• Strive for the highest levels of ZIP+4 ™ coding for your mailings.  Not only do you benefit from postage savings, but you also can improve performance more than 100 percent, on average, on records that were previously noncoded.
• Utilize proprietary correction services that correct the missing  or invalid secondary or unit numbers.  Analysis has shown that mailings without apartment numbers that are destined for multiunit or high-rise buildings perform at 40 percent to 50 percent below their expected achievement.
• Employ NCOA services regularly and as close to your mail date as possible to meet USPS Move Update requirements and improve your response.  Mailing to an old address has shown to decrease performance up to 25 percent of what is average for the campaign.
• Utilize the USPS ACS ™ service to identify additional movers.  Over the course of a year, this will help identify 2 percent to 3 percent more moves.
• Take advantage of special suppression files to eliminate undesirable records from your mailings, such as deceased, prison, old address and undeliverable as addressed files.  Doing so will remove records that generally underperform in your mailing.
• Use industry suppression files from the Direct Marketing  Association and Catalog Choice to eliminate consumers who have chosen to opt out of direct-mail offerings.
  Eliminate records from your mailing with potential deliverability  problems.
• Use of a ranking tool can identify the poor-quality addresses in your mailing that tend to perform at 30 percent or less of the performance of the overall mailing.

A Baby Boomer turns 64 about every 7 seconds – and at 77 million strong, they are the largest cohort in this country.  Age impacts the way the human mind processes information. As our minds age, we become increasingly prone to adoption of information in a storytelling format vs bulleted features. 

A recent study polled corporate marketing chiefs with budgets of under and over $1M to determine differences in their marketing strategies. The results – large-scale marketing budgets are driven more by a Big Idea than focus on ROI. 

Some will say it’s always been that way – others say the day of accountability is at hand and soon every budget dollar will be tracked back for effectiveness or simply not approved again. I think the Boomers will have their say – and they want Stories.

That reality may be challenged over the next decade without some major changes in how direct mail gets delivered – the USPS business model may well push direct mail right out of the marketing picture entirely. The effects of an entity with monopoly privledges and Congressional oversight are clear – higher prices and lower services. Consumers and business are responding – 2007 mail volume of 212 billion pieces became 177 billion in 2009 with a projected decline of another 15 billion pieces in 2010. I would say that business model isn’t working anymore. 

Is direct mail dead?  Far from it – even at 150 billion pieces going thru the system in 2010 (more likely than 162), that’s still a significant business waiting to be right-sized and restructured to better suit the economic realities of today.  I wouldn’t bet against the governments’ ability to push that elephant into the tarpit however – would you?

Also mentioned is the intention of getting the price from $35 to $20 and eventually $10.  If there was ever a time to sell that student bookstore stock you’ve been holding on to, now’s the time.  We all knew the day would come when consumer electronics would reach the pricepoint of ubiquity, but I think most people expected to see laptops drop to the $99 price range before plumetting all the way to “Starbucks gift card” territory.  Leave it to India to drag the planet kicking and screaming into the future of efficiency – first the cheapest car on the planet, now the cheapest laptop.  In the dictionary under “outsourcing” I think there’s a hotlink to India.

It’s an exciting time to be in the Technology business – and realizing that India has simply dropped the pebble in the water with this announcement – the ripples we’ll experience in the following 6, 8, 12 months from every major laptop manufacturer will be intriguing to see play out on store shelves across America.  Question: does India manufacture flat-screen TVs?

The

Although fairly comprehensive in scope, that definition lacks one key component of Integrated Marketing that really brings home the ROI.  Not only should it employ the market data generated by efforts for the benefit of sales, pricing, etc – the data should funnel back into the overall campaign elements to better inform targeting efforts overall – creating a continuous cycle of campaign improvement and a very long run-on sentence.

Integrated Marketing is about better leveraging your Marketing budget investment for improved results across the communication channels and beyond.  It’s a single message broadcast in many channels – online and offline – in the social, sales, marketing and PR spaces.  It requires customizing that message to suit the medium – and it requires intelligent design to incorporate measurement throughout.  It’s often complicated – and it’s always worth the effort.

Many companies wonder what percentage of revenue should be allocated to fund Marketing efforts – and that answer is rarely straightforward or simple to answer. Research suggests an inverse relationship between company size and marketing allocation, with the variable for a proper marketing budget between 2% and 10% of sales.

As this is an important subject and clients are keen to get a concise, easily digestable answer, my pat response is this: the correct percentage (or amount) should correspond with what you’re looking to accomplish as a company. Big, hairy growth goals require adequate Marketing dollars to achieve – flat or declining sales require less.

In the final analysis, there is no magic number that will ensure adequate Marketing support and product sales success for your firm – that percentage is unique and will require some test-and-learn efforts to arrive at over time.

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated

Business-class Telepresence Environment

A telepresence system is a high-end videoconferencing system and service usually employed by enterprise-level corporate offices. Telepresence conference rooms use state-of-the art room designs, video cameras, displays, sound-systems and processors, coupled with high-to-very-high capacity bandwidth transmissions.

Typical uses of the various technologies described above include videocalling or videoconferencing on a one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many basis for personal, business, educational, deaf Tele-Relay and tele-medical, diagnostic and rehabilitative use or services. New services utilizing videocalling and videoconferencing, such as personal videocalls to inmates incarcerated in penitentiaries, and videoconferencing to resolve airline engineering issues at maintenance facilities, are being created or evolving on an on-going basis

However, business at its heart is all about relationships, and there’s still no substitute for face-to-face contact when it comes to building those ties. Not only are you missing out on potential revenue by staying behind the desk, you’re also robbing yourself of continuing education, moral support, industry intelligence, personal fulfillment, and the serendipitous business opportunities that only arise when you take a few moments to meet someone new.

I’ll be curious to see how many business exchanges take place via the new iPhone 4 Facetime video feature – will that become the new ‘commonplace’ occurance in every Starbucks? Video in any form is a great supplement to personal meetings – but for my relationship dollar, you just can’t beat being there.