15 Statistics That Illustrate Direct Mail’s Potential Power

15 statistics that show why direct marketing should be considered as an element of your marketing mix (complied by Compu-Mail):

1. Direct mail continues to be used heavily, with a 43% share of total local retail advertising.
2. Young adults, 24 years and younger, are among the most direct mail responsive.
3. 92% of young shoppers say they prefer direct mail for making purchasing decisions.
4. An International Communications Research survey found that 73% of consumers actually prefer mail over other advertising methods.
5. 59% of U.S. respondents and 65% of Canadian respondents agreed with the following statement, “I enjoy getting postal mail from brands about new products.”
6. 56% of customers find print marketing to be the most trustworthy type of marketing.
7. 70% of Americans say mail is more personal than the internet.
8. Personalized print media has a more powerful presence than a personalized email, because the audience can recognize that it takes more effort to customize print media than digital.
9. 76% of small businesses say their ideal marketing strategy encompasses a combination of both print and digital communication.
10. 40% of consumers try new businesses after receiving direct mail.
11. U.S. advertisers spend $167 per person on direct mail to earn $2, 095 worth of goods sold; a 1, 300% return.
12. 98% of consumers bring in their mail the day it’s delivered.
13. Of these, 72% bring it in as soon as possible.
14. 77% sort through their mail immediately.
15. 48% of people retain direct mail for future reference

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 47 Standing Out

Why Use Semantic Markup? Because Making Google Smarter Lets You Stand Out From the Competition

If you’re like most people, the standard markup language of the web-hypertext markup or HTML-is hard enough to learn and master. So the realization that there is a new, powerful kind of markup-semantic markup-gaining traction might make your eyes glaze over. This Growth Spurts blog post, however, will explain what semantic markup is and why you should very much care about, and start using it, now.
When you’re designing an HTML page, you are essentially telling a computer how to present or display your information: how many columns there are on the page, what font size, what words are italicized, and so on. So for example,

$9.99 is an instruction that tells the browser to italicize all the characters between the begin and end tags when it renders the page.

When you are using semantic markup on the other hand, you are telling a computer the meaning, or semantics, of your information, something ultimately much more powerful and valuable than simply how the info should display.

$9.99 is an instruction that tells a search engine like Google that the 5 characters between the begin and end tags should be definitively understood as the price of a specific product.

Without this markup, a search engine will likely use heuristics (i.e., using common formats or conventions to make educated guesses) to try to discern meaning, but this causes difficulty and errors when confronted with uncommon formats and ambiguous situations (e.g., $9, 00).

How is Semantic Markup Used Today?

Once the meaning of information is accurately known, there are nearly unlimited possibilities for how that may be constructively used by search engines. For example, if on Monday you ask Google the following question, it replies with a very appropriate, intelligent answer:

Notice that Google’s answer appears in a large font, right above the natural search results and below the ads-and this prominent placement, which very much draws your eye on the search result page, is completely free (unlike the pay-per-click ads).
The reason why Google can appear to respond so intelligently to this natural language question is because Sales Renewal has put the semantic ‘openingHours’ markup (from schema.org) on the Concord Flower Shop’s About page indicating to Google the meaning of the string of letters “Mo-Fr 9:00-17:30”

Hours:

 
Monday-Friday: 9:00 – 5:30

More competitive advantage from using semantic markup

Another real world example of the advantage you can gain from semantic markup involves e-commerce.
Another Sales Renewal client, MATsolutions, sells lab refurbished test & measurement equipment online. If you search for Agilent 53181A (a popular device manufactured by Agilent), the MATsolutions listing stands out as the only one that includes the price.
As in many other used markets, price is one of the first things prospects want to know and is an important buying criteria. And MATsolutions is the only firm conveniently supplying this info right on the search result page!

Now you might think you could put the price in the last two descriptive lines in the snippet, but Google builds these lines itself and you really don’t have any control of what Google places there. By semantically marking up the price on MATsolutions.com, you are guaranteed that Google will display price on its own, incremental line … which also results in the client’s snippet being a little bit bigger and a bit more noticeable than the rest.
And in case the above reasons haven’t convinced you of the advantages of semantic markup, a recent research report finds that helping Google understand your pages improves their rank: pages with semantic markup rank four positions better on average, compared to pages without semantic markup!
So do Google and yourself a favor: start using semantic markup to help Google get smarter and your snippets stand out from the crowd.

About the author: Keith Loris is currently the president and CEO of Sales Renewal but before he went over to the dark side of sales and marketing, he had lots of fun researching natural language understanding and neural networks, being awarded U.S. Patents 5, 642, 435, 5, 239, 593 and 4, 876, 731 along the way.

Client’s Collaboration with Sales Renewal Leads to New Strategies, Brand, Site, Marketing Programs and … a Blue Ribbon

It is generally rare for two different companies, let alone a client and its vendor, to work together so thoroughly, on so many levels, that the resulting whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, thanks to Sales Renewal’s revolutionary JointSourcing Solution (a unique hybrid combining elements of joint venturing with elements of outsourcing, in which shared risks and rewards align Sales Renewal’s economic incentives with those of its clients), such synergies are the norm.

If you’ve been wondering how JointSourcing and its three, Blueprint, Build and Sell steps actually works in practice, in the real world, this latest installment of our JointSourcing in Action Case Studies series is for you.

This issue provides a detailed, step-by-step view of how Sales Renewal partnered with our client MATsolutions to overcome their business, marketing and sales challenges to produce a marketing & sales system neither company could have developed as quickly or efficiently on its own. One result of the collaboration: MATsolutions receiving the prestigious Blue Ribbon Small Business of the Year for 2014 award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As Steve Wedler, VP Sales and Marketing, MATsolutions has said:

“Over the last year with Sales Renewal’s critical assistance, we’ve rebranded the company, launched a new e-commerce site and introduced marketing programs and supporting technologies that truly distinguish MATsolutions from its competitors. Having two highly dedicated and bright teams responsible for this transformation has allowed us to deliver something far superior than either team alone could have. This award is a great acknowledgement of the advances we have made.”

Read the JointSourcing in Action case study.

Quick Tip Tuesday: July Digital Marketing Advice

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more.

Looking for more information like this? The Sales Renewal Advice from Across the Web page features a selection of the best, actionable marketing & technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.

Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:

Customer Reviews to Drive Revenue: We’ve written about this before, but we can’t emphasize it enough. Customer reviews and testimonials are important for all businesses, but are essential for businesses with a local presence. From providing excellent customer service and never paying for reviews to making sure your site has the correct schema markup for the search engines, this article offers five helpful tips for managing local reviews. Not sure where to get started? As you can see from this Infographic on MarketingProfs.com, Yelp is often a good place to begin.

Making Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly: With more and more ways for visitors to view your website, having a responsive site (one that adapts to the screen size and platform of the user) is a given. As reported on TechCrunch.com, Google is now helping address this poor user experience in two ways. First, it will let users know if the website is not properly set up for smartphones and instead of sending you to the search page you’ve requested sends you to a single home page (“faulty redirects”). Then it lets you decide whether to proceed or not. Second, if you have Webmaster Tools enabled, Google will send a message if it detects that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage as well as any faulty redirects it detects in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools. Details here.

Twitter Tips to Keep Followers Following: This Ragan.com article offers some useful tips for managing your Twitter account. Highlights:

• Don’t rely on automatic reposting of your content – write content specific for your Twitter feed
• Stay away from ALL CAPS
• Don’t overuse #hashtags
• Use a shortened URL service for links – makes a better visual presentation of your content
• Interact with others – use mentions in your tweets, for example

Content Marketing Idea Generator: Stuck in rut with your content marketing? Facing a writer’s block? This article introduces five keyword-based tools – like Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator – that may just help you get going again. Read more here.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 45 – July 4th Special

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 13 – Friday the 13th Edition

Quick Tip Tuesday: June Digital Marketing Advice Roundup

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more.
Looking for more information like this? Check out our Advice from Across the Web page. Here, Sales Renewal selects the best, actionable marketing & technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.
Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:
1. Why that Video Went Viral – Studies back up instinct: “If you want to melt the Internet, best to traffic in emotion, researchers have found. The emotional response can be happy or sad, but the more intense it is, the more likely the story is to be passed along.” Researchers are beginning to explore the motivations that turn a link, like a video of a firefighter saving a kitten, into click bait. It didn’t work for one site that reported that the kitten eventually died. Read the full story.
2. Measuring the Right KPI – “As marketers have been under more pressure to prove ROI on their efforts, leads have been an easy KPI to measure. Unfortunately, leads don’t always lead to revenue, which is of course the most important KPI for any business.” Read the full story.
3. Grammar Refresher – Affect vs effect. Compliment vs complement. Farther and further. Do you know when to use these words? Here are 30 incorrectly used words that can make you look horrible – and how to use them correctly.
4. SEO and Semantic Search – “SEO and semantic search overlap, but the key to success lies in finding how to mesh them together, so that they complement each other, rather than simply overlapping.” This article gives some insights as to how this is done, including: “Stop trying to just salt your content and meta data with keywords, thinking that’s all you need to get to the top of the search results. And that doesn’t mean to just concentrate on synonyms, either. Instead, focus on conveying the concept of your pages.” Read the full story.
5. Rules for Brainstorming – As we work with our clients on new projects like introducing new programs, rebranding and the like, it’s important to come together as a team. This article from 2009 offers up some good advice for making the brainstorming process work, including:

• defer judgment
• one conversation at a time
• be visual
• stay on topic

Contact us for more on these and other helpful advice.

Helping Google Understand the “Meaning” of Your Pages Improves Their Rank

A report from SearchMetrics finds pages with Schema.org markup rank an average of four positions higher compared to pages without semantic markup. Read it.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 41 – How to be a hero for $200