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After graduating in May and starting my job as a Marketing Specialist for the Print and Direct Mail team at Vistaprint in June (even though I could have started at any point during the summer), I’m calling this my “freshman year of life”. You might know Vistaprint as being the “free business card company” but I’m here to tell you that we are so much more than that now and I’m so excited to be part of a company that is striving to be the best it can be for its customers. I’m coming onboard at a really exciting time during the end of a rebranding initiative and it is fun to see how my role really supports this transition.
My title might make you think that I’m the one printing your business card order but I actually have very little to do with the actual printing process. Instead, I help drive sales by working through our acquisition and retention offline channels. For acquisition, we run tests to see what resonates better with customers we are trying to acquire – for example we can test creative, the offer or timing of the mailing. For retention, we include a box insert and top sheet in every customer’s order box. Outside of boxes, the Vistaprint catalog is sent out predominately to customers that the company considers higher-value. Both of these in-box and in-mail retention initiatives are in place to drive current customers to continue to order with Vistaprint. My day to day tasks are focused around supporting the owners of both of these channels and collaborating with our creative team to see projects progress from start to finish. One of my main roles is to manage all costs and budgeting for both acquisition and retention. Another aspect of my day to day work involves communicating with outside vendors to acquire data for all of our campaigns. Since starting at Vistaprint, I’ve increased my ability to manipulate an excel spreadsheet and have improved my organizational skills as each campaign has a set deadline to work towards.
The hardest part about my channel is that it’s offline. Most other marketing channels can see results almost immediately. On the Print and Direct Mail team, we have to wait weeks, sometimes months for our results. This can make it challenging to forecast and plan future campaigns when we don’t know whether or not our recent campaigns were successful. We have to always be one step ahead of everyone else. In June, we were listening to Holiday songs to get us in the mood to work on all of our holiday campaigns!
My manager likes to remind me that it will take 9-12 months for me to become fully acclimated to the Vistaprint ins and outs. We have a list of over 1,000 acronyms that I spent my first week combing through but even three months into the job, I still have to refer to the sheet from time to time. One of my biggest roles on this team is to actively listen, absorb everything and ask lots of questions. This has made my transition to the working world so much easier, knowing that I have an amazing team that supports me as I adjust and a company that wants to see me succeed. Vistaprint is really great about supporting a positive work life balance. I think it’s fair to say we have a work hard, play hard mentality here and these are just a few of our benefits: twice a month we have free food trucks come to the office (rain or shine and I’ve experienced both), free breakfast every Friday (where I met the CEO by chance!), the View is a social event every other Thursday after work that is usually themed and always includes “adult” beverages (a few weeks ago there was a balloon artist and mini golf), you can always find people taking a break in the game room playing pool or ping pong and I like to unwind after a hard day of work at the gym on site. I’m really looking forward to seeing what else I can learn during my freshman year of life!
Get in line early for food truck Wednesdays at Vistaprint!
