After faltering at the starting block, online procurement might have found the magic combination to finally make businesses sit up and notice: indirect buying. And PC giant Dell Computer is leading the pack. Businesses have resisted online buying services until indirect e-procurement arrived on the scene mostly because open buying was slow and perceived as less-than-secure. E--procurement is the purchasing of support goods and services through an online, private customized catalog. The catalog contains products a company is interested in, and has approved for employee purchase, as well as a company’s negotiated pricing. According to AMR Research, the worldwide market
Katie Haegele
The smart technology designed to help marketers with customer relationship management (CRM) can get confusing pretty quickly. Direct marketing, database marketing and CRM are all overapplied terms, which, in many cases, have overlapping meanings. In order to run a successful catalog business, you must understand the fundamentals of targeted marketing—that means building and using a database of all your customers and inquiries. “First off, I would caution anybody from jumping right in and looking at tools,” says Katie Cole, director of analysis and learning at Quris, an electronic touch communication consultancy. “Tools are just a relatively small part of a much larger process. The
The great American author John Updike once said, “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” The sentiment surely applies to e-mail marketing, and the operative words are “creative” and “better.” Catalogers stand to benefit greatly from trying more creative e-mail marketing techniques. Even if you already consider yourself an expert in this space, upping the ante to a more sophisticated, more technical solution could be a smart move. Not only could you improve response rates, but you could also automate portions of the testing process when working in this online medium. HTML vs. Text
