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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An article I read recently about shopping carts has radically changed my view on the best process for the final step of checking out. The Contact Point shopping cart requires a customer to ‘register’ with the website or log in with their email address and a password if they are a returning customer, in order to finalise their purchase.

It turns out that many many people are put off by the requirement to register, but by simply changing this screen to give the customer one more option - to continue their purchase without registering - provided an online business an increase of 300 million dollars (that’s USD) in sales over a one year period.

This quote from the article sums up my [previous] view of the issue:

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

Instead, their research showed that the requirement to register was resented by a large percentage of their test audience, who felt that they weren’t there to be in a relationship; they just wanted to make a purchase quickly. Returning customers also had issues because they couldn’t remember their username and password, so a large number of return visitors ended up registering again; thus making it harder for the retailer to do anything useful with the data on return visits.

We’ve taken this research on board in the Contact Point Shopping Cart, and have already implemented a change across 3 shop sites, allowing customers to purchase without registering. For an example, check out the Melbourne Storm Shop.

Some of our client sites will still want to ensure that customers register, for reasons of additional functionality such as shopping lists, and storing sensitive information. In the remaining circumstances, we will be in touch with you over the next few weeks to discuss implementing the change.

What do you think? Has the requirement to register ever put you off from making a purchase online?

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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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The EEC has been working on a new set of definitions to help email marketers see consistency in measurements used to gauge the successfulness of an email campaign.

In a nutshell (so that you don’t have to go through the rather dry documentation) they are recommending that:

• the term open rate be changed to render rate, which more accurately describes what we are measuring: the fact that we know that an email has been opened because an image we included in it has been rendered in the email client.
• an action rate be used to measure the number of renders + click throughs. At the moment, eNudge determines that if a person clicks on a URL that they have actually also opened the email, for obvious reasons. The EEC is recommending that these are kept separate as renders and clicks, but collated into one action rate measure which will add the two together.

The EEC are seeking input from email marketers and email service providers (like eNudge) into the new terms.

In terms of the way eNudge measures email activity, I would really like your feedback on these two questions:

1. Do you want to know if one person has opened your emails multiple times?

2. Would you like to know that someone has clicked on a link, but not rendered the images of your email?

3. Would you like to know if an email has actually reached the inbox (whether it was deleted, read or not)?

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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 following predictions are made by Contact Point for the most important technology opportunities that will exist in 2009 for small to medium enterprises in Australia:

1. The Internet will continue to grow in its use as a research tool before businesses / consumers make decisions on products, services and getting involved in organisations.
   This means you should make it very easy for people to find the key benefits (not features!) of your products and services on your website, and testimonials / product reviews on your site (and other websites) will grow in importance. It also means that if your website presents your business poorly because it is out of date and looks unattended, you will be missing out on business.
    
2. The Internet will continue to grow as a place to purchase goods and services, particularly niche products, and products where it is much more convenient to shop online instead of going to a physical store or waiting in a telephone queue.
   Allowing your website visitors to purchase goods and services doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive if you are just selling one or two items; in this case allowing customers to pay by PayPal or direct deposit will be acceptable. If you have a wide range of products then you need a full shopping cart system, and provide credit card payment options.
    
3. Search Engine Optimisation will be important to ensure that people find your business via the search engines, but when this happens those visitors are comparing you with others (e.g. getting 3 quotes).
   Therefore if you are wanting to capitalise on search engine optimisation your website content has to be compelling, it must inspire visitors to get in touch, and your follow up and all facets of your response have to be excellent in order to win the business.
    
4. Pay per click online advertising will provide great results for certain types of products and services.
   Testing is needed to ensure a good ROI is available for your particular business. We recommend that you allocate a budget and run tests of different advertisements over a minimum of one month, measuring to ensure that you know which enquiries were generated from which ads, and track the outcome of each enquiry. We expect high value products with an internet savvy target market to benefit the most out of pay per click advertising, but you have to test!
    
5. Social networking will continue its rapid growth. Participants will more deliberately separate their business networks from their personal networks. Tools in social networking will continue to improve to make it easier to connect with others, get real conversations happening, and also to manage your multiple networks.
   I believe that organisations that can provide not only online networking opportunities but also physical connection opportunities, marrying the two, will be the winners. People still want face to face interaction.
    
6. Because it allows much more rich communication, the use of video online will grow in popularity, and almost be expected in certain market segments.
   It’s important for your business to embrace video in communicating with your visitors about who you are, what benefits your products and services provide, and how your products and services can be used.
    
   
7. The integration of television programs and radio programs with the internet will expand. Expect to see more ‘continue to chat with us online after the show’ and a more options for viewing / listening to programs or segments again online. There are still huge opportunities available for the media and entertainment industry to improve the experience of their viewers and grow their viewer base through viral marketing (visitors sending online content to their friends and family).
   Business owners who can present on television or radio have great opportunities here also.
    
8. The astute use of electronic marketing (email and sms) will provide great benefits to business via more sales and improved customer retention.
   Your messages must add value and provide unique offers and opportunities to interested recipients. Adding value is made easier when you target your messages to relevant sub groups of your contacts, not just sending everything to all. I make this prediction not based on my personal desire to promote eNudge, but based what I continue to see happening in the business of eNudge subscribers which are expanding through electronic marketing. Even the major banks are starting to use email marketing, despite their ‘traditional’ view that they can’t use email because of the security risks (being a major target for phishing attacks). So few businesses in Australia are using electronic marketing well, that the scope for increased sales and improved customer retention is significant.
    
   
9. The scourges of spam, viruses, phishing, trojans and other malware will continue to try and infect your PC and rip you off. Overall I don’t expect this to grow in impact, but nor will it abate.
   You need to continue to be vigilant, ensure that your computer(s) are protected with firewalls and anti-virus solutions, and don’t click on links that look even remotely suspect. I’ve noticed a decrease in phishing emails pretending to be from the major banks, and an increase purportedly from the next tier down instead e.g. the Australian Trading Post. So again, stay vigilant, and if you’re not sure ask the company allegedly sending the email, or ask your technology support provider, before clicking on links or opening attachments.
    
   
10. Taking control of your internal technology systems for managing networks, backups, application access, hardware, internet and email use will continue to be vital to the smooth operation of business.
    If you have a great service provider in this area, maintain your relationship as they can be hard to find! If not you need to find yourself an excellent provider in this area - we can provide some recommendations.

What do you think?

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Many of the tools that have been available on the internet for some time, are now being utilised by businesses and delivering real results in the areas of sales, branding and relationships with other business.

You should at least consider how the following tools may help you extend the reach of your business:

Social networking - more business people everyday are starting to use online social networking tools for networking with business colleagues, not just gathering more online ‘friends’. Many of my colleagues (and I’m in this situation as well) have their details listed on a number of different business oriented social networking tools such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Xing as well as some of the more ‘traditionally’ leisure time networks such as FaceBook and MySpace. These last two are also increasingly being used for business purposes.

Next time you are looking for a particular type of business, consider using your online networks to find that business. One way to do this is to use the Ask A Question feature in LinkedIn. Kathie Thomas of A Clayton’s Secretary uses this facility very well to extend her business.

Another way to utilise these online networks is to provide comment on your topic of expertise via a Blog and invite others to comment / learn from you.

Yet another way is to join a topic group (such as those in Plaxo) and comment on / add posts to the group about that topic, thus helping to establish yourself as an expert in the area.

Video promotion - promoting a key solution you have to a particular problem can be done quite easily via video sharing websites, the most popular of which is YouTube. The recent American elections saw many videos added to YouTube by both sides of politics. Creating the video doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and can be just a recording of your PC slide show or navigation around the screen + sound narration. The funnier / more quirky your video is, the more likely it is that people will tell their friends about it. The more popular the video, the more likely it is that people will find the video via YouTube features such as ‘Videos Being Watched Right Now’ and ‘Most Viewed’, ‘Most Discussed’ etc. There is also the opportunity to pay to promote your video in the ‘Promoted Videos’ section.

Tools to help people manage their favourites - as people use the internet more and more, managing favourites can quickly become very difficult using the browser ‘favourites’ facility. That’s why tools such as Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us, Digg and Furl have become so popular. We’re linking to each of these sites from our of our recent client projects. Linking to the bookmarking sites from your site makes it that bit easier for people who use these tools to add a link to your site, and serves as a reminder as did the old ‘Add to Favourites’ link.

News sites - allowing you to submit news articles for dissemination around the internet such as Reddit (where you can, by topic, quickly see what’s hot, new, controversial and top), Digg, Propeller and Newsvine. In the words of Newsvine: ‘updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment’.

Clearly, you’re not going to be able to do all of the above at once. I suggest that you choose one or two ideas that are appropriate to your business, and give those a try. Apart from potentially reaching new audiences about your business, participating in the above sites can also help to build your rank in the search engines.

Areas such as social networking take time to develop into meaningful results; both time that you need to put in, and also elapsed time for other participants to see that you are sticking around and getting involved. This is not surprising; it’s just like face to face networks. The difference is that you can meet people all around the world in your area of expertise, not just the people that can meet at a nearby venue.

If you would like to recommend or share your story about using any of the above or different tools, please feel free to post your comments.

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