Solutions

With marketing budgets under so much scrutiny today, you’d be amazed at how many of the companies I work with still allow marketers to rely solely on instinct and intuition.

A group of North America's leading retail industry members — including stores, manufacturers, and retail and RFID associations — have teamed up to begin writing road maps and guidelines for RFID usage at the item level in the retail sector.

Staples Advantage, the business-to-business division of Staples, Inc., today announced the launch of its new Web site (StaplesAdvantage.com) to address customers’ growing demands for supplier consolidation and reduced procurement costs. For the first time, current and prospective customers – from small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to Fortune 1000 corporations – can view the full scale of Staples Advantage’s products and services, including five newly integrated business-to-business service offerings: Business Interiors by Staples, Staples Technology Solutions, Staples Facility Solutions, Staples Print Solutions and Staples Promotional Products. Combined with Staples Advantage’s complete selection of office products, these expanded capabilities represent the industry’s most extensive offering of business products and services from one source.

With more than 41 million subscribers in its nearly seven-year existence, professional networking site LinkedIn is grabbing the social media headlines these days right along with Facebook and Twitter. In his keynote presentation at last week's DM Days New York Conference & Expo, Mike Gamson, LinkedIn's vice president of corporate solutions, revealed some of the secrets to his company's success, as well as tactics other direct marketers can use to make Web 2.0 more than just a buzzword.

Susan Rappaport, a multi-disciplined direct marketing veteran, has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of ALC. Widely respected as both a direct marketer and data marketing innovator, Susan has served in executive management roles at leading direct marketing organizations for more than 25 years. As ALC both broadens and deepens its portfolio of data marketing services, Susan steps into the role that had been held by Donn Rappaport who founded the company in 1978.

An ongoing challenge for most catalogers/multichannel merchants is keeping a respectable sales pace going during off-seasons. And Shelley Nandkeolyar, CEO of multititle apparel cataloger Norm Thompson Outfitters, outlined several ways to keep momentum going following the holiday season in a session he delivered at last week’s e-Tail conference held in Washington, D.C. Below are some useful pointers he had to offer. * Keep the pressure on. Make liberal use of e-mail marketing for customer retention and reactivation, Nandkeolyar said. In his experiences at Norm Thompson and with the Solutions and Sahalie catalogs, Nandkeolyar has found that with e-mail, the more you use it, the

On the surface, customer self-service seems like a pretty good idea. What catalog company wouldn’t want to lessen the burden on its own staff by providing customers the means to handle their own issues? But like other things that also sound too good to be true, self-service has its own set of pitfalls. Some of these pitfalls and associated solutions are outlined in a recent whitepaper released by customer service software provider eGain. Following are three self-service pitfalls and how to avoid them in your business: 1. Self-service isn’t a foolproof way to reduce costs. Although the most common reason for marketers to implement

The concept of home automation may call to mind futuristic visions of robotic butlers and a retinal scanner for your home security system. But for Smarthome Direct, real-life home automation products have helped create a multibillion dollar business that’s seen its 12-month housefile double over the past four years. And Smarthome has done so by leveraging its unique and growing line of electronic home automation products against the home improvement craze that’s engulfed the nation in the past few years, says Rajeev Kapur, president of the Irvine, Calif.-based cataloger. Kapur notes that the company has sought to capitalize on the popularity of the ABC-TV

By Matt Griffin Exclusive product availability, proprietary technology and an energetic response to customer feedback provide Smarthome Direct with the keys to successful growth. The concept of home automation may call to mind futuristic visions of robotic butlers and a retinal scanner for your home security system. But for Smarthome Direct, real-life home automation products have helped create a multibillion dollar business that's seen its 12-month housefile double over the past four years. And Smarthome has done so by leveraging its unique and growing line of electronic home automation products against the home improvement craze that's engulfed the nation in the past few years,

The sudden shutdown in March of freight consolidator APX Logistics brings July 1997 to mind. That was when UPS workers went on strike. The big difference, of course, was that UPS settled its strike within two weeks that year, and its trucks quickly returned to the road. APX — formerly RR Donnelley Logistics and CTC Distribution Direct, once used by many catalogers as a low-cost UPS alternative — is gone, leaving FedEx's SmartPost as the only comparable alternative. APX's demise brings to mind the lessons learned from the UPS strike: the need to spread out your ground shipments among several carriers. But since