Marketing Blog

Spam filters can lay waste to a B-to-C email campaign. So can a busy “delete” key. By contrast, the postal service delivers your campaign right into your potential customers’ hands.

Despite the ubiquity of Internet marketing and the rise in postal rates, Marigold continues to see strong demand for its many targeted residential mailing lists. These lists are ideal for catalog campaigns, offers that rely on visuals and brochures, and mailings that include coupons, magnets, calendars, and detailed information.

Our residential mailing lists include broad, high-impact categories, such as:

* Home improvement enthusiasts
* Home office entrepreneurs
* New homeowners
* Newlyweds
* Cable TV buyers
* High-speed internet consumers

In addition, we offer residential mailing lists for highly targeted groups such as mail-order buyers of outdoor recreation products, donors to women’s causes, gardening enthusiasts, and more. (You’ll also find lists that enable your campaigns to target consumers by ethnicity, religion, or language spoke.)

Marigold’s residential lists are regularly updated (usually monthly) to ensure freshness, accuracy, and deliverability. Please contact us to find out more about any of the Marigold lists and for information on using our data resources to create a custom residential mailing list for a specific campaign.

Strategic Marketing Means Tackling More than Low Hanging Fruit

Your house is a mess. It’s easy to pick up the dirty clothes, straighten the shoes left by the back door, make the beds. You know, the easy stuff. But when was the last time you reorganized dressers and closets? Climbed a ladder to dust the tops of light fixtures and moldings? Or bent low to clean your cabinet under the sink? Now if you did that, your house would be really clean. But who has time? Or the energy to do all that?

Can much the same can be true of your marketing efforts? Too often we spend our time addressing “low hanging fruit”. Like the clothes left on the floor, we spruce up what’s easy and not especially time consuming. Get a new logo, ask the agency to come up with some new ads, write a few press releases and leave the harder stuff like market research and strategic goal setting to another day.

Why Your Customers Won’t Wait

Are you losing sales, clients or prospects to competitors who are faster, nimbler or more responsive? These days, your customers and prospects can get the information and products they need almost instantly. If you can’t do that for them, they’re simply not willing to wait. Speedy interactive web sites, email, text messaging and all those other technology tools that keep us so connected have trained us to expect immediate responses.

Here’s what you can do if you are hearing lots of “I already bought it somewhere else” or you get lots of inquiries but can’t seem to close the sale.

Look at your sales processes. Do a little flow chart – doesn’t have to be anything fancy – of how your prospects hear about you, contact you and buy from you. Look at the time between inquiries and responses, offers and the actual sale. Where are the gaps in your process that keep your customer waiting – and that give them opportunity to look elsewhere?

Automate your processes. With all the technology available to you, there’s really no excuse for not having a bang-up system for responding immediately to people who show you they are interested. That might mean emails that go out automatically and interactive tools on your web site that guide people through the sales process (or event the information gathering process).

Make it easy to buy. Don’t you want to make the sales transaction as easy as possible for your prospects and customers? We’re amazed at the unintentional road blocks people put in their sales processes – everything from too much paperwork to convoluted policies that discourage buyers to plain old bad service. If you can’t make it easy on your customers, they’ll find someone who will. Check out Converting Telephone Inquiries into Sales. It’s good advice for all types of inquiries, not just telephone.

Four days. That’s the time limit one of our clients has for handling sales leads. If you can’t contact the prospect within four business days, they say drop the lead and move on to someone else. It’s not that they don’t care about that lead, it’s just that their research shows after the four day mark the chance of making the sale is almost zero. That person has purchased from someone else – or is so far along the sales process that it’s too late.

And speaking of four, a recent study from Akamai and JupiterResearch showed that the average online shopper will wait four seconds for a site to load before they move on. That’s right – you have four seconds to get your page loaded and wow that prospect.

Your response cycle may be four seconds or four days. But whatever it is, you better get to your prospects in a hurry – or someone else will.

Is your organization a world-class provider of cutting-edge solutions? Do your people offer turn-key robust service? I’m sure you do. Unfortunately, your customers and donors have no idea what all those abstractions really mean or should mean to them.

We might criticize teenagers for talking in a language that defies comprehension (whose BFF R U?), but if you are writing business documents, be careful that your messages can be easily understood. Business language, no matter what the business, is too often laden with meaningless jargon. In fact, it’s so common that we stop recognizing the words as meaningless hype.

If you want to build your brand (who doesn’t) stop using mumbo-jumbo and start talking so that your messages are crystal clear.