Email Marketing – Get it right!

In business many of us use email marketing campaigns (with legit opt-in lists!) to be able to broadcast to our customers many things be it latest offers we have, important information, upcoming events, promotions, surveys and so much more.

But at what point do you draw the line, are you including all the necessary information, are you including too much information, are you ensuring that your customers/subscribers are able to forward the message to a friend easily enough should they choose and most importantly are you giving them a clear and easy manner in which to unsubscribe from your newsletters should they want that and are you respecting that choice?

Most of all are you even paying attention to the goings on and responses you are getting from your customer base as surely they are of the most important to you when you send out an email newsletter?

Recently I have been received email newsletters from a fairly reputable online forum to which a long time ago I subscribed to their newsletter to keep on top of certain pieces of news, however now I find that the information has run dry, not what im after and have found alternate avenues to source better information.  Now I have followed through several pages in order to unsubscribe from their newsletter and every one that forms part of the same network of sites, yet week after week I continue to receive them. Thankfully Gmail has a nice way to filter and delete automatically such emails but still this begs the question, are you simply not listening or reacting well enough to customers requests in order to maintain a larger email list and broadcast count?

Whats more after countless attempts to unsubscribe, each time saying that it had been successful the other day I received yet another and this time I had an auto-responder to say I no longer wanted to receive this newsletter and go a response to say “thank you very much for your entry into our survey, your results have been very helpful and we shall contact you soon to verify your answers”. Ok at this point several unsubscribes, emailing the list owners and even auto responding surely this should now be enough.

So for anyone who has used or continues to use email marketing which by the way is a fantastic avenue to bring old customers back, keep in contact and for many of our clients bring in a lot of revenue then at least remember to keep on top of your responses, clean the data, ensure its up to date and your email campaigns are effective, trackable, measurable and overall not being spam sent out no matter if you have 10 or 10,000 people you are contacting.

Ensure you have quality content, things people are actually interested in when they registered to join your list. Do not sell your lists to 3rd parties and do not throw useless information/advertisements at your customers if they are not interested in such things.

Remember there is a lot you can do with emails, A/B split test campaigns, spam test, design test, monitor results to see their effectiveness and so much more.

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Take a few minutes to think about actions that could damage your brand equity

I talk a lot about brand equity and the importance of building a brand, maintaining it and using it to have successful businesses and one of the things I stress to people is that it takes only one mistake, JUST ONE and that can severely damage the brand equity you have strive to build up.

Even though I preach so much about having excellent relationships with your audience and your customers – which I constantly strive to do and hopefully from the great feedback I get I actually accomplish 99% of the time. Recently I discovered an action I took as part of my business although seemed right at the time not through being greedy, lazy, inconsiderate or any of the other usual pitfalls businesses fall into when they commit an error but simply because I thought it was the right thing to do meant that I lead my business down a route that was incorrect and as a result made certain errors become more apparent and more of an issue than should have been.

Although I do not wish to disclose the errros I have commited – what I do want to say is that this has caused damage to my business and personal brand both of which I pride myself on and it takes just that one small error and it doesnt matter whether you damaged your brand in the eyes of a single person, a single business or an entire country – damage is damage.

Hopefully things can be rectified and patched but as always its so crucial to remember that making a slight mistake really will damage your brand equity. So next time take an extra few minutes to decide on various factors and stages of a product line, project milestones, that new magazine design layout, whether or not you should change the way that image looks in photoshop, how you approach someone in person or online and how you interact with the world on a daily basis.

Keep working hard people and everything you are trying to achieve will come true.

5 Ways to enhance your customer service using social media

Every day of our lives we interact with a variety of different people from all different aspects of life, different cultures, thoughts, backgrounds, emotions and so much contributes to the way in which those people will interact with you on a day to day basis. This can be very difficult when you are trying to deal with a company and their customer service is biased by so many factors – its can’t be helped thats for sure, however customer service is key to this whole social media business.

Every day I speak with customers and potential leads and ensuring that the customer service not only my company offers but myself on a personal level is the absolute best I could offer, as much as possible I go out of my way to visit and interact with my customers and actually give a damn about what they do not only in work but if personal life comes into play then that too because there isn’t a brick wall between personal and business life especially when it comes to caring about your customers. Far to many people but up barriers between their work and personal life and in some cases rightly so and some areas they are needed but knowing that if someone is going through a tough time then its really not the best idea to be chatting and trying to sell them your service.

Today I have had to deal with several fairly large companies to get some information and details changed and the manner in which this was achieved was nothing short of a 2 hour conversation for something that should have taken 10 minutes. Not because their systems were down, i was asking the impossible, there was a queue or things weren’t being put across properly but simply the cultural difference and bias bought upon them with the culture and expectancies of their company forced them to act and play out a scene that was really not needed at all.

When it comes to customer service for your business five things I think are crucial and these play a big part especially with social media:

1. Make sure your message is coming across as clearly and accurately as possible so that what you are saying does not offend or irritate the customer
2. Do not try and brush the customer and their concerns to one side quickly without properly attending to them just in order to get through more work or more enquiries
3. Word of mouth has always been a powerful tool – 1 bad customer review is worth a lot more when told to friends and family than 1 good review is and whats more with social media tools such as twitter, facebook, linkedin then this word of mouth has been increase a million fold – don’t damage your brand equity
4. Don’t rely on just your own knowledge when tackling a problem – if you need the help of co-workers or even the public – USE IT instead of being stuck or giving advice/information that may not be beneficial
5. The customer is always right, right? If they are embrace this and even display this knowledge through social media tools whereby should a customer praise, make suggestion or just ask for help with something promote these ideas and show the community you are listening. Should the customer not be the happiest person and are having problems with you – you better believe they will slate you through social media outlets – what do you do? Connect with them – engage and try your best to resolve the issue.

Make sure the way you communicate and engage with your customers not only through social media but on a day to day basis isn’t closed and restricted – caring is key – its not all about the money.

Running a business will knock you down – make sure you get back up again!

When starting your own business everyone expects things to start slow and pick up slowly but surely until they are running a business capable of sustaining themselves or even a staff of people. When considering starting up a small business unless what you are offering is something completely unique or far superior in price/quality/service than that of the competition the business will be a lifestyle business rather than a “make me a millionaire” business which is all good and well but there are several things that you may not expect to deal with when starting a business and running it for the first 3 years.

Without a doubt their are endless benefits that running your own business can bring you and your loved ones besides financial benefits however there exists downsides to a business and this can seem far worse than they truly are until you are out of the ditch.

Once you have figured out the basics of your business plan, worked out your start up costs, running costs, cash flow and sources of finance, developed your marketing plan and started to “get going” with your new business certainly within the first year and most likely for the first three years you may run into the following problems and these are things that people and books often forget to tell you.

• Your business will swallow more money than you expected at the start
• You will spend far more time and energy than anticipated getting it rolling
• Your first year will most likely make a loss
• You will become far more stressed out than you imagine
• You may loose friends because of your dedication or out of their jealousy
• Your second and third year will probably make a loss
• You will become depressed from time to time
• You will need a good support network of friends and family to rely on
• Having other time commitments such as job or family will make things VERY difficult but if you are sure about your product then you will succeed

Don’t feel bad, depressed or want to give up on doing what you love if you do come against these problems. Remember there are always ways around them and that the first three years are often the most difficult. Don’t loose faith in yourself, your product or your service.

How did you feel or how are you currently feeling with a new business? Leave a comment or tweet me on twitter.com/seanprice

Importance of honesty in social media

Building a brand is difficult at the best of times and in 2010 where many businesses are going to focus time and energy on building their brand with social Media. There has never been a better time to focus on building a brand now with the existence of easy to use tools like Twitter and facebook being honest and clear to your audience is extremely important.

If you offer a service or product don’t hard sell people will not follow you to hear you rant about how great your product is all day that said if your product/service is something they may be looking for then at that point in time by all means suggest it.

Be honest and true to your audience because if you don’t you will not only hurt your brand but you could damage others. If you have competitors don’t bash them with comments or tweets, don’t actively promote the fact that the competition have not got the reach you do and so belittle them it’s just not professional.

Something that has annoyed me slightly recently is an action @bradburton has just started which is a hashtag of #RTbomb whereby in his own words “Doing really offensive tweets and then put and RT @ofsomeudon‘t like b4 #RTBomb” something that I personally think is very unprofessional – the idea of a RT (rewteet) is sending a message someone posted on their Twitter stream and displaying it to your followers. Now if you are (even jokingly) editing and posting an offensive tweet by pretending its from the original person then this is hurting brands the examples Brad did were not particularly harmful but misleading non the less and could damage brands.

RT @dannyrowe Apple Taxi’s of WSM announce FREE piece of fruit with every trip. To help with the 5 aday. #RTBomb

RT @noredbraces Can you help? I’m actively looking for a #socialmedia expert to help my business #RTBomb

@lanternphoto: RT @BradBurton just joined BNI, looking forward to my first meeting Tuesday. #RTBomb

RT @Tesco due to lower footfall due to weather we are discounting 25% off all items on purchases over £30 plz RT #RTBomb

You can see some of the #rtbomb / #rtbombing going on here

Im all for fun and joking on twitter but retweeting users with these changes could well be damaging and hope that professionals do not attempt to take on this unprofessional hashtag.