Rio Longacre

Easypurl.com announced the launch of the Easypurl Insider blog, an information source for the latest in cross-media marketing news.

In part one of this feature, published in Inside Direct Mail, postal experts reflected on the rules and challenges marketers face when implementing the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) new Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) system. From that discussion, experts agreed that full service was a more attractive option than basic service and implementing IMB before the May 2011 deadline could take anywhere from a couple of months to two years, depending on an organization’s existing IT infrastructure.

One “urban legend” in direct marketing is the story of the direct mail campaign with an online call to action that completely fails. Certainly you’ve heard horror stories about testing a URL call to action, in hopes that, like an 800 number, the URL will boost response. Yet, when the results come in, the mailer is several percentage points below its expected response levels—perhaps even lower than previous non-URL campaigns. What happened to the unaccounted responses? Are they unconverted sales from people who visited the URL without making a purchase? Without proper tracking, the campaign manager cannot know. The tale ends with the marketer,