Wake up, b2b marketers: You’re letting your b2c counterparts steal the play in social media.
Of the b2b companies surveyed by Equation Research, 38% include social media their marketing mix. But 21% do not, or are not planning to do so.
In contrast, 71% of the b2c companies polled are active in this area, along with 59% of the firms that identify themselves as both b2b and b2c. Only 9% are inactive. Business to business direct marketing firms are behind on both these fronts. Read the rest of this entry »
Ask the average direct marketer to name the industry’s pioneers, and they will probably say Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. But there’s an important omission in that list: National Cash Register Co., a B2B concern that was sending targeted mail way before the big catalog houses tried it.
The company was founded in 1880 by John H. Patterson, a store owner in Coalton, OH. He had bought one of the new-fangled machines, and was so impressed with it that he purchased the factory that made it. Read the rest of this entry »
Industrial marketers are cutting back on trade shows and spending more online. Those are among the findings of a survey done by GlobalSpec, the B2B search engine company. Read the rest of this entry »

Josephine Messina
You think things are tough these days? Talk to Josephine Messina, our vice president of direct marketing services, who started her career 25 years ago at Fred Woolf—in production. Read the rest of this entry »
Is there anyone more slow on the uptake than the poor British direct marketer? Send an inquiry to one, and you’ve got a 25% chance of never getting a reply, according to a study by the British DMA.
The DMA emailed 100 companies to request brochures. A quarter failed to respond. And the average reaction time for those that did fulfil was 3.6 days (although that’s a slight improvement over 2005). Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Reitsema
But his success may also be due to the fact that he can handle just about anything. Need a mailing list? See Robert. Need a data overlay or a merge purge? Give him a call. Want to do an email append? He can help. And he’s especially good at finding cost savings—a skill much in demand these days. Read the rest of this entry »

Christina Bashark

Steve Mertel
Yes, his first job at Rubin Response right after college was brokering consumer files. But he was fascinated by the high-tech field, an area in which Rubin had strength, and he moved into it as soon as he could. Read the rest of this entry »