This year I have the exciting pleasure of working on two ACCM sessions for the first week of May 2009. For both of these presentations, I must find speakers to share the podium with me, and who can enlighten an audience hungry for the kind of knowledge that only experience brings.

One is This Worked, That didn’t, hosted by one of my heroes, the inimitable Herschell Gordon Lewis. The other is my own session that’ based on the topic of how a multimedia seller develops their own individual voice – be it very distinctive, outrageous, or even kooky.

And it’s been a challenge to find the right blend of speakers for these sessions.

The biggest challenge has been tough to overcome: clients are unsure that they will be allowed/be able to attend ACCM. It’s a long way off, and right now the horizon is pretty cloudy. I can appreciate that concern, and I actually appreciate the fact that they’re not committing, then dropping out later.  I’m disappointed for many of these folks, who would like to go to the conference to learn as well as to teach – but can’t plan to get away. I try to remember how it felt to work for someone else and not have control over going to conferences – I have to work at remembering, because I’ve been self employed for 25+ years!

Another challenge, which is a little more disturbing, is the concern that sharing information may in some way harm their company. While it’s made clear that the speakers don’t need to share exact numbers if their parent company says it’s verboten, there is still is a lot to be learned to see what people are testing and learning from those tests.

Sadly, many companies are keeping even those more vague cards close to the vest.

The irony of course is that every multichannel marketer  has their own special skew of customer. The more original a seller is, the less likely someone will get an exact repeat of that company’s results.  

A food catalog art director friend of mine was telling me once that they were constantly testing – and one time they tried something really different for their monthly gift package (__ of the month club). Their closest competitor saw it in the mail, and immediately jumped on it, copying it almost exactly. What the competitor didn’t know was that the original tester found that the results to that test were that the new format failed miserably!

Yet, we noticed, the competitor kept using that layout -- and even though they hadn’t known they were picking up the ‘loser’, for them it was a winner!

Seeing what a direct marketing company has tried, during a presentation of this sort, inspires others to try new things and possibly discover their breakthrough, even if their results may not match what the speaker’s results were. And truth be told, every breakthrough for a client, even if a competitor, is good for our business as a whole. It means more happy customers, and happy customers buy more in the future, from more companies.

I hope that as the Autumn rush and roar calms down, it gives folks a chance to think for a moment about whether they ever saw a presentation at a conference that taught them something – even just one little thing – that made a difference to their business. If so, it’s time to give back to an industry that needs a new generation of dedicated, knowledgeable teachers and mentors very badly.

 If not, it’s time to show the marketing world a heightened knowledge, based on real business experience, that someone can learn from.

Share your knowledge. Encourage your employees to share their knowledge. It takes some time -- but the reward is seen in the quality of our business.

Carol Worthington-Levy

Creative Director and LENSER Partner Carol Worthington-Levy is one of the nation’s only individual 8-time DMA Echo Award winners — in three categories: direct mail, catalog and eCommerce.

She is a seasoned Multi Channel Marketing Consultant and expert in Brand Marketing who helps LENSER round out our suite of Direct Marketing Services, directing her LENSER creative team to infuse quality and psychographic intelligence into the design, copywriting, and photography for every project, with an emphasis on outstanding measurable performance.

A couple of months ago, I posted some of my biggest online shopping pet peeves in a Multichannel Tip in the LENSER newsletter.

  Allow me to help you out with some additional multi channel marketing best practices, just in time for the holidays.  Okay, so this isn’t a wordy or worthy treatise on database marketing or circulation management, but direct marketing folks need to hear my pet peeves:

1. Teeny-tiny page numbers to click on to get to the next page in the category.  And no “Next Page” button.  I’ve got 20/20 vision and am pretty web-savvy, and I find it nearly impossible to mouse to the correct page number on the Anthropologie site.  Why don’t they have an arrow, or a “Next” button?  I know it looks cool to be so subtle, but it’s just not consumer-friendly!

2. Adding something to my shopping cart and then being redirected to a different place on the category page when I go back.  Gap, Inc. websites (such as Banana Republic) are huge offenders in this department—if you use their Quick Shop feature on a product in a certain category, and then add said product to your shopping cart, you will be returned back to the very top of the category page.  This can be extremely annoying when you’ve selected “View All,” your page is yards long, and you have to scroll down to the place you were before.

3. Promotion codes that just plain don’t work.  Come on, people, didn’t you test that promo code before publicizing it?!

4. Needing a snail mail address to join an email list.  I just want to get emails—so let me do it!  Don’t make it difficult for your customers to opt in to whatever form of communication pleases them.

5. Last but not least, I am tired of Friends&Family events.  These began as viral offers that were truly for friends and family.  Now they’re touted in store windows, on home pages, and in mass emails to entire databases.  I mean, it’s very inclusive of these retailers to call everyone on the planet their friends and family, but it does take away the cachet of the offer just a tad.  Is there a more creative way you can promote an across-the-board savings?  And save the Friends&Family promotion for a true viral offer.

All of these are small examples of ways in which retailers can so easily lose their customers’ attention and business.  It should be a no-brainer to make your site as utilitarian (and attractive, too) as possible.  Especially in these tough times, you don’t want to give anyone an excuse to leave without making a purchase.  Or worse yet, give their money to your competitor.

Happy Holidays!

Alexandra Singer, Senior Marketing Manager

This weekend, after having a wonderful evening out at the movies, I had the desire to replace some of our cookware.  Our scratched pans have been bothering me for some time, and there’s no better time to get good deals when two large retailers are going out of business.

Mervyns and Linens and Things, two large multichannel businesses, are in the process of liquidating merchandise and closing all stores by the end of the year.  While this may not be seen as positive news, consumers are now being able to stretch their hard-earned dollar further before the holidays to buy things they may not have purchased if they did not find it on sale.  Further, competitors trying to keep their business afloat are also cutting prices to compete with the going-out-of-business sales, offering more savings to the consumers.  Other retailers are feeling the pinch as well and are enticing shoppers with deeper discounts to lure them into their stores.

How long with this last though?  In light of weak October sales, many multichannel businesses are looking to their marketing specialists and purchasing managers to reduce the impact of the poor holiday.  Circulation Managers are revising mail plans while purchasing managers are reducing inventory by canceling product orders.  However, do we know if this is good?  A recent consumer poll revealed that shoppers are delaying, but not canceling all holiday purchases.  Consumers purchasing gifts with cash instead of credit is increasing this year, and many have not even done the bulk of their shopping yet.  Also, UPS, for the first time since being a public company, will not release their forecasts on the annual peak shipping day projection.

Words to the merchants: As you reforecast, do so as a surgeon performing an operation.  No one knows what the days and weeks after Black Friday will bring, and cutting orders may lead to significant lost sales.

Words to the consumers:  Don’t wait to the last minute this season.  Inventory reductions and early sales will lead to popular gifts selling out.  If you know you need to buy a specific gift, buy it.  If you are waiting to see if an item will go on sale, be warned, it might not be there.

Jim Whitford is a Multichannel B2B Marketing Consultant at LENSER, specializing in catalog circulation and database marketing.  Outside of providing direct marketing services, Jim is usually found riding his road bike in the hills of Sonoma County.

Why in the world would a multi channel marketing company bother to allocate resources for a blog?  Direct marketing best practices vary depending on many circumstances; and there may be very little upside for some companies to spend the time to post to a blog site, where for others it could be essential to attracting an audience and making your site a frequent destination.

It is no secret that many companies have focused attention on social networking platforms as a tool for brand marketing and with the difficulty direct marketers have prospecting through traditional catalog circulation channels, much emphasis has been placed on shifting direct marketing resources toward the web.  It is a great idea, but sometimes as empty of a solution as the vague campaign promises we hear during an election cycle.  "Oh, you need to shift your focus to the web!"  What exactly do you do when you shift your focus to the web?

Email marketing is essential to multi channel marketers, however even the best database marketing efforts leave you with true incremental gains through email promotions when properly measured.  In my opinion the best bet you have in order to find new customers is through natural search, and when done properly, certain blogging platforms and procedures can boost your natural search rankings. 

Search engines are the new phone book.  For the same reasons companies used to try to name themselves with a name that would have them alphabetically sorted toward the top of their category in the yellow pages (AAA Painting for example), you must win the search game with keywords that you want your business to dominate.  This is where, when done properly,  social networking marketing practices such as a blog can pay huge dividends. 

At LENSER, we have conducted an experiment with our own blog.  We have tapped into a blogging platform designed not only to communicate with our customers and prospects, but also to reach them by helping us win in natural search.  In a recent LENSER newsletter article I have outlined how this system can benefit some of our clients, and the article was also featured in Multichannel Merchant.  We have been very pleased with the results of our experiment.  Not only have we been able to utilize our blog as a new forum to speak to our friends, but we have also learned that a small amount of effort can truly enhance your search results.   Not all blogging platforms are designed to strategically enhance natural search engine results.  We are pleased to have partnered with a company called Compendium Blogware that has been designed to do just that, and have seen very positive results.  Please call with any questions as to how this solution may work to enhance the multi channel marketing efforts of your business.

NEWSFLASH:  As soon as I posted this blog, I noticed this article in today's Mulitchannel Merchant i-merchant newsletter. It was authored by Chris Baggott, the co-founder of LENSER partner Compendium Blogware. 

Tom Blake is a Multichannel Marketing Consultant specializing in database marketing and catalog circulation management. He works with a variety of B2C and B2B Direct Marketing companies; both with retained clients and performing marketing best practice reviews. 

While at a client meeting this week, Geoff Wolf, the LENSER partner on the account with me, said that “shopping is entertainment” and I couldn’t help but to think how true that statement is. Shopping competes with television, movies, video games, reading etc. Currently everyone is watching TV or reading the news… whether it be following the roller coaster on Wall Street, or the latest presidential campaign speech (or gaffe.) People are not shopping because they are distracted. Everyone keeps saying that once the election is over, people should start shopping again. Will it be because they now will see a more certain future, or because they have more time?

This has been a year full of distractions: Olympics  Conventions, Wall Street, Elections. In the past, events such as the O.J. Simpson trial (the first one!)  the death of Princess Diana, and of course 9/11, captivated people’s time and attention. I was working for a mail order catalog during those events back then and distinctly remember that the phones literally stopped ringing. People either A) didn’t care about shopping then, and/or B) couldn’t tear themselves away from the TV. So, what does all this mean for us now?

I’m not an economist, historian, or fortune teller (I’m just a Multi Channel Marketing Consultant) but my hunch is that in 6-12 month, when folks have adjusted to a new President and Wall Street has evened out, business will bounce back. In the words of Geoff Wolf, “Now is the time to circle the wagons  and be ready to pounce when people are ready to spend again.”

Following up on Michele's synopsis of Boudin's decision to cease catalog mailings, I wanted to share some data I'm currently working on. The graph included here is a company with four retail locations (quite similar to Boudin) where they have the ability to collect contact information on their orders. This allows us to include the retail transactions in our matchback and to allocated a portion of retail sales back to a catalog mailing. Even if a company does not have retail contact information, they still can graph out their total retail sales in relationship to their catalog drops and determine if the catalog is driving a substantial amount of retail traffic.

 
As evident in this data, there is a profound increase in retail sales immediately following the drop of a catalog. I would bet that Boudin would see this same relationship between retail sales and catalog, if they were to graph it out. Now that the catalog is no longer being mailed, not only will direct sales be affected, but retail will be as well.  
 
In my experience reviewing multichannel companies who have retail locations, the majority don't have a good grasp on what the true affect the catalog has on retail sales. For example, I had an experience where retail didn't want to contribute any of their budget to the production of the catalog because they thought "These are MY customers and they are going to come in a buy from me whether they receive a catalog or not". Because the company was being run in silos, the catalog division had to do what was best for them and knowing that if they mailed into an area surrounding a retail location, the direct sales would drop significantly. So the decision was made not to mail any catalogs into a store trade area and to focus on customers and prospects who were 30+ miles away from any retail location (40+ stores at that time). Low and behold store comps dropped by 30% for the time period of the catalog drops. You can guess what happened after that....yes the retail managers came back with their tails between their legs and started contributing their budget dollars to catalog.  
 
It always pains me to see press releases where multichannel companies decide to cut their catalog program. In those cases I can almost guarantee that they don't have a good understanding of the true affect that the catalog has on other channels. If they would have had a marketing best practices study conducted, they would be able to avoid this costly decision. I guess some just have to learn the hard way.

Travis Seaton is VP Multichannel Marketing Consultant at LENSER and has 12 years of experience in multi channel marketing management for both B2C and B2B companies. His experience working with many Direct Marketing companies, who have a retail presence, has allowed him to gain invaluable insight into the true dynamics of multichannel marketing. He is able to apply this experience to consult LENSER clients on how to optimize their catalog circulation, website and retail marketing to create a cohesive brand and take advantage of the brand marketing strengths of each channel. When not marketing, you can find Travis out on the water fishing for a variety of species to share with the office. The yellow fin tuna seems to be the biggest hit so far.

It is going to be a tough year for some folks.  And others are going to make it tough on themselves by cutting with a hatchet instead of a scalpel -- as is the saying of the day.

I just read this week in Multichannel Merchant that Boudin Bakery won't be mailing a catalog anymore and intends to just do the web and store sales. It was estimated that they mailed 4 times a year with about 300K books in the fall season. "We're not going to prospect anymore, but we're going to concentrate on our best buyers and communicate with them by e-mail," Gayle DeBrosse, Boudin's executive vice president of business development was reported as saying.

San Francisco-based Boudin Bakery, which started in 1849, began mailing catalogs in 1973.  In making the decision to get out of print catalog, the baker indicated that they understand that this could hurt direct sales, but to what extent?  DeBrosse was also reported as saying the company thinks the money it saves by not dropping four times a year will help it offset a projected loss in business-but it has been my experience that this will cause significant loss in future business.

Foolish, foolish, foolish.

I cannot help but wonder if they have done a full multichannel matchback and examined the results.  Have they studied their customers' path to purchase?  Not only that, I predict that their tourist and SFO airport sales will most likely decline over time.  I believe that the catalog is not only a multichannel sales driver for Boudin Bakery, it is a tremendous brand awareness builder.  Geez, without the San Francisco thing, it is just bread, really.  Yea, yea, it is superlative San Francisco sourdough that you just can't get anywhere else (I was raised on it and I love it), but how are you going to search for that on the web?

But when you see the picture of the bread in the catalog, you can almost taste the special tang on your tongue of true San Francisco sourdough and you remember the butter melting all over it and the crunch of the crust going soft when you dipped it in your clam chowder...

Multichannel Merchant also reported that DeBrosse says the company will continue to e-mail its loyalty club members at the same twice-a-month frequency, with additional blasts starting at the end of October.  And that they believe that e-mail, along with its current search engine optimization and marketing strategies will be sufficient in driving business.
 
"There's a risk involved," DeBrosse was quoted as saying, "but we think we have a loyal following among our best buyers, and they will buy from our Website."

This may be true and for Boudin's, I sincerely hope so because I love their sourdough bread, but customer attrition is a fact of life.  Customers grow old, they forget, they can't chew anymore, they don't have a computer--there are any number of reasons that they will not remember to order from Boudin's Bakery online.

So when this loyal following of best buyers dwindles and can no longer sustain the business, what then?  That is the question many multichannel merchants must face with postal costs and paper costs rising faster than a loaf of sourdough on a hot Indian summer day in the city, but if I was your catalog marketing consultant or brand marketing maven, I would advise doing a thorough best practice review.  I would advise mailing smarter, maybe mailing less, and certainly taking a long, hard look at what is really driving your business before I sliced catalog circulation out of my marketing mix.

For me, the web is the channel to expediently satisfy desire, but the catalog is still a most powerful driver for creating desire.  I just googled melting butter on crunchy sourdough and it didn't take me to sourdough nirvana - Boudin's Bakery.

Michele Salmon, LENSER Director of Corporate Marketing

Michele Salmon is the Director of Corporate Marketing for LENSER, a full-service direct marketing consultancy.  Michele has held key marketing positions for a wide variety of catalog and direct marketing companies before crossing over 6 years ago to the service side to work with LENSER.  Working with so many eclectic and entrepreneurial companies, she brings an unusually diverse experience encompassing not only marketing and circulation, but operations, inventory, merchandise analytics, computer systems, print advertising, catalog print buying, postal regulations, and even running a call center.

First of all, for those of you who have not yet signed up to receive Shop.org's SmartBrief, I highly recommend you do.

So, in today's SmartBrief, I caught a short news item from Internet Retailer regarding, among other things, how non-branded Internet search often leads to delayed purchases.

Here are my comments:

- "'...among retail purchasers, most searches were in one or the other, branded or non-branded, and that was a great surprise to us,' says David Kaul, vertical business specialist at Google."

Well, not so surprising to LENSER, and to companies that do not yet have an established brand presence -- i.e., the vast majority of multichannel retailers, especially those operating without physical retail stores.  Customers using branded search are far more likely to have a specific purchase in mind, or to have already collected sufficient information regarding a purchase.  Those using non-branded search, however, are still in consideration mode, and are likely to be, in the purest sense, "still shopping," collecting information about the product(s) in which they have an interest, namely pricing, availability, and features.

The next sentence in the article drives home the previous point:

"51% of consumers were most likely to use branded terms in searches leading to online purchases, and only 12% were mostly likely to use both branded and unbranded terms, the study found."

So, there you have it -- a pretty wide disparity.  I wonder, too, what percentage of customers were most likely to use only unbranded search terms in searches leading to online purchases?

- "...70% of purchases stemming from non-branded searches occur in later online sessions. Of that 70%, 16% of the purchases occur as a result of subsequent Internet searches and 54% during non-search-driven online sessions."

Hmmm, this is very interesting.  So, 4 out of every 5 orders that occur after the initial non-branded search come via non-search-driven online sessions.  How does this happen?  Are customers remembering exactly where they found an inexpensively-priced item for which they conducted a non-branded search?  Doubtful.  Are they bookmarking the page showing the item?  Possibly.  Or, as my colleague Allison Baumhefner suggests, are these people, in fact, using search again, but it is not showing up as such because the page is cached on the customer's computer as a previously-viewed page?

Todd Miller is the Director of LENSER's B-to-B Division with a dozen years of multi channel database marketing experience.  When he is not criss-crossing the country visiting clients, he can often be found in the LENSER Conference Room right around lunch time offering live-and-in-person advertising trend musings.

As many LENSER staff know, I am a bit of an advertising and communications curmudgeon. 

Earlier this year, I offered support to those predicting the demise of traditional hand-held print (i.e., ink on some sort of paper product) media -- yes, that includes (surprise, surprise) printed catalogs.

Now, don't be alarmed -- I am an equal opportunity Grinch.  Next up -- I'm stealing E-Mail's Christmas.

As I mentioned with respect to the catalog, I don't believe e-mail will ever go away -- I just believe firmly that we are in the midst of a tidal change with respect to how individuals use the medium, and in what context (personal e-mail, business e-mail, or responding to commercial e-mail).

E-mail as an application used in business, first and foremost, is a tool to make collaboration more effective and efficient.  LENSER, being that we are a database marketing consulting firm, oftentimes working from locations separate from our clients and key vendor relations, understands the sentiment behind this Forbes article all too well.  I especially liked the item re: leveraging special-purpose social networking software, as a replacement for e-mail.

Perhaps as direct marketers, who routinely engage customers via e-mail, and as business people, who routinely engage each other via e-mail, we can heed some -- or, dare I say, all -- of the advice offered here.

I know if I were to have e-mailed these musings to LENSER staff and my multi channel marketing clientele, 80% of you would not have read all the way down to this sentence -- let alone reply.

But this is the LENSER Blog -- a totally different communications medium.

Todd Miller is the Director of LENSER's B-to-B Division with a dozen years of multi channel database marketing experience.  When he is not criss-crossing the country visiting clients, he can often be found in the LENSER Conference Room right around lunch time offering live-and-in-person advertising trend musings.

I've seen it before - every catalog circulation specialist worries like crazy about the planned results from their multichannel efforts for the upcoming holiday season due to environmental influences which they've never experienced before.

I am going out on a limb and daring to predict that results will NOT be as bad as some might be predict. Why?  Gas prices are declining and I'm sure a lot of people will forget the recent pain they suffered, a war-ending candidate has a good chance of being elected, and after months of heartache due to declining 401K's, general economic bad news, and reduced spending, consumers will have a ton of pent-up demand for gifts and things for themselves.

I also think that Americans have an enormous capacity for tolerating bad news and that they recover from it quickly.  If the market continues to rebound, general optimism regarding the government bailout efforts will also grow.  We should start hearing from other direct marketing and multichannel pundits soon, but remember you heard it first here.

by
Larry Marmon, LENSER Consulting Partner

Larry Marmon provides LENSER clients with a wide-range of direct marketing services, including consulting on database marketing, ecommerce strategies, brand marketing and catalog circulation management.  Larry routinely provides reviews of direct marketing best practices for both B2B marketers and direct to consumer companies of all sizes. 

Well not exactly your oyster, but having google at my fingertips is pretty cool and as a Direct Marketing Consultant, I concentrate on how mobile devices have begun to change the way I shop.   

In the early days, we were catalog marketing consultants.  Our decisions revolved around circulation management, and generally our objectives were, perhaps not simple but at least straight forward.  We simply had to figure out who to mail, how many catalogs to mail them, which catalogs to mail them, and determine how much they would likely spend.  Oh those were simple times.

While we could expand greatly on how consumers have changed their behaviors in the multi channel world, I want to focus in particular on the explosion of hand held mobile devices with internet capabilities.  (we used to simply call them phones.)

Have you ever shut your device off on an airplane and lamented over the fact that you would have to go hours without being connected to the outside world? You are not alone, but how do we take advantage of these devices other than checking news reports and email? 

Not surprisingly I found myself among the throngs of last minute shoppers during the holiday rush last year.  I thought I was  ahead of the game as I had at least determined what I planned to buy my wife, and had subliminally planted the demand for this product.  This is a direct marketing best practice that I should expand on in another post, however it was brilliant so a few words about that are in order.

At a cocktail party I saw a woman wearing them.  I asked her (in front of my wife and the other women present) how she liked them and I couldn't have scripted a better commercial. 

It turns out that there was a lot of competition for this particular product last year, and I found myself in a crowded mall in what I believed was the only store that carried Uggs competing for attention from a sales clerk.  I overheard the salesperson speak of the limited stock they had and sprang into action. 

After a quick google search I was able to find other stores that carried the product locally, and after a phone call I found one that had what I wanted in the correct size in stock.  I left the other consumers in line before me and had a pair in my possession before I would have likely been helped in that crowded mall.  Not exactly a superhero story, but it was an example of how technology can and is being used by consumers.

Have you ever done a price check on google while in a checkout line?  Do you have any stories related to how mobile devices have changed your consumer behavior?  If so, please tell us with a comment!
 
Consumers are getting increasingly clever in how they seek and use information.  While traveling with a colleague not long ago we had a delayed flight.  Over time we actually saw the pilots leave the gate, yet no announcements were made by the airline staff.  I checked the status of the flight on-line (on my mobile device) and sure enough, the flight had been canceled.  We were the first in line at the service counter, and all because the internet provided us with information before any announcements were made.

I ask you, how has the expansion of mobile internet access changing the face of Multi Channel Marketing?  Look for our thoughts in another post!

Tom is a Multi Channel Marketing Consultant specializing in database marketing and catalog circulation management. He works with a variety of B2C and B2B Direct Marketing companies; both with retained clients and performing marketing best practice reviews.

People say that cycling is the new golf of the corporate world, and I can certainly attest to that.  Here at LENSER we joke that you have a better chance of getting hired if you mention you’re a cyclist in the interview.  In its first year, our cycling event drew nearly as many participants as the golf outing at the annual LENSER Summit.  In addition, each fall a group of LENSER associates and clients participate in the Death Valley Century cycling event.  Two of the founding members are LENSER's President, John Lenser and Bill Nicolai, LENSER Senior Partner. 

Without a doubt, the most enthusiastic cyclist I have ever had the pleasure to ride with is Bill Nicolai. I’ve ridden many times with Bill, including 130 miles through Death Valley last October, and to say that he is like a kid in a candy store would be an understatement.  His love of cycling is infectious. 

Bill’s athletic accomplishments are the stuff of legend.  He has finished several Iron Distance triathlons including one of the sport’s toughest races, Nevada’s Silverman.  As of last month, Bill has a new record to add to his list of athletic accomplishments—he is the oldest person to ever complete the Race Across Oregon and subsequently has qualified for what is arguably the sport’s toughest event, the Race Across America. 

The Race Across Oregon is one of cycling’s most grueling events.  It is a 538-mile course that treks over Oregon’s highest peaks and includes 43,000 feet of climbing.  To put that into perspective, Bill cycled the equivalent of riding from sea level to the top of Mount Everest and then a third of the way back up again.  Oh, and perhaps I should mention that he did this in just under the cut-off time of 48 hours.  This was all achieved with only three naps of 10 minutes each!

To accomplish such a feat you clearly need a team behind you.  A support crew follows each competitor throughout the weekend, providing sustenance and aid.  Bill put together one of the best possible support teams one could imagine and recruited a legend in endurance sports, Steve Born, to be his crew chief.  Steve Born is indeed a legend in the world of endurance cycling and a member of the Ultra Cycling Hall of Fame.  Steve has raced and won some of the most difficult endurance cycling events in existence—he completed three Race Across America events, got a win and a second place in the Furnace Creek 508 endurance event, and was the first and only person to complete a double of the Furnace Creek 508 race. 

As a huge fan of cycling and endurance sports in general, I had a great interest in following Bill’s progress throughout the race.  But I also wanted to get some inside perspective, so I called Steve Born to fill me in.  Steve has known Bill for years through his work as the Senior Technical Advisor with Hammer Nutrition, a LENSER Client.  Bill not only consults with Hammer Nutrition on marketing, he also uses their products exclusively while training and competing, and writes articles relating to nutrition for their newsletter. 

Due to his expertise and experience, Steve Born gets asked to crew for many events by many people, and is very selective in accepting these offers.  Steve says he did not hesitate when Bill asked him to serve as his crew chief.  “It was an honor to crew for him; the honor was all mine.  ”

Steve told me that shortly after starting his 48-hour journey, Bill exclaimed, “How lucky am I to be able to do something like this?”  Steve joked that he may have been forced to change his perspective over the course of the event. 

Closer to the halfway point things were looking a bit grimmer.  Bill told Steve, “I’m having a hard time staying conscious,” which was obviously a big concern to Bill’s crew.  Always meticulous in his planning and preparation, Bill had prepared his own nutritional concoctions consisting of his “4-hour bottles” of Hammer products to provide him with all the calories he would need to keep moving.  Between the halfway point and the 4th time station at mile 405, Bill was struggling.  This part of the course features some of the highest elevations of the race, yet somehow Bill found the strength to forge ahead. 

“It was without a doubt the toughest thing I have ever seen,” says Steve.  “This is something that no one has ever done before.  I have never seen someone grind it out like that.  It was a complete turnaround!” Steve says that “the Q word” never came up. 

We are all proud of Bill for his incredible accomplishment, and wish him a speedy recovery.  “It’s like recovering from a surgical procedure,” says Bill.  “I have slept a lot and am a little groggy but am feeling good now.”  It won’t be too long before we’re trailing him for 200 miles at Death Valley, an event that by comparison will be mild for Bill.  God help the rest of us!

By Al Bessin

  As the resident technology geek among the direct marketing consultants at LENSER, I am always trying the latest and greatest expression of technologists.  I find it almost impossible to resist the temptation to try and use, what appear to be, innovative and useful high tech products. Sometimes I am right and sometimes wrong, but I thrive on the experience, and I remain a sucker for direct marketing best practices.
I am also an avid reader, but have until recently remained bound to paper.  My office shelves are jammed with books and magazines, and there are stacks on the floor as well.  I am a sucker for information.  The problem is, to keep up as a multi channel marketing consultant, I need to read a lot.  Since I travel, that means carrying books with me.  This has gotten out of hand – have you ever lifted my briefcase?
So, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle from Amazon.  I had hesitated, partly because it looks cheesy in the pictures, and because, like iTunes, it locks you into one source (for the most part). I’ll cut to the chase at this point – I love it!  It is not perfect, but what a great application of technology.
Amazon has done a very nice job of applying marketing best practices to the Kindle.  The packaging, the dedicated website, the electronic website, and the wealth of information available all work together to deliver the experience, which is really about content delivery and convenience, to the user.   Nice job with developing the Kindle brand and applying brand marketing best practices.
 

Al Bessin is a Multichannel Marketing Consultant with over 25 years of experience.  In addition to his expertise with brand marketing and marketing best practices, he routinely applies his expertise in Database Marketing, Operations, Finance and all aspects of Direct Marketing Training to a variety of B2C as well as B2B companies.  While not traveling the world consulting, Al is an avid bicyclest and a member of the LENSER Death Valley "gluttons for punishment" team. 

Saturday is John Lenser's birthday, and from the entire LENSER team, we would like to wish him a happy birthday and a wonderful year ahead for he and his family!  Fresh on the heals of the LENSER Mulitchannel Marketing Client Summit the LENSER team has barely had time to catch our breath and get caught up on emails, as I'm sure is true to those who were in attendance last week in San Rafael, CA.  As we have a chance to catch up we will post photos and stories from our perspectives and look forward to hearing  comments from any of you as well.  Please do send us your feedback and we thank you for reading.  We are especially grateful to those of you who were able to spend some of your valuable time with us last week, and hope that the experiences were as meaningful to you as to all of us!























John celebrated with over 200 Direct Marketing Professionals and friends last week in his backyard!

Thanks again from the entire LENSER team!

The LENSER summit ended  last Friday with a a bang as we officially closed the 2008 summit with our golf scramble and our bike ride.  Over this week we will be sending out a series of highlights, complete with photos, our favorite memories, lessons learned, and hopefully feedback from attendees as well.  From Wednesday's opening remarks through the brutal bicycle hill climb led by Allison the Summit will be detailed through the many voices of LENSER's staff, and we look forward to hearing comments from everyone!  Check this site over the next week as we re-cap sessions and social events alike. 

Jude Hoffner reports in with some key points from an afternoon session of the LENSER summit in San Rafael, CA. 

Here are some of the important current issues the American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA) is following and intervening in on behalf of its members, according to Hamilton Davison who gave an update this afternoon. The list is long, so we’ll share a few key items here and follow up with more next time:

ADDRESS PLACEMENT: Effective March 29, 2009 address placement on flats must be within the upper ½ of the cover when holding bound edge in right hand.

SLIM JIMS: Expect new specifications to be published late this year with effective date in the 2009.

RATES & AFFORDABILITY: Ongoing work to address the uneconomical rate structure put in place last year. This represents an area of heavy ACMA activity to keep catalogers from migrating out of the mail.

DEFINITION OF POSTAL & NON-POSTAL PRODUCTS: Defines which rules and regulations apply to USPS products and sets forth in which areas the quasi-government agency can compete with the private sector.

ANDY COHEN, LENSER KEYNOTE SPEAKER. Renowned branding expert Andy Cohen urged us to challenge our assumptions in a presentation filled with magic and interaction with the audience. The highlight of the morning's session was LENSER Senior Partner and Iron Man triathlete Bill Nicolai held his breath for a whopping 180 seconds, the winning time! Andy shared his impactful insights on marketing with an enthusiastic crowd—Be bold. Move out of your comfort level. Use and communicate your passion, your strengths, and your values. Give customers choices. And most importantly, remember that when you think differently, magic happens as Marsha Landeros, from SmartScrubs enthusiastically comments "Andy's speech was fantastic! My assumption that it would be energetic, engaging and humorous and it was!" Check out Andy's seminal book, Follow the Other Hand, to learn how to use the power of magic in your own business.

The long-awaited LENSER Multichannel Marketing Summit kicked off this afternoon with four information-packed intensive tracks led by LENSER partners covering e-commerce, merchandising, financials, and creative.  The standing-room-only crowd had tons of questions for Al Bessin in his engaging discussion on lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.  Bill Boonstra of Bluestone Perennials attended the session and had this to say:  "I learned a level of detail that I hadn't considered before that will allow for better planning next year."

Michelle Farabaugh and Bill Nicolai led a rousing session on e-commerce, covering the gamut from site search to comparison shopping sites to search engine optimization and marketing.  Claire Gordon of VivaTerra said about the track and the printed materials, "It was a good collection of everything you need to know, a handy primer—all in one place—to take with you."

The creative track, led by Carol Worthington-Levy, gave mailers useful tips on branding across channels, from the web to the catalog.  David Spresser of SmartScrubs commented, "It was great to be reminded that most consumers have the images turned off in their email clients, so email offers need to be text-friendly as well as HTML-friendly, in order to be effective."

Geoff Wolf and guest Andrea Syverson of IER Partners presented the merchandising track which focused on 13 ways to get your product verve going. 

"I got my merchandise moxy at the LENSER summit!"-Susan Enders of NapaStyle

ByAlexandra Singer, Senior Marketing Manager

Alexandra Singer is a Multichannel Marketing Consultant with strong background in Circulation Management.  When not providing clients with excellent service and making her team laugh, she lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and young daughter and enjoys writing in her "spare" time.

By Geoff Wolf, Consulting Partner

As the headlines assault us daily, it is very apparent that we need to be extremely smart with our direct marketing best practices.  I was just completing some comments I will be making this week with regard to global merchandise sourcing when I read about the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Pakistan.  These are truly dangerous times for merchants who are sourcing overseas.  Since when did putting our lives at risk become part of merchandising best practices?  As merchants, we must venture overseas to stay competitive.  However, we must now be really smart and find new ways to work around the volatile places in the world.  Time for more chocolate and reflection to find new solutions.


Geoff Wolf offers 30 years of executive and entrepreneurial experience gained from creating success for his own businesses and success for his consulting clients.
What Geoff brings to LENSER clients is unique in that Geoff has “done it all” from multichannel marketing to merchandising to “shipping the packages out the door” in a direct marketing environment. He can fully identify with all the challenges an entrepreneur must face to create a growing, profitable business.

Well, as a Multi Channel Marketing Consultant, I finally decided I should start practicing what I preach. Besides writing my first ever blog entry here, I finally signed up with one of the various social networking sites, and I must say, I'm having a blast. Once I got past the perception that social networking is only for teens, I can easily see first hand how blogs and networking can help build brand strength and awareness for a multi channel marketer. For instance, if you were training for a marathon, you could download the Nike Running Monitor Application, which links to Nike's website. Or, if you were arguing with friends over which soda is superior, Coke or Pepsi, you could join a Cola Wars group on Facebook. If you're an Apple fan, or thinking of purchasing an Apple product, you could join the Apple Students group, which of course links to Apple's website and iTunes. The list goes on and on....

Outside of some of the social networking sites, direct mailers can start their own blogs on their own websites. Check out one of my favorites, Terry Precision Cycling: (not to mention a LENSER client)



The left side of Terry Precision Cycling's home pageinclude video, chat, and blogs. These posts and videos couldn't be more brand centric! All in all, I think customers, prospects, and multi channelers alike could have fun with the possibilities. I know I sure do!

Anna-Lisa Ullbrich, Sr. Marketing Manager

Anna-Lisa is a Multichannel Marketing Consultant who provides her clients with a variety of direct marketing services.  She has a strong background in catalog circulation, having worked with some of LENSER's largest and most complicated Direct Marketing clients.