Tim Kiss

One of the major benefits of an e-mail campaign is that it can be put together in a very short period of time. Because campaigns are sometimes thrown together at a moment's notice, it's especially important to pay attention to quality control. Be sure to include a proofreading and testing stage in each e-mail campaign. —Tim Kiss, manager of enterprise direct marketing, HoneyBaked Ham of Georgia

E-mail addresses can be notoriously difficult to collect and even harder to collect accurately. To make sure that customers give you correct information more often, offer them more value, such as follow-up on existing orders, monthly offers or special discounts. —Tim Kiss, manager of enterprise direct marketing, HoneyBaked Ham of Georgia

Responsibilities: Tim Kiss oversees HoneyBaked Ham’s catalog, Web site and retail direct marketing operations. A great save: In 1999, HoneyBaked Ham relied for the first time on an outside vendor for product fulfillment. A glitch in the vendor’s process caused almost one-third of HoneyBaked Ham’s orders to go unfulfilled. Kiss took control of the situation, and he and his team convinced HoneyBaked Ham’s upper management to mail apology letters to customers in an attempt to retain as many of them as possible; and to mail prospect catalogs to offset the customers they couldn’t retain. “In the end, our catalog production and circulation budgets that

Shorten the number of questions on your Web site's customer registration. Customers don't want to answer a long list of questions. This will make it easier to collect the customer information you need. —Tim Kiss, manager of enterprise direct marketing, The HoneyBaked Ham Co.

Proof creative elements internally as well as with a proofreader. It's also important to verify that your creative elements make sense to someone not involved with the program. —Tim Kiss, manager of enterprise direct marketing at The HoneyBaked Ham Co.

By Noelle Buoncristiano Four tactics for multichannel success. Today's multichannel merchants continually are searching for viable channel-integration solutions — a seamless blend across the key points of customer interaction, including catalogs, Web sites, retail stores and kiosks. "Providing seamless integration communicates a consistent message to consumers and results in higher transaction values," note the authors of the LakeWest Group's Fifth Annual POS Benchmarking Survey 2004. But as most catalogers will tell you, achieving that seamless blend across all sales channels is more difficult than it appears to be. Following are a few tactics that can help you make the most