A Must Attend Event for Multichannel Merchants

CognitiveDATA is always looking to bring you ways to grow your business through innovative strategies and cost-controlling measures. To achieve this, we want to bring to your attention an offer from one of our trusted business partners — LENSER. We have worked closely with LENSER for many years and have found their suite of services to be exemplary.

As a sponsor of their conference, LENSER is allowing us to invite a limited number of our clients to attend the LENSER Summit as our guests. CognitiveDATA has sponsored this valuable three-day educational conference for several years, and we believe it to be a “must attend” for catalog and multichannel retailers. I have selected you to invite from among our clients since we feel that you, or a member of your staff, in particular would benefit from the program content. As our guest, your registration, conference meals, and social events are covered by CognitiveDATA. Several of us from CognitiveDATA will be attending and participating in the program.

The Summit, held in San Rafael, CA, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, starts at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, September 22nd, and ends at 1:30 pm on Friday, September 24th. Attached you will find the full program of the Summit’s dynamic keynote speakers, informative workshops and enlightening general sessions that will give you highly actionable ideas to take back with you. Wednesday night’s dinner is at John Lenser’s home, steps from the Bay, and Thursday we’ll dine at the historic Corinthian Yacht Club in Tiburon. Friday afternoon’s optional social events include a tour of the wineries of Napa’s Carneros region, 18 holes at the gorgeous Peacock Gap Golf Club or a docent-led tour of the world-class collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Your spouse or guest is welcome at all social events.

Attendance is by invitation only and is restricted to multi-channel merchants. Please let me know if you can be our guest by replying to this email. You should then visit www.LENSER.com/Summit2010 to register. I hope that you or another member of your team can join me.

Inevitable Postage Hike Doesn’t Have to Spell Disaster

It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mike Roberts, Client Engagement Leader at CognitiveDATA.

Mike is an industry veteran and has spent numerous years in the direct mail industry. He started his career in the direct marketing department at Fingerhut and has vast knowledge of how United States Postal Service policies affect our businesses. I’ve invited Mike to share his thoughts on how and why catalogers will benefit from incorporating CPO into their mailing strategies. I hope you enjoy Mike’s first guest appearance, and the many more to follow.

- Rod Ford, Founder & CEO of CognitiveDATA

Inevitable Postage Hike Doesn’t Have to Spell Disaster
Mike Roberts, Client Engagement Leader at CognitiveDATA

By now, many of you have probably heard rumors of the pending U.S. Postal Service rate increases slated to go into effect January 2011, but you may not know how or why the hike will effect your business. When you consider the fact that 43 million people move each year, yet only three in five take the time to fill out a USPS change of address card, or the fact that 4.7 million people get married each year, creating millions of name changes, it’s nearly impossible to keep a mailing list updated and accurate!

If a company relies only on the National Change Of Address registry, 3-4 percent of its promotion will only reach the “current resident.” This is a costly problem because an average “current resident” will purchase at approximately half the buying power of the branded buyer. This is why we’ve launched the IntelliDRESS-driven Campaign Postal Optimization that not only finds the right person at the right address, but also places special emphasis on slashing mailing expenses.

CPO helps to boost the bottom line by preventing catalogers from wasting money on mailings to invalid or unresponsive recipients. It also increases the profit of a mailing list by replacing duplicated, outdated or low-yield names with higher-performing prospects. Most high-volume catalogers are aware that the USPS rewards mailers who have efficient delivery systems, and now thanks to CPO, they can capitalize on the tiered pricing system and avoid penalties at the same time. CPO works to move more mailings from nine in a carrier route to 10, improving postage by 8.4 cents. When you’re talking tens of thousands of pieces per mailing, that’s a tremendous savings!

Whether you’re a large or small cataloger, CPO is a great investment because the process is self-funding and easy to implement. Want to know more about the USPS rate hike and how we can help? Visit www.cognitivedata.com/campaign-optimization-whitepaper and download our latest whitepaper. Don’t wait until it’s too late – make updating your hygiene process a priority today.

Recommended Reading: The Accidental Billionaires and the Birth of Facebook

For all my blog followers and friends of direct marketing I have a
must read book recommendation for you - The Accidental Billionaires.

I rarely read a book compelling enough to recommend, but with all the buzz in Direct Marketing about the possibility of social media, this book is a history lesson into the not too recent past of the evolution of facebook, social communities, and information sharing. It also provides a colorful insight into Harvard life.

Enjoy!

Merkle Client Event Highlights New Trends in CRM, Ways to Achieve Greater ROI

Earlier this week, the CognitiveDATA team attended the Merkle CRM Executive Summit in Miami, Fla. We were pleased to be a part of Merkle’s client event again this year. For the past seven years, this summit has been responsible for bringing together senior marketing executives from Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations for two full days of learning, collaborative dialogue and networking with colleagues from other world-class organizations.

The theme of this year’s Summit was "Building Your Customer Strategy as a Business Strategy," and we believe participants were able to take away multiple new ideas for elevating their organization’s marketing programs. The Merkle team showed them ways to achieve greater ROI by maximizing the value of the customer portfolio as well.

I gained a lot of insight into new trends for customer relationship management in the retail industry while listening to the opening and closing remarks from David Williams, Chairman and CEO of Merkle, as well as many of the conversations I had with my peers in the industry.

I also had the opportunity to give a presentation on “Keeping it Clean.” As I mentioned in last week’s blog, CRM is all about data accuracy so we really focused on spreading the word about the latest technology focused on data accuracy.

As with last week’s CRMC in Chicago, I was delighted to be able to connect with many of our clients, blog readers, and now that we’re up and running, those who follow us on Twitter.

It’s great to have so many people passionate about the industry gathered in one place. And the sunsets weren’t bad either!