Direct Marketing Links

Email Trends through 2013
From our friend, Daryl Clark of Internet Search Marketing, comes this link to a webinar (and as an added bonus, a white paper from the Economist) that provides trends and best practices for email marketing. Very valuable info!

Green Direct Mail
Chris Hansen posts an excellent re-cap of the recently announced Green Marketing Coalition on his MarketGreener blog. It gave me some food for thought and is a nice complement to my post yesterday on the same topic.

Deceptive Direct Mail?
Another direct mail topic--this one from the Direct Creative Blog. They've presented an example of an official-looking package with quasi-governmental and tax implications, that, as a matter of fact is a mortgage solicitation. Blog author, Dean Rieck, poses the question--is this deceptive direct marketing or a clever sales tactic? I've posted my opinion by commenting on his blog...

Leading with Your Heart, and Succeeding in Business
Almost directly opposite from the type of misleading advertising discussed above, is this post from Lewis Green. He discusses his "business model that places people's happiness before all other business metrics, including ROI, profits and revenues." Hint--not only is this an effective way to do business, but you'll sleep great at night, too.

Real-Time Data Mining
A very interesting perspective can be found on the Customer World blog. The author, Sivaraman Swaminathan, discusses the need for companies to act quickly--and appropriately--on customer transaction information. I look forward to the day when companies use what they know about us to really serve us (and not just to sell to us, or in the case on the blog-post--collect from us).

Have a great weekend! I'm planning on enjoying some good Oregon microbrews (even though I'm a wine lover, but heck, the Brewfest is this weekend!).