Communicating in the age of digital media means understanding that your clients, prospects, friends and contacts use an array of tools to receive and digest information. At one time, direct mail was king and was the primary direct response tool used by businesses to reach large groups of people. Later, “new” media like radio, and later television become viable methods of communicating with the masses. With the rise of digital online communications,  email came on the scene, along with other web-based analogs for the traditional offline methods. Banner advertising, text links, search engine marketing and the once ubiquitous pop-up ad took their place in the digital marketer’s toolbox. And today, social media and other innovative media have found their place into the mix.

What’s more, where traditional direct marketers and even more recently, digital marketers have normally reached their customers in their homes, today’s marketers have the additional opportunity to find customers receiving and digesting their content on mobile devices, virtually anywhere in the world. This creates both challenges in re-thinking the message and design to fit the smaller form factor, not too mention the short attention spans of a mobile consumer, but it also presents great opportunities to integrate their location data to further target and refine that message.

Reaching a consumer with the right message, a compelling call to action, a memorable offer or branding opportunity is just as important as WHEN and WHERE that message is received. Today’s mobile platforms open up a world of possibilities to capitalize on this information.

We’ll talk more about how to leverage this data when designing digital marketing campaigns in the future, but for now, remember this: The future is here. Are you ready?

A recent article published on the ComputerWorld website discusses a problem with Internet Explorer that permits files on the targeted system’s local drive to be read. Clearly, this is a potential danger to any business.

We urge readers who use Microsoft platforms to consider mandating all employees, contractors, etc to switch to either FireFox or Chrome, as neither of these browsers has this particular security issue.

Never mind that the access came from overseas … the bank sued the customer for failing to protect its online banking credentials. The world is full of people looking to score at the expense of your business. Don’t be a victim!

Guard your online banking credentials fervently. Make sure you change them regularly. If anyone on your staff has those credentials, make sure he or she guards those credentials with equal fervor. If anyone with knowledge of those credentials leaves, immediately change them, and not in a trivial manner.

Don’t keep banking credentials on a computer that is connected to the Internet. You really cannot afford to have the keys to the vault taken by a hacker.

A bit of care can prevent tremendous trouble.

Taking the ability to target your advertising to only the best prospects is where the concept of Direct Marketing comes in. If you have a fixed advertising budget, wouldn’t you rather try to spend it reaching as many qualified prospects as possible, instead of just blanketing as many people in general?

Let’s use a simple example. Say we have a business that sells pet products. People love their pets as much as their children, so they’ll always be looking for food, toys, leashes, collars, and more. However, there are plenty of people who don’t share the love for our pets as some of us do. Mr. Pet store owner will likely take ads in local publications that reach the population within a specific travel radius of his store. According to the Human Society, just over a third of US households own at least a dog or cat. So, general advertising has the potential to reach these folks, along with another two thirds who don’t have any need or interest in the advertisement or product. That’s not bad, but depending on the cost and response generated by the promotion, wouldn’t it be better to try to target the advertising ONLY at the dog and cat owners in the area? Even if the cost of that promotion is more than the newspaper ad, it will likely generate more visits to the store simply because 100% of those people seeing the promotion are qualified prospects.

At the most basic level, that’s the object of direct marketing… and the trick is to choose the correct media mix, segment the lists, create an effective promotion piece and customer offer, and then properly analyze the results in order to refine and improve up the results with the next promotion. It’s a cycle that’s repeated over and over leading to more effective promotions and increased business.

But the power of direct marketing over traditional advertising is increased by an order of magnitude once you use the information you already have. What sort of information? Well, capturing the buying history of your customers, their address, phone, email, and more is just the start, but even this basic information allows you increase the odds that your next promotion will hit the mark and resulting in a greater response (i.e. more sales). Capturing as much information as possible, and then using that info to derive new information can be tremendous tool to improve your marketing punch.

It’s not always as intuitive to everyone how do to this, or how effective it can be, but the track record speaks for itself. When executed properly, using customer information to create targeted promotions, combined with strong creative and powerful offers and the right media can lift your profits and maximize the return on your advertising dollars.

As the Internet has grown and demand for domain names has mushroomed, the model for top-level domains has evolved. The commonly recognized and used top-level domains are .com, .net, .biz, .org, etc. The greatest demand is for domains using the .com top-level domain. As any company that has tried to register a new domain has learned, it is not easy to find a short domain name that maps well to the company name.

One proposal ICANN is considering, intended to open up domain naming is to permit any top-level domain. Thus, where one of D2M Consulting’s projects is the site, www.Dial4Tix.com, under this proposal, the site address could simply be www.Dial4Tix.

Another proposal envisages increasing the number of top-level domains by a significant number … in the hundreds. Today there are 21 top-level domains. Some of those new top-level domains will be industry related. Some will be related to geography. Others will be related to activities.

The implications for protection of branding could be significant, especially if the latter proposal is adopted. According to a recent article,
http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Security/Preparing-for-Hurricane-ICANN-726848/?kc=BLBLBEMNL10302009STR1
the changes could be implemented as soon as the first quarter of 2010. Companies that want to protect their brands may face the need to register additional domains in order to prevent cyber-squatting.

The above article discusses some measures regarding the protection of trademarks. I believe the final set of changes may change but it is in the best interests of any business that has brands and trademarks to follow the news regarding these potential changes, and to be prepared to take appropriate actions.

If you put your entire mail service on such a free service, you need to both understand the risks, and to take certain extra precautions such as keeping a copy of your contacts in a location other than the free mail service system. You might also consider downloading all your email to your local system, and keeping that backed up regularly.

You should be aware of what attachments are so critical to your business (e.g. proposals, contracts, time-sensitive brochures, etc.) that you must, by habit, download copies. It is imperative that you recognize the limits of recourse you have should the free email service not perform as expected. Use of such services introduces risks to your business, small as those risks may be.

Web-based free email (Software as a Service) is different from POP3 types of mail services. That is, with POP3 service, you download mail to your local machine(s). With web-based mail, all your mail, all the attachments, all your contacts, and possibly your calendar are kept “in the cloud” – out on the Internet.

You may wish to save money using such services. Do so with a clear understanding, and take reasonable precautions to ensure you can get to business critical data in a timely manner.

Note 1: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc20091018_124447.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

Key data will vary by business but generally includes customer contacts, legal agreements, financial records, proprietary catalogues, and deliverables. Of course, this is only an incomplete, high-level list.

It is not sufficient to keep backups solely on site. The tapes or external hard drives you use may give you a second copy but smoke from a fire, or a burst pipe could wipe out both your primary and backup copies.

It gets more complicated if you have supplied systems for employees or there are multiple partners each of whom have a subset of the data needed for the business.

There are numerous solutions to ensuring your data is safe. It could be as simple as having backup external hard drives in more than one location. However, it takes self-discipline to keep both instances current. And the more systems on which business data are kept, the more complex it becomes to ensure that data is being reliably and regularly backed up.

It is also not unheard of for businesses to back up data through a defined process, but to never verify the ability to recover that data. Sadly there are ample cases where backups appeared to be regularly performed, but when needed, the data was unrecoverable.

Business continuity must be a part of every company’s playbook. Even the smallest of businesses needs to set up proper backups. At D2M Consulting, we can help you assess and implement the best strategies for ensuring the data that is key to your business is safely protected and readily recoverable in the event of a problem on the source system. We can also help you with a range of other business continuity best practices.

There are countless time management books, techniques, and gurus.  Who has the time to digest those long books?  And if those tricks to better time management were so easy, wouldn’t we all be practicing them already?

An old friend of mine once said, “never handle a piece of mail twice.”  Great suggestion – usually not practical.  Some mail requires research, cross-referencing, follow-up phone calls, etc, and cannot be addressed in one session.

What I find useful is allocating a block of time every day to work on one backlogged task.  For me, first thing in the morning works well, and sometimes the more mindless tasks can be blocked out for the end of the day when my brain cries out, “enough!”  The key is that I don’t allow myself to be interrupted during that time.  Phone calls go to voice mail.  New email will just have to wait.  No IM’s please.  Don’t walk into my office until I am done, thank you.

In this way, I tackle things like recording and filing receipts, attacking my in-box, paying invoices and bills, etc.  Other times, if the mundane daily stuff is under control, I pick something that has risen to the top of the to-do list and use that hour or two just to work on that one task.  If I don’t finish, it is the task I return to the next day in the block of time I’ve set aside.

If you don’t already try this approach, give it a shot.  You may just feel a bit less overwhelmed.

When we look at the types of offers used in direct marketing, they can very broadly be classified into two categories: one-shots and continuity. One shots are pretty straight forward. You offer a product purchase, conclude the transaction, and complete the shipment. Yes, you’ll want to include upsell and cross-sell offers as well so as to increase the value of the single order, but essentially this is a one-off promotion. When you later decide to re-promote the list of prior buyers, you’ll be starting an entirely new promotion campaign.

The second, potentially more lucrative option is the continuity offer. This offer is more like a subscription. In fact, magazine subscriptions are one subset of the continuity offer, but by no means the only variation. In a recent New York Times post, the author analyzes the appeal and psychology of the proliferation of subscription offers in our lives today. Everything from cell phones to cable TV, satellite radio, and more are being sold via a subscription. It’s not just magazines anymore!

On the surface, continuity sounds like the Holy Grail for marketers. Sign up the customer once, then collect for months (or years) to come. But it’s not that easy, and it takes a lot of planning and smart execution and monitoring to successfully manage a continuity program. Because of the long tail on the offer, there is the opportunity to be more generous with the initial “soft” offer. That is to say you can afford to invest more to acquire new customers if you can accurately predict what their average lifetime value (LTV) will be over the months ahead. With a one-shot offer, it is much more difficult to do this since you must recover your acquisition costs (plus a small profit) with a single promotion.

In future posts, we’ll discuss the two main drivers of the continuity offer: acquisition offers, and the often overlooked, “retention” programs. We’ll also take a look the leverage points in the continuity program that drive lifetime value and at some of the many techniques used to maximize ROI when running a continuity based marketing program.

One of our clients was faced with such an opportunity. As a ticket broker, selling tickets to sporting events, concerts, etc., they compete in a crowded market. And often times, when a customer is looking for tickets to a show, getting the cheapest ticket isn’t always the best deal. Knowing the venues, understanding the sometimes subtle (or not so subtle) advantages between various seat locations relative to their price can make all the difference between an amazing customer experience, and a disappointing one. They knew that rather than simply list their tickets online, they could provide much more value to the customer by talking to them, understanding their budget and preferences, and matching them with the best tickets to meet their requirements.

With this goal in mind, Dial4tix.com was launched, with the goal of making it fast and simple for customers to reach their ticket specialist (the ticket broker equivalent of a travel agent).

Still, as in any direct marketing piece, you must have a call to action. That is, a way to get the customer to act, and do it quickly while the impulse is still fresh. Rather than post a toll-free number that often is forgotten, or written down to be dialed (maybe) some time in the future, Dial4Tix uses a device they dubbed the “Beat It” button. When the customer clicks this link, a dialer window pops up on their screen, asking for their phone number.

Once entered, the customer’s phone AND the ticket specialist’s phone ring, making the connection almost immediately. At that point, the specialist can find the best deal to fit the customer’s needs. It’s another way of using the company’s web presence to connect with customers and give their business a human face.