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Direct marketing

Articles and advice about online direct response tactics, including direct mail and email integration, virtual catalogues, e-postcards, target marketing, audience segmentation, list cleansing and more.

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MARKETING JOBS
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Holiday Shoppers Take Mobile Barcode Scanning Mainstream

  [...]

As They Ramp up Social Commerce, Will Brands Remember the Social Piece?

Last week Proctor & Gamble began selling Pampers diapers and wipes - along with an assortment of other products such as Tide, Oral B, Olay and Pantene - through its Pampers Facebook page. P&G has sold its products before via Facebook, namely its pre-sale of Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max; this initiative, though, it   [...]

Discount Site Groupon Goes Hyper Local

Groupon, a site that offers deep discounts for local services such as restaurants, auto detailing, spas and holistic healing, is refining its segmentation even further: in some markets, such as Washington, DC, it has begun offering hyper local discounts. Instead of a coupon served up to the entire region of Northern Virginia, the District and southern Maryland, viewers can ask to see only, say, coupons from southern Maryland. Launched in November 2008 in  [...]

Local Service Companies Intrigued by Pay Per Call

Local service companies such as attorneys, dentists and credit and debt counseling firms are primed to embrace pay per call advertising platforms next year. Pay-per-call models in general are poised to experience explosive growth in 2010, according to Telmetrics. If 2009's activity is any guide, it will be local campaigns driving adoption next year - the number of local search pay-per-call advertising programs the company monitors tripled from January 2009 to June 2009,   [...]

Cox Keeps ValPak Now That It's Digital

Cox Enterprises has decided to keep Largo, Fla.-based Valpak in its corporate family after announcing last year that it was exploring its sale. A number of factors no doubt went into this decision, including the likely dearth of offers during the sharp recession. However Valpak has begun to aggressively enter new forms of media - and Cox has said it believes it has a promising future   [...]

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Senate Sniffs Out Shady Direct Marketing

A recently released Senate Commerce Committee staff report is taking aim at the dark side of 'aggressive' online direct marketing, and has singled out shady and controversial practices by three companies - Affinion, Vertru and Webloyalty, in addition to the hundreds of retailers that have used their services. The report details purchase procedures in which consumers rarely realize they are signing up for a monthly cl  [...]

ROI, New Options for Video Email Marketing

A business case - complete with tangible ROI - for video email marketing is taking shape, accompanied by new offerings in the marketplace. However, because this rich multimedia twist on traditional email is relatively new, there are several caveats when developing a pricing strategy, according to a new report (pdf) by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The ability to embed vid  [...]

FDA Declares War on Fruity Cigarettes

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is exercising its recently acquired regulatory authority over the tobacco industry by targeting online ads for cigarette products that are aimed at youth. In this case, the government agency has sent warning letters to several companies selling flavored cigarettes through their websites, directing them to either cease their marketing or sales or bring the products in  [...]

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Netflix Model Channels High-End Fashion

A new website is now offering women the chance to rent up to 160 different designer dress styles for a fraction of their retail cost - and then return them after they've been worn. In a model similar to that used by Netflix, Rent the Runway is a rent-by-mail service that loans expensive dresses from designers like Diane Von Furstenberg and Proenza Schouler for about one-tenth their in-store cost. The site, which finishes testing this week, also is  [...]

Industry Buzz & Snippets: 09/21/09

Ad Networks and Analytics: 10 social media strategies from top brands. Seven reasons to ramp up paid search. AdMob vies for mobile advertising network leadership. Agenci  [...]

VSS Forecast: Comms Spending to Top $1 Trillion

Total communications spending will decline 1% in 2009 to $882.6 billion, but will grow 3.6% per year over the next five years to more than $1 trillion,  according to a report from private-equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS). This growth will make communications the third fastest-growing sector (behind mining and construction) of the US economy through 2013,   [...]

Swiss Postal Service Brings Mail to 'Net

Last month the Swiss postal service launched Swiss Post Box, a program that enables subscribers to receive scans of certain snail-mail messages via email. Upon receiving the scans in their inbox, users can decide which they want to openyg, then read the full message online. Swiss Post Box is powered by Earth Class Mail, a Seattle-based firm that serves tens of thousands of global subscribers. This is the first time it's licensed its technology to a postal service,   [...]

Coupious Couples With Local Merchants for On-Demand Coupons

Coupious, a mobile marketing platform that delivers on-demand, location-based coupons to smartphone users, is testing out its service at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. After downloading Coupious from the App Store (for iPhone and iPod Touch) or the Android market (for T-Mobile G1s), smartphone users browse deals in their immediate location (or up to 50 miles away), identified using the phone's GPS technology. Once they find a  [...]

Mobile Marketing Growth Stunted by Per-Message Fees

Per-message fees may kill the business model for SMS and MMS-based marketing, concluded a panel at the CTIA Wireless 2009 Mobile Life conference. 24% of consumers who have received an mobile-based offer respond to such messages,  according to a July survey by the Direct Marketing Association. Given that more than 2.6 billion text messages are sent every  [...]

Case Study: Crutchfield's eNewsletter Makeover

Email marketing faces numerous obstacles: spam filters, high bounce rates and a generation of consumers that are inattentive to marketing messages that do not directly address their interests, or allow for external control, organization, and management. And many marketers do not capitalize on the "key marketing moment" of the first interaction -- or the welcome email -- with just 76% of the l  [...]

Offers.com: Another Day, Another Deal Site

Vertive, an Austin-based performance marketing company, launched a search engine for online deals and coupons, writes Search Engine Land. The site, Offers.com, provides coupons and deals from more than 1,000 merchants. Each is classified by product or service into more than 150 categories with the option of further categorizing these into deals, coupon co  [...]

Nike Adds SocNet Sharing Feature to Marketing Emails

Beginning with a February 12 inbox blast, Nike incorporated a ShareThis button to the bottom of email messages promoting its Lunartrainer+iD product line. ShareThis enables users to share portions of an email -- or website -- with friends across the networks they use, giving otherwise static messages a potentially "viral" quality. It and functionalities like it are dubbed "share with your network" (SWYN) links. News of Nike's SWYN inclusion was reported by the   [...]

Email, Search & Display Show Strongest Online Performance

A large majority of marketing executives say email, search marketing, and display ads are their company's top performing advertising channels, and many plan to increase spending on them in 2009, according to a survey from Datran Media.   [...]

Link between Subject Line Length, Email Clicks Weaker than Thought

Though shorter email subject lines correlate with higher open and click rates, subject-line word order and content may be just as important to email performance, according to research by Epsilon.   [...]

26% of Small Biz Raises Ad Spend, Precipitating Online Growth

97% of US small business owners are concerned about the economy, but 26% nonetheless plan to spend more on advertising -- especially online. Another 60% plan to spend about the same as in 2008, according to a report from Ad-ology Research (  [...]

Google: Checkout Icon Increases Ad Click-Thru 10%

On its Google Checkout page, Google claims a "Checkout" icon can increase ad click-through by 10%. (At least one client, Fred Lerner of e-commerce network Ritz Interactive, claims the Checkout icon increased clickthroughs by 23%.) What's more, Google Checkout users purportedly convert 40% more than shoppers that haven't used Checkout in the past. Google Checkout  [...]

'Best' Holiday Ads: Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy

Asked which retailer has the best holiday TV commercial, consumers ranked Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Macy's, and Kohl's as favorites, according to a survey conducted for the NRF's Retail Advertising and Marketing Association by BIGresearch. Other retailers on the top 10 list include Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Old Navy, and Toys "R" Us. (See   [...]

UK Shoppers Flock to 'Net before Christmas

UK online spend last month surged 26% from October -- and 16% from November of last year, according to figures released from the Interactive Media In Retail Group (IMRG) Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index on Tuesday. The 26% surge in November sales was the highest of the year,   [...]

Only 16% of Students Read Marketing Email

Today's high-school and college students started using email at an average age of 13. Most have had an email address for 8 years and have about 2.4 email addresses each, yet 61% say they 'never' or 'hardly ever' read marketing emails, says a survey from eROI, MarketingCharts reports. The research, which was designed to uncover how students communi  [...]

55% of CMOs Are Disinterested in Social Networks

Despite the cultural phenomenon that Facebook and MySpace have become in the past few years, 55% of top-brand CMOs said they're not too interested (22%), or not interested at all (33%), in incorporating these and similar social-networking sites into their marketing strategies, according to a survey by Epsilon, MarketingCharts   [...]