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Understanding Marketing History

One of our favorite quotes is “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

In a discussion with the members of LinkedIn’s Direct Mail Group, author Dave Lewis, reviewed the history of broadcast faxes as an advertising medium and made some interesting comparisons with e-mail. He concluded that e-mail works great for [...]

Direct Mailing Trends

Target Marketing Magazine examined the last year and a half of the Who’s Mailing What Archive and concluded a few trends.

Repetition

Repeat mail was up 12 percent in 2010. It now represents a full quarter of all direct mail. The reasons include mailers being budget-conscious and staying with efforts that are clearly working.

Gifts

Mailing premiums has increased [...]

USPS January 2011 Price Increases

The United Postal Service (USPS) will increase prices on January 2, 2011. The most noticeable will be the increase in the price of a first class stamp from $0.44 to $0.46. The post office is doing many things to help. They are releasing some new forever stamps in October. The stamps, featuring evergreen trees, can [...]

Political Campaigns

On November 2, 2010 we the people are going to elect 36 U.S. Senators, all 435 House of Representatives and 37 governors. During the coming days, many political candidates and interested parties will use direct mail because it is effective.

The USPS offers special services and some processing differences for political endorsements. Depending on the circumstances, [...]

Tips to Make Direct Mail Work Smarter

Direct mail remains a vital component of marketers’ programs. Direct mail is becoming more sophisticated and is capable of delivering higher results. Late last year Randy Spurrier shared his thoughts about ways to improve mail’s results in a post on IMedia Connection. Some direct marketers are transitioning away from “blast” campaigns and are moving toward [...]

Timing

DMNews ran a great article titled “When marketing, travel through the four dimensions of time” by Paul Mandeville. They say “timing is everything”, it may not be everything but it sure can play a big part in the success of marketing efforts.

Mr. Mandeville suggests that in a marketing campaign timing has four facets:

Timing  (Recency)– the [...]

Get It Done!

Many people enjoy swapping stories of disasters, but the “saves” are so much more common. Mailing professionals often catch errors on a proof, suggest a redesign that saves handling or postage, fix mistakes on printed pieces with creative ingenuity and maybe some stickers, notice that the list is wrong, catch a huge [...]

Example of Successful Multichannel Strategy

Practical Ecommerce tells about Fairytale Brownies’ online sales being primarily powered by printed catalogs mailed to approximately 1.8 million households annually. Fairytale Brownies expects to gross roughly $8 million in 2009, with around 60 percent of its revenue from online sales.

“The brownie gift catalog really drives a large portion of our business. Although we do [...]

Reasons to Mail Now

There are no filters removing printed mail from good old-fashioned mailboxes.

Nobody likes an empty mailbox! Mail volume has decreased, a really good offer to the right person has a great chance of standing out.

Do More Marketing with Less Money

Stagger mailing schedules (200 piece mailings still qualify for presorted postage discounts)
Think about new ways to get more from your customer list

Would you tell a different story to someone based on where they live or the business is located?
Would you offer a deeper discount if they have not purchased from you in the last year?
Would [...]