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Further to our thoughts about the dying art of email earlier this week, email marketers should take a close look at their lists.
Are you emailing a number (small or large) of people each week who do not actually want to receive information from you but who cannot unsubscribe without going through a lengthy process? For instance, when someone wishes to leave your email list, do they need to try and recall a password that your system insisted was set up some 1, 2 or 5 years ago? If there has been no requirement to use that password in the interim, it is unlikely that the subscriber will recall it. What other requirements does your unsubcribe process insist upon that may prove difficult?
Try now. How easy is it to unsubscribe from any email list you run?
If your email lands, week in week out into the inbox of someone who does not want to receive it but has been unable to unsubscribe, then all you are doing is pushing home a negative message which is likely to be passed on by those recipients. Not jsut by email but by word of mouth, twitter, facebook etc.
It is all very well insisting on a double opt in process to ensure that people have chosen to receive your info, but how easy are you making it to opt out? Or are you leaving people with little option but to report your emails as spam or to filter them permanently into the delete folder?
If people are finding it more simple to report your address as spam, this will have an effect on your presence on blacklists, and hence whether your emails will be delivered to other address who may actually wish to receive your content.
Take 5 minutes today to set up an address on your email marketing list and then try to unsubscribe. Are there issues? Can you make life easier? Have you already been blacklisted for spam due to a complexity in your unsubscribe mechanism? How clean is your email list? When was the last time you spoke directly to your list and received a substantial number of responses? Are your email falling into black holes?
Does your email marketing campaign work? Have you tied it into your social media marketing campaign so that you can track results? Are you actually reaching your target audience?
let us know what tactics you have tried and the changes you have made in email marketing over the last year or so….
Once upon a time, a request for an email address was a sure fire way to be able to reach someone. Now, as recent research shows, email usage amongst the next generation has dropped by a staggering 59%, and for the vast majority of the rest of us, email has quite simply become a burden.
So, how do you get in touch and stay in touch?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been solving this problem for the last few years and we need to start learning, fast, from these solutions. But, that simple question: “How would you prefer to be contacted?” no longer has a simple three phase answer: email, snail mail or telephone.
What we need to consider now is far more complex. As social networks expand and people become more au fait with their smart phones, tablets, and alternative ways of communicating, you need to find the communication medium of choice for your customers and contacts. And you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that for the vast majority of people – email is not IT.
Spam is not the only problem. The sheer deluge of emails into your average inbox each day means that many people are just ignoring email as a means for communication. And for instant communication, as the #blackberrycrumble showed this last week or so, even your smart phone cannot save you if something more major goes amiss with email servers.
People are relying on a variety of mechanisms to stay in contact and as a company, it is now down to you to learn and adapt to the chosen communication channels of choice for your users. Whether that is Twitter, Facebook, SMS, email, a phone call, or a visit. And then within each of those channels, you may need to understand more comprehensively how your user uses that channel to stay informed.
So, for instance, post something on Twitter as a reply to a tweet I have sent or as part of a conversation I was involved with, and I will only know if it includes @myhandle. I simply do not have time to constantly monitor Twitter so the only way you can reach me is a DM or a replytome. Start a conversation on Twitter with 3 or 4 other people and you will see how Twitter handles start to fall off quite quickly in 140 characters.
Post something on a Facebook page for a client and how will I know unless you tell me?
Understanding how each of those you contact uses social networking and communication channels is becoming a must. Look at those in your office and close family. Do you know the best method for contacting each of them, according to their preferences, which will raise an instant response? If so, then you need to start applying similar knowledge to your wider address book.
For instance, don’t leave me a voice message or expect me to spot an email in the several thousand which arrive each day. Instead, a DM on any of the social networks will arrive as an SMS to my mobile phone. However, you will never know how I set up my personal devices to receive my personal communications, so you need to guess until you know. And then when you know, you need to target me in the most effective manner possible.
Here are some examples:
x: will only answer emails. Thinks SMS are the spawn of satan and will not answer. Ever. The smartphone lives in a box waiting to be sold as a heritage item, like an Atari.
y: loves Twitter. Always picks them up within moments, even at the dead of night. Other than that….
z: checks email weekly. Chooses 10-20 emails to answer only. Facebook, LinkedIn, and social bookmark sites such as delicious and Digg are monitored constantly.
Worrying? It should be if you are relying on email to reach your target audience. It is time to get personal and understand how your audience wishes to communicate. A good CRM mechanism is essential and a full appreciation of the cost of NOT reaching your audience with your messages will force you to look into these solutions.
What does your company use?
Gmail, with 175 million monthly users worldwide, is rolling out its new Priority Inbox service, and it is beginning to create certain levels of concern amongst email marketers. Many other email packages offer similar filtering options and some automatically and intelligently deal with spam, but Google has made the whole process more simple for all Gmail users.
Google, whose key skill has to be the acquisition and use of data to personalise a user’s experience, has already shown how a browser can become ‘intelligent’ when personalising the first page a user sees, with Chrome showing the top most visited sites on start up. Now, the priority inbox uses a smart algorithm to apply the same understanding of the psychology of user behaviour to help user’s spend less time in their inbox reading spam and irrelevant messages.
Potential time savings are already being touted at around 6% for the average user, which for anyone who spends around 13 hours a week reading emails, this can add up to the equivalent of a working week per year. However, what it also means is that users will read their priority mail first. For many email marketers, in particular those who have not developed relationships with the recipients of their marketing emails, applied active CRM to their email marketing, and those who do not encourage interactivity within that email (calls to action), this will push marketing mails into the second or third section of the inbox.
Whilst the time saving may free up the user to explore in depth the lower echelons of the inbox at leisure and be more willing to read the marketing mails, it may also give users the opportunity to identify more easily the mails which are filling up their inbox and which are never read and unsubscribe from all such marketing material.
For e-mail marketers, the time has come to seriously assess response rates and consider how to convert those who do respond, and how to engage more effectively with those who are within the 90-97% of recipients who currently do not read or respond. The use of best practice, plus multiple channels e.g social media marketing and mobile marketing, to pull in potential customers and encourage a response has to be a must now. Interesting times ahead!
Companies who have collected and analysed data over the years have often exhibited a considerable competitive edge; none more so than Google, who have taken data acquisition for advertising revenue to extremes – often at the expense of popularity with some who take exception to this level of data mining.
However, the quantity of data now available to companies (particularly with the response to the call for open data from government bodies) means that any company, large or small, can begin to build exciting and useful ‘maps’ of customer preferences and locations, (think of the information about you that a supermarket loyalty card generates) as well as create business tools, e.g. route maps for most efficient delivery routes based on when a customer will be available to sign for a parcel.
As we all know, possibly the most useful information your website can provide for your business is the statistics available from your analytics package. However, this wealth of information is often only given the most cursory attention, meaning that much that could be learned is ignored. Beyond your own data provided by your web analytics service, there are a number of sources making data available to all, including government departments – check http://www.data.gov.uk for an enormous range of data and new mash-ups of the data of interest to every British citizen as well as businesses.
For more on how data mining is changing our lives, this article in The Telegraph provides some very interesting new uses of data: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7963311/10-ways-data-is-changing-how-we-live.html
For many companies, interactivity is still an issue. We seem to be locked in a 20th century management world where customers should spend and not be heard. However, this denies the clear indications that many consumers now spend their time online before deciding where to spend their money. The decisions they make are not related to carefully crafted marketing messages, but to opinions from friends, family and even strangers.
For many companies, a website-based feedback form, a Facebook fan page or group, perhaps a Twitter account (often on broadcast only mode), or the age old glory of the automatic switchboard (press 1 to listen to…etc) are the limits of permitting customer interaction.
However, the Internet gives us a multitude of tools that allow consumers to not only share their opinions with the business but also with other customers. When used properly, this can allow you to ‘employ’ your own evangelists, to build consumer loyalty and your brand, as well as engaging with new social media marketing channels that previously were not available.
One of these is ipadio.com. Ipadio allows your customers to make a cheap (or even free) phone call, leave a message and then these messages can be left on your website as both audio files and text transcriptions. Better still, you can use it to run a live online radio show, permitting your customers or critics to phone in and be heard worldwide.
It is hard to stop thinking of new uses for this service and I hope ipadio enjoys a long and healthy lifespan as more companies realise the value of real-life, voiced testimonials, (and critiques) rather than fake, overpaid actors doing their dirty work on the TV. (Consumers really are not _that_ dim!)
Instead of undermining brand value with consumers watching ads asking constantly not just “Were they paid to say that?” but “HOW MUCH were they paid to say that?”, companies could be making the most of real consumers, offering real opinions, in their own voices, as per Points of View.
Recently I had a very interesting conversation with a non-web devotee about online shopping. When required to make a decision about who to buy printer inks from and overwhelmed at the choice of offers, instead of spending half an hour working out who offered the best value, the decision was made very simple by one site.
This site offered a free chocolate bar with every order. Whilst not over-interested in the Net or printer inks except when essential, the person in question is inordinately impressed by chocolate. Decision made and order placed!
Whilst many talk about offering free shipping, keeping your prices competitive and so on, perhaps there is something even more simple that you can do to win orders and differentiate yourself from your competition?! Do you have a famous local product that you could offer as a thank you for ordering from you? Could you offer a free chocolate bar with every order? Is there an affordable ‘extra’ that you could throw in that is compelling enough to make the purchase decision easy? Think laterally and see what you could persuade customers with…..
Customer acquisition carries a far higher cost than customer retention, so it is vital that you look after your customers once you have found them.
However, it is surprising how many businesses, particularly small business where the resources are often limited, fail to keep in touch with their customers.
There are multiple ways to do this, and it need not be expensive. Here are 5 quick and easy ways to make sure your customers remember you.
1. Have you sent all your existing and past customers a Christmas card yet? It needn’t be at the expense of trees – send a digital Xmas card. It’ll also give you a chance to clean up your e-mail distribution list for 2010.
2. Write a regular newsletter and email it out. When we say “regular”, it may only be monthly, every three months, or even annual, but make it regular so your customers expect it.And don’t forget to archive it on your site as extra content, and include links in your email so people visit your website. It could include news about new products, clients, exhibitions and shows you have attended, or discounts and special offers.
3. Add a blog to your site. This means that you will need to come up with regular content, but that needn’t be difficult. Pick a time schedule you can keep to, eg every Thursday or the first week of every month if you have limited time and resources.
4. Use the social networks and tools that are available. For instance, create a fan page on Facebook, use Twitter to inform your customers about sales or special offers, join Linkedin and add your news to your profile or discussion groups.
5. Send a present. It might just be a pen with your company logo on it, but every little reminder of you is good. Especially when the present is useful. (I love receiving dongles/memory sticks. And I often watch and read the content before deleting it
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I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true.
Recently, we wrote about phone call tracking. The point being that it gives very strong data about conversions from landing pages when the call to action is to ‘p.p.p.p.pick up the phone’.
Interestingly, this has now cropped up again as a subject for discussion on SearchEngineLand.
Let’s ask why consumers might call a number, rather than send an email or complete a form. The article above fails to address the issue from a consumer point of view, instead looking at all the reasons why the industry has ignored phone calls to date and why there is now a resurgence of the humble call.
As a consumer, how many times have you emailed an enquiry to a company and then not received a response? Not received a timely response? Or not received *any* response? Ditto with forms on websites. You complete the form, which is often far more lengthy than it need be, and you hit ’submit’. You get an error and are thrown back to the previous page, yet now all the fields are blank. UGH!
Having cursed all coders under the sun for that last primary school error, which are you most likely to do:
a) just return to a search engine and seek another company offering a similar deal?
b) start all over again completing the form and pray that this time it will actually be delivered and that there isn’t another bug in the system that has failed without informing you?
Now, let’s look at it a different way, but still from the consumer’s point of view.
You are looking for a particular item, to be delivered by the weekend, and the first website you fall over clearly has the item in stock (great landing page, BTW, it took you straight to what you were looking for!), they can deliver in 2-3 days guaranteed (force majeure excepted), and have the item at a price you are prepared to pay.
You have Skype or similar installed, and the only call to action on that page is “Call this number and order today”. No alternatives. Just call. No email address, no online web form, although there is obviously clear navigation to the rest of the site.
You click and the phone call is initiated. Within moments you are through to a lovely receptionist who, within literally moments, has taken down and double checked your address, your order and removed a reasonably substantial amount of your money from your account on your instructions.
Two days later, the item you wished for is on your doorstep and is precisely what you had anticipated.
Next time you try online shopping, having been more than happy with your last purchase, and less than happy with other companies’ failures to answer emails, respond to forms etc, will you be:
a) More confident using the phone to order
b) Less confident
Each time a company gets it right by having well-trained staff to answer the phones, a back-end system that confirms the product is in stock, processes the order, and ensures that is sent out to the customer’s spec, that customer will use the phone.
Any company who starts ensuring that their phone answering process is up to scratch, and PROMOTING THAT FACT publicly, will begin to win out as customers feel let down by technology and revert to the one thing that they can rely on – the goold old telephone.
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We all now that developing relationships with potential and present customers is the name of the game. To do so, we need to choose one of a wide range of tools for the job, and live chat is a fast-growing sector. This software will allow you to chat directly with your website visitors, solving any issues they may have, collecting feedback, monitoring visitor paths around your site, answering questions in real time, and much, much more.
Putting a telelphone number or email address on your site and expecting them to call or contact you is _so_ yesterday! Get interactive in real-time with your site visitors with live chat.
The obvious options for live chat can include Twitter and Skype, but there are also plenty of other choices.
Free and Open Source Live Chat software:
Crafty Syntax offers a comprehensive range of features and is well worth a look, particularly if you want to go beyond customer help and monitor paths through your website etc.
LiveZilla has an enormous number of features, and although reported to be sometimes difficult to set up, you can get help from helponchat (who will also offer operators for your own 24/7 chat if you are short on human resources to provide the service.)
Volusion free is a very simple version of livechat that is easy to implement, whilst the premium version offers all the functionality you would expect when paying for a live chat solution.
Tinychat is a simple solution with webcam support. It ties in neatly with many social networking tools and the video quality is reasonable. More useful for holding webinars than Live chat in our opinion.
Paid Live Chat solutions:
Website Alive prices start from $29.95/month for 2 operators and limited functionality, rising to $97.95/month for a fully functioned solution. No set up fees.
BoldChat has 3 options, with prices ranging from $29/month per operator to $99/month. The full featured version seems to be one of the most comprehensive available, including call load balancing, SalesForce integration etc. Possibly overkill for an SME, but great for large enterprises.
ProvideSupport has 3 options, ranging from $15-60/month. The fully featured version has some great options, such as allowing operator to operator chat (which will help deal with awkward customers or questions), as well as automatic emailing of transcripts.
LivePerson is one of the original chat solutions and has many enterprise clients. The features are many and varied and this is a 5 star solution worthy of consideration if you have the budget and resources to make the most of it.
If you are using live chat on your site, let us know which tool you are using, what your experience with it is, and how it has affected your sales and conversions.
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Seth Godin makes a relevant point in his Gotcha! blog post today.
As consumers we hate to be lied to, yet as marketers we are trained to hide the truth behind marketing spiel in order to gain a clickthrough, a conversion or a sale.
When marketing your products and services in this day and age, honesty helps. In fact, it is essential.
If you fail to mention a particular aspect of your product eg it won’t work in certain situations, or its size is cleverly concealed by “trick photography”, or any other issue that might affect the consumer’s purchase decision or use of your product, then you can guarantee that some dissatisfied customer somewhere will mention it.
Review sites, Twitter and forums are full of negative comments about products, companies, brands and so on. When trying to find the right product, consumers are becoming prosumers and increasingly looking to such sites to find reviews, customer comments, and complaints before making a decision on which product they will buy.
Many of these type of complaints can be handled by:
a) telling the truth about the product in the first place
b) dealing with the complaints as and when they occur and
c) rectifying the misapprehension of future customers by changing the description or photo of said product to be honest and accurate
A sale is not a good sale when that consumer ends up feeling misled. It is more likely to be the cause of many non-sales in the future if the customer then complains, whether online or offline, through word of mouse or word of mouth.
In a world full of lies, from politics to the corporate world, the media through to marketing, your every day punter needs to be told the truth. And you will win, long term, by telling it how it is.
Let your consumers be content with your content, and then they will be loyal, evangelical and return customers.
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