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Lunch & Learn Transcript:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s CopyDoodles Lunch and Learn. I wanted to start just a few minutes after Noon, because we usually get a few late people coming on the call. So, this week’s topic is Will You Be My Valentine? I have a bunch of different ideas that you can use for Valentine’s Day promotions, some ideas that people have sent me and some that I’ve just kind of done some research on and found that I thought were really creative and fun.
A few side notes, if you want to ask a question, here’s how, just use the Questions box on your GoToWebinar screen and I actually will have a few questions for you in a little bit, at the Q&A. So, make sure that you know how to do that.
Also next week’s topic will be How to Improve Survey Responses Using CopyDoodles. I’m just going to show you a bunch of fun and different techniques. We use SurveyMonkey, but there are a lot of different ways that you can get people to respond to your surveys. They’re a really great way to get answers from people if you’re coming out with a new product, or anything like that. So, make sure to stay tuned. Since you’re on today’s webinar you are already signed up for next week’s.
Also some side notes, we have a lot of new CopyDoodles in the CopyDoodles Access Club that we just added today. We added some borders, which are super-fun that you can use on really anything. I added some musical instruments that someone had asked me about. And, then we also added some new Leap Year CopyDoodles because this year is a leap year. So, make sure to check those out.
Chinese New Year is actually coming up next week. But, your fortune this is our Lunch and Learn Deal of the Week. It is our CopyDoodles Niche Edition. If you don’t have any niches added to your CopyDoodles account yet, you might want to think about it. We have some contractor, and chiropractor, and bowling, and real estate, and a lot of different — I can’t name all of the niches, there’s like 20 of them. So, head over to www.CopyDoodles.com/blog and check out the different niches we have and see if you want to get them added to your account. You can either get the book and CD and that’s the link that I’ve posted on www.copydoodles.com, or you can just simply get them added. There is a price difference between those. Just head over to the Resources section of the CopyDoodles Access Club for more information.
Today’s webinar, Will You Be My Valentine? The replay will be posted right after I get done with the webinar. It’s always posted at www.copydoodles.com I also post it up on our Facebook page too, so if you’re not fans of CopyDoodles on Facebook, make sure to check it out. I’ll send you reminders of different Doodles that have been posted, when we post new blog posts, and then just about Lunch and Learn and things like that.
So, let’s get started. The first thing that you’re going to want to do, obviously, if you are searching for Valentine’s Day promotions is check out all of the Valentine’s Day CopyDoodles that we have available. We have a bunch of new ones that we have added. And, I added them a few weeks ago. And, if there’s any thing that you’re looking for in particular, just like with all of the Doodles, if there’s ever any CopyDoodles that you’re looking for, just let me know at all, email me, find me on Live Chat — even type stuff in the Questions box as you’re going, right now, if you think, “Oh my gosh, I really need a CopyDoodle,” of something specific, then look at that.
But, if you have any ideas feel free to shoot them out throughout the webinar. I’ll be writing them down. We’re going to be adding a bunch of new CopyDoodles to the site.
So, to find all of our Valentine’s Day Doodles you can either type in Valentine or you can head over to HolidayDoodles, because it is a holiday, and check out all of the different HolidayDoodles that we currently have. I created some that look like those little sweet hearts candy, and then we have different hearts and flowers, and lots of different things that you can choose from, as you can see right here. There’s like a million of them — 500 different HolidayDoodles. So, just scroll through them and look for them.
So, the first thing that I want to show you today is — actually I created this Valentine’s Day card or postcard really, really quickly yesterday, just to show the different kinds of things you can create without using a CopyTemplate, or anything like that. And, I just created this really simply in Word. I wanted to use Word for almost everything here, because I know some people don’t have Publisher, or Publisher isn’t available on Mac, or you guys don’t have Photoshop. So, Word is really easy to play around with. And, I know this is a little sketchy, this card that I created, but it’s definitely something that you can think about doing.
What I simply did is I opened up Word. And, in Word you can actually create new documents just like this, because I didn’t lay out any of these hearts here, I didn’t create the color, I didn’t really do anything except for add in the CopyDoodles and the text. And, it’s really easy to do and really simple, because if you don’t have a lot of time, but you still want to send something out, you still want to create something, you could just open Word and go to ‘File – New’, and what I like to use is I really like to use all of the templates that they have available. They have a ton of different templates. So, I just typed in ‘Valentine’ and saw what they came up with. So, as you can see there’s a bunch here that you can actually download right to your computer and use. They have shipping labels, and they have post cards, and they have a flyer that I actually pulled and added CopyDoodles to it and used. So, I really just used all of these in order to create what I’m showing you today. I actually just choose this card, deleted out the images, and then placed the images in there.
The one thing that I do want to note though, is that when you do use any of these cards, I had an issue with my CopyDoodles pasting on them because there’s so many pictures here, as you can see. Each one of these hearts is a different image, and it’s actually all layered. So, you can actually delete this so it’s blank, it has no hearts. You can actually delete the swirl in the back. You can change this up however you want, but the issue that I ran into is every time I tried to add a CopyDoodle to it, it would hide in the very back and I couldn’t see my CopyDoodle. So, just make sure that you bring your CopyDoodles to the front, because that was the biggest issue I had. I couldn’t move them around, I couldn’t do anything with them until I brought the CopyDoodle image to the front, like I do with all of my documents. But, just make sure that you’re doing that, because I actually forgot to do it yesterday.
And then I actually created this Valentine’s Day card or postcard. What a really great idea to do is to the opposite. You can capture a lot of attention by saying things like, “I hate Valentine’s,” or doing things that are really outrageous. There’s actually a store around the area here in Philadelphia where their whole slogan is, “I hate Steven Singer,” and they sell engagement rings and diamonds and things like that. My fiancée and I went in a couple of weeks ago, and we always see their advertisements and we always see and hear about what they’re doing on the news, and on the radio, and things like that, but we had never been to their store. Their store was packed. It was the only store on jeweler’s row that had anybody in it. It was so packed that we had to wait in line. I mean it was ridiculous. They didn’t have anything different than anybody else. Their prices weren’t any different than anybody else, but just because their slogan was a little different than everybody else, people were going to their store.
So, saying something like, “I hate Valentine’s Day,” if that fits in with your business, you could send out a really fun postcard like this. And, all I did was create a black, blank postcard. I did it in Word, again, too. So, let me just open up Word. In order to do this, if you want to create a postcard that’s for yourself, you just want to do a solid color, you just want to lay it out however you want, all you have to do is go to ‘Page Layout’, you will choose the size of your page. So, I’m going to scroll down, so if I wanted a 5”x7” postcard I could choose that. And, as you can see this is actually a vertical postcard, but if I want to do a traditional postcard I can do — yes, change the orientation to ‘landscape’, and now I have a normal postcard here.
If you press ‘Enter’ and scroll down, and if you’ve created this postcard you can create the next one here, and you can send it over to your printer and they can put them together and print them out.
And, if you do want to have a black page color, or something like that, all you have to do is go up here to ‘Page Layout’ and choose your page color, and you can choose any page color that you want in order to match what you’re kind of creating. So, that’s really fun to play around with.
The next thing you can do — I thought this was a really cool card that I saw that Google had sent out, I guess last Valentine’s Day, or something like that. They sent out this red card to everybody and they said, “We want to overload your servers, because nothing says ‘I love you’ like free traffic to your website.” You could really easily do something like this in your business, because it’s fun, and it’s different. All they had to do, you know, is add in a CopyDoodles Font or some arrows, or they could have done the heart in CopyDoodles. And, this is something that you could do and send it out to your list. And, it’s really just a Valentine’s Day gift that they’re giving to everybody.
And, I think that using Valentine’s Day as a way to say thank you to people, and a way to get people interested in your business is a really great way to capture attention, because there’s not so many business out there promoting Valentine’s Day. I mean there’s a lot of retailers and there’s obviously a lot of Hallmark stuff going on there, but just letting your costumers know ‘thank you’; “We love you;” “Thanks for following us…” is a really great way to capture their attention in the beginning of the year. And a lot of people buy gifts for themselves, so why not create a whole campaign about show yourself you love yourself by getting yourself my product or service for Valentine’s Day.
I received this Valentine’s Day postcard from Dr. Carney, which he created. Basically it’s just a plain two-sided postcard. He handwrote the name, address, city and state, and he added a Valentine’s Day coupon on there, so everybody got a free consultation, a wellness exam, and they got $47 for that. And, he just sent this out to everybody in his list.
Another great way to do some Valentine’s Day promotions is by having an
in-store or online event. In-store, there’s a lot of stores around me that do wine parties, or wine and cheese parties, they have giveaways — just different ways to show their customers that they love them. And, it doesn’t have to be on February 14th, I mean it probably even shouldn’t because so many people go out and they spend time with their spouse or their family, or their kids, or their friends. So, they might already have plans, but if you have some sort of event in-store that can capture people’s attention, maybe a sales event, or just a meeting and greet, or something like that, it might be a really fun way to get people interested in your store.
And, I pulled this invitation directly from Word. It was something in Word that they created. It’s really, really cute. I mean I really like it. If I was doing something for my store I would easily pull this, you know, change the wording on here, because it’s really simple, really easy. And, then if you’re doing something online you could completely tweak this and create a one day sale. You could have a free webinar or a teleseminar for your list, you could have specials for gifts that you order online, just different ways to show customers that you love them, that you’re thinking of them, and things like that.
I also created this Valentine’s Day invite ticket. I though this was a really great way too to get people to come into your store and things like that. This is basically an invitation, but it’s created as an event ticket. And, you can actually get these printed either by your printer, you can actually buy ticket pages that you can load through your printer, you can print them yourselves. Or, you can get these printed at www.GotPrint.com, which is actually where I pulled everything that I created this from, the template that I created this from. So, if you decide to print through them, they have two sizes. I just happened to land upon their website, so I don’t really know anything about them, other than that I have received samples from them and they look great, and that they do a lot of really cool, unique things that you can print out.
And, they have two different sizes. They have a 2”x 5.5”, which is basically your normal baseball ticket size, or something like that, or concert ticket size. And, then they have a 3.5”x 8.5”. So, I just created this in Gimp, and I’ll show you how to do that. You can actually check on their site and download a template for the ticket, which is actually really helpful to get their template because if you’re printing this out on your own, or you want to create something on your own, you could really just take their template and use it, and it will be the correct size too.
So, I also added these tickets on the bottom, because I thought that was a really great inspiration for something, if you’re having a giveaway in store, or you’re doing something like that, you could just create these on your own, just make a ticket that looks like a normal ticket, and write things like ‘Love’ and have CopyDoodles, like heart-shaped CopyDoodles on them, and things that say ‘sweetheart’, and use any of our fonts and things like that.
So, I’m just going to escape out of here in Word. And what I did is I went to Got Print and I already downloaded their template. If you go to Got Print, you’ll see it right there. You click on ‘Event Tickets’ and then if you scroll down to the bottom it will tell you all of the stipulations for if you do want to create tickets. You want to make sure that you have 350 or 300 DPI resolution, because if you don’t have that then your tickets will print out blurry. What’s cool about their stuff is that you can actually create a perforated edge, you can buy tickets that have a perforated edge or not. So, you can play around with that too.
And what’s also really, really cool, which I really liked, if you’re doing any sort of giveaway or you actually want to use the tickets for a purpose and tell people to bring them into your store, you can actually have the tickets numbered through them. And, you can download the template, or just open up the template where it shows you where the numbers will appear on the tickets, and you can design a ticket around that. So, you can actually get each ticket numbered with a different number, if you’re doing a giveaway, or you’re doing something like that. I thought that was fun to play around with. Because if you were to do that at home or on your own, or through a printer, it would be a lot of manual work. But, since they do it for you, then it’s already done right away.
So, basically all you do is take their template and you just layer whatever you want on top of it. So, if you want to create a black background, or a white background, you would just, you know, add a background on there using Gimp. You could just add any sort of background color. Here, if you click on the color you can change the foreground and the background color, and things like that. If you want to add any text — obviously this is really just their template here, but once you create new layers, by clicking on the layer tool, it’s just a blank layer that will layer over top, and then you can change the color.
And, when you want to actually print this out or send it in, you can just click on the little ‘i’ here because it will make sure that your template goes away and you’ll be able to see your template. These lines here are just to show you where the trim zone is, so you want to make sure that you don’t have any words or anything outside there. And, then the blue line is just the bleed. So, you want to make sure that your colors go outside there, but you don’t want your text and things to go outside there. So, you create a new layer every time you want to put a new color or you want to put new text, things like that. And, you can just create your document from here.
Also, if you do send out any newsletters in February, make sure that you’re using our CopyDoodles in order to add any fun, Happy Valentine’s Day things to newsletters. I know that we talked about newsletters last week, but this is a newsletter from Brian Mittman, which he used last Valentine’s Day. So, now that we have so many Valentine’s Day CopyDoodles you can actually use in place of all of the hearts that he has on here, some of our CopyDoodles hearts and some of our CopyDoodles things, and things like that. And obviously he changed the color of his newsletter for February. He normally sends it out in blue, but he did it in red, just to kind of go along with the theme.
Another Valentine’s Day newsletter. I received this from Dr. Carny. There’s lots of CopyDoodles on here. I mean he’s just using his normal layout for his newsletter. He’s kind of themed it to talk about chocolate and Valentine’s Day. And, then he’s also thrown in CopyDoodles in there too, but he’s still focused on health and the things that he normally talks about. And, then on the next pages he actually had a survey which we’ll be talking about next week. So, I’ll probably show this next week, but what I really liked is he has a really fun giveaway here on the bottom right-hand side, which I thought would be really great to have on your Facebook page, or in your newsletter, things like that.
He’s actually giving away tickets to a movie for two. So, all you have to do is actually come into the office, if you have an appointment or anything like that, and let them know that you want to be entered to win two tickets to see a movie, and you can go with your spouse, your friends, or whatever. And, it kind of goes along with the Valentine’s Day theme. So, not only does that get people into his office, but it probably reminds people, “Oh, yes, I need to make an appointment for February. So, I’ll make sure that I make an appointment. I’ll stop in. I’ll get to enter the giveaway and hopefully win.”
This Valentine’s Day flyer he also sent over to me, which he created. They just made a very pretty, which he said that he thought that it wouldn’t actually work with the rose on there and everything, and they added a lot of CopyDoodles. But, with this flyer, which was handed out to people in the community and to all patients, it was also inserted into the doctor’s newsletter, and it was also attached to roses that he handed out to people, he got 17 new patients. So, the average new patient and the average case fee is $2,500. So, this one flyer, which I thought was really cool. It’s a very simple flyer, was worth about $42,500 to the doctor over time. So, he was just using this in February, around Valentine’s Day. So, in order to do some simple promotion like this could bring you in a lot of cash. So, make sure that you’re thinking about that, because February is a great time to do a bunch of different promotions geared around Valentine’s Day.
Next I have this flyer from Karen Campbell of Campbell’s Scottish Terriers. This is a Valentine’s Day flyer that she sent out. It’s obviously using a picture and has CopyDoodles on there. It’s just kind of saying ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’, and it’s a great way to use the theme for the season. I also saw this and thought that it was really, really cute. You could easily create something like this using CopyDoodles and you could put on the names of products you sell or services you have, and you could post this on Facebook, or send as the front of a postcard. Just a really fun Valentine’s Day type of report card, this is also a really great thing that you could send out at the beginning of the school year, or the end of the school year, or just kind of themed around anything.
You could put your product’s name there on the left, you know, “My Valentine’s is…” and you could just put different products you have and put checkmarks in for ‘never’, ‘sometimes’, ‘always’, or just send something out exactly like this with a promotion on the back and it just captures attention because you never really see anything like a report card coming as a postcard or as a letter to you.
On social media is a really great way to do some fun Valentine’s Day contests. I just posted some of these CopyDoodles there on Facebook to our CopyDoodles account, just kind of showing you an idea of what you could do. And, then in the upper right-hand corner there’s actually a lipstick company who I thought this would be really cool if they did this around Valentine’s Day. They’re actually doing this promotion right now, but they’re looking for a new name of their lipsticks. So, if somebody picks the new name of the lipstick, they’re actually giving them five free lipsticks, if they pick the new name of their lipstick. So, people are sharing it with friends, people are heading to their site, they’re visiting, they’re viewing, because it’s something fun and it’s something that people can play around with.
Also, you can have some giveaways and contests on social media, like always. Always post your sales and specials and things there, but also interact with people and let them know what you’re going to be doing. And, something new that a lot of company I’ve noticed are doing are actually doing live chats. So, I thought this would be fun to do it as a date night on your social media. So, what people are doing is they’re telling all of their fans and all of their — everybody on their list, they’re telling them, “We’re having a live chat on our Facebook wall,” or on our Twitter page, “Make sure to join us on this Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. because we’ll be answering your questions. We’ll be chatting about different products that we have.”
And, so what they do is they get online then, and their users will contact them on Facebook, they’ll post messages and things like that, and right away they’ll answer or they can chat with them back and forth and kind of give them answers to things that they have questions about. So, it’s a really great way if you’re not an actual brick and mortar store to talk with your customers right then and there, which you normally don’t have the chance to do. So, you can ask them questions about products, you can ask them questions about services. You can ask them really anything and you’ll get a direct answer and people will feel more like they have connected with you.
So, why Valentine’s Day? I already talked about this a little bit. But, few other businesses are letting their customers know that they love them. You know, they’re not really out there actively saying that. And, this is a perfect time to play around with it. Obviously, you’re not in love with your customers. But, it’s just a fun way to play around with the wording, and the promotion, and get your name out there.
So many people promote thank you during the holidays, this is just a great way to say thank you in another way.
And, people are still buying gifts for themselves or loved ones, whether they like Valentine’s Day, hate Valentine’s Day, or don’t really care either way. There’s always a really great reason that you could get people to gift for themselves. So, it’s a great way to get your name out there.