Pamela Oldham

Mothers are a $1.7 trillion annual purchasing segment in the US, according to M2Moms, a conference on mother-targeted marketing. When moms seek parenting information they can trust, they go online — often to websites run by other moms. These are just some of the reasons why marketers court mom bloggers like Jen Singer.

Why are marketers paying so much attention to data quality? Companies are starting to recognize data quality as an enterprise problem that must be solved to ensure success on many fronts, says Rod Ford, president and CEO of Little Rock-based marketing technology company CognitiveData. Ford answered questions from Direct Connect on data quality's increasing importance.

Small businesses represent 99.7% of all employer firms and create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product in the US, according to the US Small Business Administration. Firms with fewer than 500 employees accounted for 64% — or 14.5 million — of the 22.5 million net new jobs (gains minus losses) created between 1993 and the third quarter of 2008, according to the SBA.

The economy finally showed signs of recovery at the beginning of 2010 as marketers began to get back their footing after a difficult few years. So what are the top issues facing CMOs as they work to build and re-build market share in the new economy?

E-mail marketers, can we have a chat? I'm up late, trying to meet a deadline, and I'm distracted by the incessant ping ping ping of e-mails arriving in the in-box, one after another. Over the past seven days, I've received 782 e-mail messages - not counting more than 80 e-mails captured by my trusty spam filter. Marketing promotions of one sort or another make up the vast majority of this steady influx of e-mail and the volume is challenging both the storage capacity of my inbox and my patience.

Sending e-mail blasts to customers and prospects is cheap, easy, and fast, but how does e-mail stack up against direct mail when it comes to reliably delivering communications messaging? With the proliferation of e-mail, marketers are finding that their messages can get lost in the shuffle. Marketers are returning to direct mail as the best way to cut through the clutter, according to Bernie Gracy, VP of strategy and new business development for Pitney Bowes.

Custom publishing is rapidly becoming a preferred customer relationship tool for companies in industries as diverse as pet food, telecommunications, hotels, and banking. This $47.2 billion industry has grown significantly in the past few years. Much of the growth in custom publishing has come from its expanding definition. Most people are familiar with custom magazines. Today's definition of custom publishing includes magazines, as well as content-rich platforms in both print and digital formats, that help companies engage with prospects and customers to change or reinforce behavior.

Send the right message to the right customer at the right time. Most marketers can figure out how to accomplish the first two tasks. But determining the best time to communicate with a customer is often elusive. To meet that challenge, a growing number of marketers are recognizing the value of trigger marketing, which is based on reacting to predictable life events or in response to specific customer behaviors by marketing to a consumer at that time.

An interview with Thomas Day, SVP of intelligent mail and address quality at the USPS. "We had definitive data to know not only how many forms they're supposed to get; we can tell you exactly how many got delivered."

When Inland Custom Publishing Group decided to expand its offerings through niche publications, it needed to tap into a new audience and identify new business targets for advertising and find efficient distribution strategies. The company turned to Pitney Bowes for location intelligence solutions.