FOREWORD

In the “good old days,” a lot of lip service was given to the idea that you could make more money in business by being a “multi-channel merchant”—meaning that you sold your product through multiple channels of distribution and promotion instead of only one.

It sounded good in theory. But at that time, in practice, the options for multi-channel marketers were severely limited because there were so few channels. A multi-channel marketer was typically a catalog marketer who also opened a small retail store near his headquarters. Or maybe a restaurant or retail bakery that did a small business selling gourmet food by mail.

But the Internet changed all this. It has created a plethora of new channels for distribution, promotion, and commerce. The challenge today is not whether to be a multi-channel marketer. It’s knowing which channels to select and how to use them to multiply your sales and profits.

In this regard, there are no better teachers of how to use multi-channel marketing to maximize profits than Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby. They have built, individually and as a team, a number of healthy multi-channel businesses with annual revenues of $10 million to $100 million or more. In their newsletters, articles, reports, books, and conferences, they’ve taught thousands of entrepreneurs, both aspiring and experienced, to do the same. In Changing the Channel, the authors offer a unique combination of real-world experience, proven results, and teaching ability unduplicated in any other multi-channel marketing book or course.

Both Michael and MaryEllen originally made names for themselves in old-school direct-response marketing, particularly in direct mail, a field in which they are both famous. Both are masters of the hard-sell and have created mailers generating untold millions of dollars in direct orders—one of the most difficult feats in marketing. (If you can write sales letters that make a lot of money in the mail, most other marketing is a breeze by comparison.)

When the Internet came along, Michael and MaryEllen immediately saw the potential, especially in the Internet’s ability to quickly and repeatedly reach thousands or millions of prospects at minimal cost. Both were early pioneers in making the transition from offline to online direct marketing. And their innovative approach to online marketing, detailed in Chapter 3, helped double or triple their revenues, while dramatically reducing marketing costs.

Unlike many old-school direct marketers, Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby eagerly embraced the new forms of marketing that have emerged in the past half decade or so. But also unlike so many new media evangelists, who serve as cheerleaders for new technology simply because it is new, Michael and MaryEllen put all of the new media they used to the ultimate direct-response test: Does spending a dollar on these new marketing channels generate two dollars or more in sales?

Therefore, in this book, you’ll find a lot of advice on both old and new media. In Chapter 4, the authors cover today’s favorite flavor of the month: social media. In Chapter 12, they explore the now exploding world of joint venturing. And in Chapter 13, they tackle another favorite of the new media evangelists, event marketing.

But Masterson and Tribby discuss all these multiple channels with two important differences from the way you might see these topics treated in other articles and books. First, everything Masterson and Tribby write about is based on extensively tested and measured results. They spend literally millions of dollars each year testing copy and marketing methods for their various companies. Therefore, they remove subjective judgment from the discussion of which tools are best. Their recommendations and strategies are based strictly on the ROMD (return on marketing dollars) that each channel generates, not on whether they think it’s a neat idea or a cool technology.

Second, Michael and MaryEllen are media agnostics. Because they are successful business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs—and not consultants with a vested interest in promoting and selling their expertise in a specific channel (e.g., blogging, podcasts)—Changing the Channel gives you a high degree of objectivity and honesty rarely seen today in books, blogs, and columns written by consulting specialists with an ax to grind and a service or speech to sell.

Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby have no interest in convincing you that e-mail marketing is better than MySpace, or vice versa, because they are not trying to sell you either one. Their sole objective is to help you use multiple marketing channels in your business to turn one dollar into two dollars, as fast as you can, and often as you can.

You have heard the old expression, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Much of the rah-rah marketing advice I read today, especially concerning new media and other emerging marketing channels, is written by people who teach and “talk the talk,” but who do not “walk the walk.” They may advise clients to invest in their ideas and beliefs about marketing, but that investment is made with the client’s money, not their money. These advisers get paid whether their multi-channel marketing experiments work or not.

Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby are the real deal. They test and refine their ideas in actual marketing campaigns, using their own money to fund the experiments. They understand how important it is for your marketing to make money for you, and how painful it is for your marketing to fail to produce sales. Therefore, this dynamic duo of multi-channel marketing won’t always tell you to use what’s trendiest, coolest, or hippest. But, they will always share with you those multi-channel marketing methods that work best, generating the maximum results with the least risk. That’s what I want. And I assume it’s what you want, too. And in this book, that’s exactly what you get. So if you want your multi-channel marketing to make you more money (regardless of whether it gets you on the cover of Fast Company magazine or wins you a creative award from your local ad club), you’ve come to the right place. Here’s to happy—and profitable—reading!

 

—BOB BLY