Micro-Channel Consultant Success Stories

This image is of the Libey Economic Outlook. Don Libey is a multichannel direct marketing consultant. Once a month, he mails a newsletter filled with topics and parables relevant to the catalog-based direct marketer. When this document arrives in the mail, my first priority is to set down what I am working on, and read the publication.

Lenser marketing also has an e-mail marketing newsletter, though I tend to read the newsletter online. The online newsletter doesn't allow comments, though honestly, it doesn't need to facilitate a conversation.

The Rimm-Kaufman group hosts a blog. I almost never visit their website, though I am an avid reader of their information when it arrives via Google Reader. Their articles are among the content I most appreciate receiving. The blog does accept comments, allowing for a conversation to happen.

John Hagel is lucky to publish a handful of articles each year on his blog, but when he publishes them, they are must reads. I also read his articles via RSS Feed.

The next image is from Amy Africa's E-mail newsletter, called "Thinking Inside The Box". This newsletter has stories and is full of best practices to help struggling marketers improve performance. You can subscribe to her monthly newsletter here.



What's the point of all of this? Each example represents a specific use of a micro-channel, a preferred method for these folks to communicate with their audience.

Sometimes we're led to believe we have to do everything in order to be successful. We have to do direct mail, and e-mail, and have a website, and host a blog, and participate in social media.

Maybe we're better off focusing on fully capitalizing on a fusion of micro-channels that are appropriate for the audience we want to speak to? None of these folks are doing everything --- instead, they are specializing (and, by consequence, excelling) in specific micro-channels.

Increasingly, we have an opportunity to be excellent at one or two things, rather than being good across multiple channels. We have a chance to stand for something.

Do You Make A Living Blogging, Book Conversion Rates, Social Media Stuff

I purposely wrote a bunch of separate posts about ACCM to see what you were most interested in. Here are the top three articles.

• ACCM 2008: Social Media
• ACCM 2008: Lehman's Country Life And Lenser Marketing
  
• ACCM 2008: Encouragement

You consistently enjoy good news and applications of social media to the retail and catalog world, don't you?!


Speaking of metrics, you might be interested in learning what happens when you sell your own books to the public.

• Folks who click on the Amazon links of the Multichannel Forensics and Database Marketing books convert at an approximate rate of 4.5%.

• Folks who click on the Lulu link for Hillstrom's Multichannel Secrets have a 7% conversion rate, to-date.
  

This brings us to the "Do You Really Make A Living With Your Blog?" question I fielded, oh, I don't know, maybe 177 times at ACCM. This social media stuff, coupled with Google, drive an unusual and interesting funnel of activity. Since I started writing the blog in 2006:

• I wrote more than 800 posts, and three books, driving ...
  
• ... nearly 100,000 visits to The MineThatData Blog. Forty percent arrived via natural search (Google), forty percent are from various links on the internet (mostly other bloggers, businesses, and organizations). The visits yielded ...
• ... close to 1,200 subscribers. The average subscriber reads one out of every two posts I write, about 200 per year, 240,000 annual article reads in total. These articles are part of a relationship-building process, ultimately yielding ...
• ... between six and twelve projects a year that are fully or partially attributed to the blog (and books I've written).
• My Total Marketing Cost = $1,100 over two years. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate the ROI, does it?
  

Two things, folks.

• If I can do this, anybody can do this. I'm not doing anything special here.
  

• It is amazing that more businesses, crazed over reducing expenses in a sluggish economy, don't do this ... especially in the B2B world.

The funnel I illustrated in this post will be the primary focus of my talk on Non-Traditional Customer Acquisition at the MeritDirect Business Mailer's Co-Op and Interactive Marketing Conference. My talk is scheduled for 10:00am on Friday morning, July 11.

ACCM 2008: Lehman's Country Life And Lenser Marketing

Glenda Ervin, VP of Marketing at Lehman's, shared information about a blog that supports her business in a presentation hosted by Lenser Marketing.

The Blog: Lehman's Country Life.

The most popular question I fielded this week was "... how can I save money mailing catalogs to online shoppers?"

The second most popular question I fielded this week was "... does all that social media and blog stuff really work?"

I'll address the latter question in an upcoming post, illustrating how a small business generates leads via a blog.

And I will say this about Lenser Marketing. I often disagree with their views on Multichannel Issues. But they do take a leadership role on the topic, and they do a reasonable job of measuring multichannel issues. They deserve to be commended for that.

Their newsletter is also worth a read (click here for the Lenser Newsletter).