Client Support Archives

PLAN AND ORDER NOW FOR HOLIDAY MARKETING

September 2, 2025 by Rachel Hunter

After twenty years of helping clients with last-minute holiday panic marketing, these are some of the things we often regret not addressing in September.

As autumn begins each year, we remind our clients to start prepping and ordering gift bags, greeting cards, holiday decor, gift certificates, gift tags, posters, etc, and plan online marketing: e-mail campaigns, seasonal website changes, and AdWords campaigns.

Besides setting yourself up for a less stressful fourth quarter, preparation in September means free or economy shipping prices instead of ridiculously marked-up rush shipping for last-minute orders. (Reminder of our rush project policy.) You’ll also have more time to jump on the inevitable last-minute holiday opportunity or crisis.

SEPTEMBER TO-DO

Start a Halloween through mid-January calendar showing holidays, planned marketing campaigns, events, team meetings/training, and drop-dead dates.

Why into January? Because there’s often a drop-off in business in the new year. September’s the time to check into your previous January’s’ numbers (what worked, what did not) and also what your competition previously did for Q1 marketing.
Note drop-dead dates by working backwards from when you need assets finalized and in-hand. Remember that free or economy shipping may take longer over the holidays and plan accordingly.* For example, if you want a printed bring-back card to include with Halloween treats, note placing the order with the printer by October 17th, and working back from that, calendar planning and developing the asset starting a few weeks before that.
Calendar reminders to update your holiday hours over all platforms (especially Google Business Listings).

Research community calendars for events and reach out to potential partners and charities early. When you move forward be sure to plan offers that are trackable and unique to each event/partnership/charity so you have data for informed decisions next year.

Prep a stash of beautiful, printed hand-outs with a generic offer so you have a stash ready and can jump on last-minute partnering opportunities without needing to rush a design and print order.

Check your gift card inventory now! (Gift card companies may have five week lead-times—and possibly longer October through January.)

Start penning your Thanksgiving gratitude message to customers, your holiday greetings, and your Happy New Year wishes so they are ready for social media and email campaigns. During the holiday rush, you won’t have as much bandwidth for sincere message scripting.

Are you sending cards, party invitations, and/or gifts to your clients and partners this year? Let’s get on that too!

Selling gifts? Check your inventory and the lead times of items you wish to stock. From October onwards, order fulfillment and shipping from your vendors may take additional time. Also, be sure you stock plenty of festive packaging and shipping supplies if you plan on mailing items.

Sadly, if you are hosting a holiday party and have not booked your caterer, entertainment, and venue, September may be too late. Skipping the printed invites and going online is a good option to save a few weeks.

Don’t forget your team! The holidays may be extra stressful for them too, so set them up for success and a bit of joy with prepared customer service scripts, holiday season incentives, and share with them your holiday marketing how-tos and goals. Start gathering their holiday plans for your shift schedule.

Plan software updates or IT work in advance.

No stress, added costs, and drama this year — let’s get started on marketing’s silly season work now! We’ve plenty of ideas and sources for product.

Here’s some key events to keep in mind…

OCTOBER

Halloween

NOVEMBER

Daylight Saving

Veterans’ Day

Thanksgiving

Black Friday

Cyber Monday

DECEMBER

Pearl Harbor Remembrance

Green Monday

Festivus

Hanukkah

Christmas Day

Boxing Day

Kwanzza

New Year’s Eve

*This often trips up our clients—planning two weeks for free or economy shipping saves so much money and stress. Ideally, aim for three weeks for shipping so you have time to react if an exchange or reprint is needed.

MAIL LIST MANAGEMENT FAQ

February 21, 2025 by Rachel Hunter

2025 – update. Very little of this info has changed since we first published this in 2017, so with a few edits, here’s updated info.

The answers below assume you are using one of the main email service providers. (Other than MailChimp as their list management is a struggle and contrary to the way our clients work.)

Q.
If the same e-mail address is on several lists in my account, will that person receive the e-mail campaign more than once?

A.
Short answer, no.

The service provider catches duplications and only sends the campaign to each address once. For example, say you have three lists in your account: Peninsula Clients, Marin Clients, and South Bay Clients. And Maggie Jones with address mj@gmail.com has visited your locations in San Jose and Palo Alto and so is on two lists. If you select all three of your lists to which to send an e-mail, the service provider will catch this and send only one to mj@gmail.com.

Q.
How do I get addresses to you to add to my account?

A.
You’ll need to export them from your internal system or database and send to us, usually as an Excel or .csv file attached to an e-mail. All databases, whether MicroSoft Outlook, gmail contacts, your POS system, etc, have a feature to export. Occasionally John visits a client to train them on how to export, but usually a few minutes Googling “export + your database type” gives adequate direction.

We prefer to work with an Excel doc. But we have also received email lists as pdfs, hand-written addresses, and Word docs.

It is important to name the file to send to us uniquely and logically. For example, if the list is all clients, be sure to name it so – “acme-co-all-clients-022117.xls”, or if it’s just your VIP clients, “acme-co-vip-022117”. Including the date is also a good way to track the file in case we need to troubleshoot in the future.

Even more important, if you have more than one list in your account, be sure to communicate clearly to which list we are adding these new addresses.

Q.
How do I prevent an unsubscribed person from receiving mail from me?

A.
That’s one of the great things about e-mail service providers. Once a person is marked as unsubscribed, there’s no way that account will send to that address. Even if that same address is added to the account manually or through an upload, it will be blocked.

Q.
Can I log onto my account and edit lists myself?

A.
Any time. We don’t own your account; you do. We’ll be happy to point you in the right direction to handle your own list management if you like. For example, some of our clients save by manually updating unsubscribes who have reached out to them directly instead of clicking the required unsubscribe button.

Q.
I have a question regarding mail list management which is not answered here.

A.
E-mail John!

POLICY ON RUSH ORDERS

January 6, 2025 by Rachel Hunter

(Originally posted September 2015. Reposted 2025.)

Due to a terrible few weeks when many rush orders placed with a third–party were bungled by the vendor or delivered late (or both!), and we calculated a significant loss of time and money as we worked with the vendor on our client’s behalf to get reprints, a corrected order, or a refund, we have decided to change our policy on providing free customer support on rush order failures by a third–party.

Customer service time spent with third–party vendors on rush order failures may be billed to our clients at our regular hourly rate.

We know that rush orders are unavoidable and will continue to do all we can to meet any deadline, without any additional rush charges.

However, we are finding that more and more we are losing time and money responding to the issues that so often occur with a rush order or rush shipping. These issues arise from errors completely beyond our control, either from a client who has put off addressing a project or deadline, or a vendor or shipping company which has not met their promised service. Our hope is to always provide the best service and product to our clients, so we generally step in to do all we can to fix any issue, although we are not at fault and although this customer service work can be time–consuming and costly to us. This cost to us in this lack of fault and high–risk situation has led to this new policy.

Of course, if it was an error or delay on our part that caused the need for a rush, you will get our full, un–billed support until the issue is resolved.

Addressing deadlines and projects well ahead of time will prevent the high–risk rush order. For example, order all your holiday season items such as decor, gift bags and wrap, and stocking stuffers in the fall. That way you are not putting pressure on a vendor to rush a job and they can do their best work, checking and proofing as they go, and packaging it in a quality manner to prevent shipping damage. If your item arrives early and is damaged or not as promised, you have plenty of time to get a replacement or refund without impacting your deadline.

To help prevent rush shipping up-charges, we keep to a fast turn–around time. We are happy to help our clients plan ahead and keep to a schedule. We can track down third party standard lead–times if requested, so a project management schedule can be prepared in advance.

The ultimate deterrent to procrastinating and ending up in rush-order-territory? The mark–ups for rush orders by third parties are astronomical.

WHY SECURE SITES ARE NOW A BIG DEAL

September 18, 2017 by Rachel Hunter

Is your site secure?

IF YOUR BUSINESS HAS A WEBSITE AND YOU CARE ABOUT GOOGLE SEARCH, YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS. Yes, all caps!

I know this is the type of detailed techie info to which many of our clients are averse. But it’s key.

The main things to know are that we’ve got your back, we can take care of this, and it’s not going to cost you a lot. Good?

Extra good news…if you are one of our clients and your site is hosted by our partner, NeuronLinks, or our MPS server, the hard part is being done for you – FOR FREE! Thank you, Raj and John, for including this extra as part of your clients’ web hosting package.

And super good news…only businesses with credible websites will be making these updates. (If and when someone tells them about the issue.) By implementing these changes toot-sweet, you could get some google bounce while non-HTTPS sites will be penalized.

We’ll be reaching out to our clients, if we have not done so already, or, please contact John at johnp@metapix.us or 408 252-8664. Many of our clients have just asked us to “handle this” – we will certainly do so, and can quote for any time spent on site review and/or coding before we start if you wish.

Here’s the details (it will be easiest to understand if you use a desktop or laptop computer)…

(2018 update: The info below and the graphics are captured from the Chrome browser on a desktop on date blog was posted. All browsers have changed the way they display security info. Now, if you see an icon with a locked padlock, you can assume the web page is secure. If you see an icon displaying an exclamation point, an open padlock, a circled i, or the words, “not secure”, you do need to read further for the fix.)

Secure Web Site https

Here’s a view of a secure site. (And some pretty photos of great hair to break up the tech details. You’re welcome.)

If you click to every page of the Halo site, you’ll see an icon of a locked padlock to the left of the domain name. It shows this is a secure site because it’s host is using SSL Certification* and it’s using the HTTPS secure website protocol.**

If your site shows a locked padlock icon on each page, you can stop reading – you’re good.

This is a big deal because soon Google will be flagging and penalizing any website that is not using SSL Certification for their websites—that is, if links don’t start with https://.

If each page of your site is not secure, browsers may show warnings that make it seem your site is not safe, especially when forms are displayed. And there will be a reduction in your website’s ranking in Google organic (non-paid-for) search results.

From here, two steps need be taken. 1) set up of SSL certification on your server and 2) review and coding of your site to set up HTTPS secure website protocol.

If your website is hosted by a company other than Neuronlinks or MPS, you’ll need to check whether your server is already supporting SSL. It’s easy to check, just type in “https://” followed by your domain name. You will immediately see the green lock if SSL has been set up (if you are on Chrome on a desktop/laptop.) If it has not you will see this message:

You’ll need to review each page of your site – not just your home page. Contact John if you’d like us to do this site review for you.

If you go to your website, in Chrome, and see this little icon it means that page is not secure and will be docked by Google soon. You’ll need to ask your web hosting company to switch your site to SSL. Good hosting companies should be offering this free of charge.

non-secure website notification

Once your site has SSL certification, the next step is to review your site for HTTP issues and make corrections. And then add code to move to HTTPS. Our charge for this work will vary depending upon how your site is coded, if you have separate blog, store, database, and/or mobile site, and how many pages on your site.

If you’d like help in updating your site, please contact John at johnp@metapix.us or call 408 252-8664.

*SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority.

**HTTPS secure website protocol – “S” for secure. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS.

WEB/DEVICE/OS STANDARD FONTS

September 23, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

These are the few fonts that will work consistently on all operating systems and devices (currently).

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WHY WE DON’T RECOMMEND MAILCHIMP

June 28, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

(Yes, we know this is a photo of a gibbon yawning, not a chimp delivering mail – it’s all we have in our library primate-wise as we have not taken a photo of a postal chimp, although we’d be excited to do so.)

2025 update – we have one client on MailChimp, and can confirm from recent experiences that it remains the worst interface and requires arduous researching through their “help” sections rather than making their process intuitive and in line with the way small businesses work.

This was the situation back in 2016: We use MailChimp for a few clients and we find it to be the most difficult interface and address list management system of the e-mail campaign providers with which we have experience.

ONE – they don’t offer phone support.

TWO – Choosing the address list to whom the e-mail goes at step one instead of at the end of the development process causes problems and is contrary to the way our clients like to work.

THREE – They don’t have seed lists for testing. This is a development issue for us, and does not affect our clients except for a bit of time added to the process, which adds to the cost to the project.

FOUR – The same address on several lists counts multiple times towards your monthly plan, so you can spend far more than is needed for your subscription.

FIVE – MC does not offer “pay-as-you-go” as an option – monthly subscription only. You pay, even if you don’t send any e-mails.

SIX – Customization of address sign-up forms can only be done with a higher-priced account.

SEVEN – Sign-up forms that can be coded to recognize list segmentation can be done only on pop-up pages, but not for embedded forms (which is pretty much the only way people do e-mail list sign-up forms now.)

EIGHT – The biggie – they don’t allow a campaign to be sent to more than one list. The best practice for managing lists in MailChimp is to have one list, which is divided into groups and segments. Our clients find it confusing (actually we find it confusing at times), as well as cumbersome, non-intuitive, and time-wasting.

If you are interested, there’s more below on MC’s address list management. But we don’t want to simply focus upon the negative and what we don’t recommend. We do recommend using Constant Contact (although it’s far from perfect). The phone response is good – customer support reps who know the product and are helpful. And the list management is far simpler. You can have as many lists as you want and get to select the ones you want each campaign to launch to. Unsubscribes and bounces are well-managed at the account level, rather than the list level, which protects you from higher prices and grumpy customers and keeps you compliant with spam laws.

So, back to MC’s list management issues caused by not allowing a campaign be sent to more than one list:

Unsubscribes are managed by individual list, rather than at the account level. So if you have more than one list, and a recipient unsubscribes from one list, it’s not recorded in any other list, so you can e-mail to an address of someone who already unsubscribed.
Because there’s no connectivity between lists, if a client changes their settings in one list, it won’t be recognized by any other instances of that e-mail address in other lists.
If you wish to send an e-mail to separate lists, you need to duplicate the e-mail over and over, sending one e-mail launch per mail list. If there are duplicated addresses in your account, you will be sending the same campaign to these addresses. One of our clients is doing this, and are getting complaints from clients.

We know this is confusing. Send us a line with questions, or call 408 252-8664.

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SPELLING POLICY

June 19, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

Unless agreed otherwise, on a project by project or client by client basis, all copy provided to us should be publish-ready. Publish-ready means that all grammar, spelling, phrasing is ready to “go to press”. By sending us the copy, the client is saying, the copy is final and they are ready for it to be published to the world.

We do run spell-checks on all items we work upon which can call out errors in English common usage. Depending upon the client and the situation we will either use the spell-checker correction or ask the client if an edit is approved.

Industry-specific words, non-English words, names, words with multiple spellings (Hanukkah vs Chanukah or Chanukkah or crostino vs crostini), and client-unique spellings (“house made” vs “housemade” or “skin care” vs “skincare”) are the responsibility of the client.

If we note something which does not appear to be correct, we alert the client.

We go through an approvals process so that a client can review a draft before the content is placed into final versions that may require more time-consuming editing.

Approval by the client means that they are satisfied with all aspects of the piece, including the spelling – of even common usage English words.

It is difficult, we know, to get to “publish-ready” copy. We can help. If the client feels they need to see copy in place, in an item, before making edits, we can produce that. We can and do copy editing for many clients, for which we need guidelines provided by the client for industry-specific words, non-English words, names, words with multiple spellings, or client-unique spellings.

All work we do is approved by the client before we “go to press.” If a word is mis-spelled, we feel badly, and sorry, but the final responsibility is with the client.

PARTNERSHIP MARKETING

February 25, 2016 by Rachel Hunter

This fabulous corporate headshot was produced by Lisa DeNeffe Photography – a business we are lucky to work with from time to time. The model is one of our long-time and favorite clients, Rosemary Camposano of Halo Blow Dry Bars and G3 Strategy.

Lisa and Halo have put together their services in such a great way. Halo is offering a discount to Lisa’s clients on hair and/or makeup styling before their photo session. And Lisa is offering Halo clients a discount on a corporate head shot package.

Both Halo and Lisa will send an e-mail campaign to their clients, so Halo will be introduced to potential new clients and vice versa. There will also be printed collateral for display and hand-outs and the web page version of the Halo e-mail campaign can be linked to from blogs and social media. At the least, each business is generating new in-coming links from credible sites to their own website for a nice search engine optimization boost.

Partnership marketing is a win-win situation. Your business’ clients win as they get an introduction to a new service or business and they get a nice deal. Your business wins with exposure, added brand recognition, and SEO.

MPS wins too! We have the opportunity to work with these great businesses and we developed the e-mail campaign Halo will send.

And my Facebook post for Halo reached eighty Facebookers in the hour after being posted.

TIPS! Think about the types of services that would complement your business and would be of benefit to your clients. This is such an excellent sample – what could be better than hair and makeup right before a photoshoot? Find a partner:

with an over-lapping target market to your business,
with a nice-sized e-mail list and/or blog following,
with the ability or contractor able to bring about a quality e-mail campaign and print collateral,
and with your level of energy and commitment to work to maximize all possible marketing pathways to make the partnership a success.

Thanks for reading – Rachel

E-MAILS WORKING FOR OUR CLIENTS

December 28, 2015 by Rachel Hunter

(2025 review – funny how so much has changed since this 2015 post and how much remains the same.)

There are many ways to approach e-mail campaign development and production. We’ve narrowed it down to three options to cover all our clients’ budgets and all the devices out there.

We also include enhancements to our e-mail campaign services that our competitors skip. We usually do all the graphics and copywriting. For each campaign, we also produce a web page version which our clients use as landing pages for online ads or social media posts. A week after launch, we provide a free report on the campaign’s success.

And finally, because we don’t like to just do a one-off campaign with a short lifespan of value, we add the web page version to our client’s site on a news archive page so all that work put into making the e-mail campaign continues to pay off as a boost to site search engine optimization and additional information for site visitors to enjoy.

Reporting shows that around 55% of all our clients’ e-mail campaigns are being viewed on smartphones. This is a higher percentage for retail businesses and a lower percentage for B2B and service businesses. Because of this, the non-responsive e-mail campaign designs we were doing just a few years ago were dropped – a business’ e-mail must be readable and actionable on a smartphone.

Here’s what is working for our clients right now:

Mobile-friendly campaigns render cleanly, but not responsively, on all devices from smartphone (landscape and portrait) to desktop computer. These are the lowest priced options since they do not need complex responsive code or an e-mail campaign platform’s design interface.

They work well on all devices and on a smartphone do not require pinching or side-scrolling.

Here’s a mobile friendly e-mail campaign.

Responsive e-mail campaigns render the same code/design on any device. For these, we use a template provided by an e-mail campaign service provider, but prevent them from looking “from a box” with custom graphics.

Different e-mail campaign providers vary in quality and services. We like Vertical Response the best for its same-time-zone customer support and list management features, which we find to be the most adaptable to split-list campaigns and the way our clients wish to manage lists. However we have been recently surprised and pleased with how Constant Contact has improved – no more phone-tree nightmares when calling for support and great reporting. Of the main providers, MailChimp is our least favorite as the list management is non-flexible and there’s no phone support.

Here’s a sample of one of our responsive e-mail campaigns, produced through Constant Contact.

Custom, responsive e-mail campaigns require a lot of work. Two versions of each campaign are produced: a desktop version and a smartphone version. These are the best looking and performing types of e-mails as the design is specific to the device.

Our company campaigns are coded in this way.

We work closely with our clients to make sure we are providing the best fit for their needs, and their budgets.

Our e-mail campaign portfolio.