Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

I feel sorry for direct marketers. 

3 days of classes telling them that they have to be data experts, psychologists, politicians, IT experts and in each seminar that everything they used to know is obsolete and best practices of last year are now practically offensive to this year’s customers.

Sales still doesn’t do a good job of giving marketing good CRM data to work with,  the CRM initiatives have fallen short of expectations and the ones who are doing it ‘right’ seem to have lots of staff and budget for tools that most businesses can’t afford. (Who else is just a little jealous (and maybe a little tired) of hearing how BestBuy does things?)Postage rates are going higher, Spam filters and Spam laws are getting tighter, competition is growing in every market because of the ‘flattening’ effect of the internet.

It’s not enough to have a great direct mail piece, or a great email campaign, you need to make each of those interactive and have closed loop feedback mechanisms in place or you’re yesterday’s news.
From my perspective, it seemed like every class I went to was making our sales pitch for us. 

Which was great, but I saw a lot of blank stares and nervous note taking as well from the audience.  Direct marketing is getting a LOT harder, even though the DM focus is growing.  I think careers are going to be made and ruined based on measurable ROI of campaigns and the amount of revenue associated with the marketing efforts will be a key metric for success. The days of blaming the creative agency for bad results are fading fast. Heads are going to roll if there’s not a measurable payback for marketing initiatives.

This year the theme was integration and coordination using multi-channel.  I think next year the theme will be about customer lifecycle management and automation of marketing… also, there will be a lot more talk about mobile device marketing as well.

As for how we showed ourselves, we had articles in 1-to-1 Magazine, B-to-B Magazine and DM News all hitting on the same week prior to the show which was great exposure and evidence that we’re on to something big.  Our booth stood out nicely.  People responded well to our poster campaign.  I think next year, at least 1/2 of the people who attend DMA shows will know L2 and Fuse and what we can do for them and our jobs will shift from educating the marketplace about us to talking about how they can best apply Fuse to their business.