LetterMatics Getting Serious Attention at JCK Show

Down markets present big opportunities for companies that are willing to look beyond the present into a potentially prosperous future.

Those are the kind of businesses that seem to be showing up at this year's JCK Show, the biggest trade event in the jewelry world, reports LetterMatics CEO Joe Portale. The show is running May 30-June 2.

Portale has attended past events, and he reports that he's seeing quality rather than quantity at this year's event. "Attendance is down, but the quality of the people that are here s much higher," he says. Not surprisingly, people seem to have reduced their budgets to match the state of the economy. "The buyers that are here are picky, but they're purchasing in small quantities," he says.

LetterMatics CEO Joe Portale, right, talks with jewelers at the JCK Show.

Those buyers that are present seem to be the ones with the greatest resources and the biggest commitment to expanding their companies, Portale says. Though the total number of people stopping by the booth is down significantly, those showing up tend to understand the potential of next generation marketing technology and are willing to put in the effort needed to make it work.

One big lesson has been the power of industry trade magazine Modern Jeweler, Portale says. Many visitors have stopped by because they saw the LetterMatics article that ran in the publication and were impressed by it. "No one should have any doubt as to the impact trade publications can have on today's marketplace," Portale says.

Extraordinary Expertise: Nancy Schuring Covers the InStore Show.

One of LetterMatics' greatest strengths is its real-world foundation. LetterMatics was created by a team of entreprenurs who have decades of small business experience between them. They know what it takes to make a business succeed and have designed LetterMatics to make that happen.

Nancy Schuring is a great example of this. She started Devon Fine Jewelry more than two decades ago working out of her home. Today the store is in the top 2%-3% of independent jewelers in the United States. Devon got to where it was because Nancy knows how to build relationships with her customers and keep them strong.

Nancy became involved with LetterMatics because she saw it as a potent tool for connecting with her clients. Few people can match her knowledge of the industry when it comes to everything from gemstones to marketing technology. One sign of the respect in which she is held is the fact that Colored Stones magazine used her as a roving correspondent at the recent InStore show.

To get some of Nancy's insights about the event and the industry, check out the story here: http://www.colored-stone.com/stories/may09/instore.cfm

LETTERMATICS: BRINGING MAIL MARKETING INTO THE ONE-TO-ONE WORLD.

LetterMatics isn’t just technology. It’s not even a system. Instead, it’s a new way to approach marketing. For many years, mass marketing dominated the marketing world. Even on a local scale, marketing tended to take a one-to-many approach, with a single message spraying across many people regardless of whether it met their needs or not.

Then the Internet began to change this. Affordable web sites and interactive capabilities meant that online, it was possible to customize messages to a greater extent than ever before. But the mailbox remained a prisoner of mass marketing strategies, approaches and technologies.

Now, LetterMatics has changed all that. Since LetterMatics allows users to send real mail from their computers with three clicks of a mouse, one-to-one marketing is suddenly possible in the real world and not just the virtual one.

What makes this even more exciting is that, with on demand printing and state of the art printing technologies, letters aren’t the only type of material that companies can customize when they want to send messages to specific targets.

LetterMatics enables users to adapt many of the marketing approaches that have proven so powerful on the Internet to the real world. It offers instant gratification and total personalization. It is an affordable, effective way to turn distant customers into close friends of your company.