Greenfield Co-Sponsors MPI Ottawa Golf Tournament

Greenfield Services was a proud co-sponsor at yesterday's Annual Golf Tournament for Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Ottawa Chapter.  Our co-sponsor was ZOË Alliance, a provider of high-quality, fair trade promotional products.

Meagan Rockett & Angie Draskovic

The tie-in between Greenfield and its co-sponsor was a natural.  Making a bigger commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility principles, Greenfield has purchased executive gifts from ZOË Alliance for the last two years.  And ZOË Alliance recently became a client of Greenfield's, benefiting from an email and phone lead generation program to help them connect with new clients.

Ryan Watson and Mark Nisbett
of The Brookstreet Hotel

Though the skies were gray, smiles were bright and laughter was heard throughout as golfers stepped up to the 14th tee to meet Meagan Rockett, Director of Client Solutions for Greenfield, and Angie Draskovic, ZOË Alliance Founder & CEO.

Participants were asked to test their skills at Ladder Golf (a.k.a. bolla-ball, though we hear some golfers came up with their own colourful description for the game... click here to read more alternatives names).



Karen Norris, Association of Faculties of Medicine of
Canada; Sarah Pettenuzzo, Canadian Public Heath
Association & Brent Beatty, Edmonton Tourism

 Winners from each foursome walked away with a hand-crafted ZOË Alliance lunchbox.  All participants were entered into a grand prize draw for a gift basket with $350 worth of fair trade executive items, including a leather portfolio and business cardholder, a hand-embroidered silk and cotton throw, and ZOË's signature Haitian board game carved out of Bois de Lance.

The grand prize winner was announced at the dinner; congratulations Peggi Birch, of Peggi Birch Plans.  She told us, "I am pleased to say that I am the "Lucky Winner" of the beautiful basket from Greenfield Services at the MPI golf tournament.  It is truly inspirational - not just a bunch of 'stuff'.  I do love it and applaud you for your support in this initiative.  I particularly love the wooden carved game board.  It is beautiful!"  Glad you like it, peggi!

New or Used? Finding the Right Data for the Job

This post is by Nicholas Button, Business Development Specialist / Data Coordinator at Greenfield Services Inc.

If your company is launching a lead generation campaign, one of your first decisions is where to source the data.

And as that conversation unfolds, you may find yourself in one of those rare situations where trying to breathe life into your old data can lead you astray.

It may be tempting to recycle information by updating contacts from your own database. But it is possible that this data became old for a reason, because those contacts and organizations no longer are suited to your destination or hotel.

But if you invest a bit more by researching newer, specific data, you get to decide exactly the type of business you want to attract and gather brand new, information on a new group of prospects. My own experience is that online list building and competitive research, followed by phone lead generation, can produce fresh, solid leads.

Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter reduce the time it takes to prospect by making it easier than ever before to track down the right contact. Often when you have the wrong contact name, the gatekeeper may become suspicious of your call, making it more difficult to get to the right contact.

Online data gathering also involves compiling a history of the each target organization’s events. Painstaking research means precise results—so if you’re looking for medical associations with 500 to 600 participants looking for a hotel in Florida, that’s the list you get. The result is a more efficient, streamlined call where the contact needn’t spend their valuable time explaining their event history. This can lead to better relationships, more qualified leads, and a stronger possibility of your customers coming back to you.

In the end, the appreciation and new business you earn will more than outweigh the extra cost you incur by buying your data fresh, rather than using the data from your existing database.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email Design Tips & Tricks From Greenfield's Programmer

This post is by Jeff Chabot, Web & E-marketing programmer at Greenfield Services Inc.

My experience programming lead nurturing messages, e-newsletters, and special offers has led me to compile the following list of tips to maximize the deliverability and effectiveness of your email marketing.

1. Too many pictures, not always a good thing: It is tempting to make an e-mail entirely picture based to showcase your hotel room renovations or expanded meeting space Unfortunately  having too many photos can work against you by negatively affecting your email’s deliverability. When in doubt, keep it simple. A nice banner at the top, usually including your company logo and one or two photos in the body of the e-mail is all you need. 
2. Never put paragraphs in an image:  Another way to negatively affect your message is to lay out your text in an image. This can be devastating to your communication goals. If something in that image is a key component of your message and the image doesn’t load, then what? Save yourself from failure by ensuring that your text loads as text, and not as an image.  If you are worried about the text rendering properly, just lay it out in a table. 
3. Take a step back and breathe: When designing or coding I can miss things.  It is the reality almost every designer faces; we stare at code all day long and then often rush to testing. This simply isn’t sustainable. The biggest time and grief-saving tip I can give you is to step back about five feet, clear your eyes and really just look at the e-mail. This change in perspective will bring to light things like mis-alignment, problems with visibility or readability, poor use of whitespace and general layout problems.
4. Fresh eyes can be your best friend: Now sometimes the last tip just won’t work and it’ll seem like you almost constantly find new things wrong with your e-mail. That’s when it’s time to ask for a lifeline: send it to someone else. Fresh eyes will help you spot typos, pesky font-changes or color discrepancies.
5. Avoid too much white space or lack of color:  When laying out images and text and taking a look from a distance, it is fairly clear whether your e-mail is missing that appeal or not. If you don’t find it attractive it’ll be hard for you to engage your clients. You have to be confident in the fact that this e-mail looks and feels how you want it to. A good way to do this is by blending in a healthy mix of colors and images, while keeping in mind that you don’t want too much of either. You can also “cheat” so to speak by making the background of the entire e-mail a very neutral color like a light gray, and then keep your e-mail body background in white. This really brings your copy front and center and has the reader's eyes pinned before they knew what hit them.
6. Stay away from blinding colors: It’s hard choosing colors. It’s usually tempting to keep it simple with a nice white layout, and although this is great, some color never hurt anyone. It’s what you do with that color that really matters. Spicing up the links, adding a keyline (border), filling in a box or form and even picking very bright imagery can all help, but it is easy to get caught up in the whirl of color schemes. I suggest avoiding very bright colors with a very light body. This invokes an almost nauseating feeling and having to squint just to read the copy. Also, never use dark colors on a dark background or light colors on a light background. If the reader has to highlight the text just to read it they’ll likely press the “delete” button. 

When you hit send you should feel confident that this is exactly what your client needs and wants. I am always told to put myself in their shoes, and that is probably the most valuable tip I can offer.