Marketing Dynamics - All Comments

Bring back Direct Mail!

Fallon Cryer — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:16:24 GMT

Thanks for your feedback Anna. Your question is a great one. The short answer is yes-- using direct mail for contact acquisiton and prospecting is a sound and creative strategy--as long as it is targeted and you can afford to do it properly. This means an investment in both time and budget, the activity will only be as good as the follow up, which takes commitment. Prior to engaging in this type of activity, I recommend organizations have a very strong understanding of who their target market is and produce a finite list of targets. For partners with a strong vertical solution, many of them will know the name of every company within their target. It's situations like these where a higher-cost investments such as this can work. Particularly as you try to build a deep profile of contacts from across the organization. Also, the trick is to try and make a balanced investment and not to put all your eggs in one basket. I recommend putting the power of LinkedIn to good use during this activity, I see some great partners mining the connections on LinkedIn to help build a view of a target organization's profile. Additionally, there are some great data augmentation & social media tools like InsideView that can help do a lot of the hardwork for a very reasonable monthly subscription fee.

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. If it's working--I'd keep doing it. I'm sure someone once thought that bottled water was a stupid idea...

Bring back Direct Mail!

Anna Chu — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:53:49 GMT

Great post Fallon! I have been talking to a number of partners about the resurrection of Direct Mail and one has taken the approach to send high value DM pieces to a select number of target organisations. While this is not new, they have used this tactic to develop a new relationship where one does not exist with the CXO. I'd like to know your thoughts about this approach, one particular partner is having a lot of success as it is driving cut-through to their target audience when traditional DM would be low-value/high volume with a low conversion rate. As you are well aware, our partners cannot leverage the Microsoft database to generate these relationships as they are typically with the CIO, not our target audience. So seeing this initiative from our partners is great to see! What do you think about using Direct Mail for Contact Acquisition?

A single list of ALL Active Marketing Campaigns? You Bet!

Microsoft Dynamics Partner Community Blog — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:15:33 GMT

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