A Bigger Bang: The New Way to Allocate Marketing Resources By Lisa Hamilton (Direct) Congratulations! You are wisely spending your marketing dollars on single campaigns, and the results show it. But are you looking at the big picture? Can you budget based on total impact rather than cost per reach? ...

In Loyalty, Talk Now, Earn Now, Redeem Now By Bill Brohaugh The best loyalty programs thrive on dialogue. Members agree to provide information--through transactions, survey responses and declared preferences--and marketers respond with offers that not only reward customers for sharing, but also prove that the marketers are listening....

Top Ten: Marketing Ideas To Consider in 2008 By Drew Neisser Few marketing programs completely fulfill one's hopes. In the new year, marketers should avoid over-hyped opportunities to focus on measuring success by one satisfied customer at a time. Here are the key ideas you should consider....

What Direct Merchants Can Learn From Direct Marketers By David Rosen While the most sophisticated direct marketers have applied for decades statistical modeling techniques for teasing out subtle insights to optimize catalog and direct mail investment, the majority of traditional retailers who evolved into equally robust direct merchants through their e-commerce and e-mail investments have remained on the outside looking in....

Nine Tips for Using the Merge/Purge By Gina Valentino (Multichannel Merchant) Contacting customers with a direct mail piece, such as a catalog, requires data processing. Data processing can be as simple as 1) deciding that you want to mail anyone who made a purchase from your company in 2006; ...

Advanced Predictive Modeling Made Simple (Sort Of) By Ozgur Dogan (Multichannel Merchant) Predictive modeling has been widely adopted in the direct marketing industry. So much so, it has become the direct marketer's best friend....

Five Dashboards for Direct Marketers By Michael Talbot (Direct) As direct marketers vie for a more strategic position at the executive table, they have a mighty weapon: numbers....

ZIP+4 + 2 = ZIP+6 By Ray Schultz (Direct) How do you get an entire newspaper chain to improve its targeting? It's not easy when you own 90 papers, ranging from small weeklies to big-town dailies. ...

Study: Women Prefer Direct Mail to E-mail Ads Direct mail is read by 32% more women ages 25-44 than e-mail advertising, according to the Customer Focus 2007 Direct Mail study conducted by Baltimore-based marketing services provider ...

B-to-B Marketing: Getting Through By Ruth P. Stevens (Direct) Business-to-business marketing may not have the glamorous reputation of its consumer cousin. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of hot new ideas to help b-to-b companies better acquire and retain customers. ...

The Future's in the Mail By Crystal Uppercue (Direct) If there's one consistent aspect of direct mail strategy you can count on, it's this: Everything changes. As consumer and donor tastes shift — and they do, regularly — the tactics used to communicate with them should too. ...

Precision Marketing Is a Green Initiative By Jeff Zabin Can an investment in improving customer data analytics to drive precision-marketing effectiveness be considered a green initiative? ...

Making Sense of Customer Value Michele Eggers and Jeff Gilleland If you Google the term “customer value” you will get back 156 MILLION hits (to put that into perspective, the term ‘customer relationship management’ has 36 million.) It is one hot topic in marketing these days. ...

Just for You By Grant A. Johnson (Direct) Today more than ever, consumers and business prospects alike subscribe to the age-old direct marketing principle WIIFM: “What's in it for me?”...

The Brand-Direct Marketing Connection By Beth Negus Viveiros As marketers have an increased need to be accountable and make their advertising dollars go further, the brand/direct connection is becoming more important, said Karen Ebben, director of CRM modeling and program evaluation, General Motors....