Direct Marketing Association

With more and more money being thrown at digital marketing every year, now is a great time to look at ways to maximize the impact of your print campaigns and restore balance to your marketing efforts. Why? Events like Valentine's Day in February, Mother's Day in May, along with Easter in April mean that the first two quarters of 2015 are practically crying out for personalized communication!

In the past decade, considerable resources have been assigned to websites and online sales channels at the expense of traditional marketing print collaterals (i.e., catalogs). Retailers across the globe are experiencing a rebirth of the print catalog. Many businesses suffered sharp drops in sales after cutting their print catalogs. They came to realize that three-quarters of the customers that make purchases are still reviewing catalogs.

Product recommendations that give a user that "aha!" moment may seem hard to build, but are actually not that complicated if you follow these fundamental principles:

The 2014 holiday season is upon us and, as the saying goes, it's the most wonderful time of the year. With just over three weeks left in the year, make it count by boosting your email marketing efforts to raise online sales and profits. According to the Direct Marketing Association's National client email report 2014, 77 percent of return on investment comes from segmented, targeted and triggered email marketing campaigns. So despite popular misconceptions, email is — and always has been — the proven workhorse for driving online revenues. Now is the perfect time to make your list (and check it more than twice) for ways to optimize your email marketing to increase sales. Here are some tips to get started:

Consumer behavior isn't a fixed thing. It constantly changes, particularly in the fast-moving world of online retail, and marketing strategies have to change to keep pace. In 2014, there are three major trends of buyer behavior across search, social, email and the wider web and they all revolve around consumer empowerment. Consumers are typically becoming better informed, they increasingly know how to opt out of marketing communications and they have higher expectations.

Many online merchants have been watching closely the saga of the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) constitutional challenge to a 2010 Colorado law targeting remote sellers. This legislation would require out-of-state catalog and internet retailers that do not collect Colorado state and local sales tax to turn over customer transaction information to the Colorado Department of Revenue.

Today's digital age has become impersonal.  Sure, we still get greeted online and retailers know our preferences thanks to cookies, but the human element is gone for sure. Within this impersonal, digital world we live in, however, there are huge opportunities for retailers to step back and become more personal. Consider the following customer service tips as you prepare for the busy holiday shopping season: 

Join us for this fast-paced session covering advanced strategies retailers can use to optimize your email marketing performance.

LinkedIn's new publishing platform is in the roll-out stage. It gives LinkedIn members the ability to create long-form posts similar to blog posts. Users create posts like they would a status update on the top of their personal page. High-quality posts can receive thousands of views, plus likes, comments and shares on other social platforms, thus amplifying the message exponentially. I've been very pleased with the results I've seen in the two-and-a-half months I've been using the service.  

There are two kinds of companies today: those that have already had a data breach and those who don't know their data has been breached. It's a sad fact of our time that nearly every aspect of our society has been hacked, including education, business and government. The Venable law firm reports that 621 confirmed data breaches occurred in 2012 alone, and retailers represented 21.7 percent of network-based data breach incidents.
 Is your company ready? What will it cost for it to be ready? Can data breaches be prevented? These were just some of the key questions covered in a recent Direct Marketing Association (DMA) webinar on retailer readiness for data breaches.