Does Direct Mail Have Five Years to Live?

Borrell Associates -- a research and consulting firm that tracks local ad spending across all media channels -- slammed the direct mail industry hard when they released tidbits from their $995 report predicting imminent direct mail disaster. Says, Borrell, “We’re predicting a 39 percent decline for this Goliath over the next five years, from $49.7 billion in annual ad spending in 2008 to $29.8 billion by the end of 2013. If that occurs, direct mail will fall from
the No. 1 placeholder for ad revenue to No. 4, behind the Internet, broadcast TV and newspapers.”

For those scoffing at Borrell’s conclusion, the research company points out that it accurately predicted the decline of newspaper advertising in 2001, as well as the accelerated decline [38% ad revenue drop over five years] for the Yellow Pages last August. “By the end of the year, the bottom seemed to have dropped out, hurtling the Idearc into bankruptcy and causing it to tell investors that a 40 percent drop in revenues over the next five years was likely.”

Borrell isn’t alone it predicting curtains for mail,either. Last week, EMarketer reported on results of a 2008 joint study by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research showing that -- back in 2008 when they were surveyed -- marketers expected to spend the same amount on marketing in 2009. Notably, though, decision makers also were planning to shift a fair chunk of the marketing budget to online activities: the company website, search marketing, online video, webinars, email, social networking, etc. The big losers in this study were print and TV advertising, outdoor media advertising, sponsorships, in-person and virtual trade shows, and radio. Yes, direct mail was in for a 34% decline in budget expenditures, but it trailed print and TV advertising, radio, outdoor media, sponsorships, and both in-person and virtual trade shows and conferences.

So does direct mail really have just five years to live? No doubt the patient needs a heart transplant and its fate is closely tied to that of the U.S. Postal Service, which continues to stamp on the envelope parade. In early April, a friend who owns a successful mailshop in the D.C. area told me that her shop couldn’t keep up with the workload. “We’re crazy busy. There’s just one problem: after the May 11 postal increase goes into effect we don’t have a single job in the house—not one.” How does this successful mailshop entrepreneur cope? By wearing a night-time dental guard to control the tooth grinding.

The big aggressors against direct mail? Coupon and promotion-driven email, says Borrell. “Most of the growth in e-mail marketing will be local. We’re expecting local e-mail advertising to grow from $848 million in 2008, to $2 billion in 2013, as more small businesses abandon direct mail couponing and promotional offers and turn to a more measurable and less costly medium, e-mail.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, folks. Email marketing—including enewsletters -- has its detractors, too. Some gurus make a living telling people how to manage “e-mail overload.” At my office, a great deal of what comes in goes straight to some folder on my desktop -- the digital version of the notorious "round file" -- never to be seen again. It isn't that the content is lacking; I just don't have time. Moreover -- as mobile marketing becomes more prevalent and direct mail slows -- I expect the anti-email outcry to grow.

The real problem right now is too many channels and too much marketing, period. We just haven't figured out yet how to control it for maximum effect. So I think I’m going to disagree with Borrell – not that direct mail is faltering, which it may be right now -- but that email marketing is going to replace it.

So, without direct mail and e-mail marketing, then what? I don't know exactly [surprise!], but: Rather than arguing among ourselves about which marketing method is better than another, the solution probably is nature’s favorite: the hybrid -- and that means, personalized, integrated marketing, at least for the short term. Moral of the tale: He who integrates best, wins.

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo

Snippits from Search Engine Strategies 2009

From the Search Engine Strategies 2009 Conference, SearchEngineWatch.com featured these video interviews worth snipping.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR interviewed:

Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com
• Get a GOOD, professional photo to post on Twitter.

Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
• Yes, search engine optimization does have a future.
• In search social elements – direct methods of finding information like Yelp, Kayak, Facebook, Twitter – will be coming on strong.
• Expect a significant shake-up in the composition of search marketing firms (consolidation, acquisition, new people venturing forward).
• Some signals suggest that links are no longer the pac-Mac chunk of the pie chart of the algorithm or that social search is sharing space with classic SEO.

David Naylor, CEO, Bronco Internet
• Reputation management is a big thing and Twitter is big, so you need to keep ahead of it for yourself and for clients.
• Most people who have twitter also have and blogs. If they have issues with you, try to stop them on Twitter before they get to the blog side.
• Identify the negative things quickly. Take over the reputation management side of things FIRST, because it will control the negativity getting in there.
• Microsoft is the little guy, with Google as the monster; in fairness, Microsoft communicates better with consultants, and they are both business-to-business and business to consumer.

Guy Kawasaki
• Twitter is a great marketing tool for great content.
• The most objective measure is how much you’re retweeted.

Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget
• The Twiteratti (those operate at the high end of content) will benefit greatly from Twitter.
• Nothing is immune to the rules of the web, and the web increasingly gives control to the consumers.
• I agree with Kawasaki: UNfollow me if you don’t like what I’m doing and saying.
• In the excitement of new medium, we need to keep our eye on good marketing practices.
• Twangst is the angst created when you are away from your iphone or computer and can’t twitter, or when you fear you aren’t tweeting enough.

John Mulligan of SEO-PR interviewed:

Aaron Lazansky-Oliva of Sohnup Industries
• In the next two years the mobile platform will be quite useful for marketing.
• Twitter is a great news aggregator.
• We’ll see great increase in connectivity and marketing ability through browsers on the mobile platform.
• In mobile it won’t be about a lot of content, but toward social media optimization.
• Educate the clientele as to what goods and services can get the word out through globalization and aggregation between different populations and cultures.
• Gain the valuable insights that let me, my company, my colleagues use social media platforms and tools to get the information out there.
• Speaking of hash tags, it’s all relevant that we aren’t putting out garbage.
• Bubbleguru @bubbletweet – tips and tactics for mobile marketing.
• blog@sohnUP.com

Eric Qualman, Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education
• Where is the search world going? Google’s main competitors are Twitter and Facebook.
• Searching for the term “baby carriage” on Google would take about 15-20 hours; but in the future (future is now) with the Beacon tool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon I can search for baby carriages on Facebook and see that 30 of my friends have purchased a baby seat in the last year – and of those 30, 20 have purchased the same baby seat. And, I care more about what my friends think than what Google thinks.
• The best product will win because your friends will have the answer.
• With Twitter, Comcast and Jet Blue are answering frustration tweets within an hour.
• Some people speculate that Google might buy Twitter.
• I crowd sourced to find out which app was the biggest mover in social media, using Twitter and Facebook for voting.. Facebook was the overall winner; YouTube was second.

Byron Gordon of SEO-PR interviewed:

Hollis Thomases, CEO of WebAdvantage.net
• Twitter is great way to communicate with potential and current buyers.
• If you represent the brand, you need to LISTEN.
• Whole Foods has been very informative; they have a reputation for doing good and for customer support and quality – perceptions they are reinforcing with Twitter.
• Be cautious: Twitter handles can be hijacked.
• Key twitter tools include url short names tools that give you deep metrics when used.

Brian Cray of Nearby Tweets
• Nearby Tweets is a new product designed to overcome the chaotic mess that is public Twitter, and which can reduce to a stream of nearby Twitterites.

Michael Evans of The Talent Magazine.
• People are staying home for a “staycation,” and Twitter is a big part of that
• Guy Kawasaki explains how to use Twitter as a business tool.
• Talent has a Twitter account, but is using it lightly for now.
• SEO is a big thing at our company, including landing pages and how to optimize.
• It’s difficult for clients to decide which SEO consultancy is the best.

Rebecca Lieb, eConsultancy, interviewed:

Michel Leconte, SEO Samba
• Syndication is huge in terms of getting the brand out there.
• RSS is good for slicing and dicing content.
• How much should you feed? Full post? Half post? You need a strategy for each blog you are posting; some should be full-feed, some not.
• Work to get technologies like Tweetfeed http://tweetfeed.com/in place.
• Make sure you use a service that gets you some analytics and measurements.
• Get in synch with the news cycle and engage in the discourse.

-- Scrubbed by Marketing Brillo

Guy Kawasaki Talks Venture Capitalism and Twitter

I just came across this March 2009 video interview at les affairs.com with Guy Kawasaki, who chats about what venture capitalists are looking for. In the process, Kawasaki talks about Twitter, “speed-to-market,” and other marketing tidbits. Marketing Brillo thinks these are the key points:

• The most important thing is prototyping. It’s not about working two years to create the perfect product. It’s speed-to-market right now,

• The second thing: Twitter is a great marketing tool. Every entrepreneur should be on Twitter, create a following, and use that following as a marketing method. Twitter is fast, free, and widespread. Many key people are on Twitter. Got a product to sell? Prototype the hell out of it; then get on Twitter and market the hell out of it.

People make four errors when seeking venture capital.

• First, they don’t research who they are meeting with. You need to go to the website and see what kinds of investments the venture capitalist does. Know the people you are meeting with.
• Second, typical Powerpoint presentations are way too long. Ten or 15 slides is enough.
• Third, people spend too much time describing their background. Keep it short; you need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less.
• Fourth, people argue or become defensive when questioned too closely. Don’t try to bludgeon your way to success. If you don’t know the answer, say, “I’ll get back to you.” Answer a question you disagree with by saying, “I’ll get back to you.”

• A good model for meeting with venture capitalists is online dating: Is It Hot or Not? That’s the criteria for judgment. It’s not a survey, it’s not complicated, and it’s not eHarmony. Venture capital relationships come down to: “Is It Hot or Not?”

• Plenty of Fish is my hero. Marcus Frind had maybe one or two programmers working on this site, so it’s one or two people generating billions of pages. And he did it without venture capital.

• I wouldn’t have predicted Twitter or YouTube. If you’re a venture capitalist, who knows what the next trend is?

Steve Madden Gets Ecommerce Right

I fell in love with Steve Madden’s Trufle shoe (lilac) and went to order. Know how e-retailers always make unregistered customers do a whole “account set -up” thing before placing the order? Madden got the same info by simply adding a “password” registration box to the order form I had already filled out – a smart way to avoid shopping card abandonment.

Marketing Brillo loves Steve Madden.

Three Steps In Learning Brought To Us By the Digital Natives

John Palfrey, co-author with Urs Gasser of Born Digital, was on Book TV this morning. Palfrey had many fascinating observations about how “digital natives” — kids who were born into a digital world — differ from both “digital immigrants” who've had to find their way through it, and “digital settlers,” the pioneers who created the digital landscape.

He noted, for instance, that of the many hundreds of students he's observed working at the Harvard Law School library, he has never seen -- not even once -- a student with a book in hand; plenty of computers, yes -- but no books. In a library!

To paraphrase a common concern among parents and educators: How much can the information tsunami contribute to real learning? Palfrey made the first cogent argument I’d heard that digital can be better.

For example, with regard to “getting the day’s news,” Palfrey noted that the non-digital generation followed a process that began with morning coffee and the newspaper, followed that evening by some time spent with Walter Cronkite. In the digital world, news gatherers who choose to do so can have a much richer experience. “They can begin with grazing for information, which includes scanning headlines online, watching the quick newsfeeds on the bottom of the TV screen, and so on.” Some stop there, he noted—and that’s where the concern about “shallow” comes in. But for others, the learning process launches with grazing, and intensifies with what Palfrey calls the “deep dive,” clicking on links in the headlines. From the deep dive, the most energetic then engage in the participatory and creative “feedback” phase, which involves commenting on articles they’ve read, writing in their own blog, and so on.

Palfrey’s right: If you go through these three steps, digital learning is an amazing, mind-expanding, enriching experience. Marketing Brillo loves John Palfrey.

Testing Will Test Us All

This morning, I got promotions from Silverpop and Marketing Experiments. Silverpop was inviting me to a webinar series “In Search of the Ideal Email Send Time.” Bottom line promise: Reach recipients on the precise day and precise time they’re likely to be checking email and increase e-marketing returns by 30 to 100 percent. Marketing Experiments has a webinar, too: “Optimizing Your E-commece Site” focuses on test strategies that will boost revenue 56%.

All this testing is a daunting responsibility for marketers used to simply uploading e-stuff “whenever,” but testing and adjusting always has set direct marketing apart from other forms of promotion. For years, we’ve paid production experts to help us execute and measure sophisticated direct mail tests. Now we need to do the same for email and e-commerce. Our skill-set requirements are changing rapidly and it’s a bit scary, but the chance to learn something new while doing better also comes with the evolving e-territory. E-victory!

Data Visualization All Over Again

eM+C is having a webinar about “Data visualization,” a process from which marketers can gain insight into marketing data. I confess, I’d never heard of it (data visualization is the same as “enterprise tree mapping,” if that helps). Data visualization is a sort of 1990s idea, according to the DBMS2 blog, but, everybody's rush to mine data for variable data printing and imaging seems to have led to a second look. KD Nuggets lists dozens of examples of visualization software, including some free versions like Graphviz. Their cool gallery lets you see the output of some visualized data, but don’t expect pretty. For that – and for a great article showing how visualization works in graphic design -- check out PTS Blog. If it’s still too much, get out your yellow pad and doodle. That still works pretty good, too.