What we like to hear!

We got this email last week from Jeff Schroeder, who recently used RHD for an email blast for his site http://www.showcattle.com/

"Just wanted to say that blast was one of the highest ROIs we’ve had on a marketing campaign in a long time. It paid for itself in just under 48-hours and that doesn’t take future subscription renewals into account."

Then, we also just got this email from Katy Kemp, our contact with ABS Global who just started using RHD.

"Thank you and everyone at RHD for helping make these a success. This is the 6th (final) eBlast, but with the results we have seen we will most likely be using the list again this spring!"


Now that's what we like to hear!!!! If you aren't on our RHD mailing list, you can sign up from our facebook page (Join my List tab) or at http://www.ranchhousedesigns.com/ at the very bottom right hand corner of the page.

We take a lot of pride in our email marketing services. First off, we were one of the first in the business to offer this tool back when it was a new service. Secondly, we feel we have the best targetted email list in the show cattle business....and e-mail's like Jeff's affirm that. We currently have about 13,000 subscribers. All of our subscribers are voluntary, up to date addresses. After each e-mail blast we remove the bad addresses and bounced back emails so this is a very accurate and udpated count of the actual number of subscribers.

Our list grows daily. Literally. We average anywhere from 10-50 new people signing up each week for our email lists. We also have a strict policy against spam. Everyone who signs up for our list does so voluntarily, and can leave at any time. Because we hate useless spam just as much as the next person.

If you're on our list, you've also probably noticed that we have been sending out a few emails for ABS. They recently chose RHD for their sire marketing e-mail blasts. This year at Louisville Katy Kemp, one of their team members, told us they had already had several people stopping by the ABS booth to say they enjoyed getting the new email blasts on the ABS sires.

E-mail marketing is hot! You can reach nearly twice as many people as what many of the popular show cattle magazines have as subscribers.....for about 1/4 of the cost. E-mail blasts run from $150 to $250 depending on the amount of design work we need to do. If you have an ad or flyer already designed by us, or anyone else, you can send an RHD e-mail blast for $150. If we do a new design for you specifically for the e-mail blast, it's $250.

Plus, e-mail marketing is the fastest way to get your news out to a huge number of people at a very affordable cost.

Holiday Cards

For a couple of years we have been a distributor of the Tiny Prints products as well as creating our own custom holiday cards. I'm not going to lie, I've had mine done for a while, I'm an over-achiever. I did Brandon and I some custom holiday cards - of course with a picture of a cow on them - and I'm just waiting til an appropriate time to send the out so I don't look too ansy.

There are SO many cute cards in the Tiny Prints collection, you can shop til you drop. If ordering holiday cards is still on your to-do list, check out the collection here.

This one is one of my absolute favorites...it even comes with a ribbon! If you like this one just go to Tiny Prints and then in the search field search item 21150.

I also liked this one, which you can get from Tiny Prints then search item 18522:



 
We're going to keep picking out a few each day with some different suggestions. Oh I love Christmas!

The Show Text! I Like It!

Obviously this is nothing new, The Show Text has been around for quite a while. So I'm behind on the trends, I know, I know. During Louisville I really noticed the excellent coverage that The Show Text provided through Facebook and Twitter. Then over the Thanksgiving holiday, I really appreciated getting their posting of different sale results. So, this weekend I signed up. If you haven't really taken a look at this service, it's a great idea. It's $20/year. You sign up for what kind of news you want and then The Show Text will text you news, show results, sale results, etc. You get to customize what information you want, so you're not getting bombarded with text messages of stuff you're not interested in. For example, you can choose to get info on only specific breeds, or only show and sale results from a certain state, etc. It's really an innovative service, and so far I really like it.

I'd also like to just say how impressed I am with the innovation of The Show Text's creators. I'm pretty sure the founders of The Show Text are former junior livestock exhibitors, who came up with a really creative way to start a business that also provides a great service to all of us who love showing.

So check it out if you haven't......http://www.theshowtext.com/

Thankful!

This time of year makes everyone at RHD especially mindful of all of the blessings we have to be thankful for! Just a few things that top our list of things we are appreciative of....

• We have a great team of people here at RHD. Every day is a joy to be at our office and be around so many wonderful ladies. Yes, we've got 8 ladies here and everyone gets along, laughs, jokes, supports each other, and treats each other with respect and kindness. We love getting any chance to see the adorable Kinleigh Jo Guidry, the Forgason girls, the Potts kids, Stacey Shanks' two little wild men, and Carole's little Laney.  It makes it a wonderful place to spend 8 hours a day (and sometimes more lol).
• We are thankful for our clients. Each year we work with roughly 1,000 different clients. You are what make our jobs enjoyable. We love hearing the stories about your businesses, talking and emailing with you, and being a part of your business success. We look forward to every time a client calls just to catch up on their news. Many of our clients have been with us since the very beginning, and we truly appreciate the customer loyalty here at RHD and the mix of fascinating people we get to work with.
• We got a new office this year, which makes our days here even better. So far we've been finding lots of reasons to have "parties" here at lunch...birthdays, babies, random stuff. We were blessed when this office came available and God put it in our path.
• We're thankful for the work our clients give us. Despite the very tough economy, God's blessed us with our best year to date at RHD. This November we've posted 18 new web sites, that's nearly 1 new site going up per day, and that's the most # of new web sites going up in one month in the 11-year history of RHD. Every day we are busy with lots of different projects, different things going on, and while many are wishing for work, we are so thankful to have an ongoing list of things to do that keep us busy.

Here's hoping your Thanksgiving is the best yet!

Dr. Hesby's Book is Now Available!!

Hot off the press! The highly anticipated book "Big Hands, Big Heart" is ready! And how coincidental...just in time for Christmas! The form will soon be available on the A&M Animal Science web site but I went ahead and put it up here for a link in case anyone wanted to do some "pre Black Friday" shopping ha ha

http://www.ranchhousedesigns.com/Hesby/hesby-form.pdf

The book will be available to anyone making a contribution of $25 or more to the Howard Hesby Atrium Fund. All contributions of $25 or more will receive a copy of “Big Hands, Big Heart” a tribute to Dr. Hesby and can be claimed as a charitable contribution on an individual’s itemized tax return less $9.00 for the value of the book received. Additional copies of the book require an additional $25 donation.

Here is a preview of the book.....

On a side note, this is the first BOOK we've ever designed at Ranch House. It was fun and easy to do. So maybe we've found a new service to offer...book publishing :)

Show Champions Internship

Looking for a great internship at major stock shows? Show Champions USA is looking for interns for the 2011 San Antonio and Houston stock shows. Students can apply and work both shows if their school schedules will allow. Katina Costerisan is asking that applications and questions be directed to her, katina@showchampions.com.

Application deadline is December 10th with phone interviews being held the following week, and notification of internship placement by December 29th.

On a personal note, I know several college students who have worked for Show Champions as interns over the past few years. They say it's a great way to gain experience in the photography sector and also some relaly good business contacts. You'll meet tons of people. If you're interested in photography, there may even be some opportunities to build your portfolio and make a great professional contact with the rest of the Show Champions team. They're tops! Plus, you get to hang out at a stock show all day and GET PAID for it :) Seriously, if it wasn't just for college students, I'd sign up!

Show to Win on Facebook

We just created a new page on facebook for Show to win -- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Show-to-Win -- check it out and if you like it...then "Like It". Next week we'll start our weekly give-a-ways and launch the new web site for show to win.

Anyone else get this Louisville scam?

This is totally our own fault, but this weekend Brandon and I got a phone call about a "free vacation grand prize give-away" scam from something we picked up at Louisville. Wondering if anyone else had this?

When we were walking through the trade show, Brandon dropped a business card at one of the trade show vendors booths that was giving away a free drawing. We didn't think much of it, lots of booths have those drawings.

Then Friday, he got a phone call saying he WON the prize from the drawing at Louisville. The person calling said that his card was drawn at Louisville stock show and he had won a free trip to Disneyland, Daytona Beach, and a Nascar event for ourselves and another couple. The caller asked if his spouse was around to confirm the trip. Since I was at work, the caller said they would call back on Saturday at 9:00 a.m. with our official information about the prize.

Of course, we're both thinking this is too good to be true, but whatever, we'll see what they have to say when they call. Well on Saturday morning, me and Brandon were hanging out at the showbarn and the lady called back again, at 9:00 a.m. on the dot. Brandon was on the other side of the barn from me, and the lady insisted we both be there for the "official prize call" so she said she would call back at noon.

Well as noon rolled around, we had just finished working some bulls when Brandon's phone rang. Caller ID unavailable. We remembered it was our prize. So Brandon puts her on speaker phone and she starts telling us about how we won from the drawing at the Louisville stock show. She's like all super nice and saying how we are ranchers, we probably would love a vacation, they love it when people from the Louisville show win, bla bla bla. She starts off by telling us we won a 3-part vacation for us and another couple. The first segment is 5 days 4 nights at the Ramada Inn MainGate Orlando Florida plus 2 free tickets to Disneyland, and free shuttle service and meal money. From there, we go to Daytona Beach for a few days. Then from there, we can choose a "bonus trip" ranging from a Nascar event to Vegas. So she says we don't have to say the dates or the name of the other couple, just whether we want the trip or not. She says it has to be used sometime within the next 18 months. Then she starts pressing us do we want the trip or not.

I asked, how much does it cost us? Then she said that it's totally FREE, except we have to pay a $400 "promotional fee" plus any hotel taxes, which are usually $10 a night she tells us. Plus we also have to pay for our own travel to get there. Starting to sound weird.

Then I asked her, when do we have to pay? Then she says RIGHT NOW, with your CREDiT CARD, then you just call us whenever you're ready to take the trip.

Brandon says he doesn't think we can agree to that at this moment, and then suddenly her tone totally changes. She snaps at him something like "Well fine then, take care" and hangs up.

Just for fun, we looked up the Ramada Inn Main Gate hotel she told us was the five star hotel that we had won these luxurious accommodations for.....the nightly rate was $45/night.

RHD Clients in the NAILE Trade Show

We had a great time strolling through the trade show and chatting with all of the RHD clients that were participating in the NAILE trade show. If I had to guess, I'm sure lots of you also stopped
by these booths....it seems like they were packed every time I walked by.

Our leading lady of fashion - Randa Yezak with the Southern Jewlz booth. Of course I had to purchase something from there :) Congratulations Randa on all of your business success!

We met up with Katy Kemp of ABS Global, a new client we have recently started developing e

-mail marketing plans for. Katy reported to us that they had lots of people stop by the booth and say
that they loved getting the emails from ABS that were sent out by US! Woo hoo!!! If you haven't
signed up for the RHD mailing list, you can easily do it on our facebook fan page (join my list) or at the very bottom right corner of http://www.ranchhousedesigns.com/

Another big hit of the show was SJ Creations! They had tons of awesome custom metal

creations on display. These make great ideas for Christmas gifts. Check out all of Stephanie's work at http://www.sjcattlecreations.com/

Our last stop on the trade show tour was at Twisted Stitch. I fell in love with the stuff here!! They had some awesome cattle artwork and also a really neat wooden cattle cutout. They promised us that after Louisville they would be posting these on their web site too. So check out http://www.twistedstitch1.com/. Their stuff is fabulous!

Thank you Shorthorn breeders!

 I couldn't help but feel a huge amount of thankfulness and pride as I was hanging out in the Shorthorn barn at Louisville last week when I saw all of the RHD work displayed at the stalls of so many friends and fellow Shorthorn breeders. Some of our very first clients were Shorthorn folks, and as I walked down the aisles I was so proud that RHD represents the leading Shorthorn breeders in the United States.

For example, this year, Cyclone Trace raised both the champion and reserve heifer; Sullivan had chamapion bull, and Cates had reserve bull. We are the proud web designer of all of these farms. We love doing a Shorthorn web sites, and probably do more Shorthorn sites than any other breed.

Here are a few snapshots of some of the RHD work that you can see through the Shorthorn stalls. This is just a small sample of what we can do in addition to web sites. So THANK YOU Shorthorn breeders, we love working with you!

Here are a few pics from the Fischer Cattle Company stalls. Completely outfitted in RHD work :) We do their web site, did their logo, their signs, and this year just did their individual cattle stall signs. We love Stacey and Jeff!

I got to meet Stephanie Conrad from AMS Shorthorns for the first time at the show. The AMS Shorthorns booth,was also sporting lots of RHD work....we do their web site, did their logo, and did their stall sign for them.

And here is a banner we did for John Sullivan at Sullivan Farms. Each year we do a few bull banners for them, and this year, just so happened that STOCKMAN was also the champion bull! Look for him in Denver.

Thanks again to all of our Shorthorn friends for all of the work we get to do for you!