Dear Dr. pROfIt: My CEO recently asked me to run an analysis of our dollars per channel metric, one that measures how much our customer
Retailers encounter moments of truth that make or break their sales and marketing effectiveness multiple times each day. How they inter
I’ve put part 3 of my online networking series on hold until next week so I can bring you some timely, post-Thanksgiving tips for increasing holiday sales right now.
Want to add some revenue before we say goodbye to 2008? Try the following:
1. Add an extra mailing before the end of the year. Try it this way: After your last mailing is complete, mail one more catalog just to your hotline buyers, those who just responded to your last mailings of the year. If it’s too late to get your printer involved, grab some of your bounceback and office copy catalogs, and mail
These days, most B-to-B catalogers have a good handle on just how many new customers they’re acquiring through their online marketing efforts. With matchback and allocation systems in place, most can determine the results of all their integrated online efforts vs. their offline efforts. This is necessary to allocate sales to the proper marketing effort.
The challenges arise when deciding what to mail buyers who have chosen to do business with you online. A percentage of such buyers will gladly tell you what they want if you ask them, but not all will. You could just mail everyone everything. But that’s likely to
I recently heard an interesting statistic. According to JupiterResearch, Americans now spend the same amount of time using the Internet as they do watching TV — 14 hours per week on average.
Hearing this led me to pause for a moment and reflect on how old I must be, and how things have changed. It seems like just yesterday to many of us B-to-B direct marketers that we started hearing about “the Web.” It was the early ’90s. Today I realize that my wireless network of home computers (I have three) are on 24/7, ready for instant use at any time.
I
With recent increases in postage and paper costs, many B-to-B catalogers are pushing harder and deeper into the online marketing frontier. It’s amazing to see many of the new technological innovations in online marketing (e.g., video, webcasts, podcasts and Google search changes, among others), the improvement in performance metrics and measurement, and good, old direct marketing creativity that we all know and love! The question is: Where are you on the learning curve? Where are you on delivering online results?
Today, if you’re not receiving more than half of your B-to-B orders online, with few exceptions, you’re performing below average. Also, if you’re not
Every year, family and friends gather to watch the Super Bowl — this year was an especially good game, at least if you’re a Giants fan. But for many viewers, the best part has nothing to do with what’s happening on the field. It’s all about those commercials. And each year we marketers love to watch the ads and figure out which one we think is the best.
This year I noticed something different. I was struck by how many of them I didn’t get. I mean, I just didn’t “get it.” Thirty or more seconds went by, and I had no clue
Last week, I got an e-mail from a former student of mine telling me he was starting a company with mail order as one of its distribution channels. He had a neat idea, and I thought the items he was about to sell had merit. Clearly he had his product line thought out well.
It pleases me to no end when this happens: a budding entrepreneur, about to stake his claim in the business world. Then I get the question that I dread: “How do I buy a list so I can grow the business?” How do I buy a list? Oh man, haven’t I
All of us are struggling these days to find new tactics to increase our catalog response rates. With postal rates increased, we’ve all been working hard to reduce our catalog costs. But how many times can we cut trim size, reduce paper weights or cull our mailing list? What new tactics are there to help increase mail and e-mail response rates to help us offset those higher postal costs?
Many B-to-B catalogers have tested sending an e-mail announcing the arrival of a new catalog. I’ve seen some success with these programs, especially when the e-mail is well-targeted, relevant, properly executed and contains
I’m in the process of digesting an insider’s report by Universal McCann that projects growth for direct mail and the Internet in 2007 to be 7.5 percent and 15 percent respectively.
This means that direct marketing growth is once again estimated to outpace other areas of advertising.
This forecast further reinforces my opinion that there’s never been a greater time to be in our industry. So if you’re a pure-play Internet marketer, there’s never been a better time to increase your business by starting a catalog. If you’re already a cataloger, according to a recent Web poll on CatalogSuccess.com, 76 percent of you saw
