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You see them with their heads buried in their smart phones. They’re posting on Facebook, sharing a photo of their meal on Instagram and adding a “Snap” to their “Story” on Snapchat. Young people today, especially millennials, are the most connected generation ever. And marketers are looking to find the best way to connect with them.

Based on their smartphone habits, you may think that online, mobile ads and social interaction may be the best way to capture the attention of a millennial. But if you assume that, you’d be wrong.

Research has shown that millennials read books and magazines, read direct mail they receive in their mailbox and clip paper coupons from newspapers.

Millennials, Books and Magazines

A study by Publishing Technology found that millennials living in the U.S. are almost twice as likely to read a print book as an e-book. In addition, millennials would rather acquire their printed books from chain bookstores, used bookstores and public libraries as opposed to online retailers. It seems that millennials place a high importance on touch and personal interaction when it comes to buying and reading a printed book.

In February of 2015, there was a great article in the Washington Post that discussed the passion millennials have for print. In the article a 20-year-old junior at American University, Frank Schembari, said, when talking about a printed book, “I like the feeling of it. I like holding it. It’s not going off. It’s not making sounds.”

And, a University of Washington study found that even when students were given free e-textbooks 25% of the students still bought print versions of the book. Now, remember, these are individuals who have grown up with the Internet, smart phones and online but they still want to read a printed book. And this attitude has had an effect on publishers like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. Both companies have reported significant declines in e-book sales.

And when it comes to magazines, 58% of millennials interviewed said they enjoy looking at ads in magazines. And here’s the best part, 49% said they have made a purchase because of something they saw in a magazine.

Millennials and Direct Mail

Research also shows that while millennials spend a lot of time online they’re most likely to ignore pop-up ads, banner ads and email. In fact, millennials and others often consider Internet pop-up ads as an annoying distraction. While millennials may be numb to digital advertising print still grabs their attention. In fact, 82% of millennials say they read retail and department store direct mail. More than three out of four said they read direct mail from grocery stores and more than three in five read direct mail from clothing and accessory stores.

And, when they read their mail, more than 84% of millennials prefer to respond to direct mail by going to the company’s website either on a personal computer or a mobile device. Thus printed ads are a significant driver of web traffic.

Millennials and Greeting Cards

If millennials read mail from retail, department, grocery, clothing and accessory stores then how do you think they’ll feel about receiving a greeting card in the mail?

Think of your favorite millennial who may be turning 21. Would they rather receive an email with a link to an e-card or a Happy Birthday greeting card in the mail?

Speaking of greeting cards, check out our 20% discount on greeting cards.

Millennials, Coupons and Catalogs

According to the 2K16 Valassis® Coupon Intelligence Report, 82% of millennials use coupons from newspaper delivered coupon books, similar to 79% of baby boomers. And 34% of millennials report an increase during the past year in mail coupon usage, significantly higher than Gen X and boomer users.

And when it comes to catalog usage, 54% of millennials say they love and look forward to receiving retail catalogs. With 49% of millennials saying they wish that some companies they do business with had a print catalog. Combine this with the push that catalogs give to online sales and you have a perfect match.

For example, online retailer Bonobos has found that roughly 20% of their first-time customers now place orders after receiving one of the company’s catalogs. And these customers spend 1.5 times longer shopping on its website than those who didn’t receive a catalog.

Why Print is Important

The Centre for Experimental Consumer Psychology at Bangor University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to prove that content delivered in paper form is more stimulating than content delivered in virtual or digital form. Participants were presented with advertising material that was shown both on screen (virtual/digital) and in paper form while the fMRI scanner was running. The researchers found that the printed material created deeper impressions on the brain. The brain perceives physical material to be more genuine, according to the study.

The research clearly shows that millennials are comfortable with books, magazines, direct mail, and newspapers. It also shows that millennials find print to be useful and enjoyable. And we’ve seen that print creates deep and genuine impressions. So, if you want to reach millennials, print must be part of your marketing mix.

And, BTW, don’t forget to check out our 20% discount on greeting cards placed until October 31, 2016.

Weeks ago I was having lunch with a young colleague. He was beaming. The young man gleefully announced that his latest marketing campaign got him $140,000 in new business and only cost him $70,000. “We generated 100% ROI.”

My reaction might have been a smile, but it was more of a grimace.

The poor guy had made a major and common mistake. As with any business, there are expenses. He had mistaken revenue for profit. When you factor in his profit margins, his Return On Investment could be anything from 50% to nothing at all.

Finding your true ROI can be a tricky game. The math may be more complicated than my young agency owner, but it can be done and used as a vital tool in your business. Here are a few mistakes that people commonly make when calculating their ROI.

Playing down the costs: There are direct costs of any marketing efforts, but don’t forget the indirect costs of wages, benefits of the employees involved in the marketing and other overhead.

Playing up the benefits: When well executed, many campaigns will improve your morale, work environment and reputation. But there are usually more than one marketing effort going on at one time. If you don’t make any attempts to isolate the impact of the marketing effort you’re measuring, you may be overstating the benefits.

That pesky inflation thing: When projecting your benefits years into the future, don’t forget a very important factor: It’s in the future. A dollar even a few years from now will be worth less than it is now. Factor in a discount on future benefits and your numbers will be much more accurate.

Forgetting to get metric consensus: With any large effort, there will be stakeholders, many stakeholders. Be sure to collaborate or at least seek approval of the metrics you are using to gauge your success. There’s nothing more disappointing than spending hours calculating your ROI only to have a person who wasn’t involved tear it down. If you get people on board at the beginning, they will still be with you in the end.

Seeing all benefits as quantifiable: When certain metrics aren’t easy to measure, like increased sales or additional projects, they aren’t easy to estimate. Others, like professional development of the team, simply aren’t. Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t measure these benefits, just know that when your metrics aren’t very measurable, your precision on your ROI reporting will be diminished. It’s up to you on how and what you wish to measure.

Having your ROI influence your budget: Your ROI should never be used when calculating your future budgets. It is a recipe for failure. The ROI for a campaign is a gauge on past successes to predict future potential. Your ROI is a report, not a crystal ball.

Measuring what can’t be measured: When your evidence may be suspect, when your outcome metrics are nowhere to be found, or when you can isolate this marketing effort from others, calculating your ROI won’t be worth the effort. And that’s OK. This is advertising; there are things that you should still create, even if you can’t measure them.

The Wrap-up

Measuring your ROI isn’t easy. It isn’t perfect. You may see it assume sort of mathematical dark magic. You may see it as the vital tool for insights that will lead to smart future business decisions. Either way, when you choose to measure ROI, make sure you avoid the pitfalls.

Get a better return on your ROI reporting. That way you won’t spout off false results at a business lunch. Although in that particular instance, I tried to cheer my young friend up by taking care of the check.

And I didn’t bother trying to calculate the ROI on that decision.

Sources:

https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-most-common-mistake-people-make-in-calculating-roi

http://www.mcbassi.com/wp/resources/pdfs/NineROIMistakes.pdf

You’re a company with plans to conduct consumer outreach events in the top 10 markets with a strong concentration of affluent travelers. Your events will take place in cities as varied as San Francisco, New York, Washington, Toronto and Atlanta. You plan to sponsor events like the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado and the Chefs & Champagne Event in the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island. Your challenge: getting the correct promotional products and print collateral to the various events on time and in the correct quantities. And, you must maintain brand consistency across all product lines and do so in a cost efficient manner.

In 2014 this was the situation Celebrity Cruise Lines found themselves in. According to Marilys Ward, Team Manager, Celebrity Cruises Southern California, they, “were looking for an effective solution for warehousing, organizing, and ordering our promotional materials. With a large team and a very active promotional event schedule having a tool that provided a clear and simple ordering process was essential to us.”

Celebrity needed an online solution that would allow their teams to create marketing materials and customized kits for the many high-end events they conducted throughout the year. Celebrity’s events required a mix of marketing materials and promotional items that can be customized to each event. Westamerica’s StōrFront® solution provided Celebrity Cruise Lines with the solution they were looking for.

Westamerica’s StōrFront® is a flexible, integrated, all-in-one solution that helps you manage your brand, your marketing strategy, and your collateral materials in an efficient and cost-effective manner. In this way the team in charge of the Aspen, Colorado event can build a marketing kit that meets their needs while the team in the Hamptons can build their own unique kits.

StōrFront® offers print-on-demand, industry leading fulfillment and digital asset management capabilities. It’s a web portal customized and branded to match your company’s current website. This portal contains all of your branded promotional products and print collateral. In addition, the site has the capability to allow users to personalize products, such as business cards. Users, who are assigned and employed by your company, can order the quantities necessary for their specific event. Users can also build marketing kits from the materials available.

It is Westamerica’s StōrFront® that provides the teams at Celebrity Cruise Lines 24/7 access to Celebrity’s marketing and promotional materials. In addition, we created an online form on which users can build a custom marketing kit, including all the instructions needed for Westamerica to fulfill the order. When the users click “Complete Order” a series of emails are pushed out from StōrFront® to various departments within Westamerica and the contents of the kit are pulled, and the kit is packed out, ready to ship and arrive in time for the event.

StōrFront® allows you to store, order, customize, and print marketing collateral on demand. It also allows you to store and edit digital files, videos and images with our Digital Asset Manager. You can easily manage your inventory, all from a centralized custom-created portal. This provides for seamless corporate and branding integration.

No one on your team will have to search through multiple electronic files to find the “correct” logo. Everything is kept in the same location. And, when there are updates to logos, products or print collateral, all changes can be made in one location and everyone on the team will have access to the new materials.

StōrFront® is easy to use and perfectly integrates traditional marketing fulfillment practices with the latest digital technology. When asked, Marilys Ward of Celebrity Cruises told us the implementation process was easy. She further said that it has an “intuitive platform that requires very little training time, and comes with incredible customer service. I would definitely recommend StōrFront® for your fulfillment needs.”

Thanks, Marilys, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

What financial institution ISN’T interested in increasing their loan portfolio? Pretty much none of them—at least not if they want to stick around! For everyone else, that means there is a lot of competition for the loan revenue out there. Every institution large or small needs a marketing strategy with a focus on loan generation.

Loan generation describes the marketing strategy that identifies your best new prospects for a loan and, using this information, provides a preapproval at just the right time to capitalize on the opportunity. Proponents of these types of programs report an increase in loan portfolio revenues and a decrease in loan acquisition costs.

What institution ISN’T interested in those two line items? Again, pretty much none of them!

We use a program called Loan Generator, and it’s excellent for many parts of your loan portfolio. In general, the opportunities it identifies breakdown into two categories:

• Missed Opportunities: When your prospects take out a loan somewhere else, we refer to that as “lost” opportunities. Despite your best efforts to inform and entice your members to start their shopping with you, they didn’t. In the past, you could hope your general marketing copy could get these lost opportunities to refinance with you. Now you can target those specific lost opportunities—whether for a vehicle, a home equity loan, a credit card, or even a mortgage—and convince them to reconsider.

• New Purchases: Using the technology platform, you can define the parameters of what looks like an acceptable loan for your financial institution and then identify the people you have that fit them. Using this list, you can identify which of these solid loan prospects is most likely to need a new car, home equity, credit card, or even a first-time buyer for a mortgage based on “trigger events” or common life stage signals that indicate an imminent need.

Voila! In either case, a targeted list is born full of prospects ready to hear about your great loan product.

So what parts of your loan portfolio are best for these missed opportunities and new purchase. A better question would be which ones aren’t…but that’s another post. Here are the top five loan products for which the program is most effective:

1. Auto: We all know how the dealers work: They get your best auto loan prospects back in their office and next thing you know, the prospect has a new vehicle and you have bupkis. This product allows you to get some of those loans back. Or you can identify those that are most likely to be shopping for a vehicle so you can send the preapproval…before they go back in that office!

2. Credit card: How does a tiered-rate campaign sound to allow for better targeting in your new credit card direct marketing strategy? What if you could also identify those that had a good history of managing their debt? This technology can do both, as well as identify good prospects for balance transfers.

3. Personal Loans: Increasing this product category is a great way to expand your loan portfolio. With personal loans, you can segment your prospects based on revolving debt utilization ratio. You can also tier the offers in such a way that you have a bigger list of prospects without taking on too much risk.

4. Home Equity: This lucrative loan option is often missed by financial institutions because the prospect doesn’t even know you offer them. With the software, you can see who qualifies and is most likely to take one out, or who has already taken one out that you can convince them to switch to you.

5. Mortgages: Like the home equity, some of your people might not know you have these (despite your best efforts of informing them!). You can either save them from a high-interest or adjustable mortgage option, or you can reach out to those customers or members that are likely to take out their first mortgage in the near future.

With all the competition out there for loan growth, you need a marketing strategy that is targeted and effective. Loan generator is both, and a great way to capitalize on the opportunity as it presents itself with your loan prospects—and recapture the ones you might have missed. The new loans growth is out there, A LOT of it, in fact. Make sure you are getting your share.

Sources:

https://www.cunamutual.com/~/media/cunamutual/lending/loan-generation-marketing/public/loan_generation_brochure__media_file__da_231071__2.pdf

http://loangenerator.mywestamerica.com/

Email, mobile apps, responsive designed web sites, social media, PURLs, landing pages, the list goes on and on. Digital is a big part of marketing!  It’s a big part of marketing because mobile devices are a big part of the average consumer’s life.

According to Google, “82% of smartphone users say they consult their phones on purchases they’re about to make in a store. They get ideas, look up information, and make decisions, all from their smartphone anytime, anywhere.” Companies take advantage of the fact that consumers have their mobile devices within reach.

Retail and Mobile
A while back, my friend and I were walking past a major retail store when she received a text message with a 10% off coupon from the retailer. My friend was amazed. She asked me, “How do they know where I am?” I explained to her that it was a very easy thing to do. She had given her contact information, including her phone number and agreed to receive information from the retailer. Couple that with location tracking and the next thing you know there’s a coupon on her mobile device.

At Westamerica Communications we understand that the consumer’s shopping experience has changed. Research shows that foot traffic in retail stores has declined by 57% in the past five years, but the value of every visit has nearly tripled. The reason for this is simple. Mobile is driving local shopping and purchasing decisions. This is exactly why, for the past five years, we have been developing specialized mobile apps, websites, and other digital marketing methods for our clients.

B2B and Mobile
It’s important to understand that these trends are not just happening with consumers in retail markets. These same changes are taking place in the B2B marketplace. Data from Google’s Customer Journey tool shows that 42% of researchers use a mobile device during the B2B purchasing process. That’s a 91% increase in the past two years. And that’s throughout the entire purchasing path not just at the initial stages of research.

Micro-Moments
So, there you are, sitting on the couch next to your significant other watching a television program you have no interest in watching. What do you do? You reach for your mobile device and shop. Maybe you shop for a new pair of shoes or maybe you look for a new vendor for a particular product or service you need at the office. Today there’s really not much difference between the B2C or B2B customer. The purchaser may be on a lunch break or walking their dog. Either way, they are carrying and using their mobile device. These are what Google calls, “micro-moments.”

Sometimes it’s, “I-need-some-ideas moment.” Other times it’s, “Which-one’s-best moment.” And, still other times it’s, “I-want-to-buy-it moment.” Whatever the moment, you as a provider of products and services, must be available to your current and potential customers. Maybe it’s through an app that makes it easy for them to make a purchase. Perhaps it’s an easily accessed, information-rich mobile friendly website. Or maybe it’s a specialized landing page that they are directed to with a piece of direct mail. Whatever it is Westamerica Communications can help create the digital marketing methods you need to keep connected to your clients.