Direct marketing agency Robinson & Maites Promotion Marketing, Chicago, hopes to take its offline success online with its latest agreement with Response Logic, New York, which will add Internet profiling and content technologies to its relationship marketing offerings.
“It’s a logical, cost-effective, efficient next step in our agency’s evolution,” said Robinson & Maites’ president Alan Maites.
At Response Logic, president/CEO Jim Scott said the company was looking forward to accenting its ADAPTe technology suite with Robinson & Maites’ marketing expertise, which would help both shops engage their clients’ customers more effectively.
Robinson & Maites’ client GTE Communications Corp., Irving, TX, heralded the move. According to Frank Kinder, assistant vice president of consumer marketing at GTE, the new partnership would extend Robinson & Maites’ capabilities into the Internet arena without distracting it from its core business; the agency, he said, has delivered direct marketing programs yielding the highest response rates GTE has ever seen. Kinder said he and his colleagues were already considering how the alliance would help GTE continue building its business and solidifying its relationships with existing customers.
As companies like GTE begin taking advantage of such alliances to better serve customers, their competitors will surely begin seeking out the same kind of solutions from their agencies as well.
According to Scott, it’s all part of an evolution that is making more room for permission-based marketing models. But he’s cautious about any grand predictions. He said the key is that marketers need help understanding not just who is visiting their site but who they are as prospects, what interests them and how to keep them coming back. He said that Response Logic’s patented technology would blend nicely with Robinson & Maites’ core competencies allowing clients to better target the customers most likely to be interested in their products and services. But he also noted the importance of keeping an eye on increased privacy concerns, which, he said, can be addressed in part by employing permission-based marketing models.
“We already know that the best customer information that is put out there for marketers is the kind that is voluntary, and it’s also much more accurate.”
