Notice to companies getting started in social media: You’re not an early adopter.
The most advanced firms are among Inc. magazine’s 500 fastest-growing companies, according to a survey by the Center of Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
They’re ahead of the Fortune 500, which presumably means that they’re ahead of everyone.
Of those surveyed, 80% use social media. That’s up from 49% in 2008. And 14% are planning to use it. Read the rest of this entry »
It was, to paraphrase Queen Elizabeth, an “annus horibilus.”
If you thought things were bad in the fall of 2008, they got even worse during the early months of 2009. There were layoffs, budget cuts and a pervading sense of gloom.
Here are some of the leading direct marketing stories of 2009. Not all are happy. We’ve saved the best for last. Read the rest of this entry »
The fur is flying in the B2B Online Marketing Group on LinkedIn. It started when Marty Thomas argued that text emails sometimes work better than HTML.
“For small businesses who don’t a strong brand and loyal customer following (or thousand dollar design budget for each email), it is better to use plain text emails,” he explained.
You’d think that this would have gone unnoticed on New Year’s Eve. But it drew an immediate response. And out of six people who commented, nobody totally agreed. Read the rest of this entry »
Greg Grdodian likes trouble.
That is, he likes it when clients come to him with marketing problems. His job as executive vice president of Edith Roman-ePostDirect’s List Management Data Solutions Group is to help them find solutions.For example, a client was having trouble understanding who its customers were.
“We did a profile, matched it up against our BRAD/BEN database, and helped with the crafting of the HTML,” Greg says. The effort was “sent to the prospects we recommended, and it responded really well, so the client rolled out with a much larger campaign.”
Then there are the clients whose lists have stopped performing. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
As we have long predicted, “a soft economy is driving renewed focus on email marketing.” That’s the word from Forrester, which last week released some findings from its latest email wrapup.
Foremost among the findings was that email marketers expect more from their vendors. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s some news that should warm the hearts of email marketers.
“Despite reports of its demise, email is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel,” writes Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, the online sharing network, in a blog post.
Schigel reports that 46% of all sharing is driven by email, compared with 33% by Facebook and 14% by channels like Digg, del.icio.us and LinkedIn. Twitter’s “share” of this traffic? Only 6%. Read the rest of this entry »