FAQ

Shifts in workplace mobility and a glut of digital media channels leave marketers with fewer and fewer options for tactile marketing experiences. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in “gifting”, but not all gifts are created equal. If you’re in our CRM, we want you to experience all types of direct mail touches—prospect, customer, winback. It might be a simple, flat envelope with a handwritten note, or something of higher-value to nurture and thank you for being our friend (nod to The Golden Girls, We miss you Betty.)

Mail should surprise and delight, but it must—and we can’t emphasize this enough—be a part of a broader marketing effort that includes email, landing pages, digital ads, digital content, and traditional marketing activities to name a few. We’re looking at you trade show. Nonetheless, if you received a ship notification from us all we ask is that you correct any bad mailing addresses we have on file to avoid sending your package on a round trip journey back to our office.

VLG leverages B2C tactics in a typically boring B2B marketing space. We work at the top, middle, end, or throughout the entire buyer’s journey. No matter what your relationship is to a target audience, we look to create outcomes that build trust, convert, and retain customers. We can turn unknown targets into identified prospects, and help you celebrate birthdays, births, anniversaries, holidays and life with current customers. If you have an internal marketing program, we can help. A sales kickoff is a great example of how we help companies engage both external and internal audiences. Ultimately, VLG guides your customers down a path that leads to higher lifetime customer value and retain employees in a topsy-turvy world.

Do we ever! Like everything we do, our email is not boring. In fact, it’s ridiculously creative and unique. We also leverage four different email service providers in addition to our proprietary platform to ensure we have the option best suited for the quality of your data. Yep, how we set up email marketing campaigns has a lot to do with list data. No big shock there.

Good, double opt-in subscribers are like Glengarry leads. It’s the good stuff. However, data degrades at 10% per month. If you haven’t cleaned your data lately, we can help pretty that up too. That said, when there is an opportunity to give a target audience information truly beneficial to their specific need you owe it to them to extend an invitation to become better acquainted with you with a safe, compliant, secure email campaign.

We think way, way outside the box when it comes to grabbing the attention of a prospective customer or current customer. Ask yourself this one simple question: If a prospect will not answer their phone should we mail them a phone they will answer? Yes, yes we should. Who wants to take a cold call from a stranger today? No one. But, your account based marketing tactics could include shipping a target a SIM-enabled Android phone pre-loaded with marketing content too hard to reach prospects. We call it a Burner Rocket (burner phone meets jet propulsion for your sales team). Each phone is personalized and targeted and connects directly to a preassigned member of your sales team. Marketing also gets notifications via email or Slack when a user is engaged, triggering additional touch points to deliver multi-channel marketing. We just happened to invent a new way to get to a channel—the elevated, effective cold call to a device we provide.

Does a chicken have lips? No. With all due respect to Chris Farley in the movie Tommy Boy, here’s the way we see it. Some companies put a fancy guarantee on leads because they want you to feel all warm and toasty. Right? It might work. Why shouldn’t it? If you put their guarantee under your pillow at night, the guarantee fairy might fly in and leave you a quarter.

The point is, how do you know a service provider isn’t reselling you garbage leads that will just create busy work for your sales team and clutter your CRM? They have to guarantee the leads, because that’s all they have. You’re not getting a quality program that builds trust and long-term relationships. All you’re getting is an empty promise. For your prospects’ sake, for your customers’ sake, for your sales team’s sake, you might want to run a quality ABM program with VLG.

We play nice with everyone. Some of our customers spend millions of dollars a year on their marketing tech stack. If we spent that much, we’d want to get the biggest bang for our buck. That’s why we help our customers run programs on or in collaboration with these marketing automation platforms. Or, if those platforms are too bloated and your marketing operations team is too busy, just use our DialogEngine™ platform.

We launched this platform in 2005—a year before Marketo and Hubspot were even born. It gives us a leg up on our agency competition. Seriously, how many agencies do you work with that run their own software and not some white labeled app? But we will always push data into your marketing platforms, as needed. Win-win.

Yes. The long arm of the law is unavoidable. There is plenty of room to debate the merits of privacy regulation, but it is what it is. VLG was GDPR compliant before it was required. That said, there are many ways to eat a kiwi. It’s possible to build a target audience and stay compliant. Cookie-less campaigns, single-button sign ups, opt-in form submissions and a keen eye on unsubscribes are all it takes. Authenticity in marketing starts with the end user in mind. That’s the core aim of these regulations. Let’s use that, not fight it.

Yesterday is not soon enough for some VLG customers, but we’ve launched email campaigns in as little as five days. With the right VLG-customer relationship in place, we typically get the first touch points of our ABM programs out the door in seven weeks. Those programs typically run six, nine, or 12 months depending on budget, scope, and desired outcomes.

We can scrape names off the Internet just like those big, fancy list providers. However, we focus on quality not quantity. With the right buyer groups defined, our team is more than happy to track down key decision makers and influencers for your next ABM campaign with VLG. Or, you can bring your own list (B.Y.O.L.) and we will run it through our scrubbers to flag bad mailing addresses or spam trap email addresses. Effective ABM programs are data dependent, so we’ll work with you to take unknowns to knowns and build a list. We will also do address validation and verification when it’s time to target your audience with something super memorable by mail.