Multichannel Marketing
for B2B Marketers

Edith Roman, ePostDirect and Database Direct would like to wish everyone a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2010. Thank you for your business and we look forward to working with you in the new year!

Marketing pundits have already posted their annual New Year’s predictions. Some started hitting the eggnog before they did, but a few were sober. Here’s a sampling of what they said:

Sales and Marketing
“2010 will be the year when the practice of allowing sales and marketing to operate as separate, conflicting silos ends once and for all. The problem of “sales-marketing alignment” will disappear, because the urgency to get online and social marketing right, coupled with the challenging economy, will force the issue.” –Steve Parker Read the rest of this entry »

What a relief. The Godfather of Spam is on his way to jail, joining the King of Spam, the Duke of Spam, the Sultan of Spam, and other royalty.

Alan Ralsky, who sent billions of messages pushing Chinese penny stocks, was sentenced to 51 months in prison and the forfeiture of $250,000, according to news reports. Three other felons were also sentenced.

Granted, this doesn’t mean that consumers are safer, but there is one thing we can be happy about: the news coverage. There were no snide asides about “junk mailers,” or any hint that Ralsky is part of the direct marketing industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Ad executives have shaken off their hangover. They’re more upbeat about budgets than they have been since the fall of 2007, according to a MediaPost article based on a report by Advertising Perceptions.

MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reports that the “study, which is based on an index of executives who plan to boost their ad spending over the next 12-months vs. those who plan to decrease it, currently stands at a positive difference of four percentage points, the highest level since the fall of 2007, when the index stood at positive eight percentage points.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some modified good news about the economy: Companies are starting to rescind their salary freezes, and most are hiring in some areas. So says DM recruiter Les Gore, quoting a report from the Watson Wyatt consulting firm.

Of the firms surveyed by Watson Wyatt, 54% plan to unfreeze salaries in the next six months, compared with 33% in August, Les writes. In addition, almost all have made job offers in the last three months.

What’s more, two thirds say they are worried about retaining employees.

And a comparable number will restore their 401k matches to their previous levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for the human spirit: It always finds a way.

There were no computers 100 years ago, and no Excel files. But B2B businesses sent direct mail, and harvested their leads, just as we do now.

Still, it wasn’t easy.

Let’s say you wanted a list of dealers who had “bought a thousand dollars last year and had paid promptly when due.” You had to go into the accounting department’s card file and “pick out all the cards on which the postings showed the conditions in questions to have been met,” Scientific American reported in its November 1916 issue. Read the rest of this entry »

It shows you how softhearted we are: We actually felt sorry for David Crump, a British postman who dumped over 5,000 pieces of direct mail he was supposed to deliver. We’re all human, right?

Then his defender Anthony Randle opened his mouth.

“It came to the point where my client thought ‘What am I going to do with all this lot?” Randle said, according to the Express & Star.

Uh, did we read that correctly? Did he really say, “All this lot?’” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s more proof, as if it was needed, that marketers are challenged when it comes to Web analytics, the science defined by the Web Analytics Association as the “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.”

Unica found in a survey that the biggest single obstacle to success is inability to integrate Web analytics with other systems. This was cited by 46% of those polled. Read the rest of this entry »