Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce Brand Unveiling

It's official. Yesterday morning at the Rhinebeck Area Chamber of Commerce's breakfast, Susan Utter and Nadine Robbins, unveiled the new chamber brand. Susan offered her insight on the process and introduced Nadine, who described in more detail the creative process and its application to all marketing communications.

Below is an animation of the corporate image presentation. In April, Namaro will have a section of their enewsletter devoted to the new chamber brand and will go into more detail about the process from concept to the unveiling. Keep an eye out for it!

April newsletter

In next month’s issue, we are going to explore Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO. It’s the first step in creating an effective website.

Our guest blogger, Erica Darcy, an SEO consultant with experience working with small, mid-size and large companies including fortune 500 corporations will offer some insight into this misunderstood field and offer sound advice.

Some of the topics will include strategy, keywords, no-nos, and submission to search engines and why there are no guarantees on results.

If you missed the Chamber breakfast, we will review the Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce brand in more detail.

Namaro does more with less

Thanks to all of you who have filled out the survey (now closed)

So we would offer this advice. The time is now for all of us to reconsider our approaches to marketing and design. We can be smarter and do more with less by taking advantage of the web and its ability to reach more customers for a fraction of the cost. That is one of the goals of this blog which is to do research, apply it to our workflow and tell you all about it.

At Namaro, we continue to update our website based on our SEO strategy. We have developed a new campaign to target customers who want brighter corporate identity ideas with more impact and less cost. Look for it in the next few months. We are also working on a huge print catalog for Canon and researching the cost savings of going online and abandoning print.

Look for the new Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce brand to be launched next Wednesday 3/26 at the Chamber’s breakfast meeting. Call the chamber to register and come on by to check it out. 845-876-5094.

We just finished a package design sales promotion for Verbatim in North Carolina. We came up with the concept “Verbatim, Safety in Numbers” to attract sales people to carry Verbatim products. It also ties into the fact that their products are the best in the world at keeping personal digital assets safe.

The lighter side: Let’s party!

So you are planning a party for clients or friends. You’re a bit overwhelmed and could use some help in planning with a little bit of humor to lighten up your stress. Try evite.com. Top ten reasons you should use this site:

1. Your assistant has her own party to plan
2. So you won’t forget to invite your boss
3. So you will forget to invite your boss
4. Use their booze calculator to estimate your friends’ drinking habits
5. You’ll never run out of alcohol
6. It will help you remember to hide incriminating evidence
7. To make sure you know someone at the party
8. You can be the host(ess) with the most(est)
9. To make sure that you don’t lose the to-do list
10. To make sure that your significant other doesn’t lose the list

Make sure to hide the turkey when Nadine comes to the party. Cheers!

Top 15 email marketing design & content tips

1. Keep it simple and short
2. Let users know what the email is about
3. Insert low resolution graphics to capture their attention
4. Have a call-to-action
5. Personalize it
6. Your corporate identity should drive the look and feel
7. Use the same font family for all the copy and limit the use of bolds and italics to headers and proper names
8. Underscore links and make them in a different color.
9. Avoid too many colors. They tend to fight each other.
10. Emphasize call-to-action so users will focus on it
11. Emphasize other content sparingly
12. Offer useful information
13. Make the content relevant to the user and the subject in your email
14. Use the same newsletter design template for at least 4 months at a time to benefit from brand familiarity
15. Target your best leads, email to a select few to get a better response

Get more bang for your buck with email marketing

Namaro’s topic for the March blog is email marketing. We have done countless hours of research about on-line email marketing software and we narrowed down our final choice to verticalresponse.com.

1. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive
2. They offer design templates free of charge
3. You can create your own custom email design or modify their templates
4. You can personalize each email
5. You can work in code mode
6. One click content insertion
7. Preview everything in browser
8. Easily upload your database
9. Your database is reviewed for anti-spam approval
10. Your campaign is tested before you send it out
11. You set-up the launch date and time
12. One click to launch it
13. Once launched, you can monitor all sorts of stats like how many opened the email and what links they opened.
14. After the launch, you can edit your list and export it back to your computer.
15. You can sign up for free and they give you 25 free email credits
Send 25 email newsletters for free and see how it works for you
16. The cost per email is 1.5 cents!
17. For small companies, charging per email is cost effective

Let’s do some math:
At Namaro, not counting the research and strategic planning, it took us 1 day to gather the content for the subject of the newsletter, ½ day to apply our brand identity and custom create our newsletter template, a ½ day to layout the first newsletter, edit the content and finalize it, a few hours to check the list, test the newsletter and get approval to launch. We sent out 500 emails for $7.80 not including the email credits. This month we save on time since we can re-use the template we created for the first email campaign.

So with 4 days and $7.80 dollars we contacted 500 individuals—only two opted out. How cool is that?