Every year we produce tee shirts which we give away at networking events, to clients and friends. It is a great way to market the company, particularly if the shirt is something more than a big business card. We try to give ours a little style and desirability to it. This year we have gone for what one of the designers called “Techno-surf”.

Anyway, we like designing tee shirts. It demonstrates our graphic skills and allows us a little freedom in terms of design, what we do and why we do it. It also generates a bit of work in the form of tee shirt designs for clients.

It has to be said that every year we get people asking us if they can have one. Last year we had to stop because it was costing us a fortune. This year if you like the tee shirt then let us know. If you are a client have one or more with our compliments. If you are a friend then you can probably have one if you pester us enough. If you are a relative, wait until Birthday, Christmas, Passover, Ramadan, etc. If you are anyone else we can sell one to you at about £15.

All tee shirts have been made by our wonderful clients and friends Squat Orange If you don’t want one of our tee shirts, you will want one of theirs!

If you want to email to a list of people you have four options:

You can email the list to one person at a time
You can send the email once and then ‘Cc’ everyone else
You can send the email once and then ‘Bcc’ everyone else
You can use a third party service

The first will result in insanity, the second in trouble, so in the worst case please go for the third option or even better, take some time to do it professionally and go for the fourth choice.

DIY Email Marketing

A great way to market yourself quickly, efficiently and cheaply is to send emails out to lists of contacts. But beware, a well meant email to a list of people can get you into deep trouble with everyone from your contacts to the law.

Today we received just such an email from an independent HR advisor. She was launching a new website and wanted to promote it to her list of contacts - not an unreasonable thing to want to do. The email was very personal in tone “…Dear friends, family and others…” and so we thought it was from someone we knew but couldn’t really remember. Eventually it dawned on us. We met her about a year ago at a networking event, exchanged business cards and nearly did some work with her, but didn’t - in fact she was pretty rude and had a very high opinion of herself. But that’s another story.

The one thing that stood out was the Cc box on the email. Along with our email address, was another 500 or so. Bad news. So, skimming over the subtleties of good practice this is about bad practice.

Cc Vs. Bcc

If you want to email a list of people you have four options:

You can email the list one person at a time.
You can send the email once and then ‘Cc’ everyone else
You can send the email once and then ‘Bcc’ everyone else
You can use a third party service

The first option is hopeless. It will just take ages and you will be sectioned eventually.

The second option is bad form. Everyone gets to see all other email addresses, it breaks the Data Protection Act, it can get your IP address blocked as a spammer, others on the list can start to spam you as well. Most people do not want all this stuff so you can annoy people as well.

Third option is Bcc which is not bad. It is the same as Cc but each of the recipients can’t see all the other addresses the message was sent to other than the address in the ‘to’ field. Which is why most people send them to themselves and include everyone else on the Bcc list.

The fourth option is probably where you should be aiming. options like Constant Contact or MaxBulk will ‘tutor’ you as you build the email in how to use it to best effect.

Why is Cc a problem?

By Cc-ing to an open list of over 500 other people it laid us all open to receiving more unsolicited information from others on that list. There is also some invidious software out there which targets these types of emails and then scrapes this type of open data from emails and makes it available to spammers. The original message itself, as an unsolicited and unauthorised circular, is a type of Spam. To make matters worse, it is an offense under The Data Protection Act. Holding people’s data, even in a computer address book, is covered by the Data Protection Act. The privacy of that data must be protected, unless the individual has specifically authorised circulation of these details to third parties.

Additionally messages can go viral. If an original email to 500 people is found interesting enough by 10% of those people to send it to 50 others and then 10% of all those people do the same, with just two cycles of ‘forward message’ your email address will be in the hands of 15,000 people. On the plus side, if you get this right, then it is a very effective form of marketing, but that is a different matter known as viral marketing!

On the minus side, if just one of those 15,000 people is in the business of spamming then everyone on the list will get yet more endless junk email. Names are a commodity and they can be bought and sold to hundreds of thousands of spammers who will produce millions of unsavoury, sordid, and otherwise unwelcome messages.

Just pursuing the nightmare scenario, many (some say most) PCs are infected with malicious programs that strip email addresses from computers to send automated emailouts, which can also house viruses and ’spyware’. There is a statistic I read recently that an unprotected computer attached to the internet will have viruses and spyware on it within 20 minutes.

Certainly we go back to our original advice. If you are sending out to a few dozen people, the use Bcc. If, however you want to start email marketing and you are envisaging a professional approach, you can use a company like us or as a DIY option use a tool built for the job. MaxBulk for Macintosh is good, Constant Contact is a web based option, but any search on Google will provide plenty of choice.

Creative Thing recently featured as the key marketing contributors in the BBC debate on Middle Age consumers. The debate was featured as a topic for discussion on BBC Hereford and Worcester on Howard Benthams Breakfast Time show. David Yates, Managing Director of Creative Thing talked of the difficulties in defining middle age.

“Middle age is almost an obsolete term. The current crop of people between the ages of forty five and seventy were originally responsible for redefining the way we now see the world.

“The generation who reinvented themselves as ‘teenagers’ in the 1950s are now in their seventies and are reinventing old age. They don’t tend to sit around complaining about the weather, they are off on cruises or climbing up Machu Pichu. Hot on their heels are the 60s Generations. These people are now in their sixties themselves but are fit and healthy. They have high expectations and by and large, retain many of the values that they helped to establish back then – certainly they are still refusing to fit into a middle-age stereotype.

“And every decade seems to follow the lead, even Punks are now in their fifties!”

David Yates went on to say that middle age was not so much a niche marketing concept as a mass marketing one. Thanks to the baby boom, the majority of spenders out there are middle aged. They hold fairly consitent opinions and in some respects they behave similarly to each other.

“One example is that they are more likely to respond to information through traditional routes such as graphic design and even web design. These can presented by companies in the form of brochures or advertising materials and sites. Marketing to the middle age consumer is just marketing - full-stop. Marketing challenges are more accute when trying to understand the current crop of sixteen to thirty year olds.

“They have seen it, done it, played the video game of it, MSN’d their mates about it, swapped text messages about it, chatted on the web about it, and moved onto the next thing before they even get the tee shirt to prove it!”

“What do these people need marketing messages for? They are not inclined to be consumer fodder and have a more jaundiced view of marketing. They operate outside of middle aged conventions and they own all the information they need or, indeed, trust.”

Creative Thing is always trying to see the world from someone else’s perspective. A typical graphic design agency approach is to second guess the clients. Creative Thing are the graphic design agency who research our customer’s customers. Ultimately they are the people deciding to buy and they are therefore more important to a designer than the client!

Graphic design starts at the very moment a company starts. Most people are thinking about their logo before they have worked out their pricing strategy. And that is a telling thing. The way you present yourself to the world will determine the way your customers perceive you.

And then life takes over. While creating your own newsletters and business cards may have seemed like a necessity when you first started your company from your kitchen table, continuing to do so limits your potential business.

Like it or not, people’s opinion of your company is often made in the first few seconds, and during that time nothing has a greater impact than the appearance of your marketing materials. You may have the best products in the world or offer customer service that is light years ahead of your competition, but unless your communications come across as being from such a company, people are not going to believe you. You can shout it from the rooftops, but you may never have the opportunity to prove it.

This is where the services of a professional graphic designer come in. Much in the same way that you hire an accountant to handle your financial matters or a solicitor to handle your legal matters, putting graphic design in the hands of a professional will return a far greater profit than the money you try to save by handling it yourself.

There are many details to graphic design that may not be apparent to someone outside of the industry. Choosing colours, fonts and images can often seem simple but this is because people often choose what appeals to them. To take it a step further, there are many nuances to the layout of a marketing piece that have a tremendous impact on it’s effectiveness. True graphic design is about creating something that will illicit a particular response, whether it be to convey a message or to persuade a potential buyer.

Creative Thing offers a complete range of graphic design services, from print media such as brochures, posters and signage, to logo design and web site design, as well as everything in between.

Graphic Design Worcestershire - was where we started. We now have clients across the world from next door in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire in the West Midlands to Tasmania and Sydney in Australia. We work with companies and individuals of all sizes, one-man-bands up to MOD and government contracts. Small companies, start-ups, SMEs and multinationals whether it be around our own region in Upton Upon Severn in Worcestershire and the West Midlands or further afield.