Diamonds are Forever, and now so is Green...

Following up the success of the first "Forever Stamps"—a First Class stamp that can be bought at today's prices and used well, forever—the USPS has just launched another.

First in the USPS's Social Awareness series, each of the 16 stamps on the sheet offers low and no-cost tips to save energy and natural resources. And the predominant color is green. Naturally.

For instance, the stamps suggest using reusable shopping bags... fixing water leaks... using energy efficient light bulbs... maintaining tire pressure... switching off lights when not in use.

You know the drill. You've heard it before. These are the simple things that your parents tried to tell you about responsible behavior. Now the USPS is telling you, too.

Nag. Nag. Nag. Maybe you should listen this time.

But beyond the obvious value of preserving life on earth, there may be a financial benefit to using these stamps. Actuaries and Uncle Scrooge, take note!

Consider this: If you send 200 Christmas cards each year and you figure you've still got 30 Christmases ahead of you, that's 6,000 stamps you'll be licking in December. Maybe you mail 20 birthday cards, bills and miscellaneous whatnots each month. 20 x 12 months in a year x 30 years. That's another 7200 stamps over 30 years. Total: 13,200 First Class stamps in your future.

Buy in bulk today and pay just 44 cents forever. So even if rates go up, you're protecting your position at 44 cents.

No more postal inflation. Future rate hikes be damned! For a measly $5808 investment today you've protected yourself against future First Class postage rate increases.

Buy today and save enough $$$ in 50 years to put your great grandchildren through college! Or at least buy them a beer after class.

Now if the USPS simply invests that $5808 at 8%, in 64 years it will be worth big bucks! The mind boggles with possibilities. It's like buying futures when you can actually see into the future. It's so good it oughta be illegal.

The mind also boggles with possibilities of what will happen to our planet if more of us don't recycle, conserve water and use less energy. $4 a gallon for gas is just the tip of the iceberg. Oh yes, and the real icebergs—and the polar bears, walruses and seals who depend on them—will soon be just a bittersweet memory, relegated to the History Channel.

So consider this stamp a winning trifecta. Save the planet, just a bit, save some $$ in the bargain, and maybe most important of all, get ego-boosting "I told you so" points for reminding your less-than-aware friends about the importance of conserving our natural resources.

Way to go, Post Office!

You're a Colorful Character! Shouldn't your marketing be, too?

Ever since our ancestors first drew antelopes on cave walls, artists have used color to arrest attention. That’s why designers create logos, photos, illustrations and charts in color. And why they use boxes, rules, underlines, tint tones, reverses, screens, duotones and the like.

Today, even paper can get in the act by being an eye-popping neon color, or just an understated off-white. Anything but “just black and white.”

As a marketer, you know color works hard for you. It stops readers, focuses their attention and gives you a millisecond longer to make your point. If you’ve written the headline well, and designed the piece convincingly, that fraction of a second may be enough to clinch the deal.

Yes indeed, color sells.

But, until recently, full color printing was expensive. So you probably had to use it judiciously to stay in budget. Digital presses lowered the price of color on your short run jobs, but long runs were still outside your budget.

Full color envelopes were a designer’s dream—and despair. More often than not, they had to be offset printed then “converted.” Converting means die cutting the envelope from the pre-printed sheet, then applying glue and finally folding. The whole process could take weeks and cost dearly.

That is so yesterday! (Want to see more envelope samples, click here?)

Today, Paul&Partners proudly announces four color envelopes. Since we can agree that color attracts attention, we propose that a smart cookie like you would like to use a full color envelope for your next mailing.

And if getting an envelope that will stand out in the mailbox isn’t enough of a great thing, we can address the envelopes at the same time we’re printing them for you. That means we save you production time and money!

Best of all, we can print these envelopes for you fast and at a cost even your accountant will love.

Caveat: Not every artist’s inspiration is a good match for this technology. Leonardo might be disappointed in our rendition of his Mona Lisa, but Picasso would be delirious with joy with what we can do with his work. It all depends.

Send us your idea and we’ll let you know if it is a candidate for full color envelope printing. We’ll even let you know how much it will cost and how long it will take to print and mailshop the job for you.

Contact us by calling 703-996-0800 or sending an email to Ellen@PaulandPartners.net.

It’s time to show the world your true colors.

Printing and Direct Mail: We're in a Growth Industry! Or you can't believe everything you hear.

Doom-and-gloomers say that print is doomed. Direct mail is a goner. What started with the ancient papyrus-wielding scribes, grew exponentially when Gutenberg discovered offset printing, is finished. Caput. Stick a fork in it, they say. It's done.

They name the internet as the one singlehanded instrument of destruction. They cite video-game-generation short-attention spans as an accomplice and falling postal usage as evidence. Those of us in the putting-ink-on-paper business might as well be selling buggy whips, they say. We're done for.

But whoa, there, guys. Not so fast!

A leading marketing research firm, the Winterberry Group, has dramatic evidence that flies in the face of these print pariahs.

Winterberry predicts that direct mail spending will grow by 5.8% this year; while direct response print will increase by a not so robust, but still sweet 2%. But Digital and the variable data printing it provides—will increase by a whopping 14%.

14%! Wow! But let's back up a bit.

2008 to 2009 was catastrophic for print-based marketers. Printing and direct mail volume declined by a staggering 16.7% in that one 12-month period, ending up the year at $43.8B sales volume. But by mid-year 2010, things were turning around. From July to December, volumes bounced back by 3.1% producing an EOY value of $45.2B.

Winterberry predicts that all signs are for 2011 to continue the rebound, increasing by 5.8% and coming in with an EOY value of $47.8B—$4B higher than we were just 2 ugly years ago. Not bad for an industry on its deathbed, eh?

So what's going on?

The great recession seems to be easing. People are spending more again, and many marketers are returning to the mail. Furthermore, the long-touted email revolution isn't panning out quite the way it had been expected to. So marketers are abandoning the electronic world for good old fashioned print again.

At the same time, USPS-enforced regulations to keep lists cleaner, and greater acceptance of detailed response analytics mean that mailers can mail smaller, but more accurately and with more highly targeted campaigns. Hence, they should see better ROI for their efforts.

The USPS is doing its part by not seeking huge postal increases for 2011.

Digital is the big winner because as marketers mail with greater specificity, their volumes drop. And as you—savvy marketer that you are—probably knows, digital is more economical at lower run lengths. Added to the digital difference is digital's ability to create custom pieces for each recipient, thus targeting the messaging even more tightly.

So before you believe the doom-and-gloomers who are predicting the end of the print world, please consider that we are in rapidly evolving times. It's happened before and it is happening today.

We're at the conflux of technological availability and economic necessity. Printing and marketing is changing; it is not going away.

Get with it. Get Social.

If you're a youngster, you may have trouble fathoming this concept, so I'm here to help you. Give your thumbs a rest for a minute or two, and read on.

In the ancient times (before the last 5 years) when you wanted to talk with someone—say, your client—you picked up the phone and you spoke to him. Now I know in this day and age that practice of actually talking to each other sounds remarkably quaint. But it worked. Communication happened.

Then came email. Forget the phone. When you wanted to talk with your client, you sent him an email. It was fast but you had to wait for his response back. His response might necessitate another query from you which also demanded a response back.

And that was the big problem with email. It could take hours to have what had been a simple 5-minute phone conversation. Worse yet, in all the back-and-forthing, misunderstandings crept in.

Some PhD candidate somewhere (I've forgotten the exact details in a senior moment) discovered that 90% of emails were misinterpreted. It was shocking! If you ran your business (or love life, for that matter) on what you thought you had said and what you thought you had heard back, 90% of the time you would be wrong. Yikes! Communications where happening, but maybe not the communications you needed. On the other hand, you could at least have a paper trail that showed where the train went off the track.

But now I'm getting off track.

Today, 79% of corporations use Social Media today to interact with consumers. They use these communications to maintain top-of-mind presence, drive sales, get feedback, and award customer-loyalty.

The Altimeter Group cites that there are 600M (600,000,000) Facebook accounts and these 600M folks spend an incredible 700B (7,000,000,000) minutes per month on Facebook. Twitter is second with 175M users sending about 95M tweets a day. My calculator can't even figure out what this comes to on a monthly basis. Anyway, LinkedIn is third at 85M users. YouTube is another social biggie, but not quite in the same way.

If you are comfortable with the technology, and have the time each day to devote to the cause, you may find sending messages and responding to what comes back a rewarding experience. You'll be in good company. Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson, Marriot CEO Bill Marriott and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz all write their own blogs and tweets.

On the other hand, if you are like many busy people today (who don't have a support staff of thousands), maybe you want to write your own material, then have a trusted associate distribute it and respond on your behalf.

In many large organizations there are entire departments of tweeters and social media mavens, sending out tweets, blogs, text messages and checking in with Friends on FaceBook and folks in various interest groups.

Why are these firms devoting so much energy and resources to this effort?

Because it works!

Properly executed, social media does indeed maintain top-of-mind presence. A well-written blog, delivered regularly, builds community. It's one of today's communication tools of choice, and communication—whether by print, phone or by blog—builds community.

Social Media does drive sales (think text messaging, or an email click here to link to our new catalog)... get feedback (PURLs, informal focus groups and surveys)...
inspire folks to act (give to earthquake recovery, sign up for a whitepaper, register for a free webinar)... and award customer-loyalty (Panera and Ruby Tuesdays are masters of rewarding customer loyalty.)

Social Media supplements—not replaces—your other marketing efforts. It can not replace direct mail letters, catalogs in the mailbox or ads on the radio. What it can do is make your audience more receptive when your direct mail letter or catalog gets in their hands.

You learned in Marketing 101 that successful marketing is about building a relationship between your company and your customer. If you first heard this sage advice in the last century, you'll remember there were fewer avenues you could use then.

It's so easy today, though the rule of relationships still applies. Social Media is the perfect tool to build relationships. It works. And yes, it can be fun.

Get with it.