I’ve been reading a lot about “inbound marketing” these days. You’ve heard the term too, I’m sure.  It’s been embraced by social media practitioners who like to call it a new approach to marketing. Inbound marketing, they say, is an indirect form of marketing in which...

Predicting response rates is tricky business and not usually a good idea. First, it’s too easy to be wrong.  Second, it doesn’t mean very much.  Getting a high response rate is only good if it comes along with a decent conversion rate.  (Topic for another day.) Yet...

For 10 years, I taught a direct marketing course at Bentley College in Waltham, MA. It was a one-night-a-week course for business and marketing professionals who wanted to learn more about creating successful direct marketing programs. As a way to kick off each new...

There are some people in my business who will never use the “j” word. And they won’t tolerate others using it either. For them, it’s the ultimate insult for the work we do. I think we all understand that for most of the population, junk mail is just another way of...

Twenty-some-odd years ago, an unknown data entry person working for an unknown company somewhere in this great land of ours mis-typed my name into a database as “Bobo McCarthy.” I am assuming it was an accident. Hey, mistakes happen. But with mailing lists, those...

Do you remember the old “Sports Illustrated” television commercials? They were always fun to watch – with great video clips and photographs packed into 60- or 90-second spot. And they always offered some type of free gift – a sports blooper video, a football phone or...