Variable Data Printing (VDP) allows companies to customize their direct mail marketing campaigns in order to provide custom content to individuals. VDP lets you change text, graphics, and images. This means you can create fully optimized direct mail campaigns that appeal to each specific person who is seeing your direct mail piece. Without customized marketing materials, it can be difficult to stand out. Personalized communication can help increase readership, a response, and return on investment. When doing a VDP direct mail marketing campaign, it is important to test the campaign against traditional static campaigns to ensure that the VDP campaign is actually ...

There are many options available to generate new leads for your business. Whether it is through direct mail marketing, search engine marketing, or online advertisements, you can find the marketing plan that works best with your company and its budget. However, if you have leads coming in, you have to make sure that you are not letting them get away. Many businesses let valuable leads get away because they do not have a process or system for managing and following up on these leads that are generated. Here are 6 ways to create a successful customer relationship management program (CRM) to help ...

Once you get a website for your company up and running, you shouldn't just forget about it. You must take some time to analyze your website, who is linking to your website, and understand the basic structure of how your website works. Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters to see how Google is crawling and indexing your website, if there are any problems or errors, and share information to help your Google rankings. After adding your website to Google Webmaster Tools, there are 4 important areas that Google webmaster will show you: Links This are can show you all of the places that are ...

Including social media sharing options like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Digg in your email marketing messages can generate a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without a social sharing option. According to a study by GetResponse, only half of email marketers are including social media links in their emails, even though it can vastly improve the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns. The survey found that emails that had at least one social sharing option had a 30% higher click-through rate. If they had at least 3 social sharing options, then it had a 55% click-through rate. Twitter is the most popular ...

If you haven’t been paying attention to how your website is performing, you are losing valuable information. Paying attention to your web metrics can help you figure out exactly what is and isn’t working on your website. Web metrics software is easily available and can provide you a lot of information. However, it can become overwhelming if you don’t know exactly what the information is and means. Once you learn what your metrics is telling you, then you can use that data to manage your website. There are four basic ways to break down your web metrics: Traffic, Conversion, Performance, Maintenance. Performance Once you ...

Author and online consultant Mikal Belicove outlines the potential benefits of having a corporate blog as a tool to educate customers and prospects. Business Blogging

When running an email marketing campaign, personalizing your emails for each subscriber can help improve open and response rates. However, personalization means more than just addressing the subscriber by name. According to a survey by e-Dialog, respondents showed an increased desire for more personalization by knowing what products/services they like, the offers they like, and their preference on communication. Name was the fifth highest concern, while location, age, and gender fell even further on the list. Consumers were more likely to say they opened at least half of marketing emails when senders seemed to “know me a lot.” When asked about what the types ...

Although some people may think that providing coupons can cause your company to lose business, it may actually have the opposite effect. According to information from Compete, more than half of consumers who used a coupon code during their last online purchase would not have bought that item if they did not receive that discount. Some other information found about consumers who use coupons: Consumers who use coupons spent an average of $216, while consumers without a coupon spent an average of $122. Consumer satisfaction was higher for consumers who used a coupon (92%) than those who did not (88%). Consumers who used an online ...

[caption id="attachment_1660" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Source: Target Analytics Index of National Fundraising Performance"][/caption] According to a survey by Target Analytics, direct mail was the main revenue channel for non-profit organizations in 2009. Direct mail delivered almost 8 out of every 10 dollars. Also, most new donors are acquired through direct mail. For index organizations in 2009 a median 87% of all new donors were acquired through the mail, while only 12% of all new donors were acquired online. However the proportion of new donors being acquired online is growing. Over the past five years, the proportion of donors acquired online has risen – from a ...

Businesses of every size can benefit from utilizing local listings. Having complete, accurate, and consistent data on listings like Google Maps and Yahoo Local can help increase awareness for your business and bring in more sales. According to the most recent ComScore study completed in 2009 for 2008, local search grew 58% in 2008, reaching an year-long total of 15.7 billion searches. People who are local search shoppers are ready to buy now and are looking for accurate information to conveniently purchase what they need. Online local searches are the modern day, online equivalent to the yellow pages. Consumers searching for "Italian restaurant ...

Email Marketing is one marketing tool available for you to grow your business. However, without a plan, you may not be able to truly maximize its effectiveness. First, figure out exact goals for your email marketing campaign. If it is to increase sales, then your emails should focus on coupons and special deals. If you want to grow your subscribers, provide innovative information. After you have clear goals, you can customize the newsletter to meet your goal. Maybe you will send weekly deals along with a once-a-month informational email. The content for your emails should be focused on your very specific target ...

When working on search engine optimization of a website, most people tend to focus on the content and images. One area often overlooked in SEO is the PDF documents they post. PDFs are becoming more common place in business, so if you are posting them on your website, make sure search engines can read them. Here are 5 simple ways to optimize your PDF documents. Keep the PDF text-based When creating a PDF, be sure to use a text-based program like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign to keep your PDF documents search engine optimized. If you create your PDF in a program ...