a blog

Word of the day

Target Marketing’s annual survey of marketers revealed that direct mail delivers the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and second strongest ROI for customer retention (behind email).

My take: The direct mail-naysayers can take all the potshots they want — the marketing community has spoken. I would, however, like to see Target Marketing add WOM marketing and social media to their list of methods next year. Cumbaya marketing — the darling of some of you (you know who you are) — didn’t make the list this year, and hopefully never will.” – Ron Shevlin [emphasis mine]

Kumbaya marketing – hey, yeah, that’s me alright.

Tell you what, though: whoever purports to find “ROI” in direct-mail, of all things, in customer acquisition and retention is right in the sense that dead-tree mail is cheap and there are still people out there opening and reading all their mail instead of putting the spam-mail where it belongs, the waste basket. Fine with me. But is it really the method of reaching 21st century, educated, opinionated customers? Is it really?

Yes, the shock of seeing where the market is vs where it should be.

March 23, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Rants 

comments

Comments are closed.

Additional comments powered by BackType

  • subscribe

  • One man's microISV

    Playground - an on-demand requirements management tool helping you get the right things done.

  • Lifestream

    • ... problem is they are already there about 23 days ago
    • So the Taliban stoned some adulterers recently. I wish US/NATO would bomb them back to the Stone Age but the problems about 23 days ago
    • Not sure that Wave is gone altogether. I can imagine it creeping into Gmail eventually. But why didn't they kill Buzz instead? about 33 days ago
    • Rooting for Uruguay. Still bad memories of CZ vs NL a couple years back. Plus I really like URU's game. #worldcup about 64 days ago
    • @ktorn what kind of app are you going to make for your Samsung? about 65 days ago
    • Firefox 4 nighly looks pretty good to me. But I still have to restart it after installing add-ons? Hope they'll fix that one day soon. about 70 days ago
    • I love that I can put MY photo on friggin Google HOMEPAGE! about 90 days ago
    • Or more precisely, it does seem a bit smarter AFTER you've visited a given URL that corresponds with the query about 93 days ago
    • Safari 5 doesn't seem to have a "smart" location bar. Enter "Google Reader" and it tries to navigate to http://google%20reader/. #fail about 93 days ago