When Direct Mail Can Still be More Effective than Email

The WSJ made an excellent point in a piece posted last week about the continued importance of direct mail in the marketing mix of the average small business owner. The article goes on to cite examples of real small businesses who after briefly succumbing to the lure of saving money by cutting their partnership with the USPS, quickly re-instated their previously successful direct mail campaign. Email sounds great on paper but for most small business, email lists are still an…  (Read on)

When Great Subject Lines Fail to Deliver

Today I received an email with the subject, “I would like to take you to lunch.” Quick and to the point, it got my attention and made me open it. The problem was once I got inside there was a form letter from a man I do not know trying to sell me something that I could not immediately identify. So I deleted it. Writing great subject lines, like headlines, is a skill. Remember, these are the attention getters that make…  (Read on)

Respecting the Opt Out List

In honor of the death of John Jay Daly, former president of the Direct Marketing Association and  founder of the program that allows consumers to opt out of direct mail marketing campaigns, I thought it be valuable to revisit the topic of email and direct mail marketing preferences. The most prevalent misinformation about e-mailing lists is that they are readily available and cheap. When businesses started abandoning dmail in favor of email, most of them argued that it would be…  (Read on)

Increase in Advertising Spending = Recovering Economy or Desperation?

About six months ago I started encouraging clients to take advantage of the pull back in advertising spend to make their dollar go further by taking advantage of greatly reduced rates. My clients don’t do a lot of display but the same mantra held true for most of the available media at the time. Over the summer I noticed an uptick in marketing spend in my business serving the SMB space and subsequently confirmed the same was true with my…  (Read on)

Jenkins' The Truth About Email Marketing Worth Reading if You're Mailing

Although I started it over a month ago, I finally got around to finishing Simms Jenkins’ The Truth About Email Marketing earlier this afternoon. As far as nitty-gritty topics go, this is about a nichey as you can get but Jenkins kindly divided his thoughts into 49 different points (I think there are actually only about 40 here if you consider some of the overlap but I wasn’t hired as the editor of this text) to make it easy to pick…  (Read on)