If there's any consensus among office product resellers, it would probably be that the business outlook is challenging. Most are experiencing loss of base revenue and profits in a mature market that, while still over $200 billion in annual retail dollars, has started a slow, and now inevitable, decline.
Remember the days when you secured your Yellow Pages listing in the "telephone directory style" publication that was actually printed and physically distributed to millions of people around the country? You probably do, it wasn't that long ago, and it was perhaps one of the methods you counted on for potential customers to find your business.
After nearly 20 years of controversy and litigation, the question of first sale and patent exhaustion was ruled on by the United States Supreme Court as it held that "the authorized sale of a patented product, anywhere in the world, exhausts the patent holder's rights in that product." The Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit on domestic exhaustion (8-0) and international (7-1).
Here's a shot at a seventy-five-word summary of a typical independent office products reseller's current predicament.
We're in a digital world, and so much information has never been available to so many. The clock's not turning back - ever! If you're not transforming your business to become part of the digital world, you're going out of business. Maybe not tomorrow, but ultimately, your fate is sealed unless you decide to act.
If you're going to do email marketing, then to achieve satisfactory results, you must do it properly. This series of articles should have illuminated that high-quality email marketing is challenging.
If you're an Office Products Reseller and wondering why your email campaigns don't provide the kind of results the headlines may lead you to anticipate. This series of blogs explaining what you need to do to join the elite digital marketers who make as much as $40 in returns for every dollar they spend may be just what you need.
Email contact databases degrade by an average of 22.5% every year. Implementing a strategy to make up for these lost contacts is imperative.
This series of blogs started with an introductory article on the returns on investment from email marketing, widely reported to have the potential to be as much as 3,800%. However, I stressed that these kinds of returns would remain out of reach for all except an elite of digital marketers.
If you've followed the first two blogs in this series, you'll know it may be possible to earn a 3,800% return on funds invested when operating amongst the elite email marketers. However, to get up among the elite requires a whole bunch of email marketing parameters to be optimized.
