You don’t know where your next job will come from and while you should always strive to gain new clients the ones you have are a potential goldmine of repeat sales.  But, you need to remind them that you appreciate their business and that you would like to do even more with them.

Traditionally this has been accomplished through old fashioned phone calls or printed mailers.  But these forms of communication have high costs both financially and in the amount of time they take - time that could be better spent on your business.  Mailers are expensive to print and we all know they end up in the rubbish bin.  You may as well save time and just poor your money into your own bin.

Ringing your clients is great, you cannot get any more personal than that.  But think about it.  Do you really ring them?  How often?  How many of them? I bet you don’t ring them all.  And what are those calls costing you in time?  Even if you have only have 100 clients in your database and you take the time to ring 5 a day, which will take about an hour, that equates to 12.5% of your work time per month on the phone!

In this current economic climate it is essential to market to your clients but you have to be sure you are not wasting  time and more importantly, money.  So what is the answer? Read more »

Martian Design & Interactive now offer a fantastic system for running email marketing campaigns!

it’s really simple to use. We just design you an email template, integrate it into our email marketing platform. You provide us names and email addresses of your customers and we deliver your marketing messages via email to them.

After the campaign has run you can log in to our system and and see stats for how many people opened your email, how many of those clicked on a link, how many unsubscribed etc etc. Its a HUGELY powerful and cost effective form of marketing with truly trackable results.

If you have a web site already then we can supply you with some code so that you can add a “subscribe to our newsletter” form directly onto your site … or if you don’t have a web site as yet then we can certainly build a brilliant one for you.

Next time you are thinking about a marketing campaign then get in touch and we’ll work some email marketing magic for you.

Running a design business poses a lot of challenges. One of the most obvious ones is that the bulk of your income is generated from the work that you charge for and, more often than not, that work is charged out on an hourly basis.

Keeping track of all the time we spent on a job used to be a real pain for us mostly because we weren’t disciplined enough to keep proper job sheets. This resulted in us often taking a very conservative estimate when it came to totaling up a bill. We’d think ‘Surely it didn’t take us 3 hours to render that piece of artwork’ or ‘Where did Tuesday go and why haven’t I finished anything?”.

Knowing where your hours are going is really very important. Be it billable hours or non billable hours you need to know what’s going on.

Over Christmas 2007 we decided we had better pull our socks up and get serious about tracking our time.  From the traditional job sheets, to stop watch systems and more complex software (which was just overkill) we tested a lot.
The best tool for the job was coincidentally the last system we tested. A web based tool from www.getharvest.com

Harvest have a wonderfully simple system for monitoring time and it’s ideal for a design business like Martian. It’s 100% web based, has a very low entry cost and can be operated with a single click via a very cool desktop widget. You can create your various customers, projects and tasks. Set up billable and non-billable tasks with varying rates and get a very accurate picture of where your precious time is being spent. It also does timesheets too. Nice :)

Overall we give Harvest two martian thumbs up!
If you are in an industry that needs to keep track of your time then you really should check out Harvest.

www.getharvest.com

With Ponoko around there is nothing better to do than get cool stuff lasered out. It’s hard to do real work when there is so much fun stuff to make.

We were thinking of nifty little things we could give as free gifts to our wonderful Martian customers, or “Martianeers”, as we like to call them.

One of the ideas we had was a Key Ring Tag. Nice and simple, small and easy to post out. So we whipped up our little Martian guy down to Ponoko and had him blasted out of some wicked awesome fluoro green acrylic.

With a standard keyring attached he became the perfect pal for your pocket!

A lot of people think that designers push the magic logo button on the computer and a new logo is instantly created.

Well its actually a lot more involved than that.

Read more »