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.

Use of professional email marketing practices is often avoided based on three criteria, 1) time requirements, 2) skill requirements and 3) cost. These factors make using a ‘Send Only’ approach the most often used, and is enabled by services like Constant Contact and MailerMailer.

The ‘Send Only’ approach is used most often and is based on the agreement that simply getting a message or promotion viewed is sufficient. This approach fails to consider the impact of the recipients responses when they want more (information, capability, interaction, etc.), but can’t get it.

I hope this helps highlight the value-proposition to using professional email marketing practices as a core tool in your marketing and promotions initiatives. The time and resources required for professional campaign development are time and resources that are well spent.

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:

1. Setup a “RSVP” web page for prospective attendees. The RSVP form is generated by your email marketing system and placed into your web page.
2. Setup a “Register For Event Updates” web page to allow interested persons to register. The Update Registration form is generated by your email marketing system and placed into your web page.
3. Send the initial email to your list promoting the event with one link to RSVP, and another to Register for event Updates.
4. Setup two autoresponder emails for recipients who do not open your initial email. Set the first to send 3-5 days after the initial email. Set the second to send 3-5 days prior to the event. Be sure to highlight any new developments in these emails – like new presenters, or new featured guests attending, etc.
5. Setup two autoresponder emails for recipients who registered to receive Event Updates. Set the first to send 3-5 days after they register. Set the second to send 3-5 days prior to the event. Be sure both of these emails contain some “new” information about the event. Be sure the second contains something “new” and different from the new item featured in the first email. The second should also include the new item that appeared in the first – as a reminder.
6. Be sure to setup thank you emails for persons who RSVP or Register For Updates.
7. Print the list of persons who RSVP. At the event have all attendees sign-in at the event – providing their name, email, and asking ‘how they heard about the event’.
8. Compare the event registration list against the RSVP list to see the percentage of attendees your email converted.
9. Finally, be sure to setup different post event autoresponder emails to send to 1) Persons on your list who did not open any emails; 2) Persons who opened but did not attend; 3) Persons who opened and attended. Include a brief survey in the email to persons who attended that captures their impression of the effectiveness of your promotion campaign. Send these 1-3 days after the event.

This basic campaign structure has successfully promoted attendance and built opt-in databases of prospects for marketing future events. See a case study at http://businessmarketingsystems.net/portfolio.html.

EMAIL SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Below is a list of features your email campaign system should have:

• Event based ‘autoresponders’ or ‘triggers’ that can be targeted based on opens and/or link clicks.
• Creation of unlimited Custom Fields of varying types including checkboxes, radio buttons, and list menus.
• Creation of simple surveys. (Optional)

Hope this is helpful. Let me know if I can be of assistance.

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.

In my quest to connect the dots between the spiritual understanding that all things and actions manifest evidence of their effectiveness and benefit, I purchased a new self-help book titled 59 Seconds: Think A Little. Change A Lot. by Richard Wiseman.  I highly recommend it simply because it highlights what doesn’t work, and what does based on validated research.  What that means is that the book contains really clear and concise things you can do in 59 seconds or less to be more decisive, imaginative, engaged, and happy.

That’s my take.  Anyway, what’s one more book gonna hurt?

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.

Ultimately people do business with people they like. The quality of every personal interaction and the tone, character, and content of other non-human communications are all part of your customer service system. They should all work together to create an exceptional experience. Price is never a sole decision-making factor. When your customers feel respected, cared for, and have a favorable experience they will buy from you for qualitative rather than quantitative reasons.

Remember this about the importance of service to the success of a business – when a customer has a good experience they tell someone; when they have a bad experience they tell everyone they can.

Here are a few tips for delivering superior service:

• Before you sell or tell, ask.
• Listen carefully before talking.
• After listening, relate.
• Respond to what is said. Answer a question or offer a solution. Demonstrate you care.

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.

May we love ourselves richly…
with bold thoughts,
thoughtful and measured steps,
fearless actions,
and faithful vision.

May we love our children…
with principled direction,
compassionate interaction,
loving responsiveness,
and unconditional acceptance.

May our labors enrich the world…
with passionate initiative,
respectful and attentive collaboration,
and open and receptive issue resolution.

May love fill our souls…
that we may know boundless passion,
that we may swim the open waters of companionship,
that we may walk life’s beaches
hand-in-hand with love.

Happy new year!

The concerns are valid, and addressing them always requires detailed and thoughtful implementation strategies. But a new day has come and open-source has arrived. There are now mature open-source solutions for leading enterprise technology and communications requirements including file management, communications, email, CRM, web sites, content and asset management, systems integration and more.

For example I have promoted Drupal as a web site content management solution for 3 years, and on October 24 the whitehouse.gov web site was relaunched on Drupal completing a transition from running on proprietary software to becoming another open-source site. This marks an acceptance that open-source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary solutions, enables rapid implementation, and offers freedom and flexibility in integrating new technologies for future expansion. There are also many examples of corporate open-source success with leading solutions like Sugar CRM and the Alfresco enterprise content management system.

This is a terrific time where organizations large and small have viable cutting edge open-source options for advanced technology solutions that provide significant cost benefits while delivering unprecedented flexibility. Consider an open-souce solution for your next technology initiative.

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.

If we are direct, the roots of this issue extend far beyond the realm of marketing activity. And there are many sound ‘chick or egg first’ arguments to justify unethical actions. But in the end the marketing community, beginning with each individual in it, has to choose to change and act differently. The fact is that things can be sold without misleading buyers. And the marketing community can be a powerful change agent for the adoption of more ethical behavior on behalf of its clients. It all comes down to the bottom line. There is a choice to be made between whether profits or values will drive our actions. Presently we choose profits overwhelmingly. In the design business there is a mantra for effective design that reads “form follows function”. Why we do something and the benefits we seek are the function. How we do it and the benefits that result are the form. Profit is now a core function and the design of systems and solutions to achieve it have inherent misgivings.

We have evidence of the outcome when we relentlessly pursue profits and favor minority interests over those of the majority. Gross imbalances occur requiring more resources to mitigate the effects of those imbalances. And ultimately the very markets we count on to drive our profits are unable to support the demand because the necessary moral, social and capital resources are depleted. We are living this reality as the richest capital markets in the world in the west have declining sales prospects across the board, and the response is to shift attention to new developing markets like China, India, and Russia. At a cursory level this is insane behavior, akin to addressing chronic headaches by changing hats. The real issue here is a different result is not being sought.

What we are saying with this course is — we’ll take what we can get, for as long as we can get it, at the expense of forever depleting our ability to have anything at all.

There are many areas where integrity can be a key driver and force in marketing practice. I welcome your comments and feedback as part of an ongoing dialogue on integrity in marketing.