Links of the Week!

Another week has come to an end -- so time for the weekend!

To get your weekend started, here are our favorite links this week:

Ron Shevlin's Direct Marketing Whims: Ron has a great blog -- and he is really smart and better than that, he's extremely funny. So, we love reading his posts. Our favorite post this week concerns his favorite industry -- banking -- and how two particular marketing channels (branches and online) interact to create satisfied customers. And, further, he makes the point that particular customers need to be able to interact through different channels -- depending upon their specific preferences. Bottom line: all channels are cost centers but are very important to the customer experience. Our take is that no matter what the industry, if you're utilizing all channels to better serve the customer, and taking the time to understand customer preferences, the costs incurred will be money well spent because you'll keep your customers satisfied -- and loyal to your brand.

With our celebration of Earth Day this week, here is a wonderful post from Dan Smolen's Sturdy Roots blog. Dan is a marketing recruiter, and he specializes in in hooking up environmentally conscious companies with like-minded direct marketing professionals. His post this week was a great one about the need for businesses to embrace the concept of virtual office employees -- especially those outside of sales. Both Suzanne and I have been virtual office employees for most of our professional career -- whether in corporate America or self-employed. It's definitely a good thing -- it saves time, wear-and-tear and the environment. Check out this post -- we think you'll like it. Dan gives some great ideas about how to open your mind to allowing more employees to be virtual, and how to do it most effectively.

Mobilestorm's Digital Marketing blog had a very interesting post this week on how internet video is the 21st Century Gold Rush. The post quotes the NY Times as saying: "A Florida-based producer, whose clips are on varied topics like 'how to turn a flashlight into a laser' and “how to simulate a gunshot wound,” earned more than $102,000 in a year from MetaCafe, which pays content owners according to how many views their videos garner." This is wacky -- but there is a whole revenue-generating world out there making bazillionaires with internet videos. Crazy!

Finally -- and selfishly -- take a listen to my favorite acoustic finger-style guitarist, Steve Berger. Steve also happens to be my husband who has just created a site featuring many of his original songs over the past 25 years or so. I'm pretty proud of him as you can probably tell! If any of you would like to become his fans after listening to his music, please feel free to do so (you just sign up with SoundClick as a listener, then select the "Fan+" button from Steve's page)! Take a listen to the song "Time to Live My Life," which is the story of how Steve made the difficult decision to leave his life in Corporate America to pursue his musical passions. I think that this song will resonate with many!

Have a great weekend!

Great Links!

TGIF! And welcome to another edition of the Friday Blog Log. Here are some of our favorite links of the week.

Have you ever wondered what to do when your client calls you and says,"My direct mail campaign is failing miserably!" Instead of hiding under your desk, the Caslon Blog, "Worth Knowing," suggests that you dig right in and perform 3 simple steps to save the day. Here's an interesting point that we sometimes forget when we're in the middle of "life or death direct mail." It's behooves everyone to be successful -- both you and your client. This post brings up the point that it doesn't do the client any good to blame the consultant. It just makes them look like they didn't choose well. Instead, the post suggests that by being proactive, you can bring news -- good or bad-- very quickly to the client. This way you can plan together what steps to take very quickly, and how to implement a plan for immediate improvement.

There has been a lot of talk about what makes for a successful e-mail. We posted on this topic this week, as well, and discussed the importance of the from line, the subject line, and the preview pane. Dean Rieck, in his Direct Creative Blog, talks about creating compelling e-marketing campaigns from a copywriters perspective. On this post, he gives some really great advice on the copy and design elements of an e-mail message. In addition, he talks to the points of keeping the e-mail highly relevant and not too self-promotional. Make sure you don't miss this post for some excellent insight to consider for you next campaign!

We are huge fans of Becky Carroll's blog, Customers Rock! This week, she posted on how Wells Fargo has focused on wowing its customers -- then taking the next step and displaying this philosophy on the walls in the banks. Becky posts an excerpt of this philosophy from the banks website. It is really great to see a large bank take this step. This is definitely setting them apart from their competition, and I've experienced this customer focus myself when I recently switched banks and became a Wells Fargo customer. I've been very pleased with their customer service. They really consistently have gone the extra step for me. So, I know first hand that they aren't simply putting up posters. They really are practicing what they preach in the banking locations.

Finally, it looks like we may have missed out on a fun and interesting blogging event! Damn -- we hate it when that happens. There have been a plethora of posts regarding the Blogger Social '08 which was recently held in New York. I liked Servant Of Chaos, Gavin Heaton's blog post on the postmortem the best. Gavin talks about the huge sense of community that exists between bloggers -- and it's one that we experience every day. The title of the blog, "From Community to Family," sort of sums the whole thing up. Next year we're going!

Have a great weekend!

Friday Blog Log

Welcome to another edition of our Friday Blog Log! Here are our Links of the Week for your enjoyment!

1) Charles Green's Trust Matters: In this Trusted Advisors post, Charles discusses how "issues of the commons show up first in government, later in business, because government by default gets the un-economic propositions. But the issues are increasingly not unique to government." He goes on to state just how trust issues impact business. And if you read our post yesterday, you know that this is an area that we are so very passionate, that every now and again, it causes us to rant. This is a great post, and the comments are very thought-provoking as well.

2) Bob Sullivan's InfoGrow: In Bob's post, he reviews The Association of National Advertisers Conference, where attendees were polled on topics around sales and marketing effectiveness. Another area in which we are passionate is using analytical intelligence in your direct marketing strategy. In this study, attendees polled think that utilizing an analytical approach, along with an effective creative strategy, will be the most important difference makers in 2008. Take a look at the other interesting nuggets that came out of this poll.

3) Paul Paetz AKA The Anti-Marketer: In Paul's most recent post, he discusses "a classic example of what Christensen labels "cramming" in his discussion of disruption theory." He goes on to define this concept: "Basically, incumbents often ignore disruptions until it is too late to do anything about it, and then make valiant attempts to "cram" the disruptive innovations into their existing offering to try to forestall or block the disruption." Paul gives some past examples of cramming that definitely resonated with me. The topic is very intriguing -- and it will be interesting to see if the "cram" that he refers to (the Wall Street Journal recently added a Digg widget to the end of their online articles) proves to be successful. Very interesting reading!

4) Jim Berkowitz's CRM Mastery E-Journal: Here Jim discusses the first of 7 Deadly Claims: Superior Customer Service. Yep, another area of our passion. His comments are dead on. He talks about how making this claim without backing it up by actually having superior customer service can, yes, in fact, be quite deadly. He also discusses how you create excellent customer service by actually wowing your customers, as opposed to stating it all over the place. OK -- I promise not to get started on another rant. We think you'll really enjoy this post, too. It is filled with insightful ideas on the topic, and he's got six more deadly claims to go (actually, 2 and 3 are already waiting for us)!

5) Jaren Angerbauer's post on the Digital Marketing Blog: In this post, Jaren discusses how to effectively manage old or inactive e-mail accounts. With the increasing importance of e-mail marketing in our multi-channel marketing strategy, this post provides some great insight for our consideration.

We hope you enjoy all of these posts as much as we did! And, TGIF, by the way -- don't drink too much eggnog on this Holiday weekend!

Happy Holidays!

CRM Alert: New CRM Blog Added to Keep us Up-to-Date

There's a new blog that is devoted specifically to all of the happenings around Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It's brought to us by the folks at CRMIndustry.com, which is a fabulous website that gives direct marketers the ability to research different CRM applications, and review the different research that is being conducted in the CRM landscape. Their blog is published on a regular basis and it consists of highlights and newsworthy items specific to CRM. For those of us who keep track of these things, this is a nice resource tool to utilize as we assist our clients in building more profitable customer relationships. And, as blog aficionados, we're always happy to see well-written, information-packed blogs available for our reading pleasure.

Carolyn Healey is the creator of the company, the website and the blog, and she has some excellent experience. She is actually a microcosm of what has transpired in CRM over the last 10 years. She started out with a website dedicated to helping service and support centers effectively manage customer relationships. This was before CRM became our favorite acronym. In 2001, she launched CRMIndustry.com and a year later, RecognizeServiceExcellence.com. All of these websites focus on different areas of creating satisfied and loyal customers. This is a subject that we, too, are passionate about, and we applaud Carolyn's efforts.

Take a look at her new blog (actually, she has blogs related to all three of her websites). We think you'll enjoy her posts and insight on the goings-on within CRM.

Using Profitability Models with Data Mining For Direct Marketing Success

As direct marketers, we are constantly searching for better ways to reach our customers and cause a positive reaction (i.e., get them to buy some of our products or services). Recently, CIO Insight published an article that talks about utilizing profitability models in conjunction with data mining to create more profitable customer relationships (our mantra).

The authors state, "We can use these models to come up with very accurate forecasts about how long this customer will stay with us or how many purchases they'll make over the next year. So, use the basic probability model to capture the basic behavior and then bring in data mining to understand why groups of customers with different behavioral tendencies are different from each other." It's a perfect marriage of two scientific marketing tools that when joined together can really boost the success of our direct marketing efforts. It makes our hearts sing to be able to more effectively dig out those profitable customers! More importantly, this gives us the ability to enhance the customer experience by knowing how to treat our valuable customers.

In addition, using profitability modeling with data mining helps us to profile new customers and understand the likely actions of current ones. It simply makes sense to utilize these techniques together. If you're interested in this topic, make sure you read this article -- it's excellent! Also, we have written a Customer Profitability Case Study that you may enjoy.

Web 2.0, the Travel Industry, and the Customer Experience

As mentioned earlier, we are big fans of Web 2.0 and it's increasing impact on marketing. It is quite interesting to see its impact on various industries. For example, the travel industry is now examining how to utilize Web 2.0 principles in helping them to better drive traffic to their websites, increase sales, and decrease overall costs. In fact,the editor of Eye For Travel online magazine, has defined Web 2.0 for his industry as meaning that consumers now rule the web and that user generated web content is the key to increasing traffic, and therefore, increasing sales.

As a result of this, this industry is debating whether or not to continue to pour money into social media phenomena, such as YouTube and Trip Advisor (2 of the fastest growing websites on the internet). Through these sites, consumers can post their opinions of airlines and hotels, and rate them based upon their traveling experiences. The alternative philosophy is to pull back spending in this area and instead simply focus on customer retention techniques.

As you can imagine, there are differing opinions on both of these ideas. We argue that no matter what your opinion is on this debate, companies have to focus first on the customer experience. If the customer experience is not good, it doesn't matter how you market. You will alienate customers either way if their experience is not positive.

For more on this interesting debate, you can attend the Affiliate Marketing Travel Industry Conference in May. It promises to be a conference filled with a rousing debate on the best ways to capture consumers' travel share-of-wallet most effectively.

Have a good weekend!