Direct Marketing Old Timers will tell you that the success or failure of any marketing program is attributable to:

• 40% the list,
• 40% the offer, and
• 20% for everything else , i.e., copy, creative, timing, etc.

If you’re not getting the response you think you should be getting, look at the offer first.

The strategic process in old-fashioned Direct Marketing is matching up the right list with the right offer… segmenting the list into micro-segments (or “splits”), and tailoring specialized offers to make the offer more relevant. 

The 3R’s: It’s not Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but…

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Marketers the world over, with much greater resources than you or I, have worked relentlessly, and have spent millions and millions of dollars, so that their products and services can be seen and heard in an overcrowded marketplace.

So how is a small business with limited resources supposed to compete with companies that have much greater resources and greater budget?

The secret is positioning: “It’s not what you do to your product, or how you market it, it’s how you position your product in your customer’s mind.”

Don’t bet the farm on changing someone’s mind

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 A ‘Gravatar’ is a ’Globally Recognized Avatar’.

An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.

Why is this important?

One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.

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It’s Direct Marketing the way it’s meant to be practiced.

Many companies practice Direct Marketing without taking the time to measure and report the results… they enjoy the results, but they don’t try to figure out how they could do better.

Like Direct Marketing, Lean Marketing is targeted, personalized, measurable, but most importantly, it’s improveable.

As consumers, We’ve all seen successful examples of Direct Marketing. You go to your mailbox, open your mail, and there’s a letter that stands out — it comes from a real person directly to you with an offer designed to delight you and make you want to respond.

As marketers, if you use Direct Marketing regularly, you know that for every $1.00 you spend you can get $20 back, or $24.00, or whatever. Predictable return on investment helps you with your budgeting, your cash management, and your profitability.

Quality Marketing

Lean Marketing is Direct Marketing with a commitment towards improvement, it’s Quality Management or Continual Improvement applied to Marketing, which can be illustrated by the PDCA Cycle that was popularized by Edward Deming, who is widely recognized as the forefather of improving design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales.

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Reward your customers for referrals

Everyone wants referrals. They can be the easiest customers to sell.

To get a consistent flow of referrals, you have to have a system in place.

The first and most fundamental key to getting referrals is making sure that you are completely satisfying your current customers.

You must provide a great service, and it helps if you’re so good that your customers want to brag about you. The kinds of referrals you’ll get from this are “buzz” referrals.

 Next, you need to create a system where your customers refer others to you by “conditioned reflex.”  This does not happen by accident. You have to be constantly top of mind when the referral situation arises, so the person referring the business simply reacts to the referral opportunity without even thinking about it.

 How do you do this?

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Everyone loves Constant Contact.

It’s a simple easy-to-use tool that I have used to help many clients communicate periodically with their customers.

One of the drawbacks of using Constant Contact though is that the subscriber forms they are  just plain ugly.

Fortunately, Constant Contact has made it possible to create  a  normal-looking webform, and put it on your website through the use of their API.

The Constant Contact API

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What is she thinking?

We’d all like to know what others, particularly our prospective customers, are thinking.

And that’s what the discipline of Market Research is intended to do. But how do you conduct research on the web that’s cost-effective, and that produces results?

We’ve all seen them. Those Netflix popups that are generated when you’re leaving a website. They’re annoying and inneffective. The best way to conduct market research on the web is to be honest with people. Let them know up front what they’re getting into, and give them the option to say “Yes”, or “No” upfront.

Best practices require that you ask permission first

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If you apply this test in your professional and personal life, you will be very successful. ~ My grandfather Charles J. Proctor, Rotarian (in his office at the Travelier Motel in Columbia, Mo, to me when I was 10)

Rotary International

Herbert J. Taylor (April 18, 1893 – May 1, 1978) was the creator of the “4-Way Test of the Things We Think, Say or Do” (see below). He wrote this 24-word statement of business ethics in twenty minutes as he set out to save the Club Aluminum Products distribution company from bankruptcy.

Founded in 1923, Club Aluminum Cookware was sold by door-to-door salesmen until the Great Depression made this method of sales too costly. In 1932, it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. The then-Vice President of Jewel Tea Company, Herbert J. Taylor, was asked come and help out in the hopes of avoiding insolvency. After he settled the law suits pending against the company, Taylor concluded that Club Aluminum was $400,000 in debt with no chance that existing sales could service even the short-term debt. He was advised to file for bankruptcy. Jewel Tea had concluded that the situation was hopeless and asked Taylor to return full-time.

Instead, Taylor left his $33,000 salary at Jewel and became President of Club Aluminum, with a salary of $6,000. And, using his Jewel stock as collateral, he purchased the controlling interest in the Club Aluminum for $6,100. When Taylor took over the situation was so desperate. In developing his plan of action, his first priority was to change the ethical climate in the company. “If the people who worked for Club Aluminum were to think right, I knew they would do right,” he affirmed. ”What we needed was a simple, easily remembered guide to right conduct – a sort of ethical yardstick- which all of us in the company could memorize and apply to what we thought, said and did.”

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Customer Winbacks

Emphatically “Yes”!

There are lots of reasons, other than the economy, why you are losing customers.

Customers could’ve been frustrated by delays, or aggravated by one bad experience. They could be annoyed by lack of response from you, or seduced away by your competition.

The point is: “If you are losing customers—do you know why?”

There’s a big difference between customers who are gone and customers you can win back. Unfortunately, most sales managers and salespeople don’t make that distinction.

And many executives neglect to direct their managers to ferret out the reasons why customers are defecting. Why? In the rush to get new business—we ignore lost business—even though in many cases the closing ratio for winning back lost customers can be much higher than the ratio for new business. And the reasons for customer defection are vitally important.

A customer win-back program is valuable for three main reasons (1) you win back “lost” revenue (2) you can uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, and (3) you can discover potential threats from the competition.

4 Steps to Winback Success

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You make your own luck… ~ Ernest Hemingway

Business to Business lead generation is a straightforward process, but since it depends on both the sales and marketing departments working together as a team to be successful, it needs a high degree of cooperation from everyone involved.

It is not something that just happens. It requires diligence, teamwork, and yes–a little luck, the kind of luck that you achieve through hard work and persistence.

7 Steps to B2B Lead Generation Success

Here are the top 7 things the sales & marketing teams must do to improve your odds of success:

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