There’s a whole ‘nother side of Kaia that we’re excited to share with you today.

In her “free” time, Kaia is deeply vested in Special Olympics North Dakota (SOND).

How Kaia got involved

Kaia explains, “Six years ago a colleague attended the Special Olympics Summer Games and noticed there wasn’t any media coverage of the event. We reached out to SOND and offered to help and the rest, as they say, is history.”

In 2007, she started as chair of the Public Relations Committee for State Summer Games.

Since, she has assisted with the group’s marketing and public relations for the World’s Largest Truck Convoy and the send-off of the ND delegation to the national games, where she gathered close to 100 fans to cheer on athletes as they loaded the bus. Kaia and the Flint Group work to capture the media’s attention for these events, creating a larger awareness and visibility of SOND.

Kaia was honored for her ongoing dedication to the mission of Special Olympics at the SOND State Awards Banquet in early November, where she was recognized with the Outstanding State Volunteer Award!

Seeing the world differently

“Helping with Special Olympics lets you see the world differently,” explains Kaia. “The athletes have such an honest and genuine enthusiasm for life. Preparing for the events can be a lot of work, but watching the special athletes compete like any other typical athlete makes it all worth it.”

“There’s one athlete who competes in track and field every year, and he always comes in dead last in his event,” Kaia describes. “But every year he has the biggest smile you’ll ever see as he makes his way toward the finish line. The crowd cheers louder for him than for anyone out there, and when he finally crosses that line, his friends, family and competitors go absolutely nuts! It’s an amazing sight and by far my favorite event every year.”

Get to know a Flintster: Q + A with Kaia

What’s your dream job?
Product tester for Apple, Inc.

Which job would you not want to have?
Product tester for Microsoft.

What was your first job?
Sales associate at OfficeMax.

What did it teach you?
A job is what you make of it. Retail isn’t fun, but keep a positive attitude and work hard and you’ll have a blast. Everyone should have to work at least one retail job in his or her life.

What is one thing you’d be willing to practice for an hour a day?
Any musical instrument.

What’s the best advice you ever got?
If you work hard, things will come easy.

What sound do you love?
The silence when you go outside on a calm winter night.

What scent do you love?
Freshly cut grass.

Interested in seeing the world differently with Kaia and the SOND athletes? Become a volunteer.

For tweets about marketing and Kaia’s unique perspective on life, follow @kaiaw on Twitter.

[Background: Kaia Watkins is the direct mail specialist for Flint Direct in our Fargo office. She has been a designer at Flint Communications since 2006, specializing in direct marketing creative in 2011. In her new position, Kaia provides strategic and creative planning as well as direct marketing campaign development.

Recently, Kaia earned her certificate as a DMA Certified Marketing Professional (DCMP). The DCMP program certifies that marketing professionals have reached a high level of expertise in the core aspects of direct marketing. The DMA is recognized throughout the marketing community as the definitive source for information about marketing research, regulatory issues and best practices.

To obtain her certificate, Kaia completed a series of online courses and passed a diagnostic test. Congratulations, Kaia, on your impressive achievement!]

Just a few years ago, direct mail was king.

The stack of snail mail we came home to every day was proof. Then the economy tanked, budgets were cut, and everyone jumped on the digital marketing bandwagon. Many thought this marketing channel would never rebound to what it once was, but today we’re seeing a trend back to the ‘old faithful’ of advertising.

It’s not often that old-school methods are favored over the shiny and new. So why is direct mail working so well in this online world?

1. Personalization. We know more about our customers today than ever before, and thanks to continued innovation in digital printing, we can talk to each customer on an individual level. Make your customer feel special by adding their name throughout the piece, include a photo of a product they’ve previously purchased, or include a coupon that’s custom-tailored for them.
2. Multi-Channel Communication. Gone are the days of only having an 800 number or reply card as your response mechanism. Now customers can call, click, like, text, tweet or scan. Your campaign should never end with direct mail. Use the power of offline to continue the conversation online.
3. Flooded Inboxes, Empty Mailboxes. The shift to online marketing has changed how we read emails. Due to the sheer volume of emails received on a daily basis, we’ve become somewhat desensitized. But when it comes to snail mail, our mailboxes aren’t nearly as full as they used to be. Your customers are more likely to notice one of a handful of direct mail pieces over one of a hundred emails.
4. Improved Mail Services. Barcodes aren’t just for sorting mail anymore. The Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) from USPS allows us to track when mail pieces are entered into the mail stream all the way down to when they are out for final delivery. Armed with this information, marketers can follow the direct mail piece with a strategically timed second message, such as a phone call or email.
5. The Sense of Touch. The sensation of touching a direct mail piece has more impact than you’d think. It’s easy to dismiss an email or ignore an online ad without really thinking about it. Direct mail is a different story. You have to physically make the effort to pick it up, and then comes decision time: read it or toss it. By then your customer has already scanned at least one side of your mailing—a partial victory in itself! Use the sense of touch to catapult your piece above the rest by using a specialty paper stock or oversized format.

So don’t count it out just yet—give direct mail a try on your next campaign and you may be pleasantly surprised by your results.

The good news is that these customers are right under your nose. Thanks to a process called performance modeling, you can find them.

There are three basic ways that performance modeling can be done:

Do performance modeling yourself.
This can be very time consuming but you will be justly rewarded with the wealth of information you learn in the process.

Bring an expert in to do performance modeling for you.
If you look to a consultant, make sure you give them clear direction and access to every bit of customer data you have.

Send your customer data somewhere else.
Collect your data and send it to a firm that specializes in analyzing customer data. Companies that perform customer data analysis can create a customer profile for you.

How performance modeling works.
Regardless of which method you choose, it all starts with your data, and the process is pretty much the same.

1. Start collecting every bit of data you have about your current customers: sales history, demographics, psychographics, industry and any other bit of information you can tag your customer with. Save it in some kind of CRM system, whether it’s a sophisticated software solution or a simple spreadsheet.
2. Determine who is your best customer. How you define this customer depends on your business objectives. Potential criteria to rank customers includes lifetime value, tenure with company, products purchased, profit generated and more.
3. Comb through your data; categorize it, group it and analyze it. Look for trends and patterns that map towards your best customer.
4. Finally, sort and pull out the data that is tied to your best customer. Look for the customers who meet your most important criteria. You have now created “Your Next Top Model.”

Here’s an example. After analyzing top-performing customers, we’ve discovered that the highest percentile consists of males between 25 and 35 years old. They’re renters who live in cities with more than 50,000 people. They also have pets.

Sample Customer Profile from Performance Modeling

Customer performance modeling can help you determine which demographic and lifestyle variables are important to your business. It will identify key demographic attributes of those customers most likely to buy your products or use your services. Your model will show which variables differentiate your customer base – so you can target your efforts on people who are most like your Top Model.

Most sales people don’t want to spend their time writing copy, creating ads, trying to understand where and how to reach people. And when they do it themselves, you really lose control over what they say about you. You can help them. It can also be a profit center to you and a tributary to additional marketing.

A dealer direct mail (DDM) program is a great example of simplifying your sales channel marketing efforts and effectively managing your brand’s message. The way it works is that an agent, dealer or sales representative signs up annually for the DDM program. You can modify the program with opt-ins throughout the year, add special sales promotions as they come up, increase targeted markets, etc. The name of the game is “plan for the year,” but keep it flexible and responsive to sales and markets.

Basically, you are paying attention to what is happening in the industry and markets, and helping your sales channel adapt effectively and efficiently. You can worry about it for them, so they can do what they do best – sales.