One of the requests I get almost every day is to explain the difference between what is commonly called a “Consumer” list and a “Resident” list.  Both terms sound similar,  the same addresses may actually appear on each list, but there can be quite a bit of confusion over the list types and when each list should be used.  Here is a quick breakdown:

So… when should you use a Consumer List versus a Resident List?

Use a Consumer List if:

-You want a household name on every record in your list
-You require that certain demographic criteria have been confirmed on the household level such as age, income or presence of children
-Importance of targeting your list outweighs the importance of postal discounts
-Importance of targeting your list outweighs chance of slightly lower deliverability
-You are mailing first class and/or don’t mind that the file will need additional presort processing to achieve automation discounts
-You need a list that includes phone numbers for telemarketing purposes

Consumer List Example:
A luxury car dealership has a specific demographic profile for households who are likely to buy their cars; Age 40+ with a $100,000+ income within 25 miles of the dealership.  They also want the mailing to appear as personalized as possible, so showing household name on each piece is important.

Use a Resident List if:
-You want the highest possible postage discounts for sortation and saturation
-You want to make sure you blanket or “saturate” a geographic area by mailing to every available address
-Importance of postal discounts outweighs the importance of targeting your list
-Importance of highest possible deliverability outweighs the slightly lower deliverability of a targeted list
-You want a list that is already properly sorted and ready for mailing including appropriate postal paperwork

Resident List Example: A local pizza parlor knows that most households within 2 miles of their store will consume at least one pizza every 2 weeks. Using the Resident List they will saturate every address in the neighborhood with a coupon mailing.

Contact us for any other questions you may have on the details of the different list types!

Budget season is upon us. With a rapidly changing media landscape, many marketers are re-evaluating how they allocate their marketing dollars. How is your budget changing for 2012? Will you take back TV dollars? Spend on social? Move more to mobile? Invest in innovation? Chief Marketer recently asked top marketing professionals to give their opinion in several key areas of spending.  Below is the top 6:

SOCIAL
For 2012, marketing will explore how social media can be proactively managed. Understanding how marketing dollars will shift from one-way advertising to building and developing relationships is one of the keys to a successful social media marketing investment. Elements such as geo-targeted social media conversations, and social feedback will allow marketers to go beyond simply cultivating and distributing content.

DIRECT MAIL
Mail continues to be the best way for marketers to identify and reach out to prospects. As mail volume is down, the chances of being noticed are even better. Targeted mail will be used by smart marketers to build their customer base. It will also be used after a contact by a prospect was made. It works wonders in taking the engagement started by social media to a marriage by closing the sale. Personalization is also more cost effective than ever before, which makes mail a wise spend. Don’t forget to test mail on the back-end.

EMAIL
A significant portion of your email-marketing budget should be designated to analytics and multichannel efforts. Make sure every dollar spent is yielding results and supporting your marketing—and ultimately your business—goals. Engage with analytics to determine if your email, social or mobile programs drive in-store or online shopping. While a direct click may not be immediately ascertainable, is there behavior to show increased awareness with these sends that drive “soft” foot traffic?

DATABASE
It is important to sound an alarm if a company is looking to throw huge sums of money at technology and small sums of money at ensuring that the data content is of the highest quality. What stories is your data telling you? Invest in understanding your customer, prospect and lapsed customers, by each channel you use. Be sure your data is up to date otherwise you’re throwing money out the door. It’s the surest way for you to market smarter and pick- up on trends within your own customer files. It also leads to more intelligent prospecting.

LOYALTY
With the increased influence of “deal of the day” offerings popularized by Groupon, and greater adoption of smart phones, consumers want to access loyalty programs the same way they now bank or redeem discounts—wherever and whenever they want. It’s an “on demand” world, and loyalty program owners need to respond to this by investing into the mobile space and restructuring the reward mix to offer more immediate, short-term wins.

SEO
Within the next five years, more people will access the Web via mobile devices than PCs, and tablets will outsell desktops. The portion of paid search impressions coming from mobile devices crossed the 10% threshold in 2011 and won’t slow down any time soon. Plus, mobile paid search still delivers results similar to desktop paid search for about half the cost. For 2012, mobile and tablet investment in the form of apps, content, media and promotions should be a growing portion of your digital and overall marketing spend.

Did you know that the third Monday in December is usually the busiest mailing day of the year? And that the Post Office™ will deliver over 20 billion pieces of mail this holiday season?

Direct mail marketing during the holidays is a good way to get some exposure and a little bit of the holiday market share. Here are the suggested “latest dates” and tips for preparing and mailing cards, letters and packages this holiday season.

Suggested Mailing Dates

• International Mail should be mailed as soon as possible.
• Parcel Post should be mailed no later than the second week of December.
• Priority Mail by the third week of December.
• Express Mail by the 21st of December.

Be Joyful and Merry – This time of year, put aside those all too common promotional image advertisements with people doing nothing in particular with your product or service. Keep it merry by converting to a holiday theme.

Drum up Customer Excitement – Try to entice customers with special deals and or give them a sense of mystery or anticipation. Tell them about discounts and free offers but also tease them with special contest prizes if they purchase something. As long as you give readers something to look forward to and to be excited about, your marketing message should garner some success.

Scrub-a-Dub-Dub Your List
- Now is the time to verify titles and addresses by scrubbing your client’s data. Once the data is scrubbed and segmented, you’ll reduce the overall marketing cost by not mailing to outdated or bad addresses. After all, tis’ the season to save some money!

Put on a Cheery Stamp

Finally, you might want to suggest to your clients to skip the meter machine when they’re doing the mailing. Although they could save a few cents, having a holiday-themed stamp on the envelope is a much nicer touch.

For more information on deadlines from the USPS, click here.

Do you include direct mail in your marketing mix? Are you planning on sending more direct mail in 2012?  With the USPS announcement of the postage hike effective January 22nd, 2012 a number of large direct mailers will need to start thinking about reallocating their budget…or decreasing DM spending.

Let’s reflect on ways to optimize direct mail programs to help save money and explore some smart and easy ways to decrease your mail spend and increase response rates. Talk about a win/win proposition!

Segment Data. By segmenting your database, you’ll be able to quickly discover buckets of opportunity ranging from the most profitable customers to the highest potential prospects. It’s important to allocate marketing dollars wisely, and not waste the budget on messages that will fall on deaf ears.

Clean house. Running an NCOA on a mailing list could save you sometimes thousands on undelivered mail. Use this updated data with correct mailing addresses to cleanse your database and maintain a high quality list.

Craft Relevant Messaging. As a direct marketer, the goal is to illicit response. Not only do you need to find the right audience, you also need to hit them with a relevant message that will get them to act on an offer. Incorporating strategies such as personalization and human behavior response triggers into copy and design can improve response rates and ultimately increase revenue.

Only mail to occupied households. Determine if an address can be confirmed as a valid delivery point by the USPS. A simple process confirms if the address is occupied and actually able to receive mail.

Incorporate email marketing. You can append email addresses to your house file.  Using email as a complement to your direct mail campaigns can really boost your brand exposure and response rates.  And with email, there is virtually no production, materials or postage expense.

Pay Attention to Shape. The anticipated rates would give mailers a strong financial incentive to switch from flat (9×12-inch) envelopes to standard #10 envelopes, reflecting the U.S. Postal Service’s lower costs for processing the smaller envelopes. Folding and inserting machines to capitalize on this incentive will make sense for more organizations under the proposed new rules.

Paid, earned and owned media: It’s become the mantra for marketing these days. Still many marketers aren’t sure how to bridge the gap and have them work together.

Everyone understands the traditional marketing roles, but just to set the stage: paid is media you buy – you get total control over messaging, reach and frequency, as much as your budget allows; earned is what others say about your brand – you get no control but you can influence outcomes if you’re smart; and owned is content you create – you control the messaging, but not so much whether anyone reads/views it.

Today, however, earned and owned media are morphing due to social media and audiences’ increasing willingness to trust their own judgment about the validity of content.

A report recently put out by Econsultancy shows that nearly one third (31%) of respondents says the impact of the evolution towards earned media is “highly significant” for their business. 51% says it’s quite significant. Obviously, the word “significant” can mean many things, but it’s clear there is an increasing focus on earned media in the overall marketing strategy.

Paid, earned and owned media all have critical roles to play – roles that are both distinct and interconnected.

Traditional marketing in general, and social media marketing (including blogging) and all tactics that involve people and communities, specifically, are gaining traction because of many phenomena, including changing media and buying behavior but also for reasons of cost reduction and increased ROI.

Earned media will obviously not replace paid media (and certainly not owned), it’s simply getting more attention in the overall mix that is being adapted to a multichannel and integrated marketing reality with people in the middle.

Ultimately these types of media work best together but making the hard choices of what to include and what not to include is crucial – especially when budgets are tight. But if you simply start by categorizing your media and identifying the right roles based on your objectives, then you’re on the right path.

Trust is possibly the single thing that will keep a customer coming back. It’s important simply because many business services and products involve longer client relationships typically built up with a salesperson.

If used correctly, e-mail marketing is a great way for salespeople to nurture B2B relationships.  There are strategies you can use to help increase the likelihood your messages get opened and help foster a deeper relationship between a salesperson and their customer.

One of the most important ways is getting salespeople involved with marketing efforts. Salespeople owe it to themselves and their customers, to realize the value that they themselves bring to the marketplace.

In a recent article, this subject was touched upon and contained tips to help make the most of the client/salesperson relationship and potentially boost your email open rate:

Include your salesperson’s name and photo in your emails. A deeper connection is created with a company when an email comes from the salesperson. While many people have images turned off as the default, there are still some who allow images within messages. In that case, having a photo of your salesperson can help solidify that link.

Set up emails so replies go both to sales and marketing. If someone decides they are going to respond to an email message, you don’t want to waste time having the message go to marketing just to be forwarded to the salesperson. Ask your email service provider or internal email administrator to help you set up a system so both marketing and sales are copied on any replies. This keeps both departments in the loop so customers and prospects aren’t left waiting for a reply.

 Ask your sales team to help prioritize your email list so the best customers get the most personalized attention and offers. Salespeople already have a prioritized list of their own customers. The marketing team can use that to further segment lists so the best customers get the best offers.

Integrate email with your CRM system. Integrated systems will allow both sales and marketing to know exactly what the other is doing. It provides a way for salespeople to actively participate in campaigns and helps marketing measure and track which sales reps are actively using the marketing tools.

Thanks,
Ed Giordano
VP of Sales

Compact’s National Auto Owner File is built from self-reported data collected from multiple sources throughout the United States as well as a variety of sophisticated statistical models. 

Coupled with an industry-leading consumer database, this file gives marketers access to hundreds of demographic selects, lifestyle elements, buying activities, segmentation tools, and more. Accessing these economically active automobile owners will allow you to target specific individuals for your next direct marketing initiative.

If that’s not a good enough reason for you to purchase the list, here are a few more that may help entice you:

1)      There are over 80 online demographic selects to choose from including but not limited to: Income, Home Value, Age, Gender, Marital Status, Children, Lifestyle & Interests and many more.

2)      The list is 100% “permission-able use” and has guaranteed deliverability of at least 94%.

3)      The list is not just about autos, it also includes commercial vehicles, recreational vehicles, motorcycles and boats.

4)      The core of the file is compiled from a proprietary collection of after-market auto ser­vices which includes, but is not limited to, Insurance, Warranties, Vehicle Maintenance, Driver Statistics, Manufacturers Promotions, Title Services, Government Sources, Online Sources, Parts Providers and Public Records.

5)      The Driver Privacy Protection Act of 1994, as well as the Shelby Bill Amendment to this act, has virtually removed the ability to compile DMV data without the auto owners consent. Therefore, the National Auto Owner list is the most accurate national file for targeting probable vehicle owners.

6)      The data is verified for accuracy and only complete records that have make, model and/or a VIN (vehicle identification number) actually make it into the master file. The files are NCOA, CASS & DPV certified and updated quarterly to improve deliverability.

Gain access to the most accurate auto database around with Compact’s National Auto Owner File.

AccuData participated in this year’s Hearst Analytical Challenge.  There were over 500 teams worldwide, including leading colleges and universities.  Sponsored by the Hearst Corporation and judged by the Wharton School of Business, the competition’s objective was to gain insight into top modeling techniques from some of the best in the analytical community.

This year’s challenge entailed predicting which of Heart’s emails would be opened and which would be clicked on. There were over 1.7 million records provided, along with timestamps for each email and demographic data.

Knowing that the best predictive data is transaction-type data, we focused on parsing what little transaction-type data was provided.  The timestamp field was our focus. We created individual fields for the day mailed, time of day mailed, days since last mailed, day since last open, day since last click, and a variety of chronological, lag, and cumulative predictors.

Using an advanced modeling technique, called stochastic gradient boosting, we were able to detect the little nuances that were actually statistically significant differences between those that opened an email and those that did not. We repeated the same for the ‘click’ component of the challenge.

After literally thousands of iterative models, we could not improve upon what we had.  So the next step was to determine what the probability score cutoff was going to be, in order to determine if a record would be included as an ‘open,’ or a ‘click’ – or a ‘not open’ or a ‘not click.’  This was stage of the process was much more creative than scientific.  After applying a variety of ‘cutoff combinations,’ we applied our learnings to our holdout sample.  (We always use holdout samples to test the accuracy of our models.) 

The results were that our prediction was more than 98% correct overall.  As a result, we decided to upload our solution in the ‘validation’ round of the challenge.  We initially were in 10^th place.  Not bad.  We did a few more tweaks to the cutoff combinations (truly a creative exercise), and now found ourselves in 4^th place.

As a former football player, I learned that if you don’t win, you lose – and also learned the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy.  So, we decided to go for it and use our revised model – either we’d end up in first place or possibly plummet to last.  Nevertheless, we knew we had built a worthy model.  In the end, we dropped back to 10^th place.

I don’t play football anymore.  So, I’m going to throw away that ‘if you don’t win, you lose’ mentality.  However, I’ll keep the ‘no pain, no gain’ attitude and accept that a top-10 finish ahead of over 500 leading teams from around the world is a good place to be!

Last year I went to a couple of Seattle Seahawks games with my neighbors, before I moved to Fort Myers, Florida. They were all die-hard Seahawks fans that had lived in Seattle all their lives.  So, when they invited me to their tailgate I knew it would probably be fun, but I really had no idea what to expect.

About 400 yards from the stadium we set up our truck in a designated “tailgate car park” – complete with a big screen LCD TV to watch other NFL games, a full BBQ grill with side burners for the main course, and the mandatory coolers for “refreshments.” But there was one other intriguing area being set up by some friends: a Beer Pong Table.  This custom-made table for NFL fans included yard lines, hash marks, and logos.  Being an Englishman I just had to find out what it was all about!

After the setup was complete, upwards of 50 friends and family members descended on this mini-compound of pre-game activity, and the beer pong began. As a sports fan, I like any kind of ball game.  So I jumped in and immediately fell in love with it.  Memories of fairgrounds in England came flooding back, with ping pong balls being thrown in to masses of small fish bowls in order to try to win a goldfish. I loved that stuff.  But mind you, the gold fish never seemed to live more than a week, if you were lucky enough to win one!

Anyway, as the tailgating continued I got to know more and more of my neighbors, their friends and families, and was shocked at how sociable folks were when forced to drink beer for missing their shot!  The crowd was very eclectic, stockbrokers, carpenters, plumbers and bankers. People were sharing their work phone numbers and trading information.   It reminded me of golf and how that game has become the de-facto venue for mixing business with pleasure.

Then I had an epiphany, a blinding flash of light and…I realized Beer Pong should become the next business game to serve the purpose of meeting clients and suppliers, playing a fun game and making a deal!

AccuPong was born!

So, if you are interested in this new sport for dealmakers, then be sure to visit our booth (#1902) at October’s DMA show in Boston. We’ll be refereeing games between clients and whoever else shows up.  Prizes will be awarded and socializing will be mandatory.  We’ll also be giving away beer to players, so be sure to join us and pitch a ping pong ball – all while negotiating your next major data deal!

Cheers!

Rich

As a business owner, driving revenue is the first step in any marketing strategy. Knowing which marketing strategies work best can increase repeat business or drive in new business, and can increase your revenue and profits quickly. To help you accomplish this, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite and effective tips.

Send them additional information of value or interest.  This includes articles, magazine and newspaper clippings, or other information that is relevant to their business.

You could send or email them an article that mentions a strategic move one of their competitors is about to make or an article on a topic that relates to your key contact’s interests. You might even come across an article about their company. It doesn’t matter if they’ve already read the article because your gesture shows that you’re paying attention to their business – whether they’re already a client or you’re trying to get them to become one.

And most sales people or businesses don’t do this, so it’ll allow your company to stand out more. One word of advice: When sending or emailing the article, it’s okay to promote your services to capture new clients, but for those who are already a client – don’t make it a hard sell. This tactic isn’t all about you; it’s about giving your new client a reason to keep the sale with you.

Email Marketing has reached a major stage for business development. Today, email is tied to an effective social media presence. Social networks have adopted their own inbox system, for example: Facebook and Twitter both have their own inboxes. Individuals are coming to rely more on the messages obtained from these social media outlets rather than their inboxes simply because their Yahoo! and Hotmail inboxes are reaching an overload. Most of the time with what they consider to be spam.

For businesses, image blockers and intelligent spam filtration technologies further complicate email marketing. What’s more, individuals are less likely to click an email they have not condoned and so, they become uninterested in a product.

In order to achieve a successful online marketing strategy, you should consider utilizing best practices or looking at recent trends in order to obtain a clean reputation, and establish good relationships with your potential subscribers. Among them are:

Integrate Email Marketing with Your Social Media Campaigns

Companies should always link to their social media pages, such as their Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages, as well as blogs, in their email marketing campaigns. It encourages the conversation, and it gives your customers easy ways to engage with you

Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Mobile

Because so many people now read their email on mobile devices, it’s important to keep in mind their experience when creating your email campaigns. That means keeping images small and not using too many of them – and keeping text short and to the point.

Engage Readers Instead of Creating a One Way Street

It’s not enough to push your message out as a one-way conversation anymore. If you want to get people to read your emails and respond to your calls to action then you need to engage them – right from the subject line. Lure them in with a question, contest or promotion.

Plan Ahead for More Effective Email Campaigns

Ideally, your campaigns should correspond to holidays or down times to capture more sales. Before you launch your first campaign, map out your email marketing plan for the whole year.

Test. Test. Test.

Due to different email clients, email host providers and other factors, it’s imperative to test emails before approval. This includes testing items such as: email clients, email templates, spam detection rules, formatting for mobile email recipients among other factors.

Track Campaigns to Determine What’s Working and What’s Not

Use tracking or analytics software to determine which email campaigns succeeded and which ones failed — and use that information when crafting your next email campaign. What makes email (and direct) marketing such valuable ways to advertise is being able to calculate exact ROI.

It is very difficult to succeed as a sales person if you struggle getting in the door and connecting with decision makers. Your prospects are bombarded with emails and phone calls making it challenging to get their attention. So how do you get in the door with people who are willing and able to buy from you?

Step one is understanding the rules of the game.

If you have ever been on the receiving end on a cold call, you know how easy it is to get turned off. Propsecting efforts fail because sales people are doing things that just don’t work.

I like to say that in order to request a meeting with someone, you need a compelling reason to contact that person. Just saying you are a sales rep for ABC Company typically doesn’t cut it. You need to say something that gets their attention and makes it clear why you are calling them.

Sometimes it makes sense to contact a prospect by letter or email before you place a call. If you do go this route, there are some sales letter best practices to follow:

• Your headline must jump out and have a compelling ‘what’s in it for me’ principal.
• You need to build trust and credibility by end of second paragraph.
• Try relating a success story or how you solved a problem.
• Don’t start selling – say you are interested in understanding their needs.
• Include a call to action!

So now it’s time for the cold call. Not many sales people like making them because a similar number of us don’t like receiving them either.  When you approach a call, there are typical objectives you want to consider such as:

• Minimize the risk in speaking with you – ask for only two minutes of their time.
• Minimize the risk in setting up an appointment – only speak about benefits, never features, advantages or any other indication of a pitch.
• Don’t ask questions.  If they agree to the appointment you may be able to get away with one or two questions but use care!  You just distinguished yourself from everyone else who will call.  Don’t take a chance in ruining that first impression.
• Set an appointment.

There are other best practices to consider such as establishing a target list, creating goals, networking, etc.  Consider the facts that 90% of all net new customers come from referrals  and 95% of all lead generation activity is focused on networking  and building referrals. So building a personal network should be a top priority.

It wasn’t so long ago that your customer information was only useful if it included a physical address and a phone number. Then capturing email addresses came along and marketers were able to add a new channel of transactional information into the mix. Today’s databases have expanded even further and can contain a vast amount of information on web activity, social media interactions and other online behaviors.

Online data is valuable, even when it can’t initially be tied back to a name or physical address.  Any actionable element — such as a click through on an email, or a “Like” on Facebook — can be leveraged to identify and consolidate customer activities and preferences over time.  But it’s important to recognize the unique qualities of social media with regards to database marketing. To effectively market your business with data from online and social media sources, you must be able to pull all your customer data together. This enables you to gain a comprehensive view of your customers, allowing you to segment them effectively to deliver targeted, relevant messages.

The ultimate goal is a database marketing system that will allow you to support your email campaigns, loyalty programs, couponing, and other point-of-sale redemptions in real time.  With this type of system, you’re able to identify the best secondary channels and the appropriate timing to contact your customers, based on their individual behaviors. This way, you can continue the conversation even when your customers begin to lapse.

Let’s say for example, you own a restaurant. You’re using Twitter and Facebook to invite users to share their experiences with other fans. This allows you to gain a clearer understanding of what the customers want and to see what they like or don’t like about their experiences with you. By looking at combined profiles of customers, you can tailor your email marketing campaigns based on customer preferences, and provide exclusive offers and event invitations designed to trigger activity in this group. Furthermore, you’re able to track all of your efforts in real time and make quick changes as you interpret the results.

A retail organization could use this kind of system to determine what combination of channels — i.e. direct mail, online marketing, etc. — and messages are most suited for reaching their customers and prospects.  Conversely, the same approach can be used to find the right people to contact about particular products or special offers.

Regardless of the type of business, it’s important to regularly update customer records with data from all the sources you have available. If you track links to various social media platforms via email, be sure to follow trends in how customers are interacting with your brand, as well as to analyze customer behavior to ensure you’re addressing them the right way.

After all, savvy marketers have already begun effectively leveraging their investment in customer or prospect data to incorporate social media. Being able to create ongoing and meaningful conversations with customers becomes key to your success. 

About Ted Zollinger, Vice President, Client Services

Ted leads the day-to-day account oversight for our large, integrated data and database solutions. He has over 20 years’ experience designing and executing direct marketing campaigns and using the results of these efforts to improve future marketing plans through database management and deployment.

Day one as CEO of AccuData.   I open my front door, full of anticipation of what the day would bring. All of a sudden a red, black and yellow object flashes by my eyes, narrowly missing my head. It hits the porch in front of me, and then rears its head up and sticks out its tongue!

Not used to such things, I did what any self-respecting Englishman would do under these circumstances.  I grabbed my trusty umbrella, used it as a sword and eventually chased the snake into the bushes.  After regaining my composure and having a good laugh about it with my family, I finally drove off to AccuData.

I’m pleased to report that the rest of the day was up hill from there.  We spent an exhilarating day talking with staff, clients and partners about the deal that was just signed between AccuData and Compact.  It was particularly nice to be able to tell people that this is one of those deals full of good news – with no code-speak for layoffs, reorgs or other unpleasant things.

But, clearly, this type of news has a way of filling everyone’s heads with a million questions.  People wanted to know how the news would affect them personally and the organization as a whole, as well as clients and partners.

We took each question one by one.  We reflected on how fortunate AccuData has been to emerge from the economic downturn in a position of strength ­­– much stronger than many of its competitors.  How lucky we are to have particularly loyal client and partner relationships, dedicated and talented staff, as well industry-leading offerings — including its data assets, marketing analytics and database marketing technology. 

I shared with the team how I believed that AccuData has been poised to accelerate its growth, and how this new relationship provides exactly the right combination of financial and technical resources to move the company to an even stronger competitive position. 

Then, we talked about my ideas for how we can work together to build on the success of this company.  As CEO, I felt that the meeting wouldn’t be complete without making a few requests.

First, I asked that all employees – as well as clients and partners – provide honest input and share their ideas with me as I get to know the organization.  I promised to do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions.  I want people to know how much I honestly value their opinions and perspectives.  And how I will use this input as I work with the executive team to update our strategic plan for the coming years.

My second request is that employees continue to make their best effort to provide our clients with highest quality service possible.  This is the heart and soul of this company – and it will always be the source of our success.

In return, I thought it was only fair to make a couple of promises.  First, I promised to be accessible when employees, clients and partners need me.  And second, I promised to do my best to be fair and reward people’s best efforts.

 I told the team that if we all stay focused on these things that we can and will do great things together – and make a big difference for our clients, partners and the industry as a whole.

As I left the office that night, I was exhausted.  But, I was also full of excitement about becoming part of such a terrific team.  Strangely, I already felt very much at home – at least until I heard the weather report.  Sounds like I shouldn’t put away my umbrella too fast after all.  This weekend will be my first tropical storm.  But, at least I feel at the center of it all.

Cheers,
Rich

We recently posted a Facebook promotion asking for feedback on what marketers would do if they were given an extra $1 million for their marketing budget. We received some great replies and wanted to share a few with you:

• Ashley Raymond dreaming about the $1 million marketing budget. I’d probably start a few city magazines that are in need of a monthly calendar for the community…then of course I’d have to rely on AccuData more for demographics and monthly mailing list ;)
• April Scarlett: I would be thrilled to have that budget and would do a dream speaking tour, and ramp up my website to be more interactive with my readers!
• Mark Williams: If I had an extra million to spend on advertising I would take all the money with me and run to Costa Rica and hope I never get caught.
• Joseph Gersch Jr: If I had an additional $1 Mill in my marketing budget, I would spend it on advertising
• Rick Dlesk: Getting a very targeted mailing list from AccuData with an email append and do a targeted direct mail piece with an email blast before and after the mailer.

Congratulations to April Scarlett and Joseph Gersch Jr. for their ideas. They received the most “Likes” from fellow Facebookers. 

From running away to Costa Rica to increasing their advertising spend; our Facebook friends have some great ideas on marketing.  To join in on the conversation, check out our Facebook page and be sure to “Like” us for future promotions.

From telecoms to finance, e-commerce to government, predictive models are being utilized across various sectors to tackle all kinds of business problems. Companies that have yet to benefit from this practice need to examine the ways in which they can do so.

For example, AccuData worked with an ad agency to help its Client, a nationally known health and fitness franchisee, increase response rates by over 100%. Their challenge: demographics alone revealed little insight. 

With more than 700 stores, they wanted to partner with a direct marketing agency that could provide actual marketing intelligence – not just postcards and lists. The project began with a simple customer profile request as part of an effort to increase response rates. The Client chose to work with a savvy, web-to-print direct marketing agency since they had a reputation for excellent creative strategy and back-end analysis.

The direct marketing agency recommended that the client create a descriptive clone model for each of its fitness stores. However, while this would help paint a picture of the various markets, demographic elements and relational penetration, it would not solve the problem of “how do we increase response?”

Matters became even more confusing when they got the results of initial tests between saturation data and scored data from the customer profile. It appeared that scored data actually offered no measurable lift in response – on average, profiled records responded virtually the same as saturation records. The reseller wondered, that perhaps the fitness stores were placed in market areas where immediate surrounding geography was populated by demographics very similar to those on the modeled client file.

That’s where AccuData came in. We provided an actual solution: Using Predict Plus models to uncover their prime prospects. While demographic elements looked very similar between the profiled records and those saturating the geography of the store sites, we wanted to identify key differentiators.

By implementing a Predictive Plus, which looked at over 200 individual demographic elements and compared responders verses non-responders, the resulting scored data became a tremendous resource for the client. They learned exactly which demographic traits – such as credit card usage, age, presence of children in the household and interest in travel – were positive influences on the probability of an individual responding to an offer.

To further improve results, they also applied prospect suppression details – removing from the list non-responders and responders with low propensity to buy. By using predictive modeling, the client was able to double their response rates and reduce the costs of their prospect acquisition marketing campaign.

Predictive modeling will find the statistical differences between responders and non-responders whereas a profile will only give you insight into your customers without regard to those that are not and will not be a customer. So you end up marketing to people that meet a general profile but statistically have a low probability to respond.

The importance of metrics.

Numbers rule. In a time of limited marketing dollars, marketers are being pressured to deliver hard data on how their efforts increased the company’s bottom line. A focus on metrics can mean the difference between a marketing department that’s considered highly valuable, or one on the brink of extinction. If a company wants to learn more about its customers, the only way to do it is if they have the metrics, or are tracking their marketing efforts.

When used effectively, they can help you answer questions such as:
• Which marketing channel delivers the lowest cost per lead?
• What campaign produces the highest value per response?
• How do I acquire customers with the greatest lifetime value?
• How can I meaningfully increase my average response rate?
• What is the best way to retain the customers I have?

Without metrics, you’re essentially marketing in a void with no way to compare campaigns or channels and no way to determine where you can achieve the biggest “bang for your buck.”

If you do already track response rates for your campaigns, it may be one of the least important things to focus on. Why? Because a high response rate doesn’t necessarily translate into profitability. Response rate is only one piece of a larger marketing metrics puzzle. While response rate tells you how many people were enticed by your offer, other metrics can give you a better understanding of the overall success of your campaign by shifting focus to value.

Measuring the value of your responders is a great way to determine the success of a campaign. Over multiple campaigns, you can use other metrics to determine where your marketing dollar is best spent. This can be accomplished by looking at profitability by channel, lifetime customer value by channel, customer retention by channel and more.

Last but certainly not least, metrics let you test your campaigns, which enable you to understand what formats, channels, creative, and offers perform best. To ensure that the metrics will be there, develop measurable objectives from the outset, meticulously track costs and results, and report them to management and clients. The return on your time and efforts will be well worth the investment.

How much does it cost a printer to move into full service marketing? Well, if you try it and get it wrong, the sky’s the limit. It could cost you your business. There has been a lot of talk about how to become a full-service marketing provider. In fact, at this year’s Mailing and Fulfillment Services Association conference it was the main topic discussed and how it’s the way of the future for printers and mailers wanting to move up the value chain. However, this is not a business change that should be undertaken lightly.

When your business starts to think about how it should be preparing to make this kind of transition, there is likely a lot of debate internally about what you would really need.  To survive and be competitive there are some points to consider:

• Staffing – Your current sales reps who are great at selling printing and fulfillment services would now need to ‘solution sell’ analytics and multi-channel marketing products which may prove to be difficult for them to do.
• Training – Whether you’re a two-person print shop or have a bigger staff, you now need to train your staff with limited resources.
• Branding – Your existing clients know you as a ‘printer or fulfillment house’ so you’ll need to prove to them that you’re not abandoning your roots and core competency as you expand your services.
• Data Resources – you’ll need to offer your customers a full range of data resources for prospecting, marketing analytics to profile current their customers, advanced customer database technology to accurately target qualified buyers, and email services to enhance their direct mailers.  

You could rely on brainstorming, black coffee and inspiration to get you to that level. Another way to do it, though, is to partner with a vendor who can provide all of this for you – like AccuData.  By taking a more analytical approach with your clients, you’ll be offering them a much higher certainty of success. If you, as a full service provider, can offer your clients the ability to identify the most profitable customers on their lists and devise multi-channel campaigns that will reach them and engage their interest, you can virtually guarantee great response rates and loyal, satisfied clients. 

By providing access to advanced data enrichment and predictive modeling tools, backed up by the support of professional experts, a reputable database marketing partner can help you ensure your clients are able to deliver the right messages in the right media to the right people.

Everything leads back to the data. The more value you can build into this area, the better the eventual marketing ROI will be. But how does a printer with no previous experience of handling the intricacies of marketing data use these sophisticated techniques to add value for the client? The best answer is a combination of solid data and years of expertise.

In the longer term, what is it worth to reposition your printing business in an area where it can offer a premium service that measurably boosts its customers ROI and keeps them coming back for more, year after year?

We have some national clients that are relatively new to applying predictive models to their marketing campaigns. It is not uncommon to observe them pre-deciding markets without considering regional cultures.  Consequently, their marketing efforts often excel in some markets and don’t do so well in others. How do we handle this?

The starting point is to implement a national model.  The data set should include some sort of market or regional indicator (e.g. Metropolitan Statistical Area, ‘MSA’).  After the results come in, the data can be parsed by the market/regional indicator and the campaign results analyzed on that basis.  What does this do for you? 

This approach will allow you to compare and contrast performance by market.  You may find some similarities among markets. In this case, you can combine those markets for targeted treatment – starting with a predictive model built specifically for that market.  Unique markets that do not act like others get ‘teased’ out.  Strategic decisions can then be made as to the feasibility of giving those unique markets special treatment.  For example, using this approach for a national client, we were able to tease out underperforming markets that included smaller MSAs in Texas such as Austin and Portland, OR.

By taking this approach you can use your marketing budget most efficiently while continuously refining your targeted marketing for maximum performance.

Every now and then, we at AccuData like to pause from the normal day-to-day to have a little fun or celebrate a holiday with our audience. For this 4th of July, we are celebrating like most of our audience probably will be – with some delicious food!

AccuData is proud to present three tasty recipes that will add to the fun this Independence Day weekend. Try out some of our favorite holiday recipes and enjoy them this weekend!

Get the recipes here!

• Fresh Pineapple Salsa
  To start summer off with a fresh and cool flavor, we throw in some pineapple and it’s all down-hill from there.
• Sliders with Chipotle Mayonnaise
  AccuData loves to kick things up with barbeque sliders. And for those that can take the heat, we add our special Chipotle Mayonnaise!
• Red, White and Blueberry Cheesecake Pie
  What better way to top off a patriotic celebration than with a Red, White and Blueberry Cheesecake Pie.

From all of us here at AccuData, have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend!

When you begin using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you’ll find that it becomes part of your marketing environment.  You don’t just promote your business in a silo. Ten years ago, you’d take out an ad in a newspaper or magazine and it would sit there, alone and immeasurable, with no push from your other marketing and no pull back to anywhere else.

Today however, you are building a community using social media and it can’t stand alone.  Links to your Facebook page, your tweets or your blog from an email blast send traffic to your website.  It’s an active network where the energy from one platform drives the others.  To keep the traffic moving, you post or tweet as interesting and as useful a topic as you can.

What’s critical to this process? Your email list.  No, your email to customers or prospects is not social media, but it’s important that you have an email list as part of your program. Businesses can’t exist on social media alone.  For one thing, you don’t own your Twitter content or Facebook list.  If these disappear or change in some significant way, you may be out of luck. Your email list is your own. You have whatever information your customers have chosen to give you and that database stays with you.

Businesses should not ignore email just because they are engaged in social media. You should continue to grow your email database. And the great thing is there are services available that can provide you with fast access to email records including prospect data. There are also services available that help keep your current email lists clean and viable. Why is it so important?

• Email subscribers or customer opt-ins are your biggest fans.
• Email is used everywhere.
• Email is accessible.
• Email is the most effective subscription mechanism available.
• Managing email lists won’t take up your time.

It’s important that our infatuation with social media doesn’t lead us to forget about the fact that there is power in the non-social aspects of your marketing efforts and that email can’t be abandoned when you start spending your energy on social media.  It will be more important than ever.

You’ll grow your readership, build your community and monetize more effectively by combining social media with email.

Social media is a widespread tactic used to help marketers achieve some of their goals.  To be effective, social media should be combined with other communication strategies to optimize its effectiveness. The question most companies have these days is, “How do I actually integrate social media with my marketing strategy?”

To answer that question, you need to consider ways to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your outreach efforts.

Below are some ideas on how Social Media can be integrated into your other marketing tactics:

1. Link each of your other social media channels together (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) so you can always be found.
2. You know how tricky email marketing is, particularly when it comes to getting people to open and read it. So, when they do, throw in a reference to your social media channels, and what the reader will gain by visiting them.
3. In advertising, encourage people to go to your Facebook Page. When you advertise in a radio spot or place an ad in a magazine, your call to action could be “Like us on Facebook” or “Be sure to retweet us on Twitter.”  AND these simple phrases can go on anything: window clings, yellow pages, billboards, kiosks, brochures, fliers, etc.
4. Events marketing can be supported through Twitter hashtags (a hashtag is used to mark a keyword or topic in a Tweet). These tags allow attendees to share information about the event (before, during, and after) with their social networks.  To find out what a hashtag means, you use hashtags.org as a resource.
5. Similarly, promotions can use LivingSocial or Groupon to gain attendance or drive traffic.  The additional advantage is that attendees are encouraged to share their whereabouts on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. 
6. Blogging can also be a great way to support your sales and marketing efforts. You can write about a new trend in your industry, an article you read in the paper or any other topic that is relevant to your company.  It can be a short paragraph or lengthy article.
7. Get maximum coverage using traditional print and media outlets.  For example, also post your press release as a note on Facebook.  Or put a quote or other important information from the press on Twitter with links to the full release on Facebook.

Combining social media with your advertising doubles your impact, but the integration is most effective if each advertising effort includes reference to the other.

The Big Fat Marketing Blog recently posted an article about Facebook followers and the importance of quality over quantity. We agree that, “social media is about being social” and bringing audiences together to one location for a “social” gathering – which is why we thought we would bring some fun and relevancy to our Facebook page.

We’ve created some great promotions we plan on launching on our Facebook page beginning this Friday, June 10th. Every so often we’ll be posting these promotions (really good ones) and some of our lucky fans will be able to take advantage of great discounts and even the occasional giveaway. And even if you’re not a prizewinner, we will most likely always have something to give to those dropping in on the fun. We also want to hear from our true fans out there. Let us know what products or services you’re in the market for or what marketing problems you might be facing and our data experts will be on hand to answer any questions you have. Because after all, that’s what social media is supposed to be about, right?

There is an emerging trend in predictive modeling. Newer methods and technology are allowing modelers to literally build hundreds of models using less data in minutes (albeit many minutes) versus days and weeks.  This has led to the ability to build models of models. What does this mean to you?

By building ‘mini’ models based on mini samples of the modeling data set, small statistically significant movements in the data can be detected. This means that activity overlooked by traditional methods such as regressions are more likely to be identified.  This improves the accuracy of the prediction rate. After the building of the mini models is complete a final model is built using the mini models as inputs.  The end result is a more stable and accurate model.

Many resellers would agree that generating more business for your company and increasing your bottom line are two main goals. What if I told you there was a product that can help you achieve this? AccuData’s Data on Demand is a customized suite of data technologies that helps you provide an online data buying solution for your customers – but all branded under your company’s name.

From time to time our data experts are asked questions about the benefits and ease-of-use of Data On Demand. Below is a list of those questions as well as the answers:

Q. Who are the best candidates for Data On Demand?

Printers, Print on Demand companies, direct mailers and coupon services all benefit from these complementary services that will enhance sales revenue gained. So do dealer networks, franchise operators, marketing agencies and other organizations – plus you are providing a needed, value-added service to members and clients.

Q. How does Data On Demand benefit my business?

A. Data On Demand is an easy, flexible way to develop your own data business. AccuData provides all the data. You can sell data solutions directly from your current website or from a stand-alone website built to your brand specifications. Your biggest advantage is the low maintenance. Once you set up your AccuDataPipe or List Choice solution, you won’t have to touch this revenue-generating tool again!

Q. Do I need to be a data expert to sell data online?

A. Not at all. Data On Demand leverages what you know best – your customers.

With our help, you select and simplify data offerings to match your marketing objectives and customers’ needs.

Q. I already have an e-commerce and Print on Demand site, won’t this confuse customers?

A. Data On Demand integrates within your existing technology to match your company’s brand identity. From your customers’ perspective, you’ll simply have added a new feature to your site.

Q. I don’t have the resources to build and host a data site, can AccuData help?

A. Yes. AccuData can design a stand-alone data sales site built to your brand specifications. Data On Demand services include website development, training and maintenance – everything you need to start selling data online today.

Q. I am unsure what type of data set would benefit my business. Who determines this?

A. AccuData works closely with you to provide all the consultative guidance, support and feedback you need to match your business and your client’s needs.

With current technology products like Data on Demand it’s easier for you to expand your online revenues.

As you know missing data is a problem for statisticians.  It is analogous to having missing pieces of a puzzle – you kind of know the full picture but you you’re forced to somewhat guess at what the missing pieces might look like.  In the purest sense, records with missing data would be eliminated.  In the real world of compiled and sourced data that means practically all records would be removed because a vast majority of them never have 100% of the fields populated. So how is missing data handled?

There are many schools of thought.  The most popular way is to impute by using an overall average.  However, I disagree with that approach because I think it tends to be misleading and results in false positives.   My preference is to mitigate risk by treating missing data as a ‘worst case’ scenario based on the client’s needs.  For example, if my client is affluent prospects and a prospect record is missing an income value, then I will assume a low income value.  There likely will be other affluent factors that are not missing that will improve the probability score.

By taking an approach such as this I’d rather lower the calculated probability than create a false positive that ends up getting this prospect record selected for a marketing campaign.  Although I fully realize that I may be overlooking a viable prospect, I’d rather save my clients money by chasing the best prospects in a worst case scenario. 

During the course of a given day a person may get anywhere from 20-50 emails. Some of them are opened and others are simply deleted. Strategically crafted emails can help a company achieve optimal results in the areas of lead generation, lead nurturing and convert existing customers into repeat buyers.

Email marketing is a science, as well as an art. That’s why it’s critical to implement some best practices that alleviate common issues and ensure each email will not only reach the targeted recipient, but also compel the reader to open it.

1. Have a plan: Before drafting a campaign, consider the goal and objective. Is it purely for informational purposes, such as an email newsletter? Is it for lead generation or to share information to solve a customer’s problem?
2. Strong subject line: The subject line will determine if the recipient opens the email. Try to utilize words that relate to the purpose of the email message. If the email is for a specific product or offer, leverage action words to stir a sense of urgency. Also be careful not to use words that may be flagged as spam like ‘free’ or ‘deal’.
3. Consider your ‘from’ name: The name that displays in the ‘from’ field determines if a recipient will delete the email. Remember to match this field to something familiar to the recipient – such as the brand the customer knows and trusts. Having a trusted from name encourages higher open rates from customers.
4. Consider your timing: It’s always best to research specific times and dates to deploy your message. Many believe sending email on Tuesday or Wednesday is optimal while Monday and Friday are the worst days to send out an email.
5. Test your email: Due to different email clients, email host providers and other factors, it’s imperative to test emails before approval. This includes testing items such as: email clients, email templates, spam detection rules, formatting for mobile email recipients among other factors.
6. Lists: Email is only as good as the email addresses upon which a campaign is built. If you’re emailing current customers, it’s important that all the information is verified (link to your email verify product??) and up-to-date. If you’re targeting new prospects, you’ll want to find lists with certain demographic and lifestyle characteristics to meet all of your targeting needs (link to email product?)
7. Analytics: To measure the success of an email marketing campaign, utilize reliable statistics and analytics (link to your page: http://www.accudata.com/Email_Marketing.97.lasso). Having this data allows for specific types of reporting for the campaign stakeholders. Relevant metrics help marketers understand successful and unsuccessful aspects of campaigns.
8. Study and improve: Based on the results, consider areas that show sub-optimal performance and focus efforts on improving them. If a particular area needs improvement, such as subject lines, experiment with multiple subject lines and see which performs the best.

To learn more about email marketing, contact AccuData. You can also follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on Facebook.

This morning I ordered my Starbucks (tall, skinny latte) and moved to the area where I am supposed to wait for that familiar cup of morning brew.  And I waited, and waited, and waited….

Finally the Barista noticed me, asked me what I was waiting for and realized I had been skipped. 

Here is what happened next –

1.      My coffee was immediately produced with apologies

2.      The store manager (who I didn’t even realize was observing) handed me an apology card that read “A cup should never be empty” that offered a free cup on my next visit

Service failures happen to all businesses but very few companies figure out how to respond to them.  It’s simple – take care of the problem, right away, no questions asked. 

What could have been a very frustrating experience was transformed into a brand building event and in the end I left a more loyal customer than when I arrived.

Bravo Starbucks!  I’ll be back for that free cup o’ joe.

Here were my last ten Groupon offers:

1.       One Ticket to Florida Stage’s “The Cha Cha of a Camel Spider”

2.      $10 for $20 worth Greek cuisine and drinks

3.      55% off a dental exam

4.      $25 for five Baby Genius DVDs

5.      $15 for $30 worth of spices

6.      50% off a helicopter tour

7.      $99 off a facial

8.      75% off of croquet

9.      61% off a stained glass class

10.  63% off a laser skin solution

Here is a bit of commentary on each (bold were bad offers for me):

1.      I don’t go to plays alone

2.      A good offer

3.      I have a great dentist

4.      My son is 10

5.      Great for me – I’m a hobby chef

6.      Cool

7.      What?

8.      WHAT?

9.      WHAAAAAAAT?

10.  WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

So 3 out of 10 were good offers.

Maybe the sequence is actually seeking input to a targeting algorithm that will progressively make smarter offers, but I’ve played with Groupon for a bit and I don’t perceive the pattern getting any better.

The thing is, they know or should know a lot about me and the sequence was wasteful.

For example it is easy to know I am married, have a son and am probably not a great target for salon treatments. 

It really comes down to the fact that online marketing is still far, far behind what direct marketers are able to do, or simply just do, offline. 

I have read about several hundred Groupon competitors and I wonder if one of them will be able to build scale and get the targeting right. 

A few more of these offers and its Groupon.toast for me.

If you want your B2B direct marketing to be a breath of fresh air, you need oxygen….and that’s what data is, the oxygen of B2B direct marketing. Too many great campaigns have failed because the data was poor – and bad quality data reflects negatively on the content of your mailings and can alienate your best prospects.

In my conversations with clients over the years, most would agree that marketing to businesses is in many ways a far more complicated and complex procedure than marketing to consumers. Marketing to businesses can be a notoriously difficult task due to the lack of unique data sources. All of this means that buying the right external data for your campaign is an essential factor affecting success.

With an influx of suppliers providing B2B data, how should B2B marketers go about ensuring they are using their scarce budgets as effectively as possible? What are the biggest pitfalls when buying data? How do you go about appending data? And what are the best criteria for choosing a data vendor?

One of the biggest challenges when buying data is ensuring the information is accurate and determining what source of the data is. When it comes to business data, there is no denying the rate of business change is pretty constant; if the economy is booming, businesses expand fast and bring on extra decision makers whereas, in a downturn, the contacts you have may be made obsolete by downsizing or from going out of business. Making sure that external data suppliers are keeping up with these changes is important. The best way to address this is by asking your list broker a lot of questions about where the data came from. The next way is to test it. If you don’t like the results – don’t use the data again.

The other thing B2B marketers are asking about these days is appending house files. Of course you want to target customers who look like your most profitable accounts but do you really know enough about your clients? When it comes to data appends, once again, it’s important to test the data. Send your house file to multiple vendors asking them to append and then have them send the results back to you. Compare the hit and match rates and coverage rate to determine which vendor to use. The true test of a good vendor is how well they can match your data to theirs and what the coverage rate is.

As I addressed in my blog a few months ago, the other important thing when buying B2B data is where you’re buying the data. Make sure you trust your vendor, ask as many questions as possible, and do your homework! For more tips on choosing a list broker, check out my earlier blog.

And remember, choosing the right data supplier, and not buying solely on price, is probably the key element in ensuring that your response rates stay above the industry average and give you the return on investment you need!

It’s April again, and you know what that means…that’s right it’s time to pump those fists in the air, apply that orange bronze glow and grease up that hair.  It’s time to see what the Shore has to offer.

AccuData has just come out with the first Fist Pumpin’ at the Shore data card and we’re here to give you the low-down on the situation.  With a bronzed universe of over two million strong and every select you can think of possible (with the exception of the thumping club music and ladies drink free guarantee); AccuData is providing this year’s hottest mailing list. 

While I would love to say that finding out the number of people who frequent over-night guests or that utilize spray-tan applications is FREE, it may very well run you a few hundred brain cells.  That being said, who wouldn’t be able to take advantage of presence of a hot tub indicator and fist pump speed as a valuable select on their next campaign?

Have you ever asked yourself, who would ever apply makeup and bronzer like it were sunscreen, put on so much hair gel that you defy emissions laws, and speak in a made up language and refer to themselves as Gorillas and Juice-Heads?  We did, and we want to let you know how to reach them!

And even the folks at The Big Fat Marketing Blog are talking about this amazing list.  You wanted this summer’s hottest list…you got it! 

Over the course of my career I have observed the evolution of predictive modeling in Marketing.

When I first got my start, logistic regression models was the method of choice for marketing organizations that were even doing modeling. Regression methods take a bird’s eye view of the impact of a single predictor attribute on the overall model. After many manual, time-consuming iterations, it produced an algebraic equation which provided a predicted probability score. At the time, that was good enough as it was considered leading edge. It is still the dominant method for producing a probability score.

Later CHAID was introduced. CHAID (Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection) differed from regression in that it looked at how combinations of predictor attributes impacted the overall model. Because the model output was in a ‘tree’ format and in Boolean logic (if, then, else statements), it was quickly embraced because it was easier to understand by non-mathematical marketing staff and because it was essentially the first foray into segmenting the entire market. Each branch of the tree represented a statistically significant segment. Also, the time it took to produce the model was significantly reduced from the time it took to produce a regression model.

CART became the next generation of CHAID. Not only did it detect the interactions among predictor attributes but it also could handle non categorical data such as sales, number of transactions, etc that was formerly limited to regression models. This hybrid approach added flexibility and filled a void. CART is a dominant method of choice for building segmentation models but also handles regression-type needs as well.

Neural Networks also came upon the scene. This modeling method quickly gained widespread acceptance because the engineering of the model allowed it to ‘train’ itself while applying some of the same techniques used in CHAID/CART. It proved to be fairly accurate with little to no human intervention. However, it was considered to be a ‘black box’ approach meaning that it did not produce the traditional metrics that modelers used to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of the model.  Purists tended not to embrace this method. This method became the non-modelers model.

Fast forward to today.

An emerging capability has combined neural net, CART, and regression methodologies to provide the most flexibility to date. This method is used by the top finisher of the past several years of the national DMA Analytic Challenge (a contest to produce the best predictive model for a worthy cause – usually a non-profit organization.)

AccuData has recently acquired the capability and the results are simply astounding. This methodology builds hundreds of micro models and each model is evaluated on its contribution to overall results. The final step of the methodology is to build a model of the models.

What this method does that others do not is that it detects infinitesimal statistical interactions among predictor attributes. Because there are hundreds of models built (and then a model of these models) problems of outliers and skewed data are  greatly reduced to the point of becoming a non-factor.

In our side-by-side comparison of previously built models, we were consistently getting an incremental lift of over 100% in the top decile and increased predictive accuracy of 12% – hugely significant in maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing dollar. What’s more the engineering behind the model build literally reduces model build time by at least 50%.

What does this mean?  We are able to produce better models quicker allowing our clients to get in-market faster while achieving extraordinary results.

I’ve recently been testing emerging modeling approachs, summarily known as Ensemble models. This approach is quite different than past approaches such as a single model to address a problem.

Ensemble modeling entails building multiple models – usually on a subset of the data set – and then aggregating the results in some way to provide the prediction.

The primary benefit of this approach is that it isolates micro influences that otherwise might be lost in a single model. Consequently the end result is an improved overall prediction accuracy.

Companies know that ordering a mailing list for a direct mail campaign can be incredibly confusing. There is a multitude of information and source choices available to you. It can also be a nightmare to go through this process only to end up with a bad list! Not only is the money you spent on the list wasted, but so are your printing and postage expenses.

When I speak to clients I always stress the importance of doing research on a list broker before doing business with them. As the old saying goes: ‘Buyer Beware’. You need to know exactly what it is you are getting before you make that investment. It’s essential you find a company that’s not only reputable, but one that realizes the importance of creating a true partnership with their clients, rather than simply selling you a list.

•    The following are some basic questions you should ask any list broker before leasing a list: How many years have you been involved in the direct marketing industry?
•    What type of clients do you typically work with? References?
•    What type of lists do you offer?
•    Do you have suggestions on who may be our target audience?
•    Where did the data come from – in other words, who are your sources?
•    What is the expected deliverability of the list?
•    How frequently do you update your lists?

Just remember, an experienced company or list broker will answer these questions before even being asked. An experienced company will also ensure they create a perfectly targeted list that fits your needs.

Many marketers measure success by getting the phone to ring or the door to swing – we call it response rate or better yet ROI.  But response isn’t cash and ROI usually doesn’t consider the full value of the customer relationship.  What marketers should do is understand the potential lifetime value of each prospect and replace ROI based decisions with lifetime value based targeting decisions.

There is the catch – The most loyal customers, the ones that buy more over time, return less product, file fewer claims and call customer service the least – are often less responsive to direct mail, email and other acquisition marketing efforts.  So to drive long term value one must accept potentially LOWER campaign response rates and ROI.

But the flip-side is worse – the most responsive customers are often the least valuable and can even destroy value for the company over time.  They cancel orders, call customer care over and over again, default on payments and generally wreck havoc on the P&L.

How to investigate value-based targeting in four steps:

1.  Many companies already have a measure of customer value for customer care or other purposes but the information is not looped back into acquisition for targeting.  So a great place to start is with existing value measures.  If none exist, start by creating a simple value metric – net the first sale (often used as the numerator in the ROI calculation) with customer care, returns, credits and other directly associated costs.

2.  Next investigate how the incorporation of value might have impacted selection on a previous campaign.  Calculate the value of each decile in your recent acquisition campaign – how much profit was generated in total, from each decile of your most recent campaign?  Are any of the mid-deciles more valuable than a top decile?  If so this illustrates the economically destructive behavior of highly responsive prospects and offers evidence that new targeting methods based on value might be beneficial.

3.  Now it’s time to build a new targeting model.  If measures of back-end value exist in your company on a customer level then it’s relatively easy to append the data to a recent campaign and build a new predictive model.

4.  Finally, run a live test.  Create a test cell of value-optimized prospects and mail it (or email it, call it, etc.) against prospects optimized for ROI.  As in step 2, perform a back-end analysis to see if the value based modeling produced better overall economics or not.

If you’d like to learn more about value-based targeting you read the following white paper:
An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Often Decrease Both Revenue and Marketing ROI.

Direct Marketing has come a long way from the ‘spray and pray’ days of blanketing the consuming public with mass messages and hoping to attract customers that way.  Although it worked, it was recognized that the customer acquisition cost was relatively high.

Over time it was recognized that customer acquisition costs could be lowered if the consuming market could be narrowed to those more likely to buy the products or services being offered. One of the least complex ways – yet effective – to accomplish this is by an analytical technique known as ‘profiling’.

Profiling is a process of understanding the demographic, lifestyle, and buyer behavior of your customers.  To accomplish this each attribute is assessed by observing how many customers share that same attribute.  This observation process occurs for each attribute to be included in the profiling. The profile itself becomes the compilation of the attributes that appear most often across your customer base.  For example, it may be that the dominant age group is 35-54, with incomes of $50,000 to $75,000, enjoy gardening, and purchase online.

Armed with a customer profile, marketers are able to refine their targeting to prospective customers whose demographic, lifestyle and buyer behavior attributes are closely aligned with the customer profile.

The implications of applying a customer profile to marketing are obvious. By eliminating prospective customers that simply do not match the customer profile, marketing costs are reduced. Consequently, the customer acquisition cost is reduced because profiling has allowed the marketer to focus on finding and acquiring prospective customers while avoiding those that won’t become a customer. For example, if a marketer were to eliminate 25% of the consuming public then its acquisition costs would be lowered by 25%.

To go a step further, AccuData offers a profiling product known as SnapShot. SnapShot produces the aforementioned customer profile.  However, it goes a step further by providing a profile of the geographic target market area.  It then compares the customer profile to the geographic profile to help you to determine your penetration rates for that geographical market. By analyzing penetration rates, it helps you determine what the upside potential for your target market is. It helps you understand what your market share is. And it helps you understand if the market is saturated.

In summary, customer profiling is an important first step in efficiently and effectively spending your marketing dollar.

In a recent article published in Target Marketing, “Famous Last Words : Where Are the Copywriters?” Denny Hatch proposes a number of headlines, for example “what not to eat on an airplane, “what the IRS doesn’t want you to know,” as examples of effective copywriting.  The rest are “bland” or worse, “pap crap.”  Denny supports his position by quoting David Ogilvy and John Caples and these are not bad references to make, after all these ARE some of the “Foundering Fathers” of advertising and direct marketing.  For example most would agree that the seminal book “Ogilvy on Advertising” published in 1985 is a timeless masterpiece and did for advertising what Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” did for writers.

But is this really what works today?  I don’t think so and I’m not sure our Founding Fathers would disagree.  In fact, headlines like these might be toxic.

AccuData is in the database marketing business, not the copywriting business.  But being in the database marketing business, having the opportunity to help clients test creative, copy, art, offers, and almost anything else you can think of at huge scale and in multiple channels, allows us to see what works and what doesn’t.

The fact is, many of today’s consumers see right through headlines like “What the IRS doesn’t want you to know.” While such a headline might get the envelope or the email opened, there are increasing numbers of consumers that will circular file anything that looks like a trick or a scam and while this style of headline might work for some, for many others the result will be very poor backend economics.

Consumers responding to such headlines often buy less after their initial response, cancel orders more, and exhibit fewer repeat purchases.  They are less likely to become social advocates and more likely to complain.  Let’s be clear – it’s a good thing to test and any headline might work for a given campaign.  But test very carefully and be sure to look at total economics, not just a superficial open rate or response rate.

A final thought:
Amazon.com advertises the Kindle by saying “download books in 60 seconds.”  It’s simple, clear and effective – 60% market share in the ebook market says so.  But I guess Amazon could have urged consumers to buy a Kindle to find out “what bookstores don’t want you to know.”

Recently a friend, the head of direct customer acquisition for one of the top ten leading telecommunications firms in the country, told me that from the perspective of cost per add, direct mail was the most effective way to acquire new customers for his company.

Now of course I asked my friend if I could blog about this.

What he explained is that a disciplined approach to list management, creative, analytics and especially testing makes such a result possible. Production is also a major success factor, squeezing out every penny without gutting the mail piece in terms of quality (see my previous blog about see-through envelopes)

Now, I’m still a huge direct mail fan because I see so many of AccuData’s clients using it very effectively, even while others scale back or give up. But in an era of sophisticated ecommerce, mass media, social media, email, retail and all the resources my friend has at his disposal to make all his channels work, I was somewhat surprised that direct mail is still number one especially as postal rates have climbed and some of the talent in the direct mail space has bled away to the ecommerce space.

1. Busier show right?

I have not seen any formal statistics but as a long time exhibitor, AccuData found DMA2010 to be busier and a bit more energetic than last year. As a supplier, of course we were looking for the ever elusive “buyer” and there were some this year. The AccuData booth was fairly busy with marketers looking for solutions. At the same time the DMA is a great chance for the suppliers to form creative partnerships and there was a good deal of that as well.

But the buzz I heard was all about next year’s show which we understand to be in Boston. Hopefully with a better economy and a location closer to so many marketing companies in the East, the first time in four years, we’ll have a great show next year.

2. Where was the buzz?

The show was busier, but boy did it seem quiet. It didn’t seem there was as much to talk about this year. AccuData certainly had something to talk about with the launch of AccuBaseE, our new suite of ecommerce tools that link customer or prospect data to the web, but there didn’t seem to be as much innovation, new ideas or creativity as I’ve seen in the past.

On the other hand, “E2,” the merger of two great companies, Epsilon and Equifax, WAS producing some buzz and I can’t wait to see where that goes.

3. Everywhere Social Media

Social Media – marketers and suppliers are all chasing it. Almost every supplier booth had references to it, case studies, etc. It’s the new “it” capability every supplier has got to offer, and that every marketer has got to figure out.

AccuData has been an early winner in the space with AccuBaseE, our new ecommerce suite that offers web services that link back-end customer data with Facebook and other social media in real time.

But as a former client-side marketer, I’d be completely confused by all the claims. Hopefully in 2011 we’ll see more clarity in this area and real winners emerge in the supplier and client-side arenas.

4. Where are the apps?

With the tech world going app crazy I was struck by the almost complete lack of apps at the show or even talk of apps – it almost seems that the direct marketing world is living on another planet when it comes to technology.

Well I don’t think that will last long. Next year I’d expect to see and hear a great deal about apps. Next year, 2011, look for a new entrant in the Marketing Services arena to attack with apps.

5. Of course, The Brain had a great show

The Brain received a beautiful pin from client, you know, one of those corporate logo pins? To the AccuData customer that gave him the pin, you know who you are (and we love you) – A pin? Really?

After The Brain’s debut at the 2009 DMA we took a hard look at the AccuData corporate web site and I had to agree with him that our site was weak in the area of “proof points.”  The Brain correctly pointed out to me that AccuData, despite serving many top-flight clients over the years, had not taken the time to publish case studies on our site.

So, and I tip my hat to The Brain (since I can actually tip my hat….), I’m happy to say that AccuData now offers a number of interesting case studies with more on the way.

And in a homage to The Brain and the great work he does for AccuData and our clients, we’ve featured him as a regular on the site, as the mascot of AccuData’s new Resources Page. Over time we’ll add white papers, videos, case studies and other IP that properly features the great work going on around here and, yes, The Brain.

Enjoy!

When I first got into Marketing, it was product-focused. As market technology became more prevalent – first as Database Marketing, then as CRM – the insights forced a shift to becoming customer-focused. And that made sense – and produced a lot of revenue.

I’ve been pondering the customer-focus with the advent and expansion of social media. Advances in crawling, text mining, and aggregation tools have brought us as close to one-to-one marketing as we’ve ever been. So that got me to thinking, if we truly know who the customer is, then isn’t it time to tell them about our products?

Think about it. We became customer focused because we didn’t know much about the customer. Now that we know so much more, perhaps we should try to sell them something too. After all, if we know so much let’s just tell them about our products and services.  Just a thought.

For more inquisitive insight, visit me at the DMA in October- Booth #1204

Just this week, I was on the receiving end of the best B2B campaign I’ve seen in years – and had to fire off this posting to you without delay, given the valuable marketing lessons to be learned from it.

A seemingly hand addressed brown paper envelope was delivered to me.

Inside… a hotel key and a note offering a web address. It intrigued me – had I won a prize? (Of course I knew I hadn’t. But nevertheless, I was impressed by the mystery. How could anyone not be?)

So I took the bait and visited the site. It was a hotel micro-site inviting me to review a simple hotel restaurant menu and “construct” my perfect meal. Very cool interactive content.

Once I completed this menu , the true nature of the campaign was revealed. Both mailer and site were a demonstration of the prowess of VLG – clearly a very interesting interactive agency! VLG pointed out that I had not only engaged with the site, but revealed critical information about myself along the way (steak, not chicken!).

Moments after completing the site’s online form I received a call from VLG.

So what can you take away from this top-flight campaign? Five key components:

1. Accurate Targeting: I lead sales and marketing at AccuData. I’m the perfect target for this agency

2. Attention-Getting Opener: Marketers know unusual mail pieces have a better chance of being opened. Boxes are the best but a hand-addressed brown paper envelope is very good.

3. Irresistible call-to-action: the hotel key was a unique way to spur the desired response… my visit to the URL.

4. Show, don’t tell: The mailer didn’t tell me what VLG could do. It showed me the proof in a memorable way. And that made all the difference.

5. Fast follow-up: By calling just moments after my site visit, VLG reached me at the peak of my interest when they were still top-of-mind. Definitely a best practice.

Was the campaign expensive? Sure. But VLG could never have driven that response from me with email or a more traditional mail piece. B2B direct marketing can often support more expensive promotional costs because of the relatively large value of a sale.

Check out another great mail piece I’ve reviewed: “Dear Mr. Goff” isn’t even close – let’s get variable

There was an interesting article in a recent Wall Street Journal. It discussed a study that concluded eating chocolate is linked to depression. ‘How is this relevant to me’, you may ask?

The objective of the model was gain insight as to what foods may contribute to depression. But that’s not important for this blog post. What is important is the process and methodology used to arrive at a conclusion.

The study indicated that several factors were introduced into a statistical model to see what impact each factor had on the stability, reliability, and predictability of the model. What the model discovered is that introducing foods other than chocolate had little or no impact on the model’s metrics. That’s exactly the same process we use to build and evaluate our predictive response and purchase models.

Like researchers, we too seek out factors that ultimately contribute to our understanding of who may buy something – or may not.

A couple of days ago I read an article about how data from social networking sites is being used by marketers. The article discussed how chatter amongst consumers is being tracked by marketers. And they are tracking who is chatting with whom – essentially the social network for that particular product or service.

Medical research on behavior modification concludes that behavior modification is achieved through social influences. And that got me thinking: impressive gains can be made if marketers can find a way to harness the social ‘chatter’ that I view as an indication of behavior.

Analytically, this means exciting times are upon us as social media-based data is now becoming available. The ability to add this data to the already existing banks of demographic and lifestyle data will enable highly refined target marketing.

I’ve always said that the objective of marketing is to invoke an emotion in the prospect. Hopefully that emotion is to buy your product or service. The best way to invoke that emotion is by connecting your message to their behavior.

Back when I first got into this business, I applied MicroVision codes to my customer database, did a frequency analysis, figured out which cluster codes my company was primarily selling to, bought prospects with those same codes, and got reasonably strong results. But that was almost 20 years ago when few marketers were doing anything like that.

Why was it successful back then? I surmise that so few marketers were doing any type of targeting that I was getting to prospects better than my competitors.

Interestingly, some marketers still use this technique and until recently have met with some degree of success.

A current client of ours fell into that category. They came to us because their response rates have been consistently dropping.

After a brief conversation with the client it occurred to me that it might be more ‘ROI’ effective to build a response model – something the client had previously considered but concluded it would be too expensive. I was able to illustrate how the economics of a response model favorably compared to the economics of cluster code marketing for the size of their direct mail campaigns.

For clients that are doing rather large scale direct mail, the unit cost of doing a model drops dramatically when compared with the variable cost of doing cluster code marketing.

It is something to consider if you’re not currently doing any sort of predictive model-based marketing.

I’ve been in this business since before database marketing was called database marketing (let alone CRM). When Don Peppers and Martha Rogers et.al. first introduced the concept of 1:1 marketing, it more or less remained a concept. Why? Because at the time, neither the technology nor the data existed to cost-effectively implement such programs.

As I read the current issue of DM News it is clear that more and more marketing services are rapidly moving toward this concept of 1:1 marketing. They are acquiring technology companies. They are acquiring analytical companies. They are acquiring creative services agencies.  Why? There are four reasons:

1) The technology to process nano bytes of data has been refined and costs reduced. 

2) The depth and breadth of behavioral data is vastly improved and readily available – both from traditional sources and now from the social media channels.

3) Modeling software can now swiftly process millions of calculations. 

4) Variable Laser printing technology, PURLs and dynamic web page capabilities.

Although the ability to converge data, technology and analytics has existed in marketing for decades, it has not been able to be as precise as 1:1 because of the cost and time involved.  That has changed.  Additionally, the cost of personalization far outweighed the benefit.

Now with laser printing technology, PURLs, dynamic web page capabilities, integrated with behavioral data and predictive model analytics,  it is now faster and cheaper to bring personalization to the doorstep (or desktop) of each individual in your targeted market.

Why is this important? Recently I’ve developed several regional models. The results clearly indicate that there are regional differences in any given market and that incremental gains are achieved when marketing is targeted regionally rather than generically and broadly.

If you take this a step further than it is reasonable to assume that by targeting on a 1:1 basis yet more incremental gains will be achieved over a regional model. 

By now you know that on April 1^st, AccuData issues the world’s first data card of known vampires. We made this announcement via email to our customers and on Twitter and Facebook.

I’m thrilled to say the response has been tremendous and we are busy processing counts and orders. Visit Born Into Darkness for more information on the data card, or The Big Fat Marketing Blog, which features a post by Beth Negus of Chief Marketer about this sultry list.

Now anyone in the data business will appreciate the challenge of locating this file. Let me tell you, travel to Transylvania isn’t cheap (especially from Miami via Rio), easy (our vampire friends over there put the “C” in customs) or convenient (night flights only at Transylvania International Airport). But we got ‘er done.

What is it about vampires? How did they get to be so cool? Before New Moon and the recent vampire renaissance the most popular vampire was “The Count” on Sesame Street, or maybe “Count Chocula” cereal character from General Mills. I guess I’m just not cool!

Oh, well – you want specialty data? You got it!

April Fool's!!!

Consider a general store from the 1800s – the kind of store you might have seen on the Frontier in early 1800s. In those days, this was virtually the only place you could buy supplies. When you walked in, you’d find piles of blankets, bags of wheat and bottles of “snake oil.”

The shopkeeper would know you because it’s the only place in town. He would know what you bought, how much you bought and how you paid — he even knew your family. In fact, the clerk knew ALL about you because you lived in a small town and bought everything you needed at the store; furthermore, the shopkeeper was a prominent figure in town, right in the middle of all the town gossip.

Of course, there were no computers but he DID have a ledger book, which held the account balances for everyone in town — in those days, folks were able to buy on credit just like we do today. But this was a smart shopkeeper and there was much more in the ledger. I’ve seen several 1800s-era ledger books. One held a variety of notations about customers, like their likes and dislikes, their children’s birthdays, even a notation about a customer’s horse that had died (“might need new tack”).

In essence I was looking at a 1800s-style customer database and a really comprehensive 360-degree customer profile. But more importantly, the shopkeeper was able to interact with each customer on the shop floor, using all the information available in real time.

Three points:

1. What many of us are trying to do today — craft personalized communications and understand our customer — is literally a concept and practice that has been around as long as merchants have been doing business.

2. What changed over time was the scale of commerce and hence the complexity of what we now call “database marketing” or “CRM” across thousands and even millions of customers.

3. Although the technology needed to collect and manage data at this scale developed, particularly since 1995, marketers have generally NOT been able to make the data usable on the shop floor. The “marketing data” was typically not made operational because of a missing link between the data in the back-end marketing database and the shop floor. In the case of the general store the linkage was there - because the shopkeeper managed the data in the ledger and interacted with the customers.

Here is an example of how this linkage can work today, although VERY few companies are doing it:

I recently boarded a plane, as I’ve done hundreds of times. The flight attendant approached me just after takeoff to offer me a small bottle of champagne and thank me for attaining elite flight status. Wow! Now of course I had received a mailing from the airline — the direct marketing team had done their job well. They knew I achieved the flight status, ran a “trigger” campaign, and mailed me a nice thank-you note. I was able to board early due to my flight status, which of course is great. But emotionally, these benefits paled in comparison to that little bottle of champagne and the in-plane thank you.

In this case, the airline extended its customer data, and my flight status in particular, to the airplane and created an in-plane program to make the data operational. This is hard to do and I only had this experience once. But some companies are all about developing real-time, operational database marketing programs. Casinos for example (maybe I’ll talk about this in another post).

How do you do it?

In most cases, the marketing database exists, as does the customer facing POS and other systems. What’s missing is simply the linkage between the two and this is where web services come in. Today it’s quite straightforward to develop web services that link “back-end” customer databases to front line systems.

This approach allows data-enabled operational programs like:

1. Distributing coupons online or through the mail and then monitoring redemptions in real time, providing data to yet other real-time CRM trigger programs

2. Creating data-enabled experiences on planes, hotel rooms, restaurants

3. Linking to social media campaigns, like recording Facebook enrollments and reacting via email in real time.

This is really fun stuff.

Conventional wisdom has it that if you target market to prospects that look like your clients, you will have great success.  Conventional wisdom also has it that by doing something – anything – different you will likely see a change in performance – hopefully a positive change.  All of this is true and I have experienced it many times myself.  However, this approach merits a closer look to understand what the impact is on acquisition costs and therefore your return on marketing investment.

In a traditional marketing campaign, customer attributes such as demographics, lifestyles and behaviors are compared to the same attributes in the market.  If they see a high presence of prospects that share the attributes as their customers, they market to them. Ultimately this technique generates new customers as intended.  However, there may also be a higher number of nonresponders which, of course, they’d like to avoid.

If you consider that on a good day you may get a .5% response rate, then clearly 99.5% of the prospects will be non-responders.  Hence by merely comparing attributes of customers to a market – without regard to how those attributes are integrated to tell a fuller story - may inhibit your ability to gain an incrementally higher rate of  responders above the number of new customers that were acquired.

For example, let’s assume that your customers’ average age is between 35 and 45.  So, you buy a list of prospects that are age 35-45.  Unbeknownst to you, although that demographic likely contains many propsective responders, it may also have a higher ratio of nonresponders to responders.  The end result is that although you get many new customers, you may also get a higher number of nonresponders and consequently your acquisition cost increase.

How do you get around this?

A predictive response model considers how a full plate of customer attributes is integrated to better differentiate the potential responders from nonresponders.  By eliminating those that have a low probability of responding, you increase your overall average response rate thereby lowering your overall acquisition costs.

Although a predictive response model also adds incremental expense, your marketing campaigns may be large enough you need to carefully weigh the financial impact of the savings from not marketing to the low-probability-of-response prospects against the cost of the model.  You will be surprised at how cost-effective a predictive response model may be.

The economy is turning around. How do I know? My mail told me so. Maybe not in so many words but it certainly insinuated a recovery. Of course I won’t hold the mail or the mail carrier responsible if this prediction falls flat but yes, I do believe all signs point to better days ahead. So you may be asking, “What on earth could have brought about such an epiphany?” Was it a vision? A dream? Nah, it was a piece of direct mail. But not just any direct mail – it was a piece offering timeshares.

The direct mail in question, for The Hilton Grand Vacations Club, was beautifully done and very high quality. It showed – and spoke to – all of the right things and it certainly stood out amongst the mounds of mail I received.

So how does this signal a return to prosperity? Simply by the fact that the timeshare market, Hilton in particular, feels that some people are at a better place, a point where they may be willing to invest in a relatively expensive discretionary purchase.  Let’s not forget that timeshares, along with real estate in general, are big reminders of the banking and mortgage crisis. If a brand like Hilton is comfortable selling timeshares to audiences again, things must be getting better…even if just a little bit, right?

The other thing that stood out was the medium itself – direct mail. During a time when email and digital technology are heralded as the best bang for your direct marketing buck, it is proof once again that direct mail does have its advantages. When done properly, it informs and generates a positive emotional response, which makes a huge difference in prompting a buying decision or developing customer loyalty. Plus, direct mail is tangible – a piece can lay around a home or office for months, garnering numerous views from the recipient or passive viewers, making your messaging shelf-life a long one.

So, things are looking up. Let’s keep our minds moving forward and an eye on the future – in the meantime I’ve got a Hilton Mini-Vacation to book…

As PODI show continues, I am amazed at how the forum always offers new and exciting ways for participants to stay relevant. AccuData exhibited at Print ’09 and I came away from the event struck by not only the incredible printing technologies available to marketers today but the additional value-added services offered as well.

One of the best exhibits last year was Kodak’s. It was large and very high-tech but on a more practical level, it was jam-packed with great information for printers interested in becoming “MSP”s – Marketing Service Providers. This year, I can only imagine that many more attendees will be offering – or looking for just those kinds of services.

Why? Because it’s just smart business. At the end of the day, printers touch a huge portion of the direct mail and other direct marketing materials produced every year – direct mail alone is still a huge $51 billion business. But thanks to shrinking margins, dwindling budgets and attacks by competitors, the printing business is more competitive than ever before.

To remain competitive, many printers have become, or will become MSPs. What this means is that they are layering value-added marketing services (advice, creative, PURLs and email, data, analytics and database systems) on top of their traditional “ink & paper” business – allowing them to assume the role of seamless partner as opposed to disposable vendor.

Today, a successful MSP can help their clients more accurately target and develop better direct marketing materials and increase ROI.  The risk of NOT doing this is the possibility of losing key accounts to more sophisticated players. I’ve seen this happen and it’s ugly.

If you aren’t at PODI, give AccuData a call. We’re here to help as we have done for hundreds of other printers across the country.

Wow, 2010! The New Year has always been my favorite time of year for business –it’s a time of renewal and excitement for the future.  We all get a fresh start on January 1^st.

Or do we?

The boom is over – and boom-time companies, executives and marketers are done if they don’t have what it takes to survive in the new economy.

Most economists believe the country is out (or nearly out) of recession and that we’ll see some growth this year.  But recovery isn’t the only story we’re likely to hear about in 2010.  If you are a student of business history you know there is something very interesting going on – something that has already reshaped industries across all sectors and will continue to do so all year long.

Frankly, for some companies it wasn’t hard to make money during the boom.  While some companies and executives certainly did better than others, success was evident in abundance.  New ideas were easily embraced by investors and consumers.  The bar for marketers was low – everything worked and delivered sky high ROI!

Not anymore.  Now it’s time for the real stars to emerge.

Companies without a clear competitive advantage and sound management won’t make it.  Marketers can’t just throw money at the problem; products and services must have compelling value, quality marketing and delivery to succeed.

If you don’t believe me think Pontiac or Circuit City and countless other mid-sized and small businesses whose storefronts were shuttered all over America.  I’ll wager that many of the superstar CMO’s from the past decade won’t make it in the next.  Now it’s about strategy, planning, sharp pricing, distribution, etc. and these things are hard.

Now is the time to get smart – while you still can.

There are a host of great service companies, including AccuData that can help.  Now is the time to reach out, challenge your thinking and see if you can find better services at better prices.  If you don’t use services, you should seriously consider it.  Service companies can spot trends across industry sectors well in advance – they deal with hundreds, even thousands, of companies.  It’s sometimes easier to spot opportunities from this vantage point.

I promise that your competition (and your colleague down the hall) is thinking hard about this.  They are making a move.  You don’t want to be standing still when they run past you.

A client recently asked AccuData to develop a predictive model to help target a large national direct mail and email campaign. Notice the request was to develop “a” predictive model – we actually wound up building ten, and despite the incremental cost of building ten vs. one, they drove sky-high ROI for the campaign.

Why did we do this and why did it deliver economically?

Predictive models built for a national prospect universe assume that individuals or households with similar characteristics behave the same way in each MSA. They don’t. Many marketers approach this problem by asking their analytics team to include a geographic factor, essentially asking their team to make sure the predictive model includes a factor for geography. But this is often a mistake.

First, in many cases the geographic factor is weak compared to other key elements (e.g., demos, lifestyle factors). In this case the geographic factor falls out of the model. Alternatively the geographic factor could be so strong that other important variables fall out of the model.

What works?

In our experience the best way to address the challenge is to build distinct models for each key market. In this way a weak, but potentially important geographic factor, is incorporated into your targeting. At the same time a strong geographic factor is incorporated because you will develop models at the MSA level (or some other geo level).

If you are a large marketer you must fight for every 1/100th of a percent of response. In our experience, building localized models for key markets delivers critical competitive advantage.

The prevailing perception among many marketers is that all buyers of your product or service are alike.  Hence they typically focus on age or income or other basic segmenting factors.  The fact is that there are regional influences and behaviors that clearly earn a place in differentiating those that will buy from those that don’t.  For example, in some recent models I’ve built, there were buyers from both urban and rural areas.  The rural buyers tended to like Gardening and Fishing.  If we were to apply that natioanlly – without regional geographical recognition – we would erroneously use those attributes for targeting purposes. We would completely miss densely populated areas that likely do not offer Fishing and Gardening opportunities.  Clearly, the opportunities offered in an urban setting attract a certain market segment whereas the opportunities offered in a rural setting offer different opportunites. 

Recognizing these important regional differences will increase the probability of a purchase.

The AccuData team is home after a very productive week at the DMA and I have to say that this year’s show was a great success.  This seemed to be a far more serious crowd than last year.  Perhaps it was San Diego vs. Vegas or maybe CFOs simply didn’t approve non-essential travel.  While the reason is a mystery, the floor and the sessions were filled with a healthy crowd looking for solutions and to learn.  Good stuff.

The Brain enjoyed the show as well and several hundred t-shirts and Twitter followers later he’s developed quite a following.  Next year we may have to provide a bit of security for him – there were some unruly groupies and a couple of reporters that tried to sneak into his hotel room.  I just saw his last Tweet – I guess the show was a bit much and he’s tired.  So no new Tweets for at least a week I’d guess.  We’ll see.

Booths are always fun to evaluate.  On the “what were they thinking” scale, one company bought a 10×20 space and had only a chair and small round cocktail table along with minimal signage.   But this company DID hire an actor, dressed and painted to look like a bronze statue, to jab people as they passed by the booth, scaring some of them, amusing others and baffling me.  But this company’s booth traffic seemed good and I hope the show went well for them.  None of the booths really wowed me but there were many good ones and it was clear that most companies put a good deal of effort into their show presence.

AccuData certainly did and while we’ll see how leads and deals play out, the show went well.  I just wish The Direct Marketing Association would allow show exhibitors to do more direct marketing pre-show.  The delegate list was released late, email and telemarketing are prohibited and there are relatively few DMA-sponsored mechanisms for selling.  I don’t get it.  Perhaps this is why the DMA is facing so much emerging competition for mind share and marketing dollars from other associations and companies creating new forums for learning and selling.

DMA09 opened last night.  AccuData is a sponsor this year and it was nice to see the AccuData logo on large banners around the hall as well as the conference notepads.  This year we have a redesigned booth, smaller than last year’s and we believe it is much more effective at communicating with clients and prospects and is less expensive as well. 

Keeping costs down is really important for AccuData because we are one of the most cost-effective providers of database marketing services out there and to keep our prices down we must constantly think about our expenses.

Today is the day we’ll find out if the show is going to be a win or not.  Will we have a show filled with vendors staring at each other or will there be delegates looking for solutions? 

San Diego, the show venue, is an amazing city.  Clean, sleek, easy to navigate – San Diego was a good choice for the show’s venue.

The Brain will be at DMA09 and will be giving away cool concert tees.  He also has been tweeting like crazy about all of our products and services. Check out the latest post about AccuData at www.Twitter.com/AccuDataBrain.

At DMA09, stop by booth# 2423, see a demonstration of one of our products or speak to one of our experts. You’ll get a cool ’09-’10 World Tour concert tee just for your time. Want to schedule a meeting? No problem, click here, we’ll get you scheduled and one of our data or analytic specialists will be there to talk to you about 2010 planning or any of your database marketing needs.

'09-'10 World Tour Concert Tee

So, you might have caught a glimpse of the gigantic Brain on AccuData.com.  Think of The Brain as the collective intelligence of the thinkers at AccuData.  He is a big giant 300-pound brain and has some smart things to tell you. And he has even started tweeting: www.Twitter.com/AccuDataBrain.  You also might see The Brain appear in your email box, in Target Marketing Magazine and at DMA09. 

Yes, we’ve decided to have a little bit of fun with The Brain in 4Q, but the message is a serious one. 

Next year the economy will rebound and if you’re like many of AccuData’s customers you hope for better things in ’10 – in fact you are counting on it.  AccuData’s message is:  “Be smart.  Consider AccuData in your 2010 planning.” We say this because all year we’ve shown our customers how to be more effective on the top line and bottom line – and we’d like to show more companies what we can do next year.

To find out more about The Brain and AccuData’s products and services, click here.

I’ve written about see-through envelopes and a general deterioration in the level of effort many companies are putting into their direct mail efforts.  But not all companies are letting their direct mail languish – and they are still generating very strong results despite today’s poor economic conditions.

How are they doing it?  Sharp targeting and (increasingly) variable digital printing. 

Regarding the latter, I received a mail piece a few weeks ago that illustrates the level of customization some direct marketers are now achieving in their direct mail.  The piece offered an extended warranty for my vehicle.  I’ve been receiving a number of these lately but this one was different. 

Beyond the usual “Dear Mr. Goff”  the piece included a list of the top 5 repairs I could expect over the next 36 months with their corresponding costs (for my vehicle) and a map showing the location of three nearby garages that not only accepted the warranty company’s coverage, but also waived the deductable.  Impressive.

The information was important because it gave me specific information that I could weigh in my decision making process.  In fact, I even visited one of the listed garages to get a reference on the warranty company.

Out of curiosity I tracked down the direct marketing manager for the warranty company and she was quite open about their approach.  The company had been sending out increasingly less expensive pieces with generic offers and (yes!) see-through envelops.  After some internal debate and experimentation with prospect email, the company decided to double-down on direct mail and address the fundamental issues that had been limiting their response – the lack of “monetization,” that is the lack of data that enabled a consumer to weigh the cost of the warranty against the cost of repairs and the lack of specifics around garages that accepted the coverage.

After building the databases powering the cost and garage data and fully taking advantage of variable digital printing (and upgrading their paper stock), response rates had almost doubled and direct mail became the companies second most effective channel…(can anyone guess what was always and still is their most effective direct response channel?).

The truth is, this example doesn’t come close to illustrating the amazing things possible with variable digital printing, but it does illustrate how a company with a common product can use data very surgically to drive very impressive direct mail results and economics – and it was not all that hard to do.

I find it interesting that there appears to be a direct correlation between data quality and model quality.  Fundamentally this might make sense to modelers and data gurus alike.

Interestingly, on the client-side there are still many organizations that do not adequately capture data on prospects and newly acquired customers - often no clear linkages between the two. This creates a disconnect.  Consequently, the patterns that normally can be extracted usually weakly present themselves.

Bottom-line: it is critical that organizations that want to improve their marketing results, focus on getting their marketing database in shape.

A key message we’re hearing at the show is that printers must become “MSPs” or “marketing service providers” to stay competitive. 

Several presentations including a very interesting presentation given by Kodak suggested that the opportunity now exists for traditional printers, “ink and paper guys,” to help their clients develop and deliver effective multi-channel marketing campaigns.

The availability of technology like digital press solutions from Fuji, Kodak and others allows for powerful printed media that incorporates variable data including images.  Add a PURL and you have a highly customized multi-channel campaign.

Last time I talked about Direct Mail, a passion of mine and a marketing tactic some think is dying. 

Despite record postage and the state of the economy, direct mail is still extremely effective.   How do I know?  Hundreds of AccuData customers as well as the direct mail I personally recieve tell me so.  If you are reading this and thinking, “not mine” then it’s time to think hard about how your company funds, develops and executes your direct mail.  It’s time to look inward, not outward at the economy or the USPS.

I recently received a direct mail piece from one of the nation’s largest insurance companies.  To my amazement, I could see through the outer envelope, could see the offer through the paper.  I wondered at the time if this was intentional, after all this company is a large, sophisticated marketer.  Surely every aspect of their direct mail must be tested thoroughly.  Well maybe this was, but I don’t think so.  This was an attempt to shave a fraction of a cent from each mail piece.  Paper is expensive right?  Let’s save some money by reducing paper weight! 

“Boss, maybe we should move our budget to pay per click, direct mail isn’t working anymore!”  As my good English friend and marketing guru Doug Bewsher might say “Bollock”!

First things first – what is the purpose of an outer envelope?  To convince the recipient to open it of course!  Now I have received mailers that were designed to be see-through and a few of them were fantastic.  Not this piece.  This was just lazy.  If I can see through the outer envelope to the content within, if I can see the offer then I don’t have to open the package.  I won’t read the letter, won’t read the brochure,  won’t give the company a chance – particularly if the offer is just so-so.

Large insurance company – you know who you are.  Put on some weight please.  I like em’ heavy!

It’s interesting to me to see what direct mail I’m getting these days.  I’m getting more of it than I have for about a year.  Signs of a recovering economy?  Maybe I’m just a sucker for mail and I’m tagged in everyone’s database?  

The more I read about the slow demise of direct mail, shifting marketing dollars to online media and the drama unfolding in Washington related to the U.S. Postal Service the  more I scrutinize the direct mail I get.   What am I getting?  Who is sending it?  Are mailers doing anything interesting to improve response rates and ROI?

Since much of the pressure on direct mail is due to a shift in marketing spending to email from direct mail, AccuData has no stake in the outcome.  We sell data and services around direct mail.  We also sell data and services around email as well as mobile and other emerging channels.  We’re multi-channel, channel agnostic.  But as a direct marketer with 15+ years in the game direct mail is something I love.

So I’ve been keeping some of the interesting mail I get and I’m going to blog about what I’m seeing.  For now a few high level observations:

- Most pieces are just sad.  Paper so thin I can read the letter and see the offer (if there is an offer…yikes!) without even opening the envelope, nothing new, no personalization.  Cost cutting all the innovation out of the mail.

-An exception was a recent piece I received for the Visa Black Card.  I’m not sure the product works for me (no airline lounge benefit) but a well crafted piece.  I opened it and read it all the way through.

-A few mailers doing amazing things with data and personalization.  I’m stunned how few companies think about mail like they might email and leverage inexpensive ways to inject relevant data and personalization into their packages.

The industry talks about deteriorating response rates and ROI.  There are many factors driving this.   But I see a stunning lack of innovation and effort as key components of the problem.  Marketers with a good product, thoughtful targeting and creative, solid DM fundamentals and some innovation are doing well if not VERY well. 

Please let me know if you have recently received a really good direct mail piece.

Many times, perception is not reality.

There are many hidden gems in our clients’ marketing databases.  These gems gradually get uncovered as we go through the Exploratory Data Analysis phase of our model builds.  This is further refined by applying not just one – but several different modeling techniques as we build the strongest model possible.

Recently we used a Classification and Regression Tree method to build a segmentation model for a client.  The client had a specific image of their customer profile.  Our model – obviously using the client’s customer data – told us something different.  Needless to say, the client was surprised and delighted that we had uncovered a hidden gem – a ‘buried’ market segment that clearly had an affinity for the product being offered – and a previously unrecognized growth opportunity for our client.

This reminded me of one of my first projects for a large advertising agency (long ago – longer than I care to remember).  The project involved creating a catalog of services for the biggest telecommunications company in the US.  Assumptions were made about whom the buyers would be and the graphics and copy written to reflect that.  The catalog underwhelmingly performed.  Mayday: client not happy!!!

My back-end analysis discovered that the actual market was 180 degrees opposite of what the assumptions and perceptions were.  Based on my analysis, the catalog was overhauled and ended up exceeding expected results.  Alert: Client very happy!!!

Lesson learned: Let the facts drive your marketing decisions. Perceptions can be misleading and may lead to disastrous results.

Thought I was talking about a cocktail? I’m talking about social media and how it’s being used to create buzz for your product or service and how this in turn can generate leads and new business for your company.

This Wednesday, July 15th  at  2 p.m. EST, AccuData hosts the sixth installment of our Selling Skills webinar series “Prospecting via Social Networking.”  We’re using social media internally at AccuData and we are getting results.

So click here to join us.

As a follow-up to the “Odd Couple” post, here I’ll talk about Channel Switching as a way to effectively marry direct mail and email in a multi-channel campaign.

First recall the key point of the “Odd Couple” post.  Multi-channel marketing, particularly simultaneous direct mail and email, can reduce campaign ROI because the incremental channel, often the email channel, doesn’t always result in enough incremental response to recoup its cost.

Channel Switching  can solve this problem by effectively utilizing both channels.  Here is how it works:  The idea is to run a multi-channel campaign, email and direct mail in this case, in stages beginning with the most cost-effective channel (email) and then SWITCHING to the less effective channel (mail).

First, use email to generate as much low cost response as possible.  Since Email is typically less expensive than direct mail the ROI on this first round is attractive.  However since email response rates are often poor it’s important to use direct mail as a follow-up to increase the total response to your campaign (or you may not hit your overall response target).

Second, follow-up the email drop with a direct mail drop to the email non-responders, preferably using a predictive response model to maximize your response rate.  It’s often the case that prospects tend to respond to different channels and so you may find that your direct mail response rate is unaffected by the previous email drop.  In fact you may find that the email helps to increase your direct mail response rate although this is not always the case.

The combination of the two drops increases overall sales while reducing the cost per sale since the cost of the email generated response is less on a unit basis. 

As I speak with many of our clients and prospective clients, it is clear that they are increasingly challenged to be more productive with their marketing budget. Many of them have focused their efforts on improving response rates. 

To improve response rates they have:

1. Developed “look-alike” models that statistically profile likely responders

2. De-crafted their creative to be more targeted

3. Improved their offers to include free MP3 players, guides, books, etc.

The end result: a higher response rate – but no improvement in revenue.  In fact in some cases the acquisition cost has increased due to the effect of the offers that drive response rate.

A few very sophisticated organizations have always focused on response and lifetime value rather than simply response. This approach has enabled those organizations to efficiently maximize revenue.  They have learned that in many cases prospective customers that may not have the highest likelihood to respond actually do have a higher probability of purchasing and also making subsequent purchases.  Had these organizations focused solely on response, they would not have marketed to these potentially very valuable prospective customers.

In response to the growing need for improved productivity of the Marketing budget, we have developed an approach that enhances the techniques of the very sophisticated organizations - the Value-adjusted Optimization Model. Click here to read more about this please download our free White Paper, “An Unwanted Surprise.“

Direct mail and email used together in a multi-channel campaign can work wonders for your ROI – or sink it. 

No doubt, email is HOT and AccuData helps many companies develop and execute multi-channel campaigns involving email and direct mail.  But I find myself advising clients quite frequently NOT to marry email and direct mail – at least not in the way we are often asked to do it – which is to simultaneously drop email and direct mail together to the same list. 

Why?

The problem is that a careful economic analysis often shows that while the output metric of such an approach is often better (e.g., response rate), the ROI can be much worse.  Think about this simple math:

Let’s say your champion approach is a direct mail program that generates a 1% response rate at a cost of $0.50 per piece.  Now you layer on email and the cost of doing this is $0.05 or 10% of the direct mail cost.  That means your total response needs to be 1.1% to break even.  Make sense?

But in reality the cost of email can be higher, especially if you are prospecting for businesses or other targets that require you to purchase managed or specialty email lists.  So the cost could be more than 10%, maybe 20% or more.  So now you need a 1.2% response rate to break even.  Now that just covers the cost of the email – we’ve not factored in other costs such as the cost to develop the email creative, the cost to develop an effective website or landing page, etc. 

It is possible to generate incremental lift of 10% or 20% by coupling email with direct mail in the same drop - absolutely.  But in many cases we don’t see this result and the campaign winds up driving more sales, but at a higher cost per sale.

Now there IS a potentially better way to use email effectively in tandem with direct mail.  It’s called channel switching.  I’ll blog about that next time.

An avatar represents the chosen alternative personna of an individual. It is important because it can be an indication of a behavior and/or lifestyle of individuals in your target market. Although it is not (yet) possible to link an avatar with a real person, it is important to recognize that through an avatar, individuals are offering up additional lifestyle and behavior information about themselves.

So why are avatars important? Avatars often do not represent a pure demographic. Rather, they represent lifestyles and behaviors. When translating this to marketing, it is clear that demographics alone do not define a market segment. Lifestyles and behaviors capture the true essence of an individual. Therefore these factors must be included in your market segmentation strategy.

It strikes me that many marketers continue to focus only on response rate.  However if you think about it, although it has some relevance, it does not necessarily lead to revenue generation- and revenue generation is THE role of marketing management.  Hence, we need to begin shifting our focus further downstream.  We need to shift the primary focus from response rates and on to revenue generation.

This week AccuData launched a new product called Snapshot.  It’s a big deal around here.  What is it?

Snapshot is an ecommerce application on our leads site, www.acculeads.com.  Snapshot allows a user to upload a customer list (b2B, B2C) at which point the system automatically appends data (demos, lifestyle, SIC division for B2B lists, etc.) and produces a profile report or a “Snapshot” of the uploaded customers if you will.  Beyond producing the profile, Snapshot automatically scores a target geographic area for prospects that statistically look just like the customers uploaded into the application – leads that are available for purchase online.

For many of our clients Snapshot is a big step-up from simple selects or heuristic targeting methods.  The Snapshot approach applies statistical rigor and can improve lift while at the same time providing a good deal of information helpful in channel selection and in the development of creative and offers.

What really excites me about Snapshot is that we’re offering what was formerly a time consuming analytics process on the web with extremely attractive economics.

I’ve been getting a good amount of email asking for tricks to improve response rates for email and direct mail. 

I’m going to give-up one of my favorite tricks in this post, but before I do I hope you have read Andrew Russo’s post “A new era of predictive analtyics.”  He reminds us that response rate isn’t really the important metric – it’s about “adjusted response,” ultimately the EBITDA generated by a campaign.

Here goes:  I’m about to turn 43 and I can tell you that my ability to read the small type typically used in emails and some direct mail pieces is quickly eroding.  The truth is I don’t often put on my reading glasses just for your email or direct mail and it goes in the bin – I’m just not that into you!

So what to do?  It’s simple really.  Append age to your list or pull it from your house file.  Simply increase the font size a bit for those over 40.  Simple to do, and you will see results if you are dealing with customers or prospects over 40 or so.

Now some of you know that in the case of direct mail there might be an impact to printing costs.  This is just something you have to watch, perhaps adjust your copy to ensure that the increased font size doesn’t result in incremental production costs.

Marketers are overly focused on building predictive response models and AccuData’s current focus is to help move our clients beyond them.

Most direct marketers build predictive response models, but how about ROI?  After building literally hundreds of models for clients we’ve realized that optimizing response and optimizing ROI is not always the same thing.  In fact we often see that the ROI associated with the top performing response decile is LESS than the ROI of mid-deciles. The trick is to look beyond the initial sale and consider factors such as returns, margins and the post-campaign behavior of the responder.

AccuData has developed a proprietary methodology to address this question – The AccuData Value-Adjusted Optimization Model. The model is comprised of two submodels:  1) a response optimization model and 2) a revenue maximization model.  The first model is more of the traditional approach of marketers – maximize response rate.  The second model seeks to maximize near-term value (NTV).  NTV is a subset of customer lifetime value.  However, rather than projecting value over a customer’s product-buying lifetime, NTV projects out over 24 – 36 months.  This approach lends itself to reliability and stability.

I’m in the process of writing a white paper on this topic and I’ll address this topic again once it’s released.

Amazon.com made a smart move several years ago when Steve Shure (my former boss at Amazon.com) was hired from Time Inc. to lead Amazon Prime, and then again when Steve was subsequently asked to assume global responsibilities for driving traffic to Amazon’s web properties (some might call this marketing).  Steve had been with Time Inc. for over 20 years overseeing consumer marketing for People, Sports Illustrated, Popular Science and other top publications.  He was (is) a world-class direct marketing expert among other things.

In hiring Steve, Amazon made an explicit choice to bank on Steve’s classic direct marketing skills and not his online marketing experience per se.  I  believe that Steve would be the first to tell you that there were candidates with more impressive online credentials than he had at the time.

Coming from an extensive web background (peoplefirst.com, capitaloneautofinance.com, attwireless.com, amazon.com) I get as excited as the next guy about web 2.0 (hence Letters@!), cool new web technologies and jazzy online advertising advancements.  But the more I talk to our ecommerce clients and help them think about their next set of opportunities, I’ve realized that the industry needs to go back — call it “web 0.5″ — and think about the classic issues of segmenation, good copy writing and creative, disciplined testing.  Has anyone designed a good online version of a Johnson Box?

Of course we’re all going to move forward.  I have no doubt we’ll be talking about web 3.0 and 4.0, and so on, in no time. But at the same time AccuData helps our clients move forward with innovative new strategies, we’re also going to spend a lot of time helping them go back to basics.

By the way, where is Bill Toohey?

What a time for marketers, huh? Most would say, this is a gloom and doom time for us—budgets are slashed, responses are down, and what are we going to do but ride out the wave?

Absolutely not. I see a lot of editorial and industry advertising out there urging marketers to spend more during this downturn to take advantage of weaker competitors – and I agree. I see literally thousands of unique customer transactions per month and I’m seeing three distinct groups.

One group is in the process of throwing in the towel. They are getting beaten by their competitors. Another group is hunkering down, perhaps emphasizing “core” businesses at the expense of new ventures, but keeping their marketing alive. Another group is “leaning-in” and marketing more, by getting more mail in the stream, increasing email activity, and putting more advertising out there – but they are doing it smarter with sharper targeting, the application of predictive models and good offers. “Doing more with less” is no longer a platitude. It’s now survival.

AccuData is in the third camp. We are leaning-in. Last week AccuData launched our new B2B campaign and blog to dedicate and memorialize to our clients and colleagues the great opportunity we see. I’m excited about 2009.

Welcome to AccuData’s – and quite possibly the database marketing industry’s first actionable blog – Letters@, where you’ll have the opportunity to hear and learn from AccuData’s executive leadership and experts and tap into their experience and expertise. There will also be posts from our data, marketing analytics and database marketing experts.

More than a blog, our goal is to create a conduit of shared information, a platform for discussing best practices in customer acquisition, development and retention. More importantly, we see this as an opportunity for all of you – clients and industry players alike – to collaborate and learn from AccuData’s 20 years of experience helping clients accurately target qualified buyers and increase ROI.

Our goal: To create a forum that will deliver insightful tools, tips, tricks and discussions to simplify and improve the decision making process for those seeking to enhance their database and direct marketing efforts.

Coming soon: A series of 10 slightly shocking but strikingly powerful marketing insights to include:

• The New Era of Predictive Analytics
• The Atrophy of Direct Mail
• Get back to the future with Web 0.5

So, be sure to come back and come back often. Bookmark us. Subscribe to our RSS feed.

Until then…