Rhonda Basler
Create Timely Opportunities to Spark Customer Appreciation, Try Valentine’s Day
Creating meaningful and authentic opportunities for businesses to express appreciation for their customers is something many struggle with. Naturally occurring occasions do exist for this sentiment, but they are so few and far between that customers may feel overrun by receiving simultaneous messages of...
Foundational Elements For an Omni-Channel Customer Experience Strategy
In today’s business landscape, the explosion of social media and digital technologies has changed the game for companies looking to connect and build relationships with customers. Armed with a goldmine of customer data (shopping and purchase behavior, likes, tweets, posts, shares, etc.), brands can leverage...
Extend the Realm of your Gratitude During Thanksgiving
Pumpkin pie, cranberries and turkey characterize the fourth Thursday of November. We spend this day each year with friends, family and loved ones to celebrate our good fortune and everything we have to be thankful for. With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, consider how you can extend...
Eliminating the Subjectiveness of Customer Experience Metrics
First things first, to focus on customer experience metrics requires a good deal of focus. Hard to do when you’re in San Diego… …And while my hometown team, the Royals are in the World Series (first time in 29 years, folks!). But, I prevailed in...
Inspiring Ideas for Using Personalized QR Codes
Personalized QR Codes offer a highly interactive and personal way to interact with your target audience. Strategically, a personalized QR Code is a slightly different experience from pushing a text message to a group of recipients. The QR Code gives the recipient...
B2B Marketing Best Performing Channels
If you need statistics about the potential potency of multi-channel communications in business-to-business marketing, this blog post is for you. Pitney Bowes recently surveyed 4,000 B2B marketers—divided equally throughout the U.S., U.K., France and Germany—to uncover current B2B thinking regarding marketing channel choice...
Catapult Your Direct Marketing with Personalized QR Codes
It's not easy being friends with a marketer. Marketers like to watch television commercials, get mad if the mail is thrown away before they get to see it, and hijack their friends' smart phones to see what new text-based marketing campaigns they have...
Statistical Pictures Make for Engaging Variable Data Charts and Graphs
Although my made-up term of "statistical pictures" may seem like an oxymoron, by using infographics you can do just that… turn data and statistics into pictures. For many people, numbers are scary. A bunch of numbers together, even scarier. And don't...
Print Procurement: The Lesser Known Facet of Marketing Automation
Marketers are taking another look at direct marketing, and focusing on print automation and cost reduction as key drivers of profitability. As the economy shows signs of shifting in a more positive direction, many companies are revisiting direct marketing programs that were profitable years ago,...
The Remarkable Collision of Social Media and Direct Marketing
The integration of social and direct marketing is creating larger-than-life results for marketers. I recently came across a great illustration of how businesses are using direct marketing and social media together to achieve immediate results and ongoing "viral" benefits. I'd like to share this story...
Eliminating Secret Stashes in your Marketing Supply Chain
Hidden costs are lurking in the unused printed materials hoarded by your sales and field marketing personnel. Did you know that 72% of sales and field marketing personnel over-order or stockpile materials? (Yep. That's right. It's not a typo.) According to a study by the...
Eight Secrets to Using Personalized Landing Pages
Integrate online and offline direct marketing efforts with PURLs. Ever since PURLs (or Personalized URLs) hit the scene, the integration of offline and online media has become a powerful way to improve direct marketing results. Now, direct mail and email can link to a...
Seven PURL Mistakes You Might Be Making
Don't risk alienating your audience by using a PURL inappropriately. Personalized URLs (PURLs) or personalized landing pages are definitely a game changer for direct and database marketing. With PURLs, all that great data you've collected about your prospects or customers can be used to...
How to Develop Triggered Customer Life Cycle Communications
Using business intelligence along with triggered communications is the new rocket science behind digital and direct marketing. Identifying prospect and customer activities and behaviors that indicate the need for more or less contact, business intelligence is what makes everything else happen. For example, using strategic...
Four Ideas to Put Love in Your Loyalty Program
Ever been disappointed by a gift? You're not alone. 73% of consumers participating in loyalty programs have received promotions for products and services they already own (CMO Council). Irrelevant offers and messages alienate customers and reduce the love in the Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI)...
Reach and Engagement: Email Marketing’s Big Challenges for 2011
Discovering new ways to reach and engage audiences with email will be a key challenge for direct marketers during 2011. Theoretically, a marketing department should be constantly testing, reviewing their budget, and moving money to the best performing initiatives. Unlike other forms of media,...
All Aboard! It’s Time to Engineer the Marketing Process
Marketing operations process engineering should be initiated out of marketing. Throughout the past year, I have attended or presented at a variety of conferences such as the Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Conference, the Integrated Marketing Summit, the DMA's National Center for Database Marketing conference, and...
One-to-One Marketing Campaign Tips for 2011
You have to be on your toes to develop better cross-channel campaigns. The combination of using variable data direct mail, email and PURLs (personalized URLs) together can be an overwhelming proposition. But, with many statistics to support the financial results of one-to-one cross-channel campaigns,...
The Be Thankful Challenge: Business Edition
The economic challenges of recent years have revealed may opportunities, skills, and relationships that we, the business community, should be thankful for. I'm sure many of you are participating in one of the many "Be Thankful Challenges" that are widespread through social networks. My...
Six Keys for Marketing Automation Success
In most B2B marketing environments, one of marketing's main responsibilities is to create conversations and support the sales process. Using marketing technology to automate the process to build customer relationships requires six key elements to be in place and working together. Because these...