Tailoring effective marketing communications for basic things that customers need, versus things that they might want, has always been a challenge. Take energy, for example. The electricity and gas services that Utility A provides don’t work any better or worse than those of Utility B, so customers have traditionally not cared who they got them from.

I read the news today, oh boy
About a channel that had passed away
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the epitaph:

Try Googling “content marketing” and “storytelling” someday. You know what you’ll get? An argument. That’s right, an argument. It seems there is disagreement about the value of storytelling in content marketing. And that will be evident in some of the returns your Google search will deliver.

If you’re like most marketers who use email in their campaigns, you probably would like to know that you are doing everything you can to improve your email open rates. Well, before you get too wrapped up in that, it’s a good idea to first ensure that your emails are reaching the inboxes on your subscriber list.

I don’t know how I started doing this, but whenever I decide to go ahead and buy something of significant value, either online or at a store, I refer to it as pulling the trigger. As in, “I pulled the trigger on those concert tickets.”

A long time ago in a ZIP code far away, I worked as an editor on a travel industry trade magazine. Travel agents were the primary readers of this magazine.

On “closing day,” the day before the next issue came out, I would join a group of about a half-dozen senior editors in a budget meeting. The managing editor would provide us all with printouts of the stories being considered for the front page, and we’d all read through them one by one and afterwards comment on them. The idea was to decide which would be the lead story on the front page, which would be the “off lead,” or secondary story, and so on down the ranks.

Twenty years ago there was a real fear among many traditional retailers that the Internet was going to mean the end for brick-and-mortar stores. And clearly that fear was well founded for some retailers who have fallen by the wayside as pure-pay giants like Amazon revolutionized the shopping experience.

At the risk of blatantly showing my age, I can remember a time when the best option for finding an appliance repairman or a pizza place that delivers was to pick up the phone book and leaf through the Yellow Pages. Actually, let me qualify that: That was the best option if you didn’t have a friend or relative who could recommend one.

If the title of this blog post prompted you to click and read more, you’re most likely either new to marketing in general or eager to add a new arrow to your marketing quiver. In either case, learning about the basics of direct marketing can help you get started quickly and on the right foot.

To begin with, despite what you may have heard, direct marketing is more than just direct mail. While its roots are in traditional mail order, direct marketing has grown beyond that to encompass a host of new technologies, customer relationship-building techniques and performance measures. Today, companies of all kinds use direct marketing, which now accounts for 25% of the U.S. marketer’s budget, surpassing newspapers and broadcast TV.¹ Some might even argue that digital media is really direct marketing, increasing this number even more.

Buy a jacket online and pick it up in the store. Use your tablet to price a new tennis racquet. Take advantage of retail website flash sales.