In your self-promotion campaigns, this means that you need to be using industry-leading best practices.

Here are four best practices from “Digital Printing: Transforming Business & Marketing Models.” How many of these were in your last self-promotion campaign?

1. Don’t think “technology.” Think “solutions.” In your marketing message, did you focus on digital output? 1:1 printing? personalized URLs? Or increased marketing effectiveness?

2. Traditional marketing rules apply. How much expertise did you bring to key marketing elements of the campaign, such as the mailing list, segmentation, and understanding customer psychographics? Was the copy professionally written? Was it copy edited? What was the level of the graphic design?

3. Go multi-channel. Digital and 1:1 printing can be powerful tools, but they don’t work in a vacuum. Marketing is a complex world of multiple channels, including email, SMS text messaging, social media, and more. How much thought was given to these other channels and how the print portion of the campaign would fit within them?

4. Make a long-term commitment. Was this a one-shot deal? Or have you made a long-term commitment to building relationships with your customers? How often do you send out communications? Regularly? Or just when you need to boost sales?

We ask our clients to follow these best practices. If we are marketing services providers, we should be following them ourselves.

For more on digital printing best practices, check out “Digital Printing: Transforming Business & Marketing Models.” Training and educational primers also available on 1:1, personalized URLs, and Web-to-print at www.digitalprintingreports.com.

Why use customer communications? Customer communications CAN impact your bottom line. The case to use customer communications mirrors in many ways the case to invest in relationship marketing. A customer communications strategy may be for you if your objectives are to:

• Enhance your relationships with your customers
• Upsell and cross-sell products and services
• Retain customers (especially best customers)
• Build loyalty and advocacy among customers

Build Credibility Newsletters allow you to build your company’s credibility as an expert by providing customers with educative information.

Convey Information Got a lot to say? Have plenty of information to share? Customer communications work well if you need to convey complex information about your products or services on an ongoing basis.

Break Through the Clutter Customer communications can be an excellent tool to break through junk-mail clutter. If it offers valuable information to the customer, rather than just trying to sell products, a newsletter can become something that the customer anticipates, especially when sent frequently and regularly.

Deciding Whether to Seek Help or Go Out of House. Don’t have the resources in-house? Consider taking your project to an agency. Being consistent is the key.

Or how about wearing one? Seriously, people are doing it.

QR codes on clothing used to be a way for college kids to direct people to their Facebook pages. Today, QR codes are morphing into traveling business cards. Consider the emergence of a company called iD Shirt. Their website lets you choose what you want to put on a shirt – your business or personal contacts; a link to your Facebook or LinkedIn profile, Twitter ID, or other URL – and simply hit “generate code.” You can then use the code yourself or have it printed on a t-shirt. You instantly become a mobile billboard!

To unlock the code and add contacts or view the content, someone just scans it with an app-equipped mobile phone. Their phone accesses the content and your contacts are automatically transferred to it. Check it out at http://www.idshirt.net/.

I’m tempted to purchase one and wear it around just to see how many people will scan it. It may seem a bit weird, walking up to someone and taking a picture of their shirt, but the wearer is a walking invitation after all.

The point here is the extent to which QR codes are beginning to integrate into our culture. From billboards to business cards, from student t-shirts to corporate trade show attire. Magazines, direct mail, coffee cups, restaurant menus, and college textbooks. Just look around; QR codes are everywhere — maybe even on you.

I spend at least two hours of my day seeking out and reading articles that I think would be of value to the print community. It’s far too much info for me to be writing about in our Marketing Briefs, so I’ve begun posting a few of these each week on our company’s Facebook page. Please follow us if you’d like to read these.

Insqribe, a company that provides a real-time QR analytics platform, recently published a success story. One of its clients, Letterbox Deals, used QR codes to launch their first print catalog in Sydney, Australia. The objective was to build awareness and promote the brand through a direct mail sweepstakes that gave away Dell notebook computers. Recipients could enter the contest either by logging directly onto the Letterbox Deals website or by using a QR code found in the mailing.

The results were quite interesting:

• Fully 25% of entries were submitted via QR code to mobile site
• 60% of QR code respondents downloaded a code reader to enter the competition
• A 25%  of the QR code scans occurred within people’s homes

One of the perceived barriers to wider QR code use has been that not every mobile phone comes pre-installed with a reader. Yet with proper motivation (in this case, a chance to win something), nearly two-thirds of those who used the QR code downloaded a reader to do so. This suggests that not having a reader pre-installed on the user’s cell phone is not necessarily an obstacle — if the incentive is right. Admittedly, not every campaign gives away free PCs, but there are many other offers that would also work.

Also interesting is that, according to Insqribe’s data, one-fourth of the entries came from people scanning the QR codes at home. Most respondents could have entered through a home computer, but they chose to use the QR codes with their mobile phones instead. Was it out of convenience, coolness, or some other factor? Whatever the reason, the campaign was a success.

So again we ask: Do QR codes work? For the right campaigns and the right markets, you bet!

Why use customer communications? Customer communications CAN impact your bottom line. The case to use customer communications mirrors in many ways the case to invest in relationship marketing. A customer communications strategy may be for you if your objectives are to:

1. Enhance your relationships with your customers
2. Upsell and cross-sell products and services
3. Retain customers (especially best customers)
4. Build loyalty and advocacy among customers

Build Credibility. Newsletters allow you to build your company’s credibility as an expert by providing customers with educative information.

Convey Information. Got a lot to say? Have plenty of information to share? Customer communications work well if you need to convey complex information about your products or services on an ongoing basis.

Break Through the Clutter. Customer communications can be an excellent tool to break through junk-mail clutter. If it offers valuable information to the customer, rather than just trying to sell products, a newsletter can become something that the customer anticipates, especially when sent frequently and regularly.

Deciding Whether to Seek Help or Go Out of House. Don’t have the resources in-house? Consider taking your project to an agency. Being consistent is the key.