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 six lessons from their direct marketing success story that you can apply to your smart marketing strategy.

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.

What’s the best way to maximize the return on your marketing investment? Take a step back from your day-to-day marketing projects and conduct a marketing audit.

A marketing audit is a top-to-bottom assessment of your entire marketing program, from branding to tactics. The beginning of a new year or the start of a new budget period is an ideal time to do it.

How do you conduct a marketing audit? And how can an audit help you develop a smart marketing strategy? Here are some answers.

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 mail in its smart marketing strategy, and five lessons for every B2B marketer using direct mail to generate leads from C-suite executives.

Do you market products and services to businesses? If large companies are your target market, it can be tough to break in as a new supplier. Here are 10 tips for a smart sales and marketing strategy that can help you land a big client.

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 in traditional marketing channels. Here’s what the study showed, and why this insight could be important to your smart marketing 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.

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.”