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The ACMA is excited to cosponsor the upcoming webinar, Rethinking Catalogs: New Technology, New Processes, New Economics, to be held on August 10th at 1:00 pm Eastern Time. Lands’ End Creative Director Daniel Hetzer and Inkjet Insight Founding Partner Elizabeth Gooding will discuss how catalog creative and production processes are adapting to new customer attitudes, technical capabilities and economic realities. Takeaways: •How shifting customer attitudes are affecting retail buying patterns •Objective approaches to measuring catalog and direct mail effectiveness •The impact of Covid-19 on cataloging •Trends toward personalization and customization that predate the pandemic and those that can be used effectively and efficiently •Consideration of new strategies for when to print, what to print and how to print. Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6eXQly3hTnmwD8mamsUJhg

It's the most responsive marketing channel. It reaches people at home and makes them feel good. Direct Mail still delivers. Learn how direct mail is driving results and how to apply it to your everyday marketing strategies through direct mail retargeting. see great information at: https://www.navistone.com/blog/direct-mail-still-delivers

When we first think of brand campaigns, what immediately comes to mind are all the greats. You know the ones. Got Milk. Just Do It. But there have been some great B2B campaigns, too. Remember Staples’ That Was Easy? So simple it was brilliant. It tied Staples directly to the solution, and everyone from CEOs to summer interns had one on their desk. B2B marketers can and should consider campaigns as powerful tools in their arsenal. If done well, they build brand awareness; they can galvanize all your marketing channels around a specific hook, idea and goal; and provide the steady drumbeat of a consistent message to the right audience. To that end, the building blocks of a successful B2B campaign follow the same tenets as a B2C campaign. But there are some considerations to keep in mind when developing a campaign for a business audience. learn more at: https://www.jschmid.com/blog/campaign-building-blocks-b2b-success/

Two Sides are excited to announce its newest member, the Marketing Agency, Edit, part of the Kin and Carta plc. Edit are a bunch of talented data scientists, media experts, and technology architects who create marketing that matters by obsessing about less. They provide print media to their clients around the world, with a focus on accurately targeting the right audience, with the right message, at the right time. “Edit is delighted to become a member. We look forward to working with Two Sides to promote the sustainable story of print media and enhance our own sustainability story,” says Head of Media Solutions, Sarah Burns.

Join PhillyDMA on Wednesday, July 29th for “Innovative Direct Mail: How to Drive Open Rates with Compelling Envelopes!" The PhillyDMA is proud to host Jim King - VP of Sales, Strategic Accounts at Cenveo - to discuss the latest envelope treatments used to increase package opening rates. Direct marketers who want to drive response will not want to miss out on the educational content and the lively networking! We will see you there. Tickets: $5.00 PDMA Member $10.00 Non-PDMA Member register at: https://phillydma.starchapter.com/meet-reg1.php?id=5

Crafting memorable creative that will compel and delight an audience is likely the most challenging task in the campaign process. Without a creative, brand-right theme, the campaign won’t get traction and meet objectives. That said, coordinating and executing the big idea is just as important. If the campaign isn’t organized and executed well the investment will be wasted. Here are the five essential steps for getting a marketing campaign off the ground: https://www.jschmid.com/blog/campaign-building-blocks-coordinate-your-campaign/

Web accessibility lawsuits are occurring at an alarming pace. Understanding the legal and technical guidelines of what is mandated is often tricky and confusing. Although the ADA (Americans with Disability Act) laws don’t formally specify compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set of technical standards, private business sites have to be accessible, and it’s well-accepted that compliance with WCAG is the best way to achieve that standard. Unfortunately, this growing trend in claims is also due in part to the significant complexity in implementing the WCAG guidelines. As a result, the painful reality is that the majority of sites do not meet these standards. Resolving issues manually or without technical expertise can be a struggle or even cause additional accessibility problems. Further complicating matters is that by its nature, ecommerce is driven by dynamic change, continually coming in from all directions. Often, the number of people contributing to the site increases the challenge to remain in compliance. In this environment, not having a plan to protect your business from these accessibility claims could leave merchants with significant legal exposure.

The following article is part of an ongoing series from J.Schmid with the critical elements and insights you need to strategize, execute and launch successful omnichannel campaigns. Watch your email and follow #CampaignBuildingBlocks on social media to keep up with the full story. Any successful campaign, at its core, is about storytelling. The iconic signature photo. The memorable language. The heart-tugging anthem video. The humorous Instagram posts. Content … it’s what tells your campaign story. How you engage on a sensory level. How you connect with your audience. How you use content is vital to the effectiveness of the campaign. Fortunately, there are more ways than ever to capture engaging content. And with increasingly tighter budgets, it’s more important than ever to maximize your efforts while saving money.

In the last two blogs written by Michelle Houston, she covered the importance of using Contribution Per Order (CPO), instead of ROAS when evaluating the performance of marketing programs. At the end of one of those blogs, she talked about the importance of also assessing and understanding the significance of lifetime value (LTV) as part of the equation. I wanted to continue that thread and take it a step further by incorporating LTV as the last step of the proper analysis into the equation. As covered in past discussions, LTV is an important metric to track as it will vary widely by acquisition source. When applied to the first order for a new customer, CPO is the equivalent to cost or profit per customer acquired. This will vary by acquisition source as well. When CPO is combined with LTV, those metrics are a powerful tool in driving your company in the right direction (or wrong direction if you’re not careful). In the analysis below, we can evaluate the total effect that CPO and LTV have on the current and future business.

As we come out of lock-down, more opportunities for businesses are emerging and it’s important for marketers to seize them. Direct mail is perfect for doing that as it can build more personal connections with the people who value your brand. It’s a topic we recently spoke about in our article ‘Direct mail provides opportunity for brands to cut through the noise‘. Mail is highly targeted and has a format which enables a longer narrative, perfect for sparking conversations. People like receiving, sharing and discussing it. And it is measurable – so you can track and optimise your campaigns.

Last week I wrote an article about why Contribution Per Order (CPO) should be the critical revenue metric that businesses use rather than Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). As a reminder, while ROAS is an efficient measuring metric, it cannot assign health to a channel, making it a relatively useless tool. In contrast to ROAS, Contribution Per Order (CPO) brings in the magnitude of the campaign segment targeted. This metric subtracts the marketing cost and cost of goods from each order to determine how profitable each of those segments is contributing to top-line demand and bottom-line profits. In one of my side comments in this blog, I mentioned the need to analyze Paid Search programs utilizing the same metrics and by further separating into branded terms vs. non-branded terms. In a recent year-end seasonal review with one of my clients, Paid Search was only reporting at a macro level (combining branded and non-branded search), which can be misleading. As shown below, Paid Search has a relatively positive CPO compared to traditional print prospecting (+$1.16 vs. -$2.15). Without understanding the full impact, this client was considering marketing decisions to expand Paid Search, reduce print prospecting, and potentially eliminate print programs—leading to potentially devastating results.

At this time, all mailing promotions are proceeding as scheduled with no changes. We will continue to evaluate existing and upcoming promotions in light of the rapidly changing circumstances due to COVID-19. If changes to an existing or upcoming promotion occur, notice will be provided in an Industry Alert and posted here, on our main PostalPro Promotion page: https://postalpro.usps.com/promotions Building upon the success of the Promotions Calendars over the last few years, the Postal Service has developed a Promotions Calendar for Calendar Year (CY) 2020. The 2020 Promotions continue to encourage marketers, printers, and mailers to utilize new technology and print techniques that enhance the traditional benefits of a physical mailpiece. This in turn can drive higher response rates and increase the overall return on the mailer’s investment in mail. By encouraging the use of technologies integrated in mail, the Postal Service expects to increase the value of direct mail and retain the volumes of transactional mail, thereby ensuring long-term product growth.

More often than not, we engage with seasoned ecommerce professionals tasked with running print programs while simultaneously holding some measure of responsibility for Profit & Loss statements. And as such, they tend to look at performance metrics with a ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) lens instead of a more critical metric – Contribution Per Order (CPO). Why is that important, and why does ROAS lack adequate insight as a key metric? Let me explain. While ROAS is an efficient measuring metric, it cannot assign health to a channel, making it a relatively useless tool. The reality is it could be hurting your business as a primary form of indicator. ROAS can't tell you how much money you are making for every order received. As an example, a ROAS of 6x is more efficient than a ROAS of 5x, but that doesn't mean you made more money (or any money). A ROAS of 6x on $10 did not make you more money than a ROAS of 5x on $10,000,000. The volume grew top-line demand, but it did not increase profits. In contrast to ROAS, Contribution Per Order (CPO) brings in the magnitude of the campaign segment targeted (marketing cost and cost of goods). This metric will help with your payroll and to keep the lights on – in other words -- adding top-line demand and bottom-line profits.

Three online advertisers are suing Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws by monopolizing "digital advertising markets." “Google leveraged its stranglehold on online search and search advertising to gain an illegal monopoly in brokering display advertising on other companies’ websites,” the marketers allege in a class-action complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case was filed on behalf of Washington, D.C. tour company Grand Atlas Tours, Delray Beach, Florida-based Prana Pets (which sells herbs for dogs and cats) and the San Francisco law firm Hanson Law. They claim Google “achieved this market dominance in part by acquiring rivals in the online advertising space, conditioning access to its search-results data and YouTube video advertising platform upon the purchase of its separate display advertising services, and ensuring those systems were not compatible with those of its competitors in online advertising."

Understanding how to stand out in the mailbox is more important than ever in 2020 and beyond, especially so because of today’s competition for consumer attention. In fact, a 2015 study said the average American is exposed to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day. That’s madness! With the large majority of these being digital ads, this provides a huge opportunity for direct mail and print marketing campaigns. Though the average person’s mailbox is much less crowded now than it has been in decades, this competition for consumer attention is more fierce than it has ever been. That’s why when it comes to your direct mail marketing campaign, you need to be very calculated in your approach; understanding cost, attribution, average ROI and the overall health of your house file are vital considerations that must occur with the launch of any successful direct mail program. Click Read More below for details