E-mail Marketing Industry Benchmarks: Highest Open Rate in Q1 2013 Since 2006

The Q2 2013 E-mail Trends and Benchmarks Report was released by Epsilon earlier this month and it showed some interesting trends.

The first quarter of this year saw the highest average open rate (31.3 percent) since at least 2006. It was also the largest quarter-over-quarter jump (14 percent) in opens that we've seen. In second quarter, the open rate dropped but it's still the second highest we've seen (28.5 percent), suggesting that the upward trend in open rates will continue.

The real surprise for me here was the click-through rate. After reaching 5.1 percent in the first quarter, a boost of 13 percent over the fourth quarter of last year, it's down to 4.3 percent. This is a 16 percent loss over first quarter and the lowest click-through rate we've seen since at least 2006. Prior to 2012, the industry average was consistently 5 percent or higher. I was hoping the click-through rate would stabilize, but the slide continues.

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Is Amazon's New Small Business Lending Service The Right Choice For Your Business?

Amazon seems to have branched out into every business imaginable. So last year’s news that the company would be offering loans to its online sellers wasn’t too surprising. After all, Amazon is often considered the Wal-Mart of the Internet, and Wal-Mart has broken into the lending business, as well.

For Amazon sellers, the loans are welcome in the face of repeated rejection from other lenders. Designed to show its support of the many sellers in its marketplace, the lending program was offered to merchants. Loans are provided through Amazon Capital Services, Inc. and are meant to serve as an alternative source of funding for those sellers who are unable to secure funding through traditional lenders.

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3 Counterintuitive Tips to Boost Your Email Marketing

Sometimes we get stuck in the same email marketing ways and don't necessarily take a step back to assess campaigns. We get focused on growing our lists as fast as possible and keep mailing large lists as much as we can. We never stop to second guess some of our practices and then we wonder why open rates are declining, inbox rates are poor, and revenue is dismal.

Below are three tips to boost your email marketing results. Some may seem counterintuitive, but give them some thought and you might be surprised by how your email marketing efforts start to shape up.

Unsubscribing is great

As email marketers, we should make it as easy as possible to allow our subscribers to unsubscribe. You're not going to win over anybody by making them take 10 steps to unsubscribe.

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Driving Loyalty With Customer-Centric Marketing

There are two contrasting approaches to marketing—customer centric and product centric. Product-centric marketing focuses on what's being sold; campaigns are organized by product. Currently, product-centric marketing dominates the marketing landscape. But customer-centric marketing, which begins with analyzing customer behavior and deciding which customers to target, is a powerful and underutilized alternative that is key to building customer loyalty.

Both approaches are useful. When a company introduces a new product or its warehouse is overflowing with inventory, marketers roll out product-centric direct marketing campaigns featuring those products. Customer-centric marketing is a newer skill with far fewer practitioners and a less well understood methodology, despite its many advantages. Here are the components of that methodology.

Targeting

If the focus is on the customer, the place to start is deciding which customers to target. The product-centric extreme is a “spray-and-pray” campaign targeting everyone with the same message and offer. More sophisticated segment targeting can be either product centric (find potential buyers for our new widgets) or customer centric (target customers who have recently visited our website).

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Brand Building Through Mergers And Acquisitions

Relationships are becoming more one on one; communications are becoming faster and more frequent; customer loyalty cycles are becoming shorter – and yet organizations, returning to merger mode after the global financial crisis, are scaling to breathtaking size. The dichotomy between the intimacy with which customers are looking for and the footprint that companies are generating in order to, supposedly, reach those individuals more efficiently is glaring.

My awareness of this incongruity sprang from a conversation recently about the mega merger of Omnicom and Publicis. We were talking through how such a merger would probably be great for the agencies’ biggest clients but might read as a signal to depart for the many that would now fall below the horizon of attention. Imagine how much clout you’re going to have as a marketing client with even a few million to spend in a Group that will be billing around $23 billion? Imagine how difficult it is for a company of that scale to deliver communications that feel one on one?

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5 Direct Marketing Mistakes and how to Avoid Them

Long gone are the days of mass mailing cheesy, generic postcards—or so we hope. The modern marketer uses direct marketing as an enticement to spark interest and get a response. It's definitely an effective tool, but starting a campaign with a bland, general mailing can be costly and annoying to customers.  

Here are five common mistakes and ways you can avoid them:  

1) Going too broad

Not properly segmenting your audience is like throwing darts while wearing a blindfold. It hurts your brand when customers receive irrelevant promotional materials.

Instead: Identify and target your ideal customers by delivering your marketing message using the right channels at the right time. For example, if you want to capture the Gen Y market, find them on Facebook, but if you're after the older, more tech-savvy male audience then go to Google+. If you're doing email marketing, make sure your list is clean with updated information and stay away from mass mailing. Rely on your in-house list as those are the people who opted-in and have already shown an interest in your company. Better yet, allow customers to pick their preferred method of correspondence whether it's by phone, email, postal mail, or social media. 

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Digital is key to brand building

At the IAB’s annual Engage conference, representatives from companies including Unilever, Microsoft and Yahoo, talked about how they were using digital media to establish ongoing relationships in an ‘always on’ world.

Jay Altschuler, Unilever’s director of global media innovation, told attendees the FMCG giant aimed to be a people-centric company and that digital, and mobile in particular was at the core of its communications strategy.

Meanwhile, Ross Honey, Microsoft’s general manager for Xbox Advertising, said content-personalisation will be a key area of focus in the online services giant’s marketing of the Xbox One, which launches next month.     

Also speaking at the event was IAB chairman, Richard Eyre, who said companies need to focus on becoming people-centric brands, not revenue-driven ones.

He said: “For brand marketers, technology has made a 1:1 relationship with customers a reality. The most important value for brands to pursue is trust, because if you don’t have that, then customers won’t let you use their data.

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Grdodian Named CEO of Reach Marketing

Reach Marketing has named partner and database industry veteran Greg Grdodian its Chief Executive Officer. Grdodian helped pioneer the move of the list brokerage business into digital channels during 16 years with Infogroup/Edith Roman.

"The industry has experienced transformational change and this is a remarkable opportunity to apply Greg's solid understanding of the science of direct marketing to the emerging field of digital and inbound marketing," says Reach Chairman Stevan Roberts. "The challenge is to reach anyone, anytime, anywhere and Greg's an innovative leader who takes full advantage of all the latest technologies and media channels."

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The Secret to Good Product Fulfillment Catalogues

Halloween is coming, with Christmas, Chanukah, and New Year’s to soon follow. The holiday season is approaching, giving people a reason to celebrate. And these celebrations usually include the giving of gifts.

Concerns about overconsumption aside, it’s a fact that most people enjoy buying things. Whether it’s books, fancy rims for their car, or designed handbags, most people have one or two luxury items they couldn’t resist buying. There’s nothing wrong with this, so long as you spend within your limits.

What really draws people to buy is seeing the products themselves, either physically or through images. The classic example of this is the product line or department store catalogue. You’ve more than likely known the pleasure that comes from combing through a catalogue’s pages and spotting an item that appeals to you.

The catalogue is even a joy for product fulfillment pros, as it’s how they showcase their wares and entice their customers to buy their products. The product fulfillment catalogue is a major business tool and needs to be taken seriously, and creating one takes hard work, consideration, and care.

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Going the Distance in Product Fulfillment Distribution

You may have often heard “back in the day” speeches from your elders. While these tales may be a bit far-fetched and/or exaggerated, they may inadvertently mention products or services that were not readily available at the time: music fans ordering albums only available overseas, guitarists in the UK paying sailors money to bring back an electric guitar from the U.S., and even famous novels and films being smuggled into countries where they were banned or not on the market due to legal issues.

Hard-to-find or boutique items, with their limited availability on the marketplace, have served as an interesting lesson in today’s world. Sure, it seems like everything is available via online stores or specialty shops, but there are still some items that are tough to get. And with those rare items comes a need to understand product distribution legal matters.

As a product fulfillment pro, these issues are worth studying up on. You have to concern yourself with obtaining such sought-after products for your particular client base, while also knowing what you are legally allowed to provide.

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The Benefits of Easy Accessibility to Your Product Fulfillment Services

Quick, what’s your favorite sci-fi movie? Obviously something with Wookies or Klingons comes to mind, but how about some of the less-remembered films, like Johnny Mnemonic, Cube, and The Lawnmower Man? Many felt these films to be of poor quality, which is why they’ve failed to garner mainstream popularity.

However, it’s interesting to go back and look at these movies in the context of today’s technology. Many such films often featured—you might even say predicted—touchscreens and other current technology before their real-world usage.

To say we live in a very sci-fi world is not much of a stretch. Just seeing kids play interactive games or people hammering away on their smartphones’ touchscreens for everything from work to shopping is pretty wild. Looking back, could we have seen ourselves living like this even a decade ago? Probably not.

With all these programs and services influenced by screens, videos, and touch technology, it’s fair to say that people need to learn them as quickly as possible. For pros working in fields like product fulfillment, it’s worth investigating how much new technology can possibly better their business. There’s a lot that can be taken advantage of and utilized to improve a product fulfillment business‘ functionality and success.

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How to Deal with Common Product Fulfillment Problems

 

You often hear sad stories about someone that wound up with a “lemon”—a common term for bad products or services that are said to be great, but then aren’t up to snuff.

Sometimes, the lemons aren’t that large, like a broken smartphone that is easily replaced, and sometimes the lemon is large and can cause horrible accidents, such as a poorly made car with faulty airbags. But whether the lemon is big or small is irrelevant; what’s important is knowing they exist and, like it or not, you might end up with the next one.

For product fulfillment pros, a lemon is something that will likely rear its ugly head at one point or another. When you are dealing with as many products and services as a single product fulfillment business does, the chances of coming into contact with a poor product or service are rather high. Accept that lemons are unavoidable and you’ve already won half the battle.

Dealing with lemons properly is the other half. You have to be on guard and ready to take action when they happen; once you’ve got that down, you can turn those lemons of product fulfillment into lemonade pretty quickly.

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Where to Go for Third-Party Assistance in Product Fulfillment

It’s great, and sometimes even odd, when you discover a talent. Ex-007 Roger Moore is noted to have impressed a crew on one of his later James Bond films with his truck-driving skills, something he learned as a struggling actor. Crime writer Raymond Chandler, originally an executive and now considered one of history’s best writers, managed to find a talent for writing when forced to during the Great Depression. Music producer Berry Gordy failed at both marriage and record store operation, but used the production tactics he learned from the Ford Plant to create the famous Motown Records. When you find that thing that makes you something special, it defines you.

In fact, we all have traits that define us as people. Narcissism aside, we all have one or two skills that we can do better than most—skills we often want to utilize and make something of ourselves with.

This is all fine, but while there are things we can do well, there’s a lot more we can’t. And while we want to improve in these areas, we often never do.

In the end, there’s no shame in this; admitting you can’t do certain things is only human. However, if you’re a product fulfillment pro, you have to understand that you’ll need help for those jobs you can’t do. Again, there’s no shame in it, just be aware of where to find the right assistance.

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How to Snag the Big New Clients in Direct Marketing

New to You
In business, you need clients. And when those clients come in, pay for your wares, and exit happily, you feel a well-earned sense of achievement. However, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with having clients in the business world.
One is holding on to them. You need to keep them interested in what you do so that they come back for more. Often, it’s just a matter of continuing to offer quality services.
But then there’s the matter of if they leave and you require new clients to keep turning a profit. Or, if you are starting a company fresh, you need initial clients to get the ball rolling. There’s also those trying to increase their business’ potential for success by expanding their client roster.
Read More: http://www.apsfulfillment.com/direct-marketing-leads-2/how-to-snag-the-big-new-clients-in-direct-marketing

Online Broker Firstrade Introducing New Research & Tools

Firstrade Securities Inc., a leading online brokerage firm founded in 1985, today announced the launch of an enhanced Research and Tools section of its website with analyst research, tools, and comprehensive market data provided by Morningstar, a leading provider of independent investment research.
“We know research tools are crucial for investors to build up a strong and profitable investment portfolio, and Firstrade aspires to provide our customers with the most powerful and user-friendly tools. This improvement is an exciting moment for both Firstrade and our customers,” says John Liu, CEO of Firstrade, “Firstrade will never stop improving for customers, so stay tuned for more advancements soon to come.”
Firstrade’s enhanced Research and Tools section helps customers stay on top of the markets with new investment research features, including Morningstar Analyst Reports and ratings on stocks and ETFs, in-depth performance data, competitive analysis, and more, all with an easier-to-read layout. News offerings also received an upgrade with more sources like Morningstar, Briefing.com, Zacks, and Benzinga, to help customers stay up-to-date on current events and make better-informed decisions.

Read More: http://www.prweb.com/releases/Firstrade/researchtools/prweb11158253.htm

News Byte: Demandbase Intros B2B Targeting for Facebook

B2B marketers can now use Facebook to reach stakeholders mulling purchase decisions using a solution introduced today by Demandbase.
The targeting and personalization company claims that its new Company-Targeted Advertising solution does for commercial advertisers what Facebook ads don't do for consumer advertisers—target decision-makers in the social network based on their business attributes rather than their personal connections or preferences on the social network.
Read More: http://www.dmnews.com/news-byte-demandbase-intros-b2b-targeting-for-facebook/article/314130/

Outside the Box: Getting Creative with Product Fulfillment

New Wave
There’s the left vs. right brain debate; there are those who take the arts and humanities route while others do math, sciences, or trades; there are the people who go out of their way to break policy and those who actually function well within it.
When all is said and done, working at any job is a bit of a high-wire act between conforming to certain ideals and trying to incorporate one’s own ideals, effectively breaking certain conventions. We often look to those times in history where certain luminaries in various fields took on certain established influences and began to construct their own creations using their original ideas. One famous instance was the French Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave”) of the 1950s and 1960s, which combined established movie trends with others outside their genre, like combining documentaries with the romanticism of literature and art. This style would come to influence a lot of movies in the decades later.
Read More : http://www.apsfulfillment.com/creative-direct-marketing-2/outside-the-box-getting-creating-with-product-fulfillment

EcoFoil Expands Blog Format to Connect with Customers and Provide Expert Advice

EcoFoil.com, a leading supplier of reflective insulation, is expanding its blog categories to share a wider range of content with its customers.
The EcoFoil blog was initially developed to show customers the benefits of eco-friendly building. However, a recent sales and service initiative to expand the blog has resulted in several new categories, including answering some of the more common questions that the company’s sales staff receives from customers.
“The blog has been evolving quickly for us, as we’re realizing what a great tool it can be to communicate with our current customers, and also reach potential new customers,” said EcoFoil product and sales specialist, David Arnold.
Read More: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11175227.htm

News Byte: Publicis Groupe Acquires POKE

Publicis Groupe expanded its global digital offerings by acquiring UK digital agency POKE from its four founding shareholders and Mother Holdings Ltd, the holding company announced today.
“POKE is a company that we have admired for some time,” Jean-Yves Naouri said in the release. “This acquisition will further strengthen our Publicis UK offering by adding a new level of digital expertise, creativity and innovation to the Publicis UK group of agencies.”
Read More : http://www.dmnews.com/news-byte-publicis-groupe-acquires-poke/article/312322/

Handling the Big Boy Peers in Product Fulfillment

Big Leagues
Ah, to go big. You slug it out playing college basketball, and then a scout from the Miami Heat starts chatting you up. Perhaps you’re a lowly repertory theatre actor, and then comes the deal to appear in a big budget movie. Or maybe you’re a small-time inventor and a major company wants to buy your patent.
Even if the above situations sound like silly daydreaming to you, they’re not so hard to imagine in real life. A lot of people pay a lot of dues for a long time before finally having the opportunity to go big. We have to remember that, as clichéd as it sounds, people like Steve Jobs, Morgan Freeman, and Stephen King were once what would otherwise be defined as common people. It was their commitment to their trades that took them from walking the Earth to the heights of the professional stratosphere.
Read More: http://www.apsfulfillment.com/b2b-direct-marketing/handling-the-big-boy-peers-in-product-fulfillment