Do Business Well

Imagine that you’re walking down a city street when a complete stranger suddenly approaches you. He tells you he’s just been transferred to a new position in Atlanta and has to move that weekend and asks if you’d be willing to help him load some boxes onto a truck. If you help him, he says, he’s got a refrigerator full of cold beer that he’ll share. Would you help? Would the incentive be enough? What if he said that he and his wife had planned a trip to Paris that they can’t take because of the move and he’d be willing to give you a pair of airplane tickets?

On the other hand, what if you got a call from a friend who’s making the same move and needs your help? You’d probably do it for nothing. She might give you a bottle of your favorite wine to show her appreciation. It’s not really necessary, but it’s still a nice reward. Continue Reading »

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Whether an internal service group operates your email marketing program or you rely on an outside service provider, there’s only one way to get accountability: Define clear success criteria. Let’s take a look at some of the mechanisms you can put in place to evaluate the service organization responsible for operating your program:

1. Define and monitor success criteria.

• Clearly articulate program goals and performance expectations.
• Agree on turnaround times for new programs, campaigns, or messages.
• Ensure that the service provider can be flexible and responsive to your ever-changing needs.
• Ensure that you understand what a service provider offers and what it expects others to provide and manage.

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One of the unique characteristics of doing business online is the ability it gives you to measure and track the success of your marketing programs. Yet success, as we have seen, can be difficult to define. At the center is the continuous-feedback loop of tracking, measuring, seeking insight, and informing the program— a process based on both science and art. Science because we apply analytic techniques to the huge amounts of data and information in order to structure it and understand our customers‘ responses and behaviors. Art because lasting program success also depends on creative, out-of-the-box program design and interpretation inspired by the insight that we gather from the data. Continue Reading »

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Level of Marketing Service

On one end of the service continuum are the broadcasters who simply merge the text copy you give them with a list of names and blast it out. Some may also provide such basic services as canned response reports to track click-through information. At the other end of the spectrum are the full-service marketing consulting and service bureaus. These companies run their clients’ marketing functions in much the same way as traditional marketing and advertising agencies do. Here are the services to look for when choosing a marketing service provider. Continue Reading »

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Unlike a traditional, direct marketing campaign, an Internet direct marketing program is a tightly integrated combination of marketing service, technology, and 24-7 operational support. Separating these three components by, for instance, engaging a marketing services group, building an in-house operations team, and purchasing offthe-shelf products is a definite possibility, but the lack of tight integration may limit the level of sophistication the program can achieve. Continue Reading »

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