I’m starting to feel that my iPhone is an appendage. I never leave home without it. I’m sure a lot of people are like that, young people, anyway.

The right kind of marketers should know that they can reach me and millions of people just like me through our omnipresent cell phones in a number of ways and with perfect timing. Here are a few examples:

One of my favorite iPhone apps is RedLaser. It’s simple (and everyone I know has it). RedLaser is software that can scan any bar or QR code. Once I scan a code, it searches thousands of local and online retailers for the best prices. If you’re like me, you don’t want to spend your day researching or jumping from store to store to find the best prices.

I went to a computer store the other day to buy a charger for my laptop and it was $60 (far more than I wanted to spend). I scanned the barcode with the RedLaser App and found the exact same charger  on Amazon for $10. I ordered it right away and Amazon got it to me a few days later. How cool is that?

You can scan a coupon in a magazine or newspaper and bring it, on your SmartPhone, to, say, a theater or a restaurant for a discount. If you’re walking by a store, you can enter its name into your phone and there’ll probably be an offer you can take advantage of right way.

A lot of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn users, access their accounts on their SmartPhones. At the mall, I’ve noticed a lot of stores featuring in-store promotions mentioning to “Like” them on Facebook or “follow” them on Twitter. Macy’s offered me an extra 10% discount, if I showed them on my iPhone, that I “liked” them on Facebook.

Text message advertising has also grown tremendously in the past few years. In 2011, a survey conducted by the International Association for Wireless Communication showed that over 2.12 trillion text messages were sent and received. Crazy, right?

Advertising via text message, is a great way to reach your target audience directly and in real-time. 98% of all recipients read their text messages, 95% of them within 15 minutes of receiving them. People change their mailing and email addresses more often than they change their phone number. Companies can take advantage of this large consumer base.

Our good friends at Per-Keys help make this a seamless process for marketers, by offering a platform where they can integrate mobile and direct marketing. Since mobile marketing is permission-based, they use print communications to ask for permission. It uses personalized keywords to make the SMS message highly targeted, and allows for marketers to track responses. It’s also great to use, because everyone doesn’t have a Smartphone, so you can reach a broader audience via text message.

All in all, there are a lot of opportunities in Mobile Marketing. Which ideas do you like? Are you testing any Mobile Marketing? Please share with us in the comments below.

I missed it when I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago, because my iPhone service was “iffy” and my tweetdeck was very slow. Why…I ask myself into the night?

Well, if you ask my “real life” friend @amyafrica she’d say that all my followers are wackos anyway, so why even read their tweets.

If you ask my friend @anierenberg, she’ll say the only way to network is in person, not on social media. I do notice lately though when we talk on Sunday nights that there is a tweet tweet sound in the background…so she may be adapting.

I like Twitter for several reasons:
1. I can follow people that I might never have access to in life (or it would be hard to meet them). For example, recently I contacted @marcishimoff who wrote the book, Happy For No Reason. I thought she might write an article for one of our client’s on-line newsletters. So, I tweeted on over to Marci and asked, and she said we could talk about it. Bingo!

2. Learning from the Twitter leaders is interesting, and recently I was sent from Twitter to @chrisbrogan ‘s blog, where he talked about a great book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He said that it was about how the author talks about the stories of our lives and how when he got off the couch and started moving that his whole story changes.
I bought the book right away on amazon.com .

3. When I need help, I start tweeting about my problem on Twitter and someone always comes to the rescue in minutes. So, when my new television set couldn’t be set up with the Best Buy guys on Comcast…I marched over to my tweetdeck and in about 30 seconds, I heard from Frank Eliason of @comcastcares and they talked the installers through the process.
Last week I struggles with my new iMac, and people from Best Buy jumped in and told me right away to return it to the store (as there is no cure for vertical color lines on your monitor).

4. And, then I make friends on Twitter I’d never meet in life. @joebees was talking about taking a run and mentioned the loop in Aventura….right outside my apartment. I started talking to him, and he came to visit my office laden with great bee pollen vitamins for us all.

@tlmaurer and I are always exchanging funny chat during the day. She was sad about my computer and eventually told me I should write a rap song about my problems with Apple and put it on YouTube. We’ve been back and forth writing rhyming lyrics ever since.

@relevance , my friend Ted always gives me advice on my latest challenge and @Ernieschell told me about visiting the Barnes Foundation Museum a few weeks back before it moved the collection. I did and it was great.

So, I guess I enjoy Twitter, because it helps me in my life, and my work and introduces me to all kinds of great people….and it improves my luck. So many people have asked me to speak at their meetings, because I’m always giving my latest marketing tips on Twitter.

So, just try it for two months. It is not about who is eating a ham sandwich any more.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about some Twitter Marketing Strategies we’re testing for clients. Stay tuned.

I recently attended a DMIX (Direct Marketing Idea Exchange) luncheon and the speaker was the President of a large catalog company. She was kind enough to give us each a gift car d  to buy something in her catalog.

There was a book in there I wanted, so I ordered it. First they sent me a letter, saying my book was delayed. Then they sent another letter  (3 weeks later), and said it was on back order, and they’d let me know when it came in.

Months later, I wrote to her about this, and the book came flying to me FEDEX from Amazon (not her company).

She made it right, but only because I was in her industry and write a lot of articles, etc.

Afterward, they should have written and told me they were sorry about the delay in my shipment.

Meanwhile, we’re working on a hospitality client’s business at my office, and deployed a huge email campaign with an error in the offer.

I called the client, and said we have to write to all of them immediately and say we’re sorry and correct our mistake. I sent an OOOPs! email, and we received so many orders right away. In fact, a much higher response than we’d had in many months.

We apologized quickly. We gave them a good offer. We also appeared like real human beings who make mistakes.

So, they forgave us, and bought a lot from us.

Recently a client came to our offices to tell us all about his fabulous line of art books. They were great, and we enjoyed seeing the art, before it was published. He mentioned the thickness of the books, the special art historian who was the author, and so on.

Then I asked him the big question: what is your offer? His reply was, “I don’t need an offer”, and “these books are high quality and stand on their own”.

I explained to him that in direct marketing you always need an offer, or you’re just selling retail in the mail. The offer answers the customer’s questions of “what’s in it for me”, and it is really the closer for the sale.

If you think about it, when you go to a regular store at the mall, you are usually on a mission to make a particular purchase. With direct marketing that is not the case at all.

When you get a direct mail piece or read a direct response ad or open up an email, you’re not necessarily in a buying mood for the product I’m trying to sell you. You might not have an immediate need for this beautiful artbook, unless there is a compelling reason or an incentive that will overcome your “sitting at home, or at your office inertia” and get you to buy immediately.

A good offer represents 40 percent of the success of your program and it has to be: believable, creative and involving.

If you want to learn more about crafting a great offer, pick up a copy of my book, Response! The Complete Guide to Profitable Direct Marketing at amazon.com, or at your local library.

Good luck and let me hear about your amazing offer. Maybe I’ll blog about it.