Chief Marketer Staff

• Agencies

  Using Metrics To Shape Your Direct Marketing Plan

  Justification is the name of the game when it comes to determining a direct marketing budget. It’s no longer good enough to make generalizations about how much revenue you’ll make or what the margin contribution to your bottom line will be. Today, management wants to know what the ROI is going to be before releasing funds. And they want to see detailed proforma metrics as the justification, regardless of the size of the program.

• Agencies

  Want ROI? Think Teamwork

  (Promo) Thanks to improving data tracking tools, bean counters in the finance department might become defenders of marketing budgets during belt-tightening periods.
  According to a study released last month by the Association of National Advertisers, 64% of self-described “successful” marketing program leaders engage a cross-functional team to keep marketing accountable. (MarketingROI, July 27, 2006).

• Email

  E-mailers Call For AOL, Yahoo! to Follow Microsoft’s Lead

  Now that Microsoft has added an unsubscribe button to its e-mail user interface, marketers are calling for other Internet service providers

• Email

  Who is the DiGuido Smear Blogger?

  The anonymous blogger smearing e-mail service provider Epsilon Interactive president Al DiGuido may not be some low-level employee who DiGuido fired, as one first would suspect.

• Email

  E-mail No. 1 Demand Generator: WebTrends

  Online retailers rank e-mail marketing as the most important demand-generation activity for holiday success in 2006, according to a study released by WebTrends today.

• Email

  The Darwin File Revealed

  Finally, the list of idiots who respond to spam is up for sale. And the whole file of 14.3 million addresses can be had for $5,000.

• Email

  Stupid PR Watch: Spot the Exaggerations

  Eghads! See if you can spot the obviously inflated claims in the following press release. Hint: For the first overblown claim, most trade-type business books sell so few that they

• Pick the Winner – August 06 – Winner

  Most downsizing tests result in fewer sales and lower costs, but in this case the smaller #10 package produced a few more sales (an insignificant 1.9%) as well as a distinctly cheaper package. That

• Google Lands Search Ad Deal on MySpace

  Google has signed a deal that will give it exclusive rights to provide paid-search advertising and some display ads to MySpace.com, the social-networking site owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media.

• Umbria Introduces Blog Data Mining Service

  Umbria Inc. has launched Umbria Accent, a new analytics service to mine consumer data and generate reports from Internet blogs, message boards, chat rooms and other online public forums.