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Direct Marketing

Gianfagna Strategic Marketing / Blog  / Direct Marketing (Page 5)

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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40 Questions for a Smarter Marketing Strategy

Are you getting a good return on your investment in marketing? Could it be better? One way to find out is to conduct a top-to-bottom review of your entire marketing plan to determine what’s working and what isn’t. This process is sometimes called a marketing audit. I’m often asked to guide audits as an independent marketing consultant and I recently shared advice on how to do an audit effectively. What specific factors should you assess in a marketing audit? Here are 40 questions I recommend for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing 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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10 Lessons for Blogging Success: Year 1 as a B2B Blogger

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool and an increasingly popular tactic in a smart marketing strategy, especially for business-to-business (B2B) marketers. I know, because I launched this blog to promote my Cleveland-based marketing consulting business exactly a year ago. Here are 10 lessons I’ve learned in my first year as a B2B blogger and three ways blogging has boosted my business. ...

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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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What’s Driving Social Media Success? Traditional Marketing

Social media is all the rage in marketing, and with good reason. Just look at the numbers. Can you think of any other communications platform with more than half a billion users like Facebook? Or another forum where more than 90 million messages are posted every day, like Twitter? As people have flocked to social media, so have marketers. But new research by DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research published in eMarketer reveals a surprising fact: The driving force behind social media success is outreach by brand marketers via campaigns...

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How Bad Direct Mail Can Sink a Customer Win-Back Strategy

Verizon says they want me back. But based on the direct mail package they just sent me, I don’t think they mean it. Reactivating lapsed customers is an important marketing strategy for every business. It’s easier to reengage a former customer than create a new one. If you’re using direct marketing to win former customers back, however, you’d better do it right. Here’s how a major marketer blew a customer win-back opportunity with poor direct mail, and five lessons for more effective win-back direct marketing. ...

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Secrets of the Mailroom Trash Can: 3 Lessons for B2B Marketing

There’s a giant trash can in the mailroom of my office building in Cleveland, Ohio. Every day, it fills up with discarded business mail. Sometimes I peek in the can to see what my fellow tenants have thrown out, and it’s quite revealing. Here’s what I’ve observed as a casual mailroom trash inspector, and three valuable lessons from this experience for business-to-business marketers who want to develop a smart marketing strategy....

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