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.

Ms. Jean Gianfagna is tired of getting Mr. Gean Gianfagna’s mail. When I started a marketing consulting business in Cleveland in the early 1990s, someone who was compiling a direct mail list of small businesses made a typo in my name. I became Gean Gianfagna on this list and the compiler assumed that I was a man. It’s hard to believe, but nearly 20 years later, I still get direct mail addressed to Mr. Gean Gianfagna. This address has been so wrong for so long that I instantly discard any mailing that uses it. But it’s more than an ongoing annoyance: It’s an example of poor list hygiene and bad marketing strategy.

The phones are ringing, web traffic is up, and the sales manager is telling everyone you’re a marketing genius. Your business-to-business lead generation campaign is a success! But before you break out the bubbly, remember that getting prospects to express interest in a product or service can be the easy part of business-to-business marketing. Converting those leads to sales is often a lengthy and complex process. Here’s how to build a smart marketing strategy that engages B-to-B prospects and gets them to say “yes.”

The 2010 Response Rate Trends Report is out from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and if direct marketing is part of your smart marketing strategy, this report provides valuable response and cost metrics you can use to benchmark the success of your direct marketing campaigns. Here are the key findings.

If you’re a business-to-business marketer who uses trade shows to get leads for new business, you probably send direct mail and email marketing to prospects after the show to convert prospects to customers.

Lead generation via trade shows can be an important part of a smart marketing strategy, but if leads aren’t well qualified at the outset – and frequently re-qualified if they stay on your prospect database over time – your post-show direct mail and email campaigns could be a waste of your marketing resources. Here’s a case study in how NOT to do it.

Direct marketing can be one of the most powerful elements of a smart marketing strategy, especially if you need to generate leads for a field sales force.
But strategic errors can doom your direct marketing campaign to failure. Here are seven common mistakes in direct marketing strategy and ways to avoid them.

Is direct marketing part of your smart marketing strategy? Here are 10 tried-and-true principles for developing a high-impact creative approach for your next direct marketing campaign.

Loyal customers are a marketer’s best source of new sales and referrals. That’s why smart marketers treat their best customers like gold, and why earning customer loyalty is the goal of every smart marketing strategy. Except at Toyota. Their recent direct mail campaign to a loyal Toyota customer broke many of the rules of effective direct marketing and harmed a 25-year customer relationship. Here’s why this campaign failed and what Toyota should have done instead.

If your sales team often complains about the leads they receive from your direct marketing campaigns – or if you’re frustrated with lackluster lead follow-up and low conversion rates – you may be unwittingly committing one of the seven deadly sins of direct marketing lead generation.

Here are the common mistakes business-to-business marketers make with direct marketing lead generation and tips on how to avoid them.

What should you offer to generate higher response to your direct marketing campaign? Here are ideas for producing orders, generating leads, and driving retail traffic through an effective direct marketing offer.