In a slow economy, marketing and adver­tising budgets are often among the first to be "restructured" or "scaled down" by companies. However, marketers should view these times as a strategic opportunity to reach consumers in new and alterna­tive methods, specifically mobile SMS marketing, said Mike Romano, VP of SmartReply, a voice and mobile market­ing services provider.

This week, my thoughts turned to personalization - a concept that seems to keep gaining fans in the marketing world, who believe that creating offers unique to increasingly targeted audiences can lead to better engagement and ROI.

Recency and dwelling type are just a few of the home-based list selections that can help marketers from several industries target the right customers, say our four experts.

Direct marketing services provider Harte-Hanks Inc. reported that revenue totaled $269.9 million in the third quarter ended September 30, down 5.9% from the previous third quarter. The company's diluted earnings per share were 26 cents in the same period, compared with 30 cents in the previous year.

Make magazine has turned to Twitter for customer support, loyalty-building and some marketing campaigns.

If you've either decided to outsource your marketing database or you've inherited a database host, how are you going to ensure that the marketing database delivers? Many marketers are unfamiliar with the more technical side of their world, lack the staff to dedicate to this aspect of marketing or prefer to focus on directing creative development.

Hoover's and its parent company D&B have announced the release of the browser-based application Hoover's Mobile for iPhone users and the device-enabled application Hoover's MobileSP for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphone users.

Manufacturers' News Inc. (MNI) has added 600,000 non-manufacturing businesses to its database in an attempt to better serve the current US market. The expansion — the end result of a marketing agreement between MNI and another, unnamed enterprise — more than doubles MNI's original database to include approximately 1 million companies and 3 million executive names.

Does your nonprofit have low response rates? High bounce rates? Spam complaints? Is your organization at risk of being blacklisted by major ISPs? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, consider this the season to clean your data.

ETrigue Corp. released eTrigue 3.0 today. The application was designed to coordinate marketing and sales efforts by finding, sorting and qualifying suitable buying prospects.