Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Well, not entirely.
You may notice some subtle changes to this blog. I’m no longer the host, for one. As of the end of October, I am bidding a fond farewell to L2 though I may still stop in here from time to time to muse […]

I can’t speak about Sunday, because I was spending time with my husband; and I can’t speak about Tuesday, because I was in the office furiously working on our redesigned webpages (hopeful that we will be able to unveil soon). Monday was my time at DMA and I had the opportunity to attend a few […]

Well, DMA ‘06 is over and we’ve packed up our booth and taken our laptops home. It was an excellent show and we had the good fortune to be able to give everyone the opportunity to work the booth and talk to attendees since the show was practically held in our own backyard.
I have notes […]

Via Seth, we are directed to Mouse Print, a site dedicated to the teeny, tiny disclaimers, product alterations, and outright deceptions practiced on the consumer through packaging… with the occasional bit of humor. Because this site is a blog format, you also get a good point/counterpoint discussion in the comments.

More people are reading emails in their preview pane. Designing for that can be tricky.

We know that good personalization can help in our pre-sale marketing efforts by increasing response rates, but after the sale, are we suddenly forgetting our customers’ names?
The Wynn Hotel in Vegas, according to Ben Mcconnell of Church of the Customer, is maintaining its personalization efforts throughout his experience. Now, granted, this is Vegas and they […]

I’m not going to get heavily into this topic because, frankly, I lack the specialized knowledge to make a deep argument. However, it is a subject that concerns me. Actually, to be perfectly honest, the possible repercussions scare the whey out of me.
Some time ago now, Eric French, a blogger […]

One of the great things about the new technologies being used for marketing is that they are often low-cost, allowing for a greater scope of creativity and testing. Good taste, however, remains in the purview of the marketer and is still, sadly, optional.
BL Ochman alerts us to an advertising scheme that has, at best, very […]

Jon poined me at an article at MarketingVox reporting on a study coming out of KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann that indicates that more than 53% of professionals’ purchasing decisions are impacted by content they read on blogs.
A different study by PQ Media shows that ad spending in blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds has more than […]

There’s a lovely little recycled paper company in Wales with a slightly different approach to paper making and with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Their showcase product is Sheep Poo Paper! By allowing the sheep to pre-process cellulose, they can then easily separate it out into pulp suitable for papermaking and fertilizer to grow more […]

Anita at Small Business Trends speaks out against the stampede towards certain types of Consumer Generated Media. For most businesses, the flashy, big budget, high-tech efforts of Chevy or Mastercard just aren’t reasonable. So Anita reminds us of the more basic version of CGM: the Testimonial.
This form of customer feedback is quite a bit less […]

I’ve been having great fun with our software this week - so much so, in fact, that I have officially termed it "tasty dog food" within the company. Our latest project was a direct mail campaign to a new list of a bit over 1000 names. Among other things, we want to test what kind […]

We’ve been playing a lot with words this week — datasheet, a couple of direct mail campaigns, rewrites of this and that — and Robert asked me to come up with a few words to summarize our product. After writing my 100 words (approx.), I emailed it around for others to bang on and polish. […]

A little while back when researching In-N-Out burger’s packaging, I discovered that they have a ’secret’ menu. Now, I am informed (via Seth) that Starbucks does, too. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with the article writer’s premise that hiding choices helps consumers, but it’s prevalent enough that it can’t be hurting the companies much.

…is like Pushing a Rope… but only a little bit because, sometimes, it does work.

Robert DeMarco, one of our sales guys, is gearing up to run the marathon in San Francisco. Check out his Fat Guy to Run Marathon page.

Checking my "live bookmarks" in Firefox this morning, I found a gem from Joel: his favorite FireFox extensions.
I started using FireFox as my preferred browser about a year ago because the tabbed browsing and live bookmark features are quite useful for reducing open windows on my desktop and keeping the sites I want to visit […]

I’ve been working on getting us a tasty, easy to use web log analysis program. Searching on Google turned up a few candidates but none of the companies’ web sites really grabbed me and said "this is exactly what you wanted." I downloaded a few pieces of trial software and installed the two that looked […]

I recently talked about the poor impression that a would-be vendor has given us with his blatant disregard for our opt-out preferences. But that’s just half the story because sometimes "opt-out" just means "this doesn’t quite suit my needs right now" and if you can capture what those needs are, or find some other way […]

We are getting ready to release the 5.3 version of Fuse and the entire company is aiding in our bug-finding efforts… and having a marvelous time.
When I started with L2, some five years ago or so, there were seven of us and we all had to do a bit of everything. In my time here, […]