Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.
Let’s give you some product news today, Dear Reader, because we know you like it. Salesforce has announced versions of its Sales and Service cloud products tailored for small business. Price is $25 per user per month, which is the same as their previous lowest tier. It’s not clear what’s different.
Nordstrom is beefing up its tech staff, but what if tech were so easy that workers could just build their own systems? Australia-based Kradle just launched a system that lets small and mid-size business workers do exactly that, at least to the extent of creating automated process flows. Companies that tried this in the past have discovered that ease of use isn’t enough: workers need a lot of help figuring out what to do with these superpowers.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.