Direct marketing

Almost across the board, there is an expectation from today’s customers that they should be able to interact with a chosen company through any channel - whether that be picking up a phone, going online or purchasing in store. With the huge growth in e-tailing over recent years, it is important that B2C organizations keep in mind the importance of the more traditional channels to the customer.

I read an interesting article this week about a recent study that looked at online retail marketing practices.

I was recently approached by TMCnet’s Customer Interaction Solutions and asked to share a few thoughts on multi-channel and cross-channel trends that Portrait has seen recently. One of the topics we discussed was the increasing use of multiple channels to interact with customers. Utilizing multi-channel communication doesn’t mean contacting your customer through all channels, but rather through the right channels, as determined by the individual customer and his or her specific needs and preferences.

Recently, while prepping for a customer meeting to present the advances of Portrait Dialogue 5, I was thinking of the time I spent in the mid-1990s as an imbedded account representative at Lotus Development for Barry Blau Partners (BB&P). At the time, BB&P was one of the preeminent direct marketing agencies in the U.S. and Lotus was still competing in the desktop tool marketplace (remember Lotus SmartSuite?) against Microsoft Windows.

The past quarter has seen Portrait recognized by leading industry analysts, Forrester Research as both a ‘Leader’ and a ‘Strong Performer ‘alongside specialist niche and global enterprise vendors alike in two separate technology Waves™ ¹. We are obviously delighted with these endorsements but it is also worth exploring why we were able to achieve such notable rankings on first showings in each of these Forrester Waves™.