Executive Focus: Help Your Business Weather a Disaster
5. A couple of quick notes for mailers not in prime areas for disaster: Stay in touch with vendors in affected areas, as they may not be able to meet their obligations. For example, if you use outside design, pre-media, printing and other vendors, see if they’re still able to meet their timelines for you. More importantly, remember that after a natural disaster such as a hurricane, cleanup takes time. Postal service can be interrupted. Moreover, your customers most certainly will be focusing on their own recovery. Partner with the post office or your mailing house to be sure you don’t mail to the affected areas until they’re ready to receive it. If you’ve already pulled the trigger on a particular mailing, be sure your analysts factor in potential lowered response rates in all reports and future plans.
Jim Gilbert has had a storied career in direct and digital marketing resulting in a burning desire to tell stories that educate, inform, and inspire marketers to new heights of success.
After years of marketing consulting, Jim decided it was time to “put his money where his mouth was" and build his own e-commerce company, Premo Natural Products, with its flagship product, Premo Guard Bed Bug & Mite Sprays. Premo in its second year is poised to eclipse 100 percent growth.
Jim has been writing for Target Marketing Group since 2006, first on the pages of Catalog Success Magazine, then as the first blogger for its online division. Jim continues to write for Total Retail.
Along the way, Jim has led the Florida Direct Marketing Association as their Marketing Chair and then three-term President, been an Adjunct Professor of Direct and Digital marketing for Miami International University, and created a lecture series, “The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing,” which he has presented across the country at conferences and universities.
