Now is the time to plan ahead for your holiday season direct mail campaign.  Be ready to capitalize on the most profitable quarter of the year,  and understand that you will be competing with many different offers and advertisements during that time.  Your offer must be unique and have a high percieved value to drive the response you need. So what do you do?

Send Gift Cards to your best friends...your customer base.  Why?  A well put together Gift Card Mailer  produces on average a 200% response rate and

Around here on the 25th of August most people are thinking about summer winding down and the kids heading back to school. But I know what you're thinking. . . . it's only four months to Christmas! That may seem far away to most people but we retailers know it will be here before we know it. We'd better be ready.  Here are some of my predictions, thoughts, and tips to prepare for the 2008 holiday season.

1. My 2008 prediction. While most pundits and experts will be predicting holiday shopping season that falls somewhere between soft and disastrous, I'm taking a different route. I'm predicting that (short of some catastrophic event beyond human comprehension) there will be a holiday season. That's right; I'm going out on a limb and predicting that we will indeed have a holiday season in 2008.

Since we know the holiday is coming, why not plan to make it a successful one? Why go into the holiday not planning to succeed? Here's my advice: Look at

Loyalty: we all seek that quality from others and hopefully value that quality in how we treat others. But what does loyalty mean in regards to running your wireless business?

In the end it means how financially successful you will be. Consider this definition of Brand loyalty: “The degree to which a customer is loyal to a given brand in that they are likely to re-purchase/re-use in the future. The level of loyalty indicates the degree to which a brand is protected form competitors”

If you want to put a figure on that definition then consider the following statistic from “The Loyalty Effect” written by Frederick Reichheld and published by the Harvard Business school press:

"We discovered some years ago that raising customer retention rates by five percentage points could increase the value of an average customer by 25 to 100 percent".

Furthermore Consumer spending is 46% higher with companies that offer loyalty card programs
According to a Loyalty Monitor study by Total Research Corp and Custom Marketing Corp

Improve response, measure your results and reel in more sales.  Here are some recent statistics on the benefits of advertising with a vanity wireless type 800 number.

84% Improvement in Recall Rates with Vanity 800 Numbers in Visual Advertisements.
Data shows that when vanity 800 numbers like 1-800-NEW-CELL are used in visual media (TV, print, billboard) advertisers can expect to see an 84% improvement in recall rates over numeric phone numbers. Sixty-five percent (65%) of consumers were able to correctly recall a vanity 800 number that was featured in a visual image – simulating a billboard or print advertisement. In comparison, only 31% of consumers could correctly recall the numeric tollfree number in a visual image.

Consumers Are 9x More Likely to Recall Vanity 800 Numbers in Broadcast Ads.
An audio advertisement featuring a vanity 800 number yields a nine times higher recall rate compared to an audio file featuring a numeric phone number. Of the survey respondents, 72% correctly