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Winning strategies for your eBay and Internet business.
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Winners Circle
It's in the Mail
Going Postal The U.S. Postal Service forwarded a recommendation for a 5 to 6% rate increase to the Postal Board of Governors on Monday, said Postmaster General John E. Potter. The postmaster said the increase would be necessary unless there is a change made to a new law calling for the establishment of a $3.1 billion escrow account that affects the postal service's retirement system. Otherwise, the U.S.P.S would have been able to use that money for operating expenses and put off a postage rate increase until 2007, Potter said.
Credit Issuers Mailed a Record 5.2 Billion Pieces in 2004 U.S. households received roughly 68 credit card offers each in 2004, setting an overall record of 5.23 billion offers, according to the Mail Monitor direct mail tracking service Synovate, the market research arm of Aegis Group. The volume of credit card offers was 22% higher compared to 2003 and it exceeds the previous mail volume record of 5.01 billion offers set in 2001. The higher level of clutter has caused response rates to drop to an all time low of .4% in 2004, compared to .6% in 2003. Still the shear volume of mailings generates millions of applications each month. Direct mail remains the key response channel, although consumers are increasingly being encouraged to respond by telephone or the Internet, according to Davidson.
Survey Finds 37% of E-Commerce Revenues Come From Mail and the U.S. Postal Service, found that 67% of consumers consider mail more personal than the Internet. The study also quantified the synergy between mail and the Internet. It found that catalogs typically generate 22% of a company's Web site traffic and that direct mail generates 37% of e-commerce revenues. Consumers consider direct mail useful and are most likely to read it to browse for new purchases and for help managing a household or overseeing finances, according to the survey. Findings of the survey conducted by InnoMedia Inc. were released Monday, March 21.
Email: The average number of spam offers received by consumers on a weekly basis has declined to 78, compared to 137 per week one year ago, according to a survey conducted by Opinion Research Corp. on behalf of the DMA. In addition the percent of e-mail viewed as spam declined to 53.1% n February of this year, compared to 60.4 in February 2004. While the overall volume of spam is has been reduced, the higher volume of spam compared to legitimate e-mail continues to inhibit consumer trust and threaten e-commerce, according to Cerasale.
Your Marketing Efforts: If you sell items that are shipped to physical addresses, you have amassed a postal mailing list. There are ways you can help your winners and yourself by using this list. The most effective use of your list is to send your material along with the winner's order. Brainstorm the types of mailers or items you could do this with: flyers, surveys, business cards, coupons, thank you cards, magnets, promotional t-shirts, etc. Try vista print or cafepress for awesome and inexpensive ideas for your promotional materials.
Your second mailing list will include the email addresses you have collected through your dealings with winners. When is an email considered SPAM? When it is unsolicited. In other words, if you purchase a list of email addresses, make sure that the people on this list have opted to receive email from you. If you've ever signed up or registered with a credible company, they will often ask you if you'd like to receive offers from their affiliates, partners or like-minded companies. If you say yes, you have "opted" to receive extra junk mail from service providers you may have never heard of, even though the original company was a well established one. Always offer a way to your winners of opting-out of your regular mailers. And if you receive more than one complaint, you may have purchased a cold list, or a bad list from someone who simply collected names without permission.
The best practice on mailing out to your list, is to stick with your winners, or the people who have contacted you first, because they have already granted permisssion to receive more info directly from your business, and statistically they are more likely to buy again from a merchant they have already dealt with. Email campaigns can include the same type of promotions that physical snail-mail-outs contain, but it may take more creativity on your part to win them over.
So, what are you waiting for? Let's get rolling out on those campaigns.
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