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Direct Mail Marketing

Gianfagna Strategic Marketing / Blog  / Direct Mail Marketing (Page 3)

4 Things My Idea File Taught Me about Great Direct Mail

Most marketing agencies keep an idea file of creative, interesting promotions by other marketers that serve as inspiration for new marketing campaigns. Since we’re moving soon to new offices (a new suite in the same building in Cleveland, Ohio), I decided to take the opportunity to weed out our idea file, especially our massive collection of direct mail. I tossed a lot of old stuff, but I was surprised at how many direct marketing campaigns created five, ten, or even 20 years ago still pack a powerful marketing punch. I wondered: Why do...

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A Lesson in Bad Direct Mail List Preparation–from the USPS

I am a born and bred direct marketer. I learned about direct mail from the legends of the industry – Ed Mayer, John Yeck, Paul Sampson, and Rose Harper – at a seminar for college marketing students sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association in the 1970s. And though I often recommend social media and other marketing strategies to clients of my marketing agency, direct mail is still my first love. Like all direct marketing practitioners, I’ve been dismayed to watch the U.S. Postal Service struggle for survival. As the organization...

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Social Media Marketing Success | Smart Marketing Cleveland

For Social Media Success, Think Like a Direct Marketer

Clients of my marketing agency often want help with social media marketing. So I’ve been researching best practices and using my own experience as a blogger and social media marketer to help clients integrate social media into a smart marketing strategy. And guess what? I’ve discovered a simple secret about social media: To achieve success, you need to think like a direct marketer....

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13 Creative Ideas for Your Next B2B Direct Mail Campaign

Smart marketers know that direct marketing can play a crucial role in a business-to-business lead generation marketing strategy. But creating a direct mail campaign that makes it past the mailroom and the administrative assistant to the desk of a business decision-maker – and captures the executive’s attention – can be a real marketing challenge. Here are 13 ideas for creative direct mail formats – some familiar and some you may not have thought of – that can help get your next B2B mailing past the gatekeepers and entice business executives to open...

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4 Lessons Big Direct Marketers Can Learn from Small Mailers

The marketing budget for a local, service-based business is a tiny fraction of what a global company spends on marketing. Yet small marketers with limited resources sometimes outshine the big guys when it comes to marketing effectiveness, especially in direct mail. Here’s how a regional painting business in Cleveland, Ohio nailed a prospect direct mail campaign with a simple postcard, while Dell, a huge business-to-business marketer, committed several cardinal sins of direct marketing in a B2B direct mail promotion -- plus four lessons for your smart marketing strategy....

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To BRC or Not to BRC? The New Direct Mail Strategy Question

Take a look inside the next direct mail package you receive and you might discover something’s missing: The reply card. Business reply cards (BRCs) and reply forms with postpaid envelopes (BREs) have been core elements of direct mail since the medium began. But they’ve been notably absent from some recent direct marketing campaigns I’ve received. Is this a new trend? A test? A fundamental shift? Here are some insights for your smart marketing strategy....

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7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Strategy with RFM Analysis

Do you know which of your customers are most profitable to your business? Or even how to measure customer profitability? One of the best ways to gauge the value of a customer is to perform a recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) analysis of your customer data. Here’s how RFM analysis works and seven ways you can use insights from RFM for a smart marketing strategy. ...

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How Great Direct Mail Helps a Retailer Win Back Customers

Direct mail is often used to reactivate lapsed customers, but few direct marketers do it well. Instead of a powerful, personalized appeal that rekindles the relationship, they turn the customer off with a generic message, irrelevant content, and a “so what?” offer. But when a direct marketer gets it right, with a highly personalized, data-driven message, a compelling offer, and a warm invitation to re-engage, it’s a thing of marketing beauty. Here’s how a major women’s retailer – Chico’s – nailed it with their customer win-back direct mail campaign, and...

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The 7 Most Important Things to Do with a Sales Lead

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers often use such tactics as direct marketing, e-marketing, advertising, trade shows, and web marketing to generate sales leads. But a smart lead generation marketing strategy goes well beyond the creation of the marketing campaign. If your goal is to build a relationship with a business prospect, increase your sales conversion rate, and maximize the value of your sales resources, you need a careful plan for what happens after the lead comes in. Here are the seven steps you should take with a marketing-generated sales lead to achieve success....

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Success in a Box: The Power of Dimensional Direct Mail in B2B Marketing

What if you got a real mailbox – a full-size, metal mailbox – sent to you at your office? Would you open it? You bet you would. MSP, a direct marketing services company in Pittsburgh, has been sending real mailboxes to its best prospects for nearly 10 years. I still remember my reaction -- “Wow!” -- when I opened the mailbox I received from MSP in 2004. Six years later, MSP’s mailbox remains the single best example of effective B2B lead generation dimensional mail I’ve ever received. Here’s how MSP deploys dimensional...

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