Q&As

Roger Boor had a problem. His corporate outsourcing operation, New Business Consultants, needed to be able to identify and reach new-born businesses in his Silicon Valley market at just the right moment: when they were growing. What made the situation more ironic was that Boor

Success has a thousand fathers, the saying goes, but failure is an orphan. But in the case of Tom Bihn, a specialty maker of backpacks and carrier bags for laptops, no one

USPS touts value of Standard Mail marketing as a Web driver

As a small business owner, you face a conundrum: you need new customers, but may not have the know-how and resources to acquire them. You could hire an expert to do it for you, but this option can become costly. Or you can do it yourself, with a little help from an information solutions provider and the Internet.

How many data miners does it take to build a model? More than you would think, judging by the stories told by Sam Koslowsky.

Smart postal mailers carefully plan their campaigns, taking both season and day of week into account. So should e-mailers, say executives from UAL Loyalty

Habitat for Humanity Responds to Hurricanes The wave of hurricanes that ravaged the southeastern United States earlier this year caused massive devastation, upended a great many lives and set an immense challenge for humanitarian organizations. One such …

Business-to-business marketers have used private promotional databases to improve response and better target their mailings since the early 1980s. Now, says Linda Huntoon, executive vice president, of Greenwich, CT-based list services firm Direct Media, consumer merchants are starting to take advantage of them as well.

Best Western is out to see how smart its customers and prospects really are with a rapid-fire trivia contest aimed at touting the chain’s free high-speed Internet access. The hotel chain began yesterday its High Speed IQ Challenge, where contestants log …

Shell Oil Products U.S. is testing a good-deeds campaign for the holidays to boost consumer loyalty. Its five-city Shell Holiday Patrol effort sends teams to Shell stations and malls to help customers at the pump, host local events and distribute a …