Personalising your email or SMS messages in a useful way will help your contacts to feel like you are having a one to one conversation with them, and will help them feel like a valued client, not just one of the masses.

So what do I mean by a “useful way”? It’s pretty easy to add the firstname to your message - people expect that level of personalisation even in what is obviously a bulk email send now. What is useful for your clients / customers is going to be different from another organisation, but here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

• expiry date of your customer’s account / subscription
• number of loyalty points they currently hold
• address and contact details that you currently store on file for your contact (ask them to update you if the details have changed)
• last item that the customer purchased online (so that you can ask them what their experience has been like with that product, or you can ask them to rate your customer service during the transaction).

We’d love to hear what other ways you can imagine personalising your messages - reply to this post below.

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On Friday a week ago, Apple launched the iPad in a number of countries outside of the USA, including America. That same day I know of at least two organisations - Borders and Domain - who sent emails out to their contacts on that exact day telling people about tools that they now have available for the iPad.

The message to the end consumer is very clear:

• we’re up to date
• we’re providing you with useful tools

I think you will agree that the above a very powerful messages to provide to your customers.

Timing your messages to co-incide with major news events, particularly when you are supplying useful tools to help people around that event, is a great strategy and should be something that you factor into your Communication Plan.

You’re could be thinking: “that’s easy for large company with big budgets”, or “but how do you know what the major news is going to be?”, or “co-inciding my emails with the news will take too much preparation time”. Yes… it does take effort to co-incide your campaigns with major news; and that’s why it gives such a powerful message to the message recipients.

So don’t discount this strategy as too hard! Factor this into your next Communication Plan brain storming session, or tweak your Communication Plan when you become aware of big news coming up. Share your thoughts by adding your comment below.

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When I’m talking to people who are considering starting up a regular e-newsletter, I often ask “how many contacts do you have in your client database” [I only ask this to demonstrate how many messages they can send for what price]. The response is very often almost an apology such as “oh, I only have a few hundred, but I intend to increase it”.

I would like to say here and now, there is no shame in a list of “only a few hundred”, and the size of your list should not delay you in starting your regular email newsletter.

An email campaign to the 200 person list, where every one of those 200 people personally know the business owner, and the services they are providing, could deliver a much better response rate than the same campaign to a list of 2,000 people who subscribed to a list ‘accidentally’ or ‘by default’, and have never used the business’ services.

I see this born out all the time with eNudge Subscriber’s campaigns. Those businesses with lists that have grown organically over time, or where they have grown rapidly through obvious interest in a particular product or service, produce much better results than purchased [Spam Act Compliant] lists or lists developed by ‘tricking’ people into consenting. The sooner a new business starts their e-newsletter, the better. It has a number of advantages including:

1. Provides fresh content for your website, which will help your search engine rank on your area of expertise.
2. Gives your contacts something easy to forward onto people whom they wish to refer to you.
3. Reminds your contacts of the things they want to do with your business.
4. Gives you a forum to educate your customers to make it easier for them to do business with you.

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In our edition of eNudge News describing 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009, the 4th key was:

Mix up the communication & follow up responses: make sure you act in a timely manner when people respond to your communications, don’t forget to occasionally ring your key prospects, or send a hand written note in the mail. In addition, using personalisation (more than just your contact’s first name) in your messages and more targeted special messages outside your regular ‘news’ messages also helps to connect better with your contacts.

Tips for helping you to mix up the messages:

1. When you’re reading news and industry articles - keep your customers top of mind. If you’re thinking about them (as well as your own interests) as you are reading the news, you will undoubtedly find information that will be very helpful to a customer. Scan the article, and email / fax it out.
2. If there is a key date in one of your client’s businesses, diarise a week before that date and send a hand-written note, give them a quick call, or send them an email about that date; your communication might be a reminder / a good luck / a ‘yell out if I can help you’ / a congratulations type of message.
3. In your Christmas message, you can use the unlimited personalisation feature of eNudge to add a personal sentence to each message. Refer to our ‘Extending your Message Personalisation’ tutorial for more details on how to do this.
4. Consider SMS as the vehicle for sending a special short message to your key clients announcing an important event that is date sensitive / a success you have achieved / a success of one of your clients to which you contributed.
5. After a meeting with your client, on occasion send a hand-written note thanking them for their time. You can get some great personalised or company branded note cards created for this purpose from Note Côuture.

Tips for helping you follow up inbound responses:

1. Have a process for how you are going to handle responses, including a script (for a telephone response) or a set of possible written responses, ready before you send out the message that you expect to ellicit a response.
2. Assign a staff member to handle the responses, and set a time frame in which the responses must be made / sent.
3. Manage the process to ensure that it is being followed.

It’s very easy to put all your effort into creating the message, and then not having any time left to plan for the response. This is a recipe for handling responses in a tardy or unprofessional manner.

How have you handled large volumes of response from your marketing efforts?

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In our edition of eNudge News describing 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009, the 3rd key was:

Continue to grow your List by promoting your communications in all your customer touch points. This is very important as it does two things: 1/ ensures that you keep focused on your communications with your customers. If your emailing / sms list is continuing to grow there will be less chance that you will tire of sending your messages, and 2/ adds new prospects to the start of the sales process. Most people need to feel that they trust you and understand what you can do for them before they will be ready to buy.

Here are 10 ideas for ensuring you are making the most of all your customer touchpoints:

1. Invoices - one of the most neglected touchpoints in terms of promoting the benefits of your products and services. You should use a portion of your invoices to:
   describe the benefits your products or services offer, or
   draw attention to other products that the customer is not currently purchasing, or
   promote special offers.
2. At point of sale - supermarkets do this with the chocolate bars and magazines sitting at the check outs. If you have a shopping cart facility on your website, are you suggesting related products to your customers just before they checkout? Amazon has been doing this for years. If you have a retail store, ensure that your sales staff ask customers if they are on your mailing list so that they know when the latest products come into store, and so that they hear about sales.
3. New Customer Telephone Enquiries - when the phone rings and it’s a new enquiry, part of your standard process for handling the enquiry should be to ask if you can add the person to your mailing list. Make sure you describe the benefits of receiving the messages, and how frequently they will be delivered. If you describe these things and then ask for permission (and the person’s email address), if the caller is at all interested in your products or services 9 times out of 10 they will be happy to be placed on your mailing list.
4. Meetings with Prospects - at your meeting to discuss a potential new client’s requirements, make sure you ask them if they would like to go on your mailing list. Again… advise them of the benefits and frequency of messages, and most times they will be happy to be added to your list. This gives you further opportunity to build trust with the prospect.
5. Written Proposals - make sure you add a section at the end of your proposal that promotes other products / services you provide, which may also be of interest to the prospect. Describe the benefits of being added to your mailing list in the proposal, which will also act as a trigger for you to ask for their permission to be added.
6. Business Cards - if there’s space, include your unique selling proposition and how to sign up for your mailing list perhaps on the back of your card. You can also have cards printed that have a perforated, tear off section that a prospect can fill in to give you permission to add them to your list. As you hand your card to a customer or prospect, that will also act as a prompt for you to ask the consent question.
7. Letterhead and other Stationery - include a statement of the benefits of your products and services, and a web address to sign up for your newsletter - again describing in brief the benefits and timeframe for sending.
8. Printed / Online Directory listings - depending on available space, your slogan or statement of benefits of working with your organisation should be included in the listing.
9. Meetings Prospects at Networking Events - if you meet a person who is genuinely interested in your products or services, but might not be quite ready to transact with you yet, ask them if they would like to be added to your mailing list to hear about what your other customers are doing / hear about special offers etc.
10. Front page of your Website - this seems obvious, but many businesses who have a mailing list don’t promote it well on their website. It should be on the front page of your site, allowing a visitor who is interested in your offering but not yet ready to transact, to still connect with you.

Out of 10, how many ideas are you already employing? What have we missed?

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In our edition of eNudge News that included 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009, the 2nd key was:

Execute [Your Marketing] Plan without fail.

Of course, you can’t keep to your marketing plan if you don’t have one. If you don’t have one, stop reading this now, and instead read our article that takes you through a step by step process for creating a email communication plan - you can expand that to include all your marketing communications; e.g. letter drops, newspaper ads, Google Adword campaigns etc. Then come back here and keep reading!

To help ensure that you execute your plan:

1. Keep in mind the following points:
• if you are not communicating with your customers and prospects on a regular basis, your competitors might be talking to them instead.
• if you provide a wide range of products and services, it is easy for your existing customers to be unaware of some of the products and services you offer. Increase the understanding of your clients through value added ways of talking about the breadth of your products and services.
• even if your audience doesn’t read every element of every one of your communications, they still get the message that you are thriving, and are interested in them.
2. Use the eNudge Communication Plan function to store details of your future electronic messages. This allows you to add to the information when useful input comes to hand. It’s a great help having lots of useful input and ideas when you start writing your message.
3. Diairise the job of writing your communications, giving the writer plenty of time to get it ready.

What are your tips to help others execute their marketing plan?

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In our last edition of eNudge News, I listed the following as the first of the 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009:

I really can’t emphasize enough the importance of connecting with and providing value to your audience.

Your contacts really want to feel like you are speaking to them, about something that is actually relevant and useful to them. Otherwise they will stop reading your messages.

You will never achieve a feeling of connection through your emails or sms messages unless you:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your contacts, and think about (or ask them directly) what they want to hear about before putting together your messages or your special offers.
2. Send your message to subsets of your list so that you can ensure that the message is relevant to the contacts that receive the message. This might require you to write more than one version of your newsletter for instance.
3. Write your message in a communication style that makes people feel like you are sitting down having a coffee with them - try and visualise that as you are writing your message.
4. Personalise your message, perhaps also the subject line. I mention this last, because personalisation is possibly the least important of these 4 points. Of course, the more you personalise a message the better. eNudge allows you to personalise your message in an unlimited manner because you can add your own special fields to any campaign. Have you considered adding a personalised paragraph for specific contacts that is very personal to them e.g. ‘it was great meeting with you last week…’?

A recent Borders email gave a great example of personalisation. If you have a look at the image to the right, you will see that Borders have included the contacts name in the front cover of a new book, as the co-author of a new book. Seeing my name on the front cover of a book certainly got my attention!

With regard to providing value, I would also like to share a recent experience I had while shopping in a specialist clothing store. I’m not much of a shopper, so having found this particular store which had some great products, but not enough of the items that I wanted, I was keen to be added to their mailing list to hear when new stock arrived. I was very disappointed to be told that they don’t do any emailing at present, and that I should just drop by the store every so often when I’m nearby to see if they have new stock. Hmmmm…. where’s the value in that? This experience reminded me that businesses that are doing email marketing in Australia are fairly unique.

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I see it time and time again; business owners / marketing managers start an electronic marketing program but only get around to sending their first message out to their customers. Alternatively, they send out another message 6 months later which contains nothing more than a promotion of one product in their business.

Yes, it takes more effort, but significantly more benefit can be derived from doing the following:

1. Create a plan for your marketing communications with the intention of connecting with your audience, educating and providing value. Have a think about those 3 bolded words. I believe they should be the sole purpose of your messages - the repeat sales, new customers and profits will flow automatically if you do those. Your plan will include message dates, key topics and who is reponsible. For help with your planning session read our article.
2. Execute the plan without fail. Though, be mindful that details in the plan may change in response to environmental events or unexpected changes in your business. To ensure that you do execute your plan, and execute more than your first communication / advert, diarise the preparation of each communication, and the execution date giving yourself enough time to carry it out.
3. Whilst you may not see any results from your first communication, your message is out there, people are seeing that your business is still alive and well, and they are potentially moving closer to being ready to respond.
4. Continue to grow your List by promoting your communications in all your customer touch points. This is very important as it does two things: 1/ ensures that you keep focused on your communications with your customers. If your emailing / sms list is continuing to grow there will be less chance that you will tire of sending your messages, and 2/ adds new prospects to the start of the sales process. Most people need to feel that they trust you and understand what you can do for them before they will be ready to buy.
5. Mix up the communication & follow up responses: make sure you act in a timely manner when people respond to your communications, don’t forget to occasionally ring your key prospects, or send a hand written note in the mail. Electronic messaging is great for getting the majority of your communications done at low cost, but it can’t completely replace phone calls and face to face meetings. In addition, using personalisation (more than just your contact’s first name) in your messages and more targeted special messages outside your regular ‘news’ messages also helps to connect better with your contacts..

With businesses and consumers being more selective about what they spend money on, businesses that really are about providing value and serving their customers will be the ones that succeed in 2009. You need to make sure that your communications reflect those attitudes.

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The buzz around email marketing circles at the moment seems to be about how to ensure that a visitor to a social media site where your business is active (e.g. Facebook / You Tube to name just two) is added to your email program.

This sort of issue is really only a problem for larger businesses where there are different people looking after different communication channels to your client base. But it raises three interesting questions for any business:

1. Connecting through email with a visitor to a social media site sounds dangerous. Wouldn’t the visitor only want to be participating in the social media site? Why would they want to be added to your email list? Why isn’t business happy to just communicate solely in the social media site?

   The fact that businesses are talking about the issue of connecting in a meaningful ongoing way with visitors to social media sites demonstrates that there is a need for greater connection. However, you need to be very careful in communicating through email, that you don’t destroy the fledgling connection created by the social media. Your communications would have to be very soft sell, and very much about adding value and adding connection / relationship.

2. Is this just a problem in the area of social media or are there other touch points to your customers that are also not connecting to your email marketing efforts?

   I believe that this is an area of concern for all areas of business, which is why many businesses invest in CRM (customer relationship management) software to keep track of all their communications - from enquiry to purchase to invoice - with each customer. As an initial exercise in considering this problem, map out all the different ways that you communicate with your customers or potential customers, and think about how you could be promoting your email marketing initiatives in those other communications. Do you promote your email list on your invoices for example? (mental note: not yet implemented for eNudge)

3. Are the results of your email marketing efforts also being distributed back to the other areas of your business?

   Of course, it’s a two-way street.  When there are trends demonstrated through your email or sms marketing activities, they need to be fed back into the other marketing efforts of your business.  Of course, this assumes that you are paying attention to the trends.

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Before I talk about the little known clause, let me first give you an extremely brief summary of what the Australian Spam Act requires:

1. Consent - this can be inferred or explicit, but the onus is on the business sending the email to ensure that they can prove they have received consent from the recipient to sending emails or sms messages.  With regard to inferred consent, the Act talks about “an existing business or other relationship, where there is a reasonable expectation of receiving those commercial electronic messages”.  ACMA then gives an example of a relationship where you could infer consent as: strong business relationship with the holder of an electronic address – for example, the address holder is a member of a club, a subscriber to a service, or a client it deals with on an ongoing basis.
2. Identify the Sender - your messages must identify who is sending the information, including your name, business name, phone number, address and ABN.  That’s why we have this information included at the bottom of all your eNudge emails.
3. Ability to be Removed / Unsubscribe - this should be an easy process for a person receiving your emails or sms messages.  This is why eNudge places an unsubscribe link at the bottom of all eNudge emails, and instructions for unsubscribing by replying included at the end of all eNudge sms messages, automating the unsubscribe process for you.

Please note, the Australian Spam Act applies wherever there is an Australian link - if the message was commissioned in, sent from, or sent to, an Australian location then it applies.

So, what’s this little known clause?  It also relates to consent: that consent can be inferred from conspicuous publication of a work-related electronic address.  There are some key rules around using a conspicuously published work email address:

1. You can’t use the email address (e.g. from the person’s website, telephone directory or brochure) if they also state next to it that unsolicited commercial emails are unwelcome.
2. The email you intend to send must be directly related to the person’s line of work.  An example given by ACMA is that if you sell washers (for taps) you can’t say that every person needs a washer because everyone has a tap in their home!Instead the example given is that the Purchaser working for a bathroom supplies business could be considered to have a job directly related to the line of work of selling tap washers.

In summary, AMCA states that there must be a strong link between what you are promoting and the recipient’s role or line of business. You cannot infer someone’s consent just because you believe your product would benefit them.

Warning!!  As this is a little known about clause in the Spam Act, that means that the people receiving your emails don’t know about it either.  So if you are relying on this clause when sending a particular email campaign, please make sure that you explain to the recipient, right at at the start of your email, how it is that you have their email address, and why you are able to email them.  I strongly recommend that you approach such an email very politely and professionally to ensure that you do not damage your business reputation or annoy people.

Like to discuss this topic further?  We’re on standby to talk with you via our blog.

Before acting on the above information, please first refer to: The Spam Act Frequently Asked Questions (ACMA)

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