By Mark on Jun 11, 2008 in Direct Mail, Featured, Marketing, Process, Strategy, Testing | 0 Comments
You plan for offensive operations, while you prepare to play defense. You'll find this concept in both warfare and sports, and it's applicable in business as well.
I much prefer playing offense, because that's where you score and generate revenues. A strong business offensive plan also limits the amount of places you'll need to prepare to play defense, freeing up more resources for--you guessed it--playing more offense.
By Mark on Jan 28, 2008 in Database marketing, Featured, Process, Testing | 0 Comments
I've recently received several direct response efforts that are unfortunately poor examples of our science and craft. But they provide some important lessons that we should all take into account when preparing our next campaigns, whether they be acquisition, retention or winback efforts.
The two efforts I'm going to write about appear to suffer from at least one flaw that I try to address with clients and employees. I call it "fingertips."
By that, I mean that the nuts and bolts and detail of the marketing effort or analysis need to flow from the written page or the computer monitor through your eyes, be processed by your brain and then exit via your fingertips to the email, instant message, Excel spreadsheet, etc. It's not about forwarding the print production schedule you get from your printer or assigning the analysis of the media plan to your least-experienced employee because it's tedious. Having "fingertips" means you know the detail because you've not only seen it, but processed it and then had it exit via your keyboard.
I didn't see the "fingertips" of the marketing managers in these efforts. Al Pacino, in his famous rant at Kevin Spacey in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross would have put it more bluntly.
"Where did you learn your trade?"
By Mark on Jan 27, 2008 in Advertising, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Inserts, Marketing, Testing | 1 Comment
For the first time in a long time I took a few minutes to run through the Valpak co-op mailing I received last week.
After a few minutes of looking at the offers, I came up with a short list of things to consider if you're using Valpak (or other co-ops) as a marketing channel. The [...]
By Mark on Jan 6, 2008 in Analytics, Online, Optimization, Testing | 0 Comments
A client recently asked me "who can tell me if my website is working well for me?" My immediate response was "your customers and your browsers." This, of course, triggered a conversation of how it was possible to talk to tens of thousands of (usually) anonymous visitors, collect their insights and then translate that to [...]
By Mark on Dec 11, 2007 in Email marketing, Online, Process, Testing | 0 Comments
Today's example of online marketing waste, which probably went awry someplace in the 4% of process (see Focus on the Four in our featured article section), comes from Samsung in the form of a promotion for their new Blackjack II cellular phone, which is available to subscribers of AT&T's wireless network.
A couple of reasons why [...]
