New Year's Resolutions

People often begin the New Year by making resolutions to improve themselves or change something in their personal life. I'm sure you've noticed the huge increase in attendance at the gym during the first week in January.

I'd challenge you to do the same thing for your business. It may seem overwhelming, since at this time of the year we are bombarded with marketing and technology predictions for 2010. Start small with just one or two things that can really matter to your business. I'd suggest in 2010 you should resolve to:

• Analyze the responses to your past marketing efforts. There may be campaigns that you think are successful because they generate a great deal of responses. But do these responses turn into sales?

• Try something new. Test a customized digitally printed mail piece to a small portion of your list, send an email newsletter, test a personalized URL as a response tool.

All of us at ForbesAMG wish you and your loved ones a Happy and Healthy Holiday season and a prosperous New Year!

Sincerely,
Tom Forbes
President, ForbesAMG
Phone: 973-601-8110
tom@forbesamg.com

eMarketing

• eMarketer's CEO Geoff Ramsey offers Seven Predictions for 2010. Read More

• Twitter and Facebook may be all the rage, but ordinary email is still king when it comes to sharing content online, according to new research from ShareThis. The company's "ShareThis" button has become ubiquitous at the end of articles and blog posts, linking to a widget that lets users share material via email, instant messenger and social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Yahoo Buzz. Email remains the tool of choice for that purpose, accounting for 46% of content-sharing activity compared to 33% for Facebook, 14.5% via other channels and just 6% for Twitter, reported Online Media Daily. Read More

• A recent ClickZ article offers nine questions to help you think about your business in ways that enable you to maximize your social media marketing efforts. Read More

• Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students, it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics. Facebook is found to be the "coolest network" by far among students with over 300,000,000 Facebook active users, half of whom return to the site every day, according to MediaPost's Research Brief. Read More

• Like their larger counterparts, small businesses will be doing even more marketing online in 2010, according to studies from Vistaprint and Ad-ology. Vistaprint found that small businesses would be increasing marketing activities in social media, online and search advertising, and email most in the next year, with email marketing currently their top tactic, reported eMarketer. Read More

Traditional Marketing

• In a recent article, Newsweek magazine polled some management consultants and business futurists on how to improve the U.S. Postal Service and make it run more like a profitable (or at least break-even) business. Click here to read their suggestions

• DMnews offers five suggestions to help marketers start the year off right. Read More

CASE STUDIES
Arizona's Children Organization (AzCA), a non-profit agency offering foster care, adoption, and other child welfare services, needed to increase its revenue from private donors. The new fundraising approach included versioned and personalized direct mail pieces, emails and personalized URLs. Materials for the campaign took into account a donor's contribution history and geographic location in an effort to generate an emotional response that might encourage more and larger donations. AzCA was thrilled with the substantial increases in number of donations, total amount, and average amount per donation. Although AzCA didn't report the return on its investment, the campaign cost approximately 75% more than the previous year and generated 270% of the total donation amount, which suggests a pretty good return. Read More

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