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Marketing Automation is becoming a premium for small and large organizations. Over the past 15 years there has been increased pressure to squeeze the most one can out of their marketing dollars. Typically this falls into two camps, the actual money spent on marketing initiatives and the money spent towards the headcount to administer them. The marketing automation dilemma You essentially have a back and forth issue. You don’t want to strip headcount too badly, because it will be difficult to administer campaigns, but you want to maximize the amount you spend on external campaigns that drive people back to your site and drive interest. The first step to solving this dilemma So now you recognize you have this dilemma and the question of how to make strides to maximizing my headcount and at the same time spend money on initiatives that will drive revenue, retention, sign-ups or whatever your key success metrics are. What are the next steps? Strip away non-value additive activities via automation Busy work is the bane of anyone’s existence, but it should also be the first thing in your organization you look to remedy. Physically handling mailing items, stuffing envelopes, or even spending the time managing 3rd parties to do this isn’t additive. In many cases manual interactions not only increase the time that you spend doing other things, but also increase the chance of errors. The irony of introducing more manual work is that it introduces more errors that may require further work to manage. At the end of the day, outsourcing these operations to a 3rd party is crucial to improve efficiency. It improves efficiency for a number of reasons: You won’t ever be able to do something as effectively as a specialized shop – Typically if you are printing and stuffing envelopes, your cost per impression is much higher than a 3rd party shop. You have to consider the time for anyone babysitting the exercise of printing and mailing Print on demand vs. Inventory – One of the essential problems with all in house marketing activities is that you have to print extra and warehouse those extra pieces. Initiate from your systems rather than a spreadsheet – If you have systems for managing people and operations, then why are you exporting to a spreadsheet and manually hand holding the process to completion. It wastes time, while you could automate the entire process. Enter a Print & Mail API  A print and mail API is the perfect solution to move manual tasks off of the plate of marketers and just making sure things “happen” on their own automatically.  There are many marketing professionals that...

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Over a year ago, Printchomp started working on our API. As we brought on thousands of printers we started to have developers reach out to us and ask how they could leverage this network. We quickly obliged them and started building our Print API. If you want to skip the article and get started using the Printchomp Print API go here. Declan Whelan was the primary architect of our API. He wanted to make sure that not only external users could consume it, but our own internal development would be tied to our API infrastructure. This also changed the way we approached our own development of the API as we became primary consumers of it. We built it based upon a number of principles. 1. Scalability – Because we had 1000s of printers and many developers wanting to integrate we needed to make sure it would scale. Scalability meant a number of things. The ability of our printers to handle the load, the ability of external developers to ping our platform as needed as their apps scaled. Additionally scalability is crucial for offerings where we offering Direct Mail integration with our platform. We wanted to make sure if a person initiated a direct mail campaign from our platform it would scale both from a technology and pricing perspective. 2. Flexibility – When looking at the Print API landscape we noticed a few things and this was immediately validated by some of our early customers. When we had people approach us about the lack of customizable products. Because our printer base is so strong, we can literally offer any product under the sun, and customize it for any developer. This gives us a lot of ability to really help solve problems and not just offer a cookie cutter solution. We have the ability to spin up new products for you to order via API in less than 30 minutes if needed. Listen a little bit more about our product selection. One thing that we offer that is unique is multiple pick-pack and ship facilities across North America. That way we can find the best way to distribute based upon price and turnaround time. We can either adopt a print on demand approach or stockpile at our facilities and deplete if there is a fixed demand. 3. Monetization – Most people looking for a Print API are looking for either two principal things, either automation to reduce costs or monetize their digital assets in some way. We wanted to offer a variety of ways for people to monetize their app and providing value within their own ecosystem. So please, if you want to...

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Welcome everyone to The Anything Show In our first interview we discuss a number of things with Charles Mire of Structur3d printing,  including 3D Printing, getting traction on Kickstarter, entrepreneurship and family, getting traction, customer feedback loops, and the Waterloo region tech...

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Well my cute daughter Anna is running around with our generation one iPad. Since the tech is relatively new there are no hard and fast rules for managing your child’s iPad usage. We have tried to figure it out as we have gone along, but finding quality apps is always a challenge. It is a challenge because you want to find something interative and can teach you something instead of just mindless drivel. She is now 2.5 and now these are her favorites that we totally approve. As a result here are our recommendations for Apps Endless Alphabet – This is a fantastic app for increasing your child’s vocabulary and getting them to start spelling and sounding out letters. Download Endless Alphabet           Toca Boca Kitchen/Doctor/Hair Salon – Toca Boca produces some fun games for kids. These three are our favorites. Download Toca Boca Kitchen / Doctor and Hair Salon  Princess Fairy Tale Maker – Don’t let the name fool you. This is a fun little app for creating visual stories with your kid increasing their imagination. Duck Duck Moose is a great studio for kids games. Download Princess Fairy Tale Maker. Download Princess Fairy Tale Maker   Recommendations on Youtube Peppa Pig – While this is not limited to just the web it is a great show that has been adapted for countless languages. Mother Goose Club It is a great series of unique songs, very friendly and catchy. I still can’t get the Dinosaur stop song out of my...

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WrestleMania has transformed itself from a small wrestling event to an international media spectacle. In its 28th incarnation, held at the beginning of this month, there were no signs of it stopping. The WWE did something unique last year – it announced the main event for Wrestlemania over a year in advance. The big match featured Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a huge cross-over star, and John Cena, the current flag bearer for the company. Recognizing the challenges of trying to keep interest for the match a year in advance, the WWE turned to social media. I wanted to some of the people driving this initiative, both on- and off-screen. Jason Hoch, SVP of Digital Operations for the WWE, discussed his social media strategies for fan engagement and social TV. Since joining the WWE, Hoch undertook a huge project to re-launch WWE.com with a totally new UX with social media at its core. Rather than just putting as Jason says “plug-ins” or social areas, they have tried to build the entire site to be socially enabled. This included deep integration so users could follow their favorite stars on multiple social networks and interact with them seamlessly. Throughout the event, WrestleMania and related hashtags dominated Twitter. As they push hard into social, Jason specifically recognizes that social media fatigue is a key element that needs to be closely monitored to determine what level of interaction is appropriate and doesn’t turn off fans in its broadcasts and other media. I also interviewed Zack Ryder, who talked about how he has elevated his career due to social media. Zack has been one of the key individuals who helped push social onto the WWE radar and elevate its corporate importance. While he isn’t the biggest star in the WWE, his usage of social has elevated his position in the company and allowed him to better engage his fans. He points to this and says if he didn’t embrace social media and make some waves he would have likely been fired. This is a good example of how employees are using social media to elevate their status within a company and make themselves more valuable employees in the eyes of their employers. So far, their engagement strategy appears to be working. The WWE feels like they are more up-to-date and engaged. In many cases, WWE wrestlers were actively retweeted, followed and engaged by fans. One stat that is very telling was the number of followers and likes they have on Facebook and Twitter. The numbers behind this are impressive. Between all of the stars’ accounts, they have over 60 million Twitter followers and 20 million Facebook...

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