Q&As

E-MAILBOX PROVIDERS blocked 19.2% of all permission-based commercial e-mail during the first half of 2006, according to a study by e-mail delivery firm Return Path.

This average is a slight improvement over the 21% reported in the second half last year, the firm noted.

E-MAIL PHISHERS ARE honing their skills in ways that indicate at least some of them think like the best direct marketers, says James Christiansen, Experian’s

A NEW SUBSCRIBER OPTS IN to receive your newsletter. Great! So you respond with a simple thank-you, right? Not exactly. The right welcome message can

THERE’S AN OLD SAYING THAT IT’S LONELY AT the top. If that’s true, our agency leaders should look around. They’re in good company this issue. Direct talked

There are worse places to be than San Francisco in October. So stop worrying, and relax on the flight by reading this issue of Direct. We hope you’ll

Kara Richter had one goal in mind when she co-founded From Bags to Riches in 2004: bringing high fashion to people in the not-so-high income brackets.

Shades of 1999! Social networks got hot this summer when both Google and Microsoft announced deals to add search and syndicated contextual ads to MySpace

JUSTIFICATION IS THE name of the game when it comes to determining a direct marketing budget. It’s no longer good enough to make generalizations about

TEN YEARS AGO, Frederick Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect demonstrated to the world that a five-percentage-point decrease in customer defections could improve

Eight O’Clock Coffee has one of the oldest brand names in America. But the company launched as a private label by A&P Stores in 1859, sold to an investment