The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing – Presentation from #DMA2011

On October 5th I presented The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing to a packed house at the Direct Marketing Association Annual Conference and Exhibition.  Here is the deck from that presentation.  I have some video and pictures I will clean up and post next.  Feel free to pass this presentation on. The 9 Immutable [...]

Social Media for Non-Profit and other Marketers presentation for the Florida Direct Marketing Association

On Thursday 8/18/2011, I spoke at the Florida Direct Marketing Association’s annual Non-Profit Summit.  The subject, “Social Media for fun and Profit”.  Here is a the presentation for your review Fdma presentation social media non profit 8-18/- View more presentations from Gilbert Direct Marketing, Inc.

How to Mess Up a Perfectly Good Customer Experience

As a marketer, you should be overly concerned about how your customers experience your brand, products and customer service. I evangelize how in the internet age it’s very easy for a company to wind up getting skewered via social media. But all isn’t the same out there. I come across businesses daily who don’t have [...]

How Integrating Social Media Into its Marketing Mix Brought The Fresh Diet Success

By Melissa Campanelli, from eMarketing and Commerce Magazine Integrating social media into its marketing mix has helped drive revenue for The Fresh Diet, a gourmet diet delivery service established in 2005 that delivers freshly prepared meals and two snacks directly to its clients’ doors each day. The Fresh Diet’s newly redesigned website makes it easy for [...]

A 3,500% increase in fans/likes, engagement and sales on Facebook? (a case study)

When I first started marketing via social media, I didn’t understand Facebook. A blog was the central focus of my social media programs. I’d create a blog post and push it out via Facebook and other social media channels. And that worked well at driving traffic to my blog. As for engagement with my readers, I got some comments back, even some people interacting with each other on occasion, but nothing earth-shattering. But about a year ago, I found the key that unlocked the Facebook engagement factor.

7 ways to make the Inc. Magazine 500 Fastest Growing Companies list in a down economy like my client did

I’m not really big on self-promotion or self-congratulations — especially here in my column. However, I’m quite pleased to “admit” that one of the companies I work for has made Inc. magazine’s fastest growing companies in America list.

So, what does it take to make the list? While it’s not Inc.’s criteria, I’ll tell you from my perspective what you and your company need to do to get there.

Are you automating your emails with trigger and drip campaigns? (an overview and 3 good tips)

Lately I’ve been working with clients on automating their marketing tasks, specifically their emails. The more I work in this channel, the more I realize how wide-open a frontier — with a huge upside — it is for cross-channel merchants. Most medium- to high-end email service providers (ESPs) offer some sort of automated functionality. This [...]

My prescription to heal the US Postal Service in 8 easy steps. (all direct marketers get behind this)

If John Potter and the post office want to get out of this mess, they need to take s few steps. Now I’m not naive enough to assume that my prescriptions to heal the USPS are alone a cure, but hey, it’s a start….

How to Spread Exponential Customer Goodwill

Last week I sent out an email for a client to its recent past customers. The email’s goal was to reactivate those customers, and the copy was written as a message from the company’s CEO.

At the bottom of the email in a P.S., I added the opportunity for these customers to let the brand know why they weren’t ordering from it anymore.

So the email was sent, and the responses

Why Direct Marketers Hate Beer Commercials and Branding

But usually I love the Super Bowl. Actually, I should say that I usually love the Super Bowl’s commercials. They’re usually clever, funny and make my annual trip to my friend’s Super Bowl party much better.

But I’m not really sure what happened this year. Here are four ways that I would’ve rewritten the scripts of all the commercials I saw (and a select few actually did this):