A lot of foot soldiers contributed to the groundbreaking advertising created during the Mad Men era of the late 1950s and 1960s. David Herzbrun was one of them.

In his 40+ year career as a copywriter he toiled for Doyle Dane Bernbach, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy, among others. Although creative directors and copywriters might argue the analogy, a copywriter was akin to being a back-up bass player in a good band. You were constantly joining new teams or looking for your next award-winning gig.

In between working as a hired hand, Herzbrun even attempted a solo run with his own agency. But for this true collaborative writer, nothing ever matched the electric petrie dish, creativity and mentoring environment of his first stint with DDB–even his second stint at DDB years later when he discovered that the “MBA suits” had taken over the place.

It was at DDB that Herzbrun came to work on the Volkswagon account. At the time, Americans coveted their big v8 Cadillacs and Buicks. The “Bug” was an anomaly and foreign. But the creative team decided therein lay its hook. Among the notable VW ads created during this period was one of its most famous (and award-winning). ”Snowplow” essentially answered the question, “How does the snowplow driver get to the snowplow?” 

In his book, Playing in Traffic on Madison Avenue: Tales of Advertising’s Glory Years, Herzbrun recounts his copywriting gold, zingers earned by years of  practicing his trade for big and small companies, all still valuable in today’s content-driven online marketplace:

• Don’t use big, high-falutin words. A dress cataloger once ”dressed down” Herzbrun’s initial copy: “I changed words our readers might not understand. You’ve got to remember our ladies are not very educated but that doesn’t mean they’re dumb. I figure intelligence happens as much among poor  as rich, same with those who go to college and those who don’t. Now you take a barely educated, intelligent lady and give her a word she don’t understand, and you make her feel dumb. That makes her feel bad. When she feels bad, she’s not in a buying mood. Make her feel dumb enough times, and she won’t read your catalog again. In fact, she’ll buy her dresses from someone who makes her feel smart.”
• “Never confuse art with technique. If museums did that they’d be filled with Rockwells and no Picasso’s.”
• Define the product’s target “persona.” On the Avis account, Herzbrun said, “We tried to define how Avis talked. It was Broderick Crawford in ‘Letter To Three Wives.’ The voice of a successful man who was very intelligent but not well educated, and who’d been raised on the wrong side of the tracks. This made it a lot easier to write the ads. Before writing I would first either cast or create the character who wouild do the (magazine) ad writing. This allowed me to write in a distinctive and appropriate style for each campaign. The characters became so real to me that even 27 years later, I can recall each of them vividly: The Scottish-born English educated New Yorker who spoke for Chivas; the Jamaican sugar millionaire whose English family settled the island four centuries ago and who studied English at Princeton; the ex-Army platoon sergeant from Newark who spent a lot of time on his feet in his appliance store and thought a lot about shoes.”

Today we think we invented “truth in advertising” with blogger reviews and bad customer service Twitter shout-outs. But there really is nothing new under the sun. During the Avis “We Try Harder” days, the pitch was, “We’ll never rent you a dirty car.” But when Herzbrun rented his Avis car, the ashtray was full of butts. He emptied the evidence into an envelope which became the inspiration for a pointed open letter of apology print ad that Avis surprisingly green-lighted.

Unfortunately, Herzbrun’s story, while filled with exotic travel, celebrities (Andy Warhol, Christo, Victor Borge) and large international clients, has a “relatively” unhappy financial ending compared to other early Mad Men who struck it rich with their award-winning creative. Living as an ex-pat while opening their international offices, there was a fluke in the DDB office org chart reorganization, and the company went public without him. Yet Herzbrun’s retained his good humor and was grateful to be “touched by glamour, sprinkled with stardust and destined for greatness.”

I love the TV series Mad Men. I’ve always been a fan and a student of the post-WWII, baby-boomer advertising industry which started on Madison Avenue and invented consumerism worldwide. While the show’s writers spin award-winning weekly dramatic tales, the “advertising accounts” strategized about in Don Draper’s office and during 3-martini lunches are grounded in fact from the era.

Amazingly, some of the show’s sponsors, like BMW and Clorox, have TV commercial pedigrees dating back to the early days of TV sponsorships. The show launches their commercials with a short backgrounder slide on the history of the advertiser’s TV spots. Mad Men should be required viewing for all advertising journalism students–and inbound marketers.

David Ogilvy’s path to advertising icon status predated the 1950s, but his reputation was cemented during The Golden Age of Advertising. But unlike some of his peers, David was schooled in the ways of direct response advertising, as he says, having bought his “first direct mail course from Dartnell in Chicago with my own money.”

Direct Response Ads Are Measurable

Why was this so important? Because direct response, unlike general advertising, was measurable–something we take for granted today with our Google AdWords, Google Analytics and email marketing metrics. No matter how cleverly written a pay-per-click ad is, for example, you won’t continue to throw money at it if it doesn’t produce new leads or orders. You pays your money, and within minutes, hours or days, you know if you won, lost or broke even on that investment. That’s direct response. DO (as he was known) said, “Direct response is my first love. Later it became my secret weapon.”

David was such a believer in the principles of direct response that he said, “No copy should ever be presented to a client until it has been vetted by a direct response expert.” He steadfastly believed that when you spent a client’s money, you had to show a return on that investment–not just earn a bunch of creative (“whatever that means”) awards for the agency–a lesson that still holds up today, probably more than ever. Not only is Ogilvy, the man, still revered, but his company is still one of the world’s leading advertising agencies as part of the WPP Group of London.

Homage to the Original Mad Men

In homage to the upcoming season of Mad Men, I’ll be sharing wisdom from other sages of the Golden Age of Advertising. As you look for new ways to market your business, there’s no finer inspiration than the original Mad Men. Take it from Advertising Hall of Fame Honoree David Ogilvy who says in this video, “For 40 years I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness to get my fellow advertising practitioners to take direct response seriously. Today, my first love has come into its own. You face a golden future.”

The right email marketing software helps The Missourian Publishing Company meet its monthly email newsletter deadlines.

How long does it take to publish a monthly company email newsletter? 10 hours? A hundred hours?

Well, if it really takes that long, it’s no wonder more companies have good intentions, but don’t actually do them.

With the right email marketing software and a simple newsletter template, an email newsletter should take only an hour or two each month to research, compose, post and send. Here’s how Stephen Trentmann, sales manager of the commercial print division of The Missourian Publishing Company, gained momentum with his email newsletter marketing.

The Missourian Publishing Company is a family-owned and -operated newspaper and publishing company. It has two production facilities in Washington, MO, and satellite offices in Union and St. Clair, MO. The Missourian is also a full-service graphics communication company that provides a wide range of creative printing solutions for our business and publishing clients.

Stephen’s goal was to start leveraging the nearly 3,000 contacts in his ACT! Software, which he had been building for more than two years. “I needed to create marketing campaigns that consistently reached out to our customers and did not take 100 hours per month to do so,” Stephen says.

Stephen followed The Database Diva’s email newsletter template suggestion, which included 3-4 recurring topics, each with the goal of educating, entertaining and compelling his contacts to use The Missourian as its communications resource. “Lori showed me the logical steps to create a professional looking email newsletter and good techniques for gathering story ideas that could be used when it was time to assemble the next scheduled newsletter.”

Stephen distributes his newsletter using the email marketing software Swiftpage, which works with his ACT! Software. The integration allows him to update his email newsletter template and then send it to current contacts right out of his database. “The result has been just what I wanted. Our customers remember we are here when they receive the newsletter, and it sparks ideas to help them with their business. And the time it takes to publish the newsletter has been reduced to under a manageable few hours.

After successfully  meeting his monthly newsletter deadlines for more than a year, Stephen’s goal is to utilize ACT!’s dynamic groups better and send more focused email campaigns to specific markets.

But he believes his real success comes from using his ACT! database everyday to follow up consistently. “I would not be able to be able to keep in contact and document activity without ACT!,” he says. “In the first 3 months of 2010 I documented communication with 729 different people in our database.

“I was surprised at the amount of reporting Swiftpage feeds back after a campaign is sent. There’s a lot of info in the call lists and other email reports.”

I just love working with my Texas friends and clients. They always know the biggest and best recipes for having a good time. Years ago I worked with one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies, teaching their salespeople all about direct marketing.

Whether we were done with training or not, when it was happy hour in Texas, it was happy hour in Texas. That was the first time I learned that you could order pitchers of margaritas while you waited for appetizer trays of jalepeno poppers.

My most favorite Texan taught me how to make the perfect margarita. “Pick the cheapest, off-brand bottle of tequila you can find,” he instructed. “The cheaper the better.”

Who knew? He was right!

Here’s his famous recipe, for which the statute of limitations has expired on my promise to keep it a secret from other yanquis (non-Texans).

Dale’s Famous Perfect Margarita

• 1 can frozen limeade concentrate
• Cheap tequila
• Cheap triple sec
• Grand Marnier
• Water (optional)

Dump the limeade into the blender. Fill the limeade can once each with the cheap tequila, the cheap triple sec and Grand Marnier. Add 1/2 can of water if you must (obviously, you’re a yanqui). Blend for about 10 seconds. Remove half the mixture and reserve it in the refrigerator. Fill the blender with ice, and blend till the ice is chopped.  Run a lime wedge over the rim of the glass, then dip the rim in kosher salt. Pour. Repeat with reserved mix.

Cinco de Mayo–felicidades, amigos!

Loan Originator Patrick Loo is on his way to mastering list segmentation to drive his email marketing campaigns.

Patrick Loo had an unusual marketing challenge: He wanted to shrink his list. Most marketers struggle with the opposite challenge. They want to build their list. The bigger the better. 

But as a loan originator for 20 years and a former manager of a large mortgage office, Patrick’s database had grown in size to 9,500 contacts. Today he’s one of the top 8 of 50 loan originators at Mortgage Capital, a Beverly Hills, CA, lender, and personal service is his number-one core business value. 

Patrick knew his list was too large for his marketing to be as personal, and, therefore as effective, as he wanted it to be. So he made a commitment to an aggressive, 9-month marketing plan to find his top 2,000 prospects. “Originally I contacted ‘The Database Diva’ to automate my sales and lower my cost for marketing,” he said. But he had a lot of database work to do first. 

“Lori Feldman helped me really organize my contacts. She gave me ACT! training to target specific demographics in my database, such as people with certain loan amounts and those with active emails,” Patrick said. “At least 70% of my training involved learning how to use ACT! software–and I’ve used ACT! for more than 15 years and considered myself proficient. Lori moved me from being proficient to being a pro!” 

As a busy mortgage professional, Patrick didn’t have time to fine-tune his database. He needed to be on the phone talking to home buyers and real estate agents. But he dedicated himself to the process because he wanted to reach out to each contact as if in a one-to-one conversation–in every message. 

Value Each Person on Your Email Marketing List

“I hate receiving email that’s impersonal. What’s the point of sending out a lot of email to my marketing list if it’s not useful, looks like everyone else’s or goes straight to the spam folder?” he said. “I want to be very personal, specific and most important, capable of responding quickly. You can never automate everything, and you must always lead with the personal touch.” 

His comprehensive marketing system included a website redesign, direct mail postcards, with emails and drip marketing using ACT! e-Marketing powered by Swiftpage. 

“Initially I had to increase my mailers from 700 to 2,000 in order to clean up my list. Now I’m trying to reduce the number of mailers to around 1,000,” Patrick said. “I would ultimately like to rely more on email marketing. However, I think I’ll always have a need for sending postcards to my clients.” 

The most critical component of his marketing plan became his database segmentation of active clients and prospects. Once this was done, Patrick could survey his customers to confirm their loan balances and mortgage rates. 

Best Customer Service with Email Marketing

With that information verified, Patrick could send individualized savings options to homeowners each time rates changed. One campaign netted him 9 extra closings in one month. 

Patrick’s future e-marketing goals include developing more follow-up drip marketing campaigns and creating more surveys to capture homeowners’ borrowing intentions that can be automatically populated into ACT! 

He offers these 3 insightful tips to anyone starting out with drip marketing: 

1. Personalize your email marketing
2. Respond quickly to email responders, and
3. Find a balance between keeping in contact and not overloading your list with what recipients may consider spam.

Candy Torahs credits its successful email marketing campaigns for its structured follow-up system

 CandyTorahs.com manufactures personalized, Jewish-themed party favors and place cards for special occasions. Unlike most of its competitors, the company specializes in serving a niche of Bar Mitzvah moms, planners, Synagogues, Jewish agencies, clergy and schools. 

It’s a “one-man” show, says owner Harry Liebman, who develops the products, builds the website, designs the promotional materials, manages the customer database and drip marketing campaigns, takes the orders and customizes the designs. “My family helps me make and ship orders,” he says. 

A few years ago, Harry had a big problem: Tracking and following up on sales leads. The typical lead time for his products is 3 to 24 months. But when a mom would contact Harry a year or more before her family’s event, he would lose sight of her after a few months.  Sometimes, he says, so much time would pass without communication that he’d feel too uncomfortable to contact her again. After all, there’s nothing worse than saying to a once-hot prospect, “Um..you might not remember me, but about a year ago you contacted CandyTorahs.com about party favors,” says Harry. “Ugh!” 

After talking to The Database Diva, Harry realized drip marketing was his answer. “In fact, I knew it the first time I heard the term ‘drip marketing,’” he says. “I could see the value of creating a well-thought-out email marketing campaign, planned in advance and delivered over time, targeting different types of prospects. It seemed to be the best way to stay in touch, offer prospects useful information, and deliver persuasive information as the event approached.” 

But now Harry had a new problem: He couldn’t figure out how to launch his drip marketing campaign. “When I tried to start, I ended up going in lots of different directions, starting over, and getting discouraged. I needed a roadmap, a guide.” 

Enter The Database Diva and her DripMarketingCamp, which gave Harry exactly what he needed: a drip marketing blueprint that helped him plan a complete communication campaign. He also learned how to find his own authentic writing voice. 

“I began to understand how to see my messages from the mom’s point of view. I learned how to be someone she liked–a giver of useful info and resources about planning big special parties–and not someone she scorned–a spewer of product data about CandyTorahs.com sizes, prices, colors, choices, blah, blah, blah. The Database Diva gave me confidence. Most important, committing to the DripMarketingCamp process forced me to allocate the necessary time to finish and launch my campaign.” 

Email Campaign Design

One of the biggest benefits of creating email marketing campaigns is tracking the results. Harry says his results have been “good to excellent,” and he generously shares his top three benefits here. 

1. Staying in touch. “Right now, I have about 50 people in my database who are having events within the next 3 months. Each of them has heard from me on a monthly basis for a while, and more often as the date draws near. My niche is very small. It’s critical that I keep a tight focus on every lead I get. Swiftpage has made that automatic. This is excellent.” 

2. Engaging with prospects. “My open rates are astonishing. One of my mailings TO PROSPECTS went to 80 people. 36 people opened it (a 45% open rate). Each person opens my emails an average of 3.5 times! They click on my links an average of 59 times!” 

3. Retaining customers’ interest. One mailing Harry sends goes out after the customer’s party. It gets an open rate of 72% and a click rate of 7.5%. The message includes just one link inviting them to CandyTorah.com‘s Facebook fan page. “Here’s one of my secrets,” Harry says. “Fully leverage ACT e-Marketing’s mail-merge personalization features.” Below is the letter Harry sends. He thinks at least half of all recipients reply personally to this message. “That’s relationship building!” he says. 

Hi [[First Name]],
How was [[Child Name]]’s Bar Mitzvah weekend? Are you still on cloud nine? How about [[Child Name]]? After you decompress, you might check-out the CandyTorah’s Facebook page. You can post photos (I’d love to see them), review our products (please), share advice with other parents and so on.
Congratulations on this milestone. And be sure to enjoy these upcoming years – they go by so fast. This year my eldest, Elliot, started college!
Harry 

Like many other businesses, Harry believes his business has been off this year, but he understands what he must do next. “I’ve neglected my pipeline (no post card mailings, for example) and that’s a factor. And although I engage my prospects, I must refocus on closing sales. I believe the drip marketing sets up the sale. I need to figure out the best way to close more. 

“My customers love me, but currently I don’t have anything else to sell them. Once the party’s over, it’s over. I’m thinking about products for their kids as they start driving, graduating, etc. These are some of my next steps.” 

Email Campaign Tips

Before he leaves us for Candyland, Harry has these 3 drip marketing tips to share so you can create your own successful email marketing campaigns. 

Tip 1: Don’t delay. Set-up a drip campaign now. The sooner you start, the sooner you can develop it and focus it on your goals. It takes time and you will get better at it. So start now. 

Tip 2: Don’t be stuffy. Talk to your prospects like they’re your friends.  For example, 

BAD: If we can be of assistance as you consider your party favor needs, please give us a call.
BETTER: Your party’s coming up fast. Please let me know if I can help. 

BAD: Thank you for entering our monthly drawing. We will notify you early next month with the results.
BETTER: Thanks for entering our drawing. There are 22 entries so far – hopefully I’ll have good news for you after the 1st. 

Tip 3: Look at your own email inbox. Which regular mailings do you look forward to receiving? Which emails do you always read? “Why? I know why! Because they’re useful, valuable, entertaining, forward-able. Make your own mailings that way, too!”

“My email marketing template’s better than yours,” says the first one. I’m gonna knock it outta the park.”

The second email marketer says, “Are you frackin kidding me? No way is that POS graphic of yours going to produce a respectable open rate. And that subject line..? Fuggedaboutit.”

“Oh yeah?” says the first email marketer. “I happen to know there isn’t a serious ly qualified prospect on our customer database who would read one sentence of your crappy copy. And my mother could design a better HTML email template than that.”

“Fellas, fellas, no fighting in this bar,” cries the bartender. “Let’s split your list in half and send an email blast using both your templates. We’ll take it to the court of public opinion and let the open rates, click-thrus and sales speak for themselves.”

Both marketers look at each other, speechless, for a few seconds.

Then the first email marketer turns to the second email marketer and says, “My mobile messaging ad is better than yours…”

Sometimes a diva needs her own personalized silver soldered tiara.

That was the mission on my recent vacation to beautiful San Diego where I was fortunate enough to land a spot in Portland artist Sally Jean’s workshop, “Totally Tiara.”

I’ve been designing and creating jewelry for the past five or six years as a hobby. In my recurring fantasy, I quit my day job, liberate my 70s Bohemian skirt and peasant top (again in style, I might add) and set up a table selling my handmade wares at the Farmer’s Market.

But then Carolyn, our bookkeeper, reminds me that payroll is Friday, so I get back to work. (My good friend, Sue, says, “Why do you think they call it work? If it was fun, they wouldn’t pay you to do it.”)

There were about 20 of us aspiring artists in this class. Besides me, two others had traveled great distances to study with the Queen of Silver Solder. One woman flew in from Hawaii, another was from upstate Illinois. All the rest were from up and down California.

Besides trekking home with my very own tiara, my other objective was to master a new skill that used an entirely different section of my brain. As The Database Diva, I spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to present complicated relationship-building tactics to my clients who want to leverage their customer databases.

Burning Brain Cells vs. Skin Cells

You burn a lot of brain cells mastering the creative process for email or drip marketing campaigns. You must think of exactly the right words and offer such compelling ideas that your readers are entertained or educated enough to buy what you’re selling or ask to stay on your list. (Or at least not opt out). Very. Tough.

With soldering there’s a specific hand-eye coordination required–while holding a soldering iron that’s 100-plus degrees Fahrenheit.

I sat across from a woman who had taken Sally Jean’s class 13 times. She owned many crowns. I was in awe of her prolificness. Her pace was brisk as she added spikes to the base, and she was very fluid in her work, even though she was conducting 7 or 8 simultaneous conversations around the room. I thought I was a multi-tasker. I was truly amazed.

Within the first few hours of the 3-day class, I had dripped molton solder on my index finger. It was so hot, I didn’t even feel it at first. (Just a flesh wound, as Monty Python used to say.)

Within 5 hours I felt like a dismal failure. Everyone was soldering much faster than I was, and my iron was operating on the scorched earth principle. Instead of beautiful shiny charms, I was cremating my pieces (or inventing the Goth look of the technique…never one of my favorites).

I burned a lot of skin cells in that class. I could not get the hang of Sally Jean’s loving command, “Melt and Flow! Melt and Flow!”  I had soldered precisely zero times before this. Why did I think I could show up and master it in a mere  3 days when almost everyone else had been a Sally repeat offender?

My fellow artists were encouraging. “Keep going, you’ll get better; it takes practice,” they all said. “When you get home, solder something everday,” said another. I doubted this advice as I pushed yet another ashy charm off to the side and picked up my next victim–with a death grip on the pliers.

How much longer would I have to endure this ego bashing (which hurt more than my finger)? And, surely, Sally was not serious about taking a group picture with all of us wearing our crowns. I guess I could hold up my iron as a lightsaber. Darth Diva.

“Done Is Better Than Perfect”

But then a miracle happened. I realized I was trying to be perfect. I was totally out of my comfort zone–where I typically live everyday. I was being tentative because I didn’t want to ruin my expensive stash of class supplies. I didn’t want to wear a Goth tiara or put it on display as evidence of my vacation at the art colony. I was putting a ton of pressure on myself expecting to produce first-class craftsmanship, while the reality was I was a soldering virgin! And I was failing anyway.

(Ironically, Sally had also taught “Soldering for Virgins” a few days before, but I couldn’t attend. Even if I could have, I proabably wouldn’t have signed up. I assumed it was the “beginner’s class.” I wanted a challenge–until now that I had one.)

With the realization that there was no way I was going to produce jury-level art, I relaxed. I breathed. I ate some chocolate (not on the low-carb diet, but, heh). And I created my first beautiful silver-soldered charm. It was magnificent. I didn’t care that I had 45 more charms to go.

So, success. I got my new learning experience. But I did not finish my project in Sally Jean’s class. I did not fly home wearing a tiara. But I did turn on the soldering iron as soon as I got home. The solder amazingly “melted and flowed.” I am now a soldering addict.

You can see my finished masterpiece, entitled “Inspiring Divas” above. It features pictures of the wonderful line of women in my family tree that I am lucky enough to descend from. The spool of thread is from my great-grandmother’s Marshall, TX, dry goods store. It’s close to 100 years old. The brooch in front was my grandmother’s.

The takeaway: Your art could be your career, your writing, your marketing, your tiara. How committed are you? Only you will know where all the little flaws in your crown are. So to some degree, you must suffer for your art if you care about it and you want it to someday be better. The secret is to fear the creative process, and then do it anyway.

You’re in business. You either get why you must use customer database software or you don’t. Let’s find out which. Take this 10-question quiz and give yourself 5 points for each *yes* answer. 50 points total…easy schmeazy.

1. You send hand-written notes to people you meet for the first time (because you’ve got one finger on the mouse, but you still know that a snail mail thank you card shows you’re a mensch.)
    
2. You have a drip marketing autoresponder with at least 5 messages in place for people who opt in on your website or fill out your Contact Us page. 

3. You live and die by your customer database software. The 2 questions you ask every new prospect without fail are 1) How did you find us? and 2) May I have your email address to send you our [your product/service] tips? (Clincher: Excel, Outlook and your PDA do not count as a customer database!)

4. All contacts in your database are coded by type (customer or prospect) or by behavior (“attended a webinar,” “downloaded a white paper”, etc.) It’s easy for you to perform database segmentation and run ad-hoc reports to tell how many referrals, website leads, and new networking contacts you get each month.

5. You write and publish a regularly scheduled email newsletter…and you know how many people are opening the message and clicking on each link. You use this “interest barometer” to get ideas for the next issue of your email newsletter. In other words, you write about what your readers want to read, not what you want to tell them.

6. When you don’t hear from a good customer for awhile, you have a “win back” strategy in place. (This assumes that you actually know the drop-dead date after which your customer is no longer acting like your customer.)

7. When you get home from a networking event, trade show or conference, you enter every business card into your customer database, code them properly with the name of the event, and enter a few notes about each person so you’ll remember who they are 6 months from now. Then you add them to your event follow up drip marketing campaign. Give yourself 5 bonus points if you take your business card scanner to events to scan your cards before you get back to the office.

8. You mail a thank you card or send a small gift to everyone who sends you a referral. Give yourself 5 bonus points if you follow up with your referral partner in 90 days or 6 months and update him on your progress with the referral he gave you.

9. You have a proven drip marketing campaign in place for nurturing a new prospect to keep your sales funnel full. You do not subscribe to or succumb to the “batch and blast” theory of email prospecting. Each prospect gave you permission to email him and you’ve personalized your drip marketing messages to him.

10. You know that only 2 out of every 15 sales opportunities are ready to buy from you today–so you created a ready-to-launch drip marketing campaign for each prospect you send a proposal to. Give yourself 5 extra points if that drip marketing campaign lasts one year or more.

What Your Customer Database Score (or Lack Thereof) Means

50+         I want you to be the guest expert on my next Marketing with Your Database webinar. Please contact me using the Contact Us form at the top of the page.

30 – 49  OK, you get it, but you’re slacking. Hire an intern. That last 10% you never have time to finish is costing you big bucks.

10 – 29   Sorry; this is a case of you don’t know what you don’t know. You only think you’re in control of your business. The competition is stomping all over you with your passive permission. Watch this video on The Importance of Following Up, and call me in the morning.

0 – 9        Why are you reading my blog? How did you find this website? I bet you have an AOL account as your business email address. Thanks for stopping by, and have a nice day.

• Appreciated by all 615 people on their distribution list
• An effective way to personalize an email marketing campaign message (ie., sales pitch)
• CAN-SPAM compliant

(Outlook email message shrunk to readability oblivion to protect the guilty.)