greater the illusion of depth.

Create a Timeless Treasure

New trends take shape every day, and you can make a bold statement with existing techniques that give your print materials a sleek twist.

While embossing was originally found mostly in personalized stationery, today, raised elements can be used in envelope flaps, business cards, packaging, hang tags, and more. Great designs mix the old and the new to create timeless print pieces your clients will love!

Need some fresh ideas? Contact us today to get started! 516-561-1468 or FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ANY OF OUR MARKETING PRODUCTS GO TO:www.printcafeli.com

Print Perfection: Achieve Foolproof Production with this Pre-Printing Checklist

 

Have you ever rushed out the door and slipped on an icy sidewalk?

Or made a hasty decision in traffic that cost you loads of energy in the long run?

Accidents happen when we hurry, and that’s true in both life and work. In project management, sometimes people fail to allow adequate time for extra details or unexpected delays. As you draw close to a marketing deadline, errors are made, and important details are overlooked.

According to large-volume print production expert Allen Glazer, marketers should allocate 25-75% of a design project’s budget for printing costs. And if you don’t catch a mistake in prepress, it will be much more costly to fix down the line.

Do you want to be proud of your next print project while smoothly transitioning from design to print? Use this handy preflight checklist to help you eliminate chaos when a deadline is near.

Thoroughly Proof Your Piece

Scour your document for typographical, punctuation, margin, or grammatical errors.

Have one or two other people proof as well. Mistakes are easy to miss but embarrassing to everyone. To slow yourself down, trying reading your document out loud or read your text backward.

Include Correct File Formats and Crop Marks

It is crucial for you to send the correct file formats (like InDesign, PDFs, etc.) for your project.

This includes support files -- such as original images, artwork, and fonts -- in clearly labeled files. If you have to convert files, check for any corruption or formatting errors.

To maintain your design’s integrity, it is important to link all aspects (images, artwork, and fonts) into a high-resolution PDF. This includes crop marks for bleeds displaying the exact size of your trimmed and finished piece.

Use Correct Resolution

The resolution of image files needs to be higher for print: a jpeg file needs a minimum resolution of 300 DPI (Dots per inch).

If your file does not meet that standard, the quality will not be as sharp or distinct. Also, be sure to clean up distracting resizing or conversion artifacts and lighten any images that may require an ink density too high for the type of paper being used.

Use Consistent Page Layouts

Clean layouts communicate professionalism and make documents easier to read.

Proof your design (especially multi-page documents) to ensure margins are consistent on every page, including booklet covers or pages that feature charts or infographics.

Convert Image Formats to CMYK

RGB JPEG is the default image format for photographs from many cameras, cell phones, and mobile devices.

Screen images on TVs, computers, and cameras use red, green, and blue in varying percentages, but commercial printers typically separate artwork into four-color plates (cyan, magenta, yellow, black).

Most design software will allow you to convert or save a file in CMYK easily, or there are several free online file conversion tools available.

Provide a Printed Proof

A surefire way to ensure a quality product is to generate a poof and discuss it with your printer before the final printing.

It’s also important to discuss turnaround times so you can plan your milestones accordingly and allow for multiple print runs (if necessary).

Nervous? Don’t worry. With local printing, you get the benefit of a work-in-progress partnership. While it’s helpful to have a preflight checklist, the trained eye of a professional is even better! Our goal is to increase your productivity, reduce your stress, and save you time and money as your prep and proof your prints.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ALL OF OUR MARKETING PRODUCTS OR HELP WITH AN UP COMING PROJECT GO TO:www.printcafeli.com