Benefits of Professional Email Marketing Practices

Though professional email marketing practices require investment in time and resources, they use a holistic approach and offer key benefits:

Engagement
A professional campaign includes the creation of specific web pages and triggered autoresponder emails that provide relevant and current information on the subject matter, as well as the producers, partners, and stakeholders. This is important, as it delivers a turn-key experience that effectively promotes the subject matter, the parties involved, and heightened recipient engagement (ie: registration for updates, RSVP to events, etc.).

Measurable Results
Professional email campaigns make detailed performance metrics accessible including read/open rates, link click rates, and conversion rates. They also create databases of qualified opt-in recipients interested in the subject matter and the offerings of producers, partners, and stakeholders.

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Promoting Events With Email

My firm, Business Marketing Systems, specializes in email-based event promotion.

To promote an event using email I propose going beyond the notion of simply sending email and tracking reads and link clicks. Instead, consider setting-up a campaign that:

• Collects RSVP Responses
• Tracks Conversions (persons on your list(s) who actually attend)
• Grows Your Database

Email marketing is an amazing event promotions tool. Here’s what you need to setuip an effective event promotions campaign:

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Focus On Growing Customer Share – Best Bet In A Down Economy

With customers rethinking spending decisions across the socio-economic spectrum, increasing customer share (the amount of business you do with existing customers) is an important strategic consideration. Acquiring new customers costs 5-10 times more than keeping existing customers. A strong base of satisfied customers generates referrals and favorable brand equity, which are both important competitive advantages – especially in tough economic times.

Price is not the leading factor in purchase decision making — trust and recognition are. People buy when they trust they’re going to get what they want. Customer service touches a spectrum of qualitative and emotive buttons that are important to your customers.

So, how do you grow customer share? With timely personalized service. Service is a key differentiator and value generator for businesses. Service excellence makes customers more likely to buy from you, buy repeatedly, and tell someone how great they think you are. Service is the ultimate relationship glue that binds customers to you. And it a powerful tool to turn around lagging sales.

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Service Is A Winning Strategy

Facing tough economic times and changing customer behaviors, businesses are forced to do better or fail. There are two keys to success – hiring great people and providing a simply exceptional experience.

Finding friendly, engaging, and intuitive people who will leave customers with favorable impressions is challenging at best. You cannot teach friendliness and intuition. And intuition (defined as the ability to make sound decisions with incomplete information) is a gift some people possess and others simply do not. So its imperative that businesses hone their ability to spot this “soft skill” during the interview process.

Delivering a superior experience, or the ability to consistently provide exceptional service, is a key competitive advantage and effective differentiator. Time magazine recently reported, “The No. 1 marketing strategy for businesses and organizations now and in the future will be directly related to the quality of that organization’s customer service.” 68 % of customers leave because of an attitude of indifference displayed toward the customer, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey.

Service is a critical success factor. It establishes and helps to build relationships and referrals. When customers and prospects are deciding weather to patronize your business they are judging you by three things:

1. Are you trustworthy?
2. Do you care about me?
3. Are you committed to my satisfaction?

And you have a really simple and surefire way of knowing the truth of this claim: just ask yourself if these are the things you care about when you’re buying.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a growing practice with many new technologies that enable businesses to effectively implement strategic relationship development programs. What gets lost are basic underlying values that ensure substantive connections and successful relationship building. Below are some guidelines to successful customer relationship building:

1. You do not sell to consumers. You sell to people. Develop and maintain a view of your customers as individual people with individual needs and wants.
2. Setup your service interactions to ensure you treat every customer the way you would want to be treated.
3. Develop ways to identify and address the unique and specific wants of your customers.
4. Listen to your customers. Invite them to tell you what they think. Make it easy for them to do so. And pay attention to what they say.

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Social Media Explained

While the term “social media” has quickly become a fixture and is often used, it is not always understood. Here is a brief breakdown.

The keyword is “social.” It refers to a place where people interact online, usually organized by groups around common interests. What makes social media “social” is that anyone can post and respond to content. There are presently three main social media categories or types of sites: 1) News; 2) Networks; and 3) User Generated Content.

Social Media Categories:

• Social News: People post and vote or rate news or other content they consider important. StumbleUpon and Digg are popular social news sites.
• Social Networks: People organize into groups along interest lines and communicate with each other with pictures, memos, status updates, email and other applications. Facebook and MySpace are social networks.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Sites where users can post content and make accessible to the public. Typical UGC formats include comments, ratings, reviews, and other feedback mechanisms. YouTube and Flickr are popular user generated content sites.

So here are highlights on where some social media types overlap the three categories:

• Blogs have features that touch all three of social media categories. Blog content is user generated, may have news value, and is typically viewed by a network of followers. Blogs overlap the social news and UGC categories.
• Twitter is a collection of networks, covering different and varied topics and interests, where users follow each other’s brief updates (or “Tweets”). Twitter overlaps the social news and social network categories.
• RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) allows a person to subscribe to receive new or updated content they are interested in, automatically whenever it is added or updated by the author. Content is made available to subscribers using RSS by creating what is called an “RSS Feed.” RSS overlaps the social network and UGC categories.

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Integrity

We have reached a tipping point where our values fail promote human and societal benefits that or goods and services are supposed to serve. This has led to the current state of affairs where marketing occurs in an environment void of integrity. We sell relentlessly and too often without regard for rules of conduct.

Integrity is defined as “adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.” As part of the marketing process integrity is also a vital core agreement that establishes a foundation for establishing trust, achieving effective communication, and communicating value. Integrity is and has been substantially subverted in competition with the relentless pursuit of profits, by far the leading market value. It is spoken of. It is placed at the forefront of ethical and operational standards. Rules are established to punish unethical behavior. Yet unethical acts occur consistently, and the prevailing values are used to justify those actions. In our present state of affairs as a marketing community, ethics are nothing more than words, text and ideals that are rarely upheld.

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Market Your Way

If the economic downturn has hit big businesses hard then it has hit small businesses harder. In these challenging times it is critical to market according to your unique business requirements. In other words do what works for you – market your way.

Too many of the strategies and trends asserted and supported in marketing media are effective and relevant only for large enterprises. As an example the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey found that Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. E-mail and e-newsletters was next with forty-six percent. For smaller marketers the leaders get flipped with e-mail being most effective. Published information and recommendations are generally skewed to favor strategy for large enterprises because they pay for most of the research and publications.

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Sending email IS NOT marketing!

It really hurts businesses seriously interested in leveraging new marketing technologies to market and promote more effectively when email marketing services sell themselves as “Marketing” solutions. They are email marketing services, period. An email marketing system or service is one component of and email marketing campaign.

But let’s digress for a moment, I am defining marketing as “the activities that a business undertakes to prompt customers and prospects to take a desired action.” That action might be to make a purchase or attend an event. Whatever, the point of any marketing effort is to get people to do something you want them to do.

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3 Tactics For More Effective Email Marketing

Here are 3 crucial items that are typically overlooked in the discussion and planning of email campaigns. They focus on what I feel is the bottom line reason businesses use email marketing at all – to generate sales or some other specific action.

1. Track Conversions
Design and implement conversion tracking processes for your campaigns. If your objective is to attract attendees to an event then be sure to require people to check-in so you can know who came and which of them participated in your email campaigns. If the goal is sales then devise a way to know if the sale came from one of your campaigns.

2. Follow-Up Consistently
Do do you remember the the last place you shopped that sent you a timely and relevant email thanking you for your business and/or extending you an offer? Thought so. So be sure to put all that wondrous email marketing technology to work enabling you to send relevant follow-up communications consistently. And take care to follow-up based on each persons interests and preferences, not generically. See item 3 for more on personalization and segmentation.

3. Personalize and Segment
At a minimum capture the name and email address of anyone in your mail lists. Then personalize all emails with the persons name appropriately. And don’t send the same email to everyone. Segment your list. Group list members by different products or services you offer and by characteristics that make them most and least likely to buy what you offer. This most often means collecting more data. Do that.

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Predictions For A Challenged Economy

As retail sales plummet across all major verticals and job losses continue at record pace, I thought I’d share some predictions for the near to mid-term future of consumer behavior.

• Sales of non-essentials will remain flat.
• Homemade gifts will become popular.
• Sales of arts & crafts materials will grow (i.e.: fabrics, decorative papers, glues, fasteners, etc.)
• Designer clothing will sell at discount prices.
• Housing sale will remain flat.
• Renting will become the predominant primary housing format.
• Cellphone usage will rise, but plan rates will fall.
• Online entertainment consumption will not grow as fast as expected.
• Movie attendance will grow.
• Live entertainment sales will fall (even more).
• Intra-personaL transactions will rise as people share more amongst themselves.

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