Today we meet Wendy Peichel, senior business development manager at Options Media in Boca Raton, FL where, for the past three years, she has dedicated herself to furthering the practices of e-mail and mobile marketing.
At Options, she works with "all the top-tier brokerage companies" brokering lists in such areas as student marketing, ailment marketing and many others.
Before her current gig, Peichel worked at World Class Marketing in Milford, CT mostly in list acquisition.
A 13-year veteran of the industry, she's witnessed many changes
"But the nice part is that we're seeing our core competency of e-mail marketing continue to explode," she says. "All your traditional mailers are continuing to wake up and say 'hey, I better get into the digital side of things.'"
Much of this is based on cost, she points out, with ever-increasing postal rates.
"The thing about the e-mail and mobile component are that they're very trackable, you can see what kinds of responses you're getting and you're able to reach large audiences to get your message out -- which is very exciting," she says.
To an increasing extent, these characteristics of e-mail apply to mobile marketing, she notes.
"I was just on a conference call with a fairly large advertising agency and they're like 'we want to get into mobile –we are going that route—that's where we see the business going,'" Peichel says, noting the use of things like text to win and mobile couponing.
She does concede that right now it's mostly younger people who use mobile devices. But she predicts that in the years ahead, older people will start using them for medical applications like getting regular alerts to take their medications, if nothing else.
Despite the growth of e-mail and mobile Peichel doesn't think direct mail will ever go away. And even though much of the rest of the industry and the country feels the pinch of the recession, she says Options Media is actually doing well at present.
"Our business continues to grow," she says.
In her off-hours, Peichel, who lives in Delray Beach, FL, works out and takes a lot of spinning classes.
"I guess that kind of takes the edge off this crazy business," she says.
