Will The United States Postal Service Survive?
The US Postal Service began negotiations today on a new contract with the 211,000-member American Postal Workers Union (APWU).
Top USPS negotiator calls one of the most important negotiations in his 35 years
The negotiations will occur as the USPS is seeking permission to reduce home delivery to five days per week and enact a series of rate increases.
As you may know the Postal Service has suffered from the economic downturn just like other businesses
Email and digital communications make a significant dent in mail volume. Mail volume has declined by 35 billion pieces since 2007, according to postal experts and the Postal Service expects to lose another 28 billion pieces by 2020.
The USPS can’t count on mail volume growth in the future and they need to be flexible in order to survive.
The Postal Service needs greater flexibility in how it schedules its employees,accoding to experts in that it no longer
needs all employees to work a fixed eight-hour schedule.
The Postal Service has gone from an operation that runs 24-hours a day, seven days a week, to a smaller organization that processes mail only 16 hours a day for five or six days a week, he said.
The USPS needs to look at workload and schedule people for when the work needs to be done and how it needs to be done.
We need a mix of different types of employee positions including full time, part time and non-career
employees.
APWU President William Burrus said at the opening of negotiations that “the history of the Postal Service is replete with
forecasts of doom and gloom, but such dire predictions have not prevented us from exploring every opportunity to achieve
agreement.”
The contract with the APWU and a separate one with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association expire November 20.
The USPS will begin negotiations on September 13 with the Rural Carriers.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Prospect or Grow Existing Lists
Do you have a marketing plan strategy
for building your lists?
If your thinking about generating more income for your business than you better have a good plan for building your mailing lists.
Define your marketing plan objectives like are you trying to build your active customer base with high quality as far as prospects with money with an immediate need for your product or service.
What are the best channels for completing your objectives by email, direct mail or mobile phone or telephone marketing platform.
Profile your current customer base you can append with major business to business databases and look for the best profiles are far as segments or age groups that purchase the most with frequent high dollar volumes.
If you can combine channels you can double your conversion rates. For example mail or e-mail and follow-up with a telephone call with an appealing offer. Improve your return on investment by negotiating multi-list volume use.
Offer a deal that will create urgency to increase response rates. Build your list through lead generation. Do you have a library of well written products that appeal to your target group?
Build back links to strategic product pages on your Website to informational white papers with hyperlinks pointing to your website.
Find Websites that are generating more traffic than yours and exchange articles. Build landing pages with white papers that can be downloaded from your Website and collect prospective data for promotional reasons.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Six Steps To a successful Holiday Email Campaigns
September could be the busiest month of the year for email
Marketers because it’s usually when they begin planning their holiday email campaigns. How big the email
list volume and how many responses do you need to meet objectives? Which days should they send their holiday messages?
What should the offer will be and how will this beat our control package.
The following are six best practices outlined in the report, designed to help retailers and other B-to-C email marketers have a successful holiday season this year:
1. Review last year’s holiday campaigns. In preparing for the holiday email season to come, examine what happened during your 2009 and how can we improve response.
Ask yourself the following:
* Which of my email campaigns generated the highest conversions? On what days were they sent? What were the emails about and what were the subject lines?
* Which campaigns generated the lowest conversions? On what days were they sent?
* Which segmentation tactics were most successful?
* Which campaigns were forwarded and shared the most? What about those campaigns made them so viral?
* Which campaigns generated the highest unsubscribe rates? The highest spam complaints? Why was that?
* Did you have to send any apology emails? If so, why? Have steps been taken to fix the problems?
2. Start Christmas campaigns early. On average, retailers began their 2009 holiday campaigns 67 days before Christmas (Oct. 19), according to the report. This is on par with the 2008 holiday season, but it’s nine days earlier than the 2007 holiday season. Last year’s soft economy and the precedent set in the 2008 holiday season was likely behind the earlier start. With a slowly recovering economy, retailers may begin their holiday campaigns a bit later this year, the report says.
Clean your lists by asking customers for their preferences:
* Ask subscribers directly to update their preferences, or make the link to your preference center more prominent by moving it above the fold.
* Ask subscribers to complete a survey about your email program.
* Try a delayed reward program designed to bring customers back during the holiday season.
* If you have a private-label credit card, loyalty program or member-based shipping program, promote it in advance of the holiday season.
4. Increase holiday email frequencies. If that logic appeals to you, then send on the days just before or after these high-volume days, the report advises. Also, the report recommends targeting brand loyalists with a “daily deal” email series or a “X Days of Christmas” campaign that requires an additional opt-in.
5. Stand out among inbox clutter. With the increase in volume pouring into subscribers’ inboxes, it’s critical to stand out with not only relevant content, big deals and helpful advice, but also with compelling subject lines, eye-catching creative and effective designs. To do this, the report offers the following suggestions:
* craft better subject lines;
* introduce a holiday header and navigation bar;
* add a gift services footer;
* use animated gifs more frequently; and
* leverage social sharing.
6. Change strategies over time. To maximize your holiday email revenues, adjust your strategies throughout the season, the report recommends. There are 18 phases to the holiday email season, according to the report, including Christmas in July; early holiday messaging; core holiday messaging; Thanksgiving Day sales; Black Friday sales; Cyber Monday campaigns; X Days of Christmas campaigns; the end of express shipping and guaranteed Christmas delivery; and so on.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
How To Improve Your Marketing ROI
Email marketers today have faced their own unique challenges.
Spurred by increased program performance expectations, more email marketing messages have been pumped into inboxes with more offers – and more competitive noise.
It is more difficult to break through that noise and generate meaningful results; this has made creating relevance in email messages more important.
Email marketers do have unique opportunities to drive performance and ROI – if they know where to concentrate their efforts.
Email Marketing Remains the Cornerstone Of all the trends to watch, this is the one that many people will miss simply because it seems so obvious.
Email marketing alone
Isn’t exactly a hot new trend, but you’ll want to start using email more effectively in your marketing mix.
The primary reason why email has been, and will continue to be, of major importance of the online marketing world is that it’s the one method of online marketing that everyone uses.
As shown below, email marketing had the highest penetration of all the online mediums last year – with over 90 percent of companies using email marketing.
Email is the Most-Used Online Marketing Tool
Email marketing effectiveness can be improved through integration with other online marketing channels. For instance, social media marketing (SMM) is an efficient way to extend your email
campaigns between send dates, search engine marketing (SEM) can be used to build your email opt-in list and mobilemarketing is a great way to improve the response rates
of email offers.
Improving Email Marketing ROI:
• Optimize the opt-in. Don’t just ask for a name and email address; get to know your customers better when they opt in for your email. Ask for what products or services interest them, how often they want to be contacted and what
offers appeal to them.
• Make relevance the priority. By getting more than just the basics at the opt-in, you’re well positioned to send relevant, meaningful email messages each and every time. After the opt-in, continue to build a history on all customers in your file based on what they bought, what information they requested and anything else that tells you who they are as individuals.
Use this information to make your communication focus on the “what’s in it for me” from the customer standpoint and not the “what do we want to sell” that other companies may use.
• Leverage social media for email marketing, and vice versa. Email used in conjunction with SMM is a powerful combination because it makes email more interactive.
Once connected with you via SMM, your followers can communicate in an interactive way and become more engaged.
This engagement can result in quicker response, faster conversion and higher ROI. And properly engaged, your followers will share your message with others. So ask your recipients to “tag” your email to spread your messages virally.
With little or no investment on your part, your email has new life. And review the discussion threads on social media sites to get ideas for offers, what content is interesting and to find out what your customers want.
Promote your opt ins on those sites as well to grow your list.
• Make search earn its keep. Optimize your pay-per-click (PPC) and organic search programs by making sure that your opt in is promoted on each destination page. And as they are opting in, record by customer what interested them and what the source was of their initial interest. Use this to segment your messaging to increase relevance from the beginning.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Marketing Financial Products to Boomerang Demographics
The ages of 22 to 29 years old are a time for first purchases
cars and homes and with that comes financial responsibilities.
Financial services marketers could benefit greatly on how well they communicate to this demographic group of financial young wave of new consumers now entering the market.
Marketers need to ask themselves on how to market to this group of generational that are very much part of a household that who are connected to family and are more financially aware than viewed by some.
The implications of a growing Boomerang
(they are called Boomerangs because they are 20 year olds moving back in with their parents again.) This is a market that shouldn’t be ignored since Boomerangs are sensitive to finances of both themselves and their parents.
The reason that this group should be observed by financial planners is because they save a good portion of their income along with helping out their parents to pay the rent. The largest piece of their income goes into saving according to recent research.
Targeting Boomerang using direct marketing methods and shifting their message towards saving rather than dept management could be worth the investment.
Boomerangs view themselves as individuals making a choice to return home to eventually turn their lives around to make a major investment or to reach financial goals.
State Farm insurance and other financial services company that says it strives to incorporate prudent credit use in its marketing messages. They use various direct marketing messages towards younger consumers.
They use websites that link to Twitter and Facebook dedicated to savings along with a number of mobile applications targeting this group of consumers.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Is E-mail Marketing Doomed to low Response Rates?
Monitor your campaigns
It is strongly recommend that email marketers monitor their subscriber responses and adapt their campaigns to either slow down the emails to once per month or send a permission email to determine subscribers or your email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing campaigns are plagued by a lack of response and not much adjustment by marketers to solve the problem, according to a new study from company Return Path. Without appropriate monitoring and follow-up your email campaings could be doomed to a low response.
The new study—“The One-Way Conversation: Email Marketing to the Non-Responsive Subscriber”—analyzed the continuing email efforts of 40 e-commerce companies after Return Path purchased a single product from each.
A majority of the studied marketers sent follow-up emails at a steady, high frequency for a 19-period despite a total lack of response—no opens, clicks or other purchases.
Eventually, 27% of the companies stopped sending email, but a quarter stopped without any attempt to re-engage or request continuing opt-ins.
About The Author
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Email Marketing for The Small Business Budget
Email marketing is constantly evolving…
which means the best practices you take for granted today could easily change tomorrow.The small business entrepreneur must
make the most of every cent for a return on investment.
Email marketers are often doing their job on a limited budget.
These two facts are the main reasons that email.
Always include compelling pre-headers. Pre-headers are the short text messages that appear above graphics or body copy. Typical pre-header content includes, “Click here to
add us to your address book” and “Click here to view this email in your browser.You should test and create a compelling pre-header that gets the most clicks.This is a great place to tell people why they might want to open your email.
You can include your call to action
Massage the text-only version. It’s a given that all emails should go out with a text-only option because, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA),
about 20% of all recipients view their email on smartphones or other handheld devices. Yet many marketers don’t even bother to look at their text-only email to make
sure it is formatted properly. The bottom line: It’s not enough to simply clean up the HTML and dump your copy into text-only format,
Don’t just hand off your coding. Placing code—either links or formatted content—into an email is typically left to a technical person, Berger said.
While Web browsers might be tolerant of mistakes, email servers and clients are not.. Yes, it’s OK to hand off the technical details of your email campaign, but
make sure you’re outsourcing to or hiring someone who has significant email experience.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Building Effective E-mail Campaigns
Effective e-mail campaigns require two critical elements…
Good clean and updated list and an understanding of customer preferences.
These elements form the foundation for a successful e-mail program. Below are some quick tips for building and maintaining a good e-mail list, and recommendations on how to capture customer preferences so that you’re able to deliver relevant and effective e-mail marketing messages to your audience.
Good clean and updated list hygiene
Regardless of how well an e-mail is updated, cleaned if it’s not making it to the inbox, it has no impact. Current statistics show that more than 25% of e-mail addresses churn per year.
Therefore, no matter how clean your initial list, it is imperative that you have a process in place that manages and removes bounce-backs and inactive addresses.
Are your e-mail addresses accurate? Have they been updated? Are your prospects and customers still receiving communications at their listed e-mail addresses? If not, your Internet Service Providers will notice that you consistently send messages to bad addresses.
Left unmanaged, this will have a direct impact on your companies ability to deliver e-mail to any customer’s inbox. Moreover, if a significant percentage of your e-mails are not being delivered, your marketing ROI will be negatively impacted; the CPM rate you pay to your ESP doesn’t discern between delivered and undelivered e-mail.
There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your list is clean and up-to-date:
Send a triggered opt-in confirmation e-mail while collecting addresses. This confirms that the address is active, and gives you the opportunity to explain what communications the recipient should expect to receive from you.
Develop a system to remove inactive and/or invalid bounceback e-mail addresses from your database. Internet Service Providers are increasingly measuring engagement or how many people read or click on your e-mails. Removing inactive addresses keeps engagement measurements high.
Collecting customer preferences
Customer preferences help you understand two key things: your customer’s specific interests, and their preferred method(s) and frequency of receiving information.
Your goal is to leverage this information and create relevant messages that speak to your customers as individuals. In short, you are aligning your messages to the topics they find most important, and delivering those messages at the times and frequency they find most appropriate.
Once you collect customer preference information, you should append this infromation to the other preferences who opened what, which links they
clicked, what they are buying, and how often they are buying. Understanding these inferred preferences will enable you to further refine your messaging and content to drive even greater results.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
How Social Media Can Impact E-mail Marketing
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
Manufacturing Online Produces ROI
The recession has been tough for marketers
trying to prove ROI and generating leads.
The manufacturing sector has been the slowest to recover but is now showing signs of improvement. According to surveys fewer respondents reported a decline tin their business in comparison to the first six months of last year.
Manufactures have been slow to open their pockets to make capitol investments. Many manufactures including small companies were just beginning to explore more involved online marketing before the recession hit.
Marketers are now beginning to revisit more involved marketing plans before the recession hit. Manufacturing marketers are beginning to move online because because Web advertising and search engine marketing are much more measurable.
They can point to return on investment…
lead generation and customer acquisition. Today you need to measure the value of each campaign and effort and companies are now demanding a return on investment. Previous marketing methods need to be reexamined.
A manufacturers Website is often is the center of the online strategy. What customers experience at the site is critically important you must therefore make your Website accountable like you would a sales person. Arm them with information that will help them close the sale.
Industrial buyers are quite sophisticated they spend a quarter of their time searching for products online. Manufacturers must have the information that buyers are looking for and this information must be easily searchable by category, keyword or by product.
About the Author:
Tim G. Little has a BS in Business Administration, and has worked in the magazine publication and circulation management for the past 20 years. As an Internet Publisher and Entrepreneur, he has developed a website to help small business entrepreneurs find the best mailing list and marketing programs ps: I would like to recommend a tool to you to help find Boost Sales… Gain Market Share.. . With Focused List Selection, Tips and Tools for Finding the Perfect List. Once you e-mail segments, track how they differently they react to messaging options. Free 100 leads from InfoUSA from your neighborhood or across the country you choose or call me for more details buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
FREE eBook “Boost Sales With Lists”
