Marketing 201: AdBase - A Timesaving and Valuable Tool

So, how do you go about marketing yourself when you want a ready-made solution that you can implement in a brief period of time, with maximum impact? You outsource.

You are a specialist in your field - photography. So too, was your wet-lab technician in processing your film. So too, are you struggling with mastering photoshop/lightroom/etc in your post-production and workflow efforts. All of these things presumes you have work. However, what if you don't have any? Want more? Want to promote your new website?

We outlined how to use a bare-bones solution like Vertical Response (Marketing 101: Bare-Bones-ing It With Vertical Response, 10/5/08), and that works - when you actually have a list of people to market to. What if you don't? Then, how much will it cost you each month in time, or dollars out-laid to an assistant to update your lists? I submit that your monthly costs will exceed $60 or so, and if that's the case, then why not entrust it to an outsourcing solution like many other things we outsource? Why not let a professional handle the distribution of your marketing materials? Heck, you entrusted the postman when you were using snail mail!

To that end, I thought I'd walk you through my experience using the service AdBase. Step-by-step, so you can see how easy it is. Yes, AgencyAccess, and others, are out there, and yes, AdBase has a free trial here, so too, AgencyAccess here. But, often we as photographers fear the unknown, so this will de-mystify it for you. Show you what's possible. But, it's by no means exhaustive. This is one way, but there are, of course, many others.

So here we go - step-by-step, though setting up a mailing list campaign using AdBase, and then summary thoughts and pricing information at the end.

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The first thing you'll do on the home page, once you're signed in, is go create a list of people you want to make out reach to. You can, of course, use pre-made lists, but let's go through the process of creating our own. First click on the My ADBASE tab, as shown below.

Scroll down to the "List" section, and choose from the drop-down menu "Custom List".

Once you've done that, ADBASE has broken down the variety of categories into several super categories, separated by US, and Canadian.

Below, for this mailing, we've chosen US Print Advertising, and there are a total of 10,266 e-mail addresses at 1,953 companies that hire, within that category, across the country. We can further narrow down that field using one of the other 8 filters, from agency size, job title, type of business, and so forth.

With that in mind, let's make outreach to just the geographic region that is "Northeast", as chosen below. We could have specified one or more area codes, or even a specific zip code. Remember, we're building a list here, and more importantly, we can build multiple custom lists. So, if I wanted to build a list for the DC area, I would choose area codes 202, 703, and 301. If I then wanted to add in Baltimore and Richmond, I would build a list that included those area codes. And lastly, we can then select multiple lists to mail to as a part of the mailing. So, you can take the shotgun "pray and spray" approach, or you can take a snipers tact, with extreme precision - say, just award-winning firms in the 202 area code that have billings over $5m a year? Bingo, you can do that.

Below is the summary of our list, refined by region to just 3,901 e-mail addresses. While that may seem like a small number, it's still a huge number, and probably not one you can manage to market to, and to maintain an ongoing market outreach to. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint, so choose your recipients with the notion that you will be marketing to them over time, repetitively.

Below you will see the tab for your next destination - eMailer. Click that tab, and let's have a look.

Below is the "Summary" tab, and you'll want to start here. Choose a name that means something to you, and then begin to choose what type of e-mail you want to send. For my first attempt with them, I took the same html template that I used on Vertical Response, and sent that out. Here, we're going to use a very basic version of one of their templates, and talk about some of the variations you can apply to those.

Your next tab is the "Style" tab. Of course, as you become more familiar with the features and options, you can choose to customize them, but in this case, I'll be choosing the Simple Black style.

Up next is the layout. YOu can see that you can choose how any images, and the spacing between each. This is a very what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) approach. If you want to add text in, other image areas, and so forth, just selecting the boxes allows you to do that very easily. You can also specify the final width of the e-mail, and the default is 650 pixels.

If you choose, as I have selected below, to have 3 images in the layout, you are presented with six variations to choose from, which pretty much runs the gamut of options. After looking at this, I decided that I wanted to do just one image, as above.

Next up is the Content tab. Think long and hard about the subject line, to minimize the likelihood that it'll get deleted. What subject line would peak your interest? What would get an instant delete? Also of importance is the Plain Text box. This is the e-mail that people who don't get/want html e-mail will see, so be sure there's a link to click in there, as well as other insightful/informative text. As you can see, I've opted to personalize the salutation, which I did by clicking the small icon at the top of that box of the two heads, and chose the field - in this case - first name, whom I wanted to be identified in my salutation. I felt this was more personal than a "Hi there!" salutation.

Next up is the Featured Image entry. This is where you'll select or upload your image. Since I don't have one already uploaded, once I click "Select", I'll choose the "Upload New Image" tab and upload it. Of critical importance is the "Terms" checkbox. If you're a photographer, it's easy to certify that you own the copyright - unless that work was shot as a Work-Made-For-Hire assignment, then you have no right to use the photo. If you are in another field - retoucher, or another field, you are certifying that you have permission from the photographer to use their image.

Once I've selected my image, named the file, the "Upload Image" button appears, and clicking that uploads the file to the ADBASE server.

Now, we see a preview of everything, and on the left is a preview of the text inputs, and two images below is the preview of the what the e-mail will look like. You can click the "View Full-Size" button to see the e-mail, as well as all the other text at the bottom that is compliance information with SPAM laws. If I had opted to have text areas, I would see that information in this preview as well.

Below is a general preview of the e-mail.

If you're not careful, you'll miss the "Linked to" option. It's important that when someone mouse-over and then click on the images, they they get taken to your website, so clicking the "Add Link", and then entering in the destination information there is important, as shown below.

The next tab is the Tracked Links tab. These are the links that ADBASE will actually track for you to see if somone has clicked on the ad. This is especially valuable when you have multiple images, to see which images were the most popular in the e-mail you sent out.

Next tab is the Delivery Options tab. Here you'll fill out where the e-mail came from, and which list you've chosen. ADBASE will tell you how many e-mail credits you have left, and how many you'll be using up based upon the size of your list.

Down near the bottom is a "Preview Recipients List" link. Clicking that gives you a list of everyone that is on your list, and other details about them. (This is probably a screen grab you'll want to click to see larger, but all of them in this piece are click-to-see-larger enabled.)

Clicking the "Save and Review" tab above, you come to see everything specific to this e-mail campaign. When you're ready, click the "Schedule This Email to be Sent".

Here, you may choose to do it immediately, or at a specific date and time. I strongly encourage you to be thoughtful about this and do it at the right time, not just rightaway.

Then, you'll see that your e-mail is set and pending, ready to go, as below.

Once the campaign is underway, you can see it in progress. Below is the first one I did, in progress. You can see that almost 1,000 people viewed my e-mail with the image, (the number well exceeded 1,000 when the entire campaign was done). What you can also see is that I didn't get a great deal of clicks through to my website. Perhaps this was as a result of a bad image choice, or the shotgun approach to the mailing in terms of reaching the right audience. When I asked ADBASE about my mistake, they responded: I noticed that the open rate of your campaign is currently 17%. This is obviously lower than our system average. After taking a quick look at the lists that you sent your campaign to, it is clear that you didn’t spend a lot of time targeting your list (e.g. you mailed all magazines instead of picking magazines with specific subjects). In our experience, the more targeted the distribution, the higher the open rate. For comparison, the average email campaign sent using Emailer has a distribution of just over 1,000 contacts. I would also point out that the open rate you achieved with your Vertical Response campaign is much more in line with that one would get by mailing a personal client list which I believe is what you did. Ok, lesson learned, I won't do that again!

Take special note of this - 84% done. ADBASE doesn't blast out every e-mail all at once. They do it over time. They do this so as to not otherwelm the recipient's servers.

Here's an explanation of why they throttle:

I also asked about e-mails going to people outside of normal working hours, and what impact that had on view/open/click-through rates. Here's what they wrote, in response:

We do acknowledge that sending promos outside of business hours does reduce their open rate. Our average open rate is currently 21% overall. This goes up to 22% between the hours of 8am-6pm and drops to 18% after-hours. So the effect is not huge but it is still significant in our opinion. As a result, we are currently testing some changes to our back-end system that will prevent our mail throttling system from sending email outside of normal work hours. This will lead to campaigns taking a bit longer to send, but should have a positive impact on the overall open rate.

So what does using the service cost? ADBASE subscriptions range in price from $395 to $1,695, with pricing depending upon the desired functionality and coverage each client requires. Their most popular editions are the Editorial edition and the Standard North America edition. If you wanted to go whole-hog, the Premium North America edition has the same functionality as the Standard North America edition, but includes 1) Emailer, their custom-designed email tool that allows you to determine which individuals open their email and visit their websites, for ease of followup, and 2) Fine Art data which includes art galleries, museums, and corporate art curators.

Each Subscription Includes:

• One-year license to access the edition of your choice
• Unlimited usage and access during the subscription period
• Constant updating of the database
• ADBASE Accuracy Guarantee
• ADBASE Insight (educational resources for Creatives)-practical articles, webcasts, whitepapers and podcasts-all content created specifically for artists by the ADBASE team and industry experts
• Access to partners and their special offers for ADBASE clients including: sourcebooks, postcard printing and mailing services, and consultation services
• Choice of output including mailing labels, email lists, and telephone call sheets, ASCII output, mail fulfillment

The typical photographer/client chooses a North American subscription with Emailer, along with an annual capacity of 24,000 Emails. Overall, when this is sold as a bundle, the cost of each email works out to about 3.5 cents. Obviously this is more expensive than others, but they have built a system that is so specific to the needs of artists that they believe it still delivers a lot of value as evidenced by over 50% of our clients having added Emailer onto their subscriptions.

ADBASE is the only provider that offers an online email solution where you yourself create and send your promotions, freeform, or with the templates, as shown above. They also are able to pinpoint more than 25 specific regions, if you're taking a regional approach to your campaign. Lastly, ADBASE is the list provider used by ASMP, APA, Alt Pick, theispot, Serbin Communications and many others.

Clearly, ADBASE is well defined as substantially different from options like Vertical Response, eROI, Constant Contact, and other bare-bones solutions, and making an investment in ADBASE is worthwhile to consider at approximately $0.035 per e-mail, up from $0.01 with Vertical Response.

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RELATED:
~ Marketing 101: Bare-Bones-ing It With Vertical Response, 11/4/08

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Marketing 101: Bare-Bones-ing It With Vertical Response

You no doubt saw that we just launched our new website two days ago, and we wanted to get the word out. How to do that? Send a silly e-mail with a few sentences? How could I know if that was effective?

I turned to one solution - Vertical Response, that I was familiar with, and yes, they have a free trial. I know there are others - eROI, Contant Contact, and so forth. What follows is a step-by-step through the process we undertook to launch the campaign, and just how easy it was - save for gathering the list of people to actually send it to, more on solutions for that later.

So, here we go - promoting the website launch.

(Continued after the Jump)

Below is the top of the webpage (note, every graphic below, when clicked, opens larger in a new window), showing that you're logged in, and giving you the control tabs to work on your campaign.

Click on the "Emails" tab, and on the right, you'll see "New E-Mail". Click that link, and the options below appear. The default is "e-mail wizard", but that option gives you a lot of really funky templates, that I don't think are consistent with a professional-level photographers' website. When I sent out my campaign, I recreated my website as HTML, using the "Freeform HTML" option. For this example, we're going to use the "Email Canvas" choice, so that you can insert a single image that is a screengrab of your website, or a single image of yours you want to showcase. Then choose "Next Step".

Below you will see the "Email Creation" section. Choose the label that your e-mail will come from, and select a useful subject line. Then, click on the icon with a little tree on it, which is identifed by the bottom red arrow.

If you have an image that is currently on your website somewhere, you can paste the URL into the top entry line. If you've done a screen grab of your site, or have the image on your computers desktop, just choose the "upload image" icon, as noted by the other red arrow.

Below, there were three "Browse" buttons, and you will see that I have filled one up with the JPEG website_facade.jpg. That file will now reside on the Vertical Response server.

Below, you'll now see what my image looks like, within their "My Images" folder.

Double-click on that image and you will see the window below. There, you can change your ALT text from the default filename (as shown) to something like "John Harrington's New Website", or something else. You can tweak other details of the image, like spacing, and so forth, but it's not necessary. You can also take note of the URL for that image in the top line.

Up above you'll see the "Insert" button at the lower right. Click that, and you'll see the image inserted into your email page. At the bottom of the graphic below, you'll see that you need to put in your physical address, as well as other information to be compliant with SPAM laws. Be sure you do this completely.

Next, as shown below, right-mouse (or cntrl) click the image, and choose the "Insert/Edit link", so that if someone clicks on the photo, they will be taken to your website.

Below you'll see where you can type in your URL. Again, this is the URL that someone will be taken to if they click on the graphic. If you encounter any errors, just click on the "view source" tab to check the HTML, or confirm it works when you send yourself a test e-mail.

Next up is the "Text Content" tab. This is the e-mail that people will see if they don't get html e-mails, and there are very few of them - under 1%. However, you'll want to complete this text with something similar to what I've entered. Be sure there is a link to your website there!

Following that, click on the "2. Preview" tab, and confirm that your e-mail looks good.

Next is the "3. Send Test" tab. You can choose option 1, and elect to just have it sent to yourself, or you can include up to ten people to get the test. this is often helpful if you're working with a marketing consultant, or want feedback from a spouse/partner, trusted colleague, or whomever. They will get both the text version, and the graphic version. What you see will be exactly what your list gets.

Once you've clicked the "Send Test" button, you will get confirmation that your test was sent, and the links that were converted from standard links, to trackable links, as detailed below.

Next, it's time to select who you want e-mails to go to. Here's where your hard work begins, and where a list service like AdBase or AgencyAccess actually becomes significantly valuable, but more on them in another post. The challenge here is to collect a list of e-mails that you are targetting. Vertical Response charges about $13.00 per 1,000 e-mails they send out for you, and you buy them in blocks, but you have to populate the lists yourself.

Next, you'll want to schedule your e-mail to go out, and you have a wide window to do so. Vertical Response has a review schedule, because they want to make sure your e-mail complies with all laws, so you can choose to send it out at the earliest launch time available (Option 1) after their review, or set the time. I highly recommend you set the time yourself. No doubt many of you are working o n things like this at 8pm, or 2am, and if you contemplate your own nature, any e-mails you get at that time are not likely useful ones. Let people clear out their inboxes in the morning, and schedule it for a time after that, and remember time-zone variations too!

Next is the last tab "Launch". Here, they validate that you have everything completed, and once you click "Launch Campaign" and it's in the queue for approval, you can't change the content or mailing list, but you can unlaunch and then re-submit it.

So, that's it, bare-bones style. Vertical Response does not charge an annual fee, and the cost per e-mail is about $0.01. Yet, you have to do everything yourself, and the templates they offer are not photo-centric. You may ask - why bother, especially if I am just mailing to 20 or 50 people? Can't I just send the e-mail from my own desktop? It's detailed information like that below that is really helpful. It helps you see how effective the e-mail was. There's no "shot in the dark" approach. I see that over 37% of the people saw my image in the piece, and that a subset of that clicked through to my site. For a mailing of just over 1,100 people, that's a decent read/response rate. Would I have liked it to be higher? Sure. I also can see how fast people read/clicked it too. In addition, to can click that "Domain Report" tab, and see just how many people from each company opened it, clicked it, and even unsubscribed from your mailing list. This is valuable information for you to have, and allows you to tailor your campaigns moving forward.

Ok, so then, what's with all the companies selling lists? Do you really need to use them? Are they worth it? In a word - YES!

Consider this - Adbase (information here) has multiple versions for artists, from Editorial, to Regional, to Standard, to Premium. And, if you click here, you can request a free trial to give them a spin. We are working on a review of their services, as comprehensive as this one. AgencyAccess has a free trial too, to check that offer out, click here.

One of the things that struck me in preparing lists from scratch, was how much labor was involved, and that was just collecting and concatenating the information, and that information is static, and does not include any of the time maintaining your list. Let's say an annual subscription to AdBase of AgencyAccess is $700. At first blush, that sounds like a large amount of money - in fact, it probably sounds like a deal-breaker, but it shouldn't be. Back when we wrote about Mastheads.org, (Getting Clients - a few options, 7/7/08) there was plenty of suggestions at the value of their $24 offering. Nelson Nunes, founder of AdBase wrote about them at the time:

Mastheads.org is good if you are only interested in getting a few names off of a select number of mastheads. If you need to create or update a mailing list for direct marketing purposes, you would still have a considerable amount of work to do. That is, you would still have to analyze the masthead to determine which contacts are of interest to you (i.e. involved in selecting a photographer), enter all the information into a database and double check every piece of information to make sure you didn't make any entry mistakes. The first time you do this, you would also have to check that the address provided in the masthead is the correct address for the contacts of interest to you as generally the contact information provided is for the advertising sales department.

This might make sense if you are a photographer that works in a very specific niche and only targets a handful of magazines. Even then, the value of Mastheads.org is not clear as you would likely want to subscribe to those magazines to keep on top of what photography is being used. For any photographer doing more general work, the amount of effort required to keep a mailing list up-to-date using mastheads, whether from Mastheads.org or directly out of magazines, will quickly add up to much more than the cost of a subscription with a service like ADBASE.

And that brings up a much more critical point - the cost of list maintenance. I spent hours and hours, and hours putting my own list together, and even then, how could I be sure that "Liz Smith" and ClientCompany is "liz.smith@clientcompany.com", or is she "elizabeth.smith@clientcompany.com"? and do I want to be the one doing all that work for just one list, not to mention all the work to check and re-check who is now at what company? Nope, I don't. Nunes points out, specific to pulling information from just editorial mastheads:

For example, say you can scan through a masthead every 5 minutes (which is aggressive if you include double checking and breaks -- it's pretty tedious work), that's 12 per hour on average. If you have a list of 600 magazines, that will take about 50 hours. Even if you have an assistant working for only $10 per hour, that's more than the cost of subscribing to a full-year Editorial Edition from ADBASE that also includes book publishers. Now that's for only one update. If you plan to send out additional mailings throughout the year, you will have to update the list again costing your more time and money.

But, this isn't about Mastheads (read the previous piece for more information on them), it's about proving the value in preparing and maintaining the list. If you consider a list is $700 a year, that's about $60 a month so that you always have a ready and up-to-date list of e-mails, and then there's a nominal charge per 1,000 e-mails as well. And, these are qualified e-mails too.

So, it seemed to me, after the extensive amount of time I spent preparing just 1,100 e-mails, that using a pay service with tens of thousands, where they've done all the hard work of validating e-mails, and organizing them, might just be a far far more effective and efficient (and time-saving) way to go. To that end, as I noted above, we're working on an extensive review of adBase, and hopefully AgencyAccess too.

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RELATED:
~ Marketing 201: AdBase - A Timesaving and Valuable Tool, 11/5/08

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Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

Digital Railroad - Saving Your Facade

If you are looking to preserve your website's look and feel, in order to transfer to a place like liveBooks, or hire a designer, while your site is still up, go into Adobe's Acrobat Professional program.

Go to the "Advanced" drop-down menu, and choose "Web capture". Choose "create PDF from/Append web page...", and enter in your URL, and how many clicks in you want it to capture.

Good luck.

(Comments, if any, after the Jump)

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Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

UPDATED: Shame On Thank You, Yahoo!

In what can only be described as a tool to incur repetative breaches of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) yesterday produced a tool that will purposefully strip out textual metadata, which includes copyright management information, ownership information, captions, and so forth, from images.

CNET reports (Yahoo web tool speeds up image shrinking, 10/6/08) on Smush It:

The operations Smush It can do include: convert GIF images to the PNG format; reduce the range of colours used in PNG files; strip out textual metadata from JPEG images.

If you're a lawyer representing photographers, you've got to be singing "Oh...happy day!"

(Continued after the Jump)

A read of the DMCA (THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1998, U.S. Copyright Office Summary, 12/98), page 6 lays out the problems this technology has:

Integrity of Copyright Management Information

New section 1202 is the provision implementing this obligation to protect the integrity of copyright management information (CMI). The scope of the protection The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is set out in two separate paragraphs, the first dealing with false CMI and the second with removal or alteration of CMI. Subsection (a) prohibits the knowing provision or distribution of false CMI, if done with the intent to induce, enable, facilitate or conceal infringement. Subsection (b) bars the intentional removal or alteration of CMI without authority, as well as the dissemination of CMI or copies of works, knowing that the CMI has been removed or altered without authority.

It goes on to define CMI:

Subsection (c) defines CMI as identifying information about the work, the author, the copyright owner, and in certain cases, the performer, writer or director of the work, as well as the terms and conditions for use of the work, and such other information as the Register of Copyrights may prescribe by regulation. Information concerning users of works is explicitly excluded.

There can be little doubt that this well intentioned product, designed to speed downloads, will in fact, speed you into multiple DMCA violations.

In fact, checking Section 1201 of the DMCA:

Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems, subsection 3:

(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS- (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or
`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.
`(2) As used in this subsection--
`(A) to `circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure' means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure; and
`(B) a technological measure `effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.

Thus, you need not even have registered your work, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 or §§ 1202, in order to be eligible to bring a civil (or criminal) suit. A great resource and FAQ on this: Chilling Effects.) In fact, it didn't take long for the US Department of Justice to indict a company for a "1201" violation (First Indictment Under Digital Millennium Copyright Act Returned Against Russian National, Company, in San Jose, California, 8/28/01):

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California announced that Elcom Ltd [was] indicted today by a federal grand jury in San Jose, California on five counts of copyright violations... The DMCA requires that the government prove a defendant offered to the public, provided, or trafficked in technology that was primarily designed to circumvent copyright protections, or was marketed for use in circumventing copyright protections...According to the indictment, Elcom and Mr. Sklyarov are alleged to have conspired, for commercial advantage and private financial gain, to traffic in a technology that was primarily designed and produced for the purpose of circumventing, and was marketed by the defendants for use in circumventing, the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader.

I surely expect that Yahoo's promotion of this tool, with the expressed purpose of removing textual metadata, will get their Exceptional Performance Team in a bit of hot water. Check this Yahoo Developer blog video, about 34 seconds in, to see item #3 - "strip JPEG meta" (note - the audio is useless, but the screen visual makes the point) is where the problem lies. They could easily make it strip all the metadata BUT the copyright and ownership information.

Here's my image from yesterday's blog entry showing the before and after of both the visual effects, as well as the textual metadata wiping. (click the image below to open in a new window full size)


We need not look for "bad actors" looking to strip ownership information from our images under the soon to die and yet will reappear next year Orphan Works Act - well meaning people are producing products that will orphan every image it processes - intentionally.

Yet one more reason why Orphan Works, as written, is horrible for everyone.
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Update: Check the comments below. It seems that the developers have been responsive to the issues raised, and have ensured the preservation of the metadata. Thank you, Yahoo!

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Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

Ensuring Proper Delivery

We, as do many businesses, rely on the receipt of paperwork via the US Postal Service. Some call it snail mail, and sometimes it is, in fact, slow. Other times, it's lightning fast - a thank you note dropped into the post office box down the street from my house not only arrives at it's intended recipient's home across town the next day, but I get a follow-up phone call of thanks from that person.

We do everything we can to ensure proper delivery to us, yet what do you do when you get an envelope with a stamp like the one at the right on it?

(Continued after the Jump)

Curse in frustration. As you can see, this wasn't some random solicitation - it was a check for just under $2k from a client. This check arrived in the mail to me on Saturday. Thankfully, the honesty of whomever recieved it, opened it, and returned it, I have to thank ever so much.

I looked closely at the address - had the client misspelled something? Nope. Was the zip code wrong? Nope - in fact, we use the USPS' Zip+4 to make it that much more certain that the mail would arrive. That was accurate as well.

Every single one of our clients gets their invoices via "Electronic Original", meaning it's a PDF that gets e-mailed to them. About 10% of our clients have some form of electronic payment/direct deposit set up. About 3% pay with credit cards. That means, like most of you, we are reliant on getting checks in the mail from clients for our survival.

We remain vigilant about checks that are delayed, contacting clients to ensure we are in their system to pay, determining when a check will be cut, and then following up when it's not. Occasionally, a client says they sent the check, but we have no record of recieving it. In that case, we ask the client to confirm it's been cashed. So far (knock on wood) they have all come back and said it had not. They issued a stop-payment on the check, and re-issued it.

Take note - until such time as you receive payment from a client, the onus is on them to pay you. Perhaps they mis-typed your address, or perhaps it got mis-routed, as this one did. Regardless, until such time as you get it, they are responsible - similar to F.O.B. for a product you've purchased. For example, suppose you ship original film to a client for review and consideration. Your terms of delivery state that you are responsible for the package until such time as the images arrive to the client. Once recieved, they become the responsibilty of them to ensure safe handling, as well as their safe return. When they ship them back to you, until such time as you sign for their return and confirm they have all been sent back (usually within 24 or 48 hours) the client is responsible. They chose the return shipper, they paid that shipper, and thus, are responsible.

I have had clients who have sent me payment via FedEx. Costs more - yes, but there are fewer mis-delivered packages that way. That client chose a safer/more secure form of delivery than a USPS delivery - especially when it's USPS without return receipt, or delivery confirmation.

This is also a cautionary tale - when the client says "The check is in the mail", they may well be telling you the truth. My approach in handling this - "trust but verify."

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