Paul Seabrook (pictured) examines the latest fast.MAP survey results.
Websites – whether independent, comparison or brand-owned – together continue to be people’s main financial service research routes, each used by around three out of ten consumers, according to new research.
Also revealed are people’s main reasons for selecting the financial brands they use – they include the [...]

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Business solutions specialist Amadeus Software Limited, has helped UK consumer rights magazine publisher Which? develop an agile, scalable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, cutting data processing time from days to hours.
The customised SAS solution began delivering a return on investment immediately and will pay for itself within 12 months, the company reports.
Which? used to be a [...]

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David Excell (pictured) discusses what it means to really understand customer buying behaviour
How well do you know your customers?
Not your customer base as a homogenised whole; your individual customers?
With minimal growth forecast throughout most of the industrialised world during 2012, never has it been more important for consumer-facing businesses to initiate direct marketing that delivers [...]

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Businesses, charities, communities and other legal entities need to act fast to avoid missing out on the Internet domain name revolution, warns domain name management specialists, NetNames. 
From, January 12, ICANN, the body that regulates Internet naming conventions, has been open to applications to operate almost any characters after the ‘dot’, replacing conventional domain extensions such [...]

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MEF, the global community for mobile content and commerce, has kicked off the new year by unveiling its predictions for 2012.
In 2011, MEF accurately forecast that the proliferation of smartphones would drive mobile consumer engagement – with a number of other predictions also coming to fruition.
MEF’s success in anticipating and addressing key industry issues, combined [...]

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Tony Foggett (pictured) shares agency insights into emerging trends.
Now is the time to reflect on key milestones from the past 12 months and examine the trends that will have the biggest effect on multi-channel strategies in the year ahead.
How quickly a year shifts in digital!
In 2010, it sometimes felt as if consumers and technology were [...]

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Luke Griffiths (pictured) forecasts the key digital marketing resolutions for 2012.
Integrate to communicate
Make way for convergence. This will be the overarching trend for 2012 – separate channels will converge into the sea of digital media, all working together to make up one digital hub of communications.
Where channels such as email and mobile have celebrated success [...]

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Small businesses seduced by the hype around social media risk alienating their customers by investing time and money in social interaction techniques they do not want, rather than focusing on getting the basics right.
So says communications expert Pitney Bowes, which commissioned research into the customer interaction methods that encourage repeat purchases. The study reveals that [...]

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Market leaders across sectors are now generating statements, invoices and other critical customer transactional documents in colour – in far greater numbers than ever before. Here, John Ricketts, sales director UK & Ireland, Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies, examines why the balance has shifted towards colour communications.
While the benefits of colour print have been documented [...]

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. . . but let sleeping (email) dogs lie, says Kieran Kilmartin (pictured), director of marketing EMEA, Pitney Bowes Business Insight.
A colleague recently recounted how one retailer was only targeting the most relevant customers by direct mail but targeting everyone by email. His reason: ‘“Because email’s free; there’s no mailing cost so there’s no real [...]

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