At Direct’s annual business-to-business list roundtable, moderator Bob Castle asked what the future holds for the world of B-to-B.
Participants included Deb Goldstein, president, IDG List Services; Ryan Lake, CEO, Lake Group; Ralph Drybrough, CEO, MeritDirect; John Papalia, president/CEO, Statlistics; Tim Barlow, vice president, list service group, Venture Direct Marketing; Ed Mallin, group president, Walter Karl; and Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president, Worldata.
See tomorrow’s Direct Newsline for an excerpt from our consumer list roundtable. For more from both roundtables, see the August issue of Direct magazine.
CASTLE: In the coming months and years, how do you think the B-to-B field will change?
LAKE: For a few years after Sept. 11, we started to see a lot of people who had historically done a lot of expensive direct mail [turning to] cheaper sources like telemarketing and some online venues to generate new customers. I think the long-term growth of those customer bases has led to a return to direct mail.
GOLDSTEIN: The Internet has changed everything. We are sharing our dollars with search, with newsletter sponsorships, a diversity of media that we didn’t have to compete against five or 10 years ago. I think we need to as a community to find ways to harness that. One of the ways we’re going to evolve is finding lines of business where we separate the names and addresses from the data—there are clearly values in both. I think there’s going to be a revolution in terms of looking at the data itself as well as the environment of the database or the data warehouse.
PAPALIA: You look at the Internet—seven, eight, nine years ago when the Internet burst upon the scene, it was there to wipe out direct mail. It’s maturing as another marketing segment, just as direct mail is evolving too. The next 12 months are going to be very interesting, as we see direct mailers coming back to the basics. The Internet is as much a marketing player now as a gimmick.
BARLOW: I think the spirit of collaboration between online and offline and different sources of media is going to change dramatically. We’re going to have to learn to integrate those as B-to-B folks get more and more sophisticated. We’re going to have to get better at replicating best practices and bringing them to smaller B-to-B marketers. Creativity is going to be key.
DRYBROUGH: Search engine marketing is something most of our catalog clients and publishers have at the very minimum experimented with, and most have robust [SEM] programs that are being funded with money that two or three years ago was being invested in more traditional direct mail avenues. That said, I do believe in the ascendancy of rich data. Controlled circulation publishers have a treasure trove of information both demographic and functional that hasn’t been completely exploited.
SCHWEDELSON: E-mail is in a lot of trouble as a prospecting tool. B-to-B hasn’t fallen as far as consumer, but e-mail list rental is heading down a very bad path. In many cases, the consumer cataloger isn’t even looking at e-mail as a primary prospecting tool. On the B-to-B side it still is. I think the shift can be [attributed to] a turn from an HTML, very pretty environment back to text environment, as the software providers try to fight off this ad ware and spyware and viruses, coupled with the inflated CPMs that B-to-B list owners are currently charging on e-mail. It’s going to be an ugly 12 months for e-mail, and I think it’s a problem.
MALLIN: We’re acquisition specialists, but I don’t think we’ve really focused on being retention specialists too. We’re looking at ways we can help our customers and prospects retain their existing customer base. The B-to-B marketplace is not just about selecting names but about business intelligence. Our customers know which names perform for them and they know their markets, but they want to be able to penetrate those markets deeper. It circles back to the challenge of investing in our capabilities — we have to make hard decisions and that means investing in people with certain types of expertise. We need to be an integrated solution. If we’re not, we’re not going to be as important player to them and they’re going to find somebody else or other tools, like SEM.
DRYBROUGH: Five years ago, we viewed our jobs as almost exclusively acquisition. In the last few years, with lower budgets, people have asked for help in reactivating customers. If you’re not working on retention solutions for your clients, you’re missing an opportunity to serve them.
Network
