By Cliff Guy

I was discussing with a colleague of similar advancing years as my own (i.e. we remember the 80’s!) how much direct marketing has changed over the last decade, with the rise and rise of new media.

But something occurred to me this morning, when using dotMailer’s newest and coolest reporting feature, called Geo Mapping. I realised that some of the old ways are still the best.

You see, dotMailer’s brand new Geo Mapping tool creates a hot-spot map showing you where around the world your contacts are opening your emails. It’s eye-opening to see, because there are so often hot-spot areas you just wouldn’t have expected. You can then select map areas at the click of a mouse and instantly create data segments by geographical selections – even if you don’t have the postcode data in your database. I told you it was a cool tool!

This is leading-edge technology for email marketing, but it’s also using traditional corner-stone marketing data that some of us may even have come to overlook or neglect in recent years. It may not be as sexy or dynamic as marketing data like behavioural analysis, click paths, and preferences or even RFV, but that most fundamental of sales and marketing questions – ‘where are your best prospects based?’- can provide some powerful and lucrative answers.

Luckily, with dotMailer you can now get the answer to that question at the click of a mouse!

by Dave Ivy

I thought I’d share a little experience we’ve had with a computer manufacturer over the past few years. I was reminded of this by a piece of Direct Mail that came through yesterday, something I threw in the bin without even looking at. Why, I hear you say?

Put simply, it started with their email marketing. They used to send us emails at least once a week, sometimes twice a week and at first, we were glad to receive them. We’ve always bought their kit for the office – High-spec machines and laptops for the staff and some test servers for the developers. The number of machines we’ve bought over 9 years has been considerable for a small company – around 150 in total so with this in mind, you’d think they would be sending us offers about the new thin laptops, or perhaps multi-core servers. Maybe even the multimedia range, great for gamers but thanks to their multimedia power, good for power users too, right? Well, no.

Every communication that came through was advertising a cheap ‘dumb terminal 259 pounds’ type offer. No laptops, no design-spec machines, nothing over 300 pounds in fact so nothing ‘powerful’ enough for us to use. Imagine this in a showroom scenario: CUSTOMER: ‘Hi, I’d like to buy a 5-door saloon car with V6 engine and all the trimmings please’ SALESMAN: ‘No problem Sir. Here’s a lovely little hatchback we have, only 3-doors with wind-up windows and an engine that wouldn’t pull a fart but it’s really cheap’ CUSTOMER: ‘Erm, no thanks – can you just tell me about the more powerful models please’ SALESMAN: ‘Certainly Sir. Here’s a lovely little hatchback we have…’ and so on. You get the picture.

So dear computer manufacturers, if you’re reading this, please feel free to subscribe me to your list, as long as you tell me about hi-spec machines and direct the emails with the 259 pound desktop calculators to my mum.