2010 DMA Should Be Interesting
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized, integrated marketing
2009 Direct Marketing Association's Annual Conference Oct. 17-21
I can’t remember a year where we have had as much change in our marketing world. With the economy struggling, this alone has had significant impact. Add onto this the evolution of new digital tools such as Search, Social Media and Mobile and this year’s Direct Marketing Association’s national convention is bound to be interesting.
Yet my initial day at the conference reinforces much of what I thought. While new tools and mediums evolve, much of the foundation for targeted marketing remains the same:
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Test, test, test: Continues to be the foundation for targeted media. With today’s powerful analytics, you can set up your testing strategies to optimize your marketing efforts whether it is your direct marketing acquisition effort, search or your web site.
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Permission-based: Permission-based marketing comes in the form of many names now (i.e. opt-in, preference centers, social media invitations), but a constant thread has been forming in marketing for over a decade. Today’s marketers realize that putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their communications is the key in today’s world. Now there are just more targeted consumer options to opt-into than ever before.
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Technology Centric: Technology continues to drive our advances on many fronts. More user friendly tools to use without tapping the IT department. Increased abilities to personalize the medium to known customer attributes, easier and lower cost tools to manage all these efforts.
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Integration: A couple of decades ago, it was integrating targeted marketing with mass media to deliver improved performance. Today, these integration points are still important, but can be taken much further. Web site integration, retail point of sale, digital targeted media campaigns are now all thrown into the mix as well.
My point in all this is that while times are changing, likely 99.9+ percent of what we see at this year’s DMA will be based on the foundation already set. Should be an interesting time to see how the industry is doing and where the experts see it all going. From my first day in attendance, what is being touted as “new” looks very familiar.
Advantages of Creating an Integrated Marketing Database for Your Business
Filed under: Data Cleansing and Enhancement, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Uncategorized
Integrated marketing is creating growing complications for most businesses to manage their customer data. Customer Email data management requirements for opt-outs and bounces are often difficult to maintain, and creating intelligent landing pages for customers to provide you with updated customer data adds yet another level of complexity.
In our opinion, one of the easiest ways for organizations to address these new complexities is to create a replicated marketing database driven from your enterprise customer data management tools. Rather than trying to make your enterprise tools something that they are typically not meant to be, creating a replicated marketing database provides the security and fully functioning marketing features for integrated electronic and traditional communications to your customer base.
While you may be concerned about costs, we find that this approach provides significant advantages:
- Typically costs much less than trying to customize your own enterprise system
- Can be launched much quicker and with less hassle than changes to your own system.
- Immediately offers more features (i.e. Landing pages for customer email and general updates, customer preference centers, activity reporting, demographically enhanced customer data) that would require even more costs and development time if done internally
Given the growing demands for integrated marketing communications, you are likely looking at this area if you haven’t already set a strategy for your organization. We recommend that you consider this approach when you do.
Feel free to give us a call to discuss options in this area, or listen to our recent webinar How Changing Communications Trends Drive Integrated Marketing ROI for more concrete Direct Marketing Association facts in this area. You will also find an overview of ICS’s Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) which may be consideration for your business as well.
