How to connect? An interview with Mark, Ebony, & Mike!

I spoke to three engaging marketers on how they would connect with their customers. Mark was fondly called the direct mail king, Ebony is a social media diva, & most of us want to be like Mike.

Mark wants to start off right. You sign up for email, & he wants to make sure you get his first email right away. He offers personalization through surveys that are delivered via email. So in each communiqué he asks you a little bit at a time, building up rapport with you.

Ebony wants to chat with you, (all the time). She wants to know you better & get to know your friends. So she thrives on small talk and nice cute offers that you can forward on to your friends. Ebony has a show on BlogTalk Radio and encourages email marketers to engage their clients over live audio channels.

Mike wanted you to personalize without being creepy. His philosophy is to drive people towards providing their preferences and leveraging that information into the marketing mix. He doesn't want to use 'click' data to personalize as he feels that the consumer really hasn't offered that. Mike is able to overcome this by continuously asking for feedback. His one advice, don't treat your list like a bunch of numbers, there is a person behind each name.

Getting your recipients engaged is vital, else you are wasting time. The one advice that all three gave was to try and humanize your interactions. Do join them and other star marketers in our discussion later this afternoon on how to grab recipient mindshare.

Service in Action: Recipient Mindshare
Friday, October 30 2:00 ET/ 1:00 CT

Need the dial-in and webinar? Send us an email!

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How to grab your recipients mindshare?

Your consumers are constantly on the go, checking messages anytime, anywhere… factors that could limit your opportunity to truly reach the recipient. Relevance is key to connection, offering valuable information and customized offers will earn top-of-mind status and reduce some of the age-old questions of when to send and how often to mail.

People pay attention to email messages for a few reasons - they are looking for information from you, you find them at the right time, they trust you, & or your message is relevant to their interests. You have to leverage relevancy to make a connection! A little luck, and a little more than being at the right place at the right time.

We will be hosting a group of really smart marketers in a dialogue around best practices. Join the discussion, we will focus at some key ways to increase the relevancy of your campaigns. We have been hosting this call once a month since February 1997 - the best interaction amongst your peers!

Service in Action: Recipient Mindshare

Friday, October 30 2:00 ET/ 1:00 CT

Need the dial-in and webinar? Send us an email!

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Five steps to leverage 'Cause' into your marketing mix

Consumers pay attention to a 'cause.' With October being breast cancer awareness month we have been made aware of the cause and have been seeing a lot of effective marketing campaigns. People seem to pay more attention to a brand that is associated with a cause.

'Cause' marketing works effectively for consumables. It can help brand higher ticket items. Even on airlines, there is a concerted effort to think pink & sell pink .

Rather than the traditional feature, function, & benefit; it is now a focus on psychology, 'cause', & benefit to the 'cause.' The implication is that our product or service is good, here is a 'cause' that is very good, please use our product as well will 'contribute to the 'cause.'

Here are five ways to apply 'cause' marketing to your online marketing mix:

1. Design your branding to include the 'cause' standing out

2. Make the contribution clear - you are making them aware of the cause or that your company contributes to the cause

3. Highlight the impact that the consumer can make

4. Create one or a few campaigns to build 'cause' awareness, then make it a banner on your campaigns

5. Dedicate a landing page to carry forth your message.

Don't just do it to drive sales, be genuine and talk about your accomplishments.

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Old Man Meets Social Media

Okay, he is my grandfather & I can call him old.

'Nanaji' is 85 years old and to my chagrin has stopped subscribing to the newspaper. When we asked him why, he explained that he was tired of having to wait for the newspaper and even the 24 hour newschannel so he now has a schedule where he reads the news online thrice a day. Plus, he can always go online when he wants to. Additionally, he reads five different news magazines everyday. He loves joining discussion groups, not to share his opinion but to get peoples perspective on the news. He has stored our family pictures online, enjoys YouTube, & is constantly getting updates via the online world as to what the rest of his family is doing.

He is religious and worships his wife, God, & Google. Google, he says has taught him a lot about the web and he also loves his dialogue with Google. He leverages the search engine to find recipes, news, information on medicines, etc. He asks, Google answers! No waiting!

What he loves about an online article is that he doesn't have to find page B16 for the rest of the story. A simple click gets him there. He fills out his preferences and loves advertising that is targeted. He despises irrelevance and hates pop-ups.

All this from a man who would file and keep all the newspapers for months.

His quote on the value of social media - informational, entertaining, & giving him the ability to solve problems. A simple message for all of us, think about the value proposition. (If you have comments let him know, he will absolutely love them.)

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A Tale of Two People

I stayed at a very nice resort recently. My check-in experience was inspirational. The service in their lounge was impeccable. As I sat in the lobby they would always rush over to get me a drink or ask if I needed something. My plate in the restaurant would barely be empty when they would run up and offer me more. Of course, I was always searched like everyone else (security reasons) as I entered the property, sometimes a little too aggressively, most times with disdain or contempt. If I hung around the lobby I was always asked what I was doing there - once they knew who I was it always changed the way they treated me.

It was the best of service, it was the worst of service. It was almost like being two different people. The key challenge was getting them to recognize me, once they did it was fine.

Online gives us a great opportunity to recognize and reward the customer. You know their preferences and can anticipate their transactions. But what if you don't recognize them (they cleared their cache)? Shouldn't you anticipate such situations? You should always come up with unique back-up offers or ways to guide the customer into your site, so you could recognize who they are. You can do this by making sure that messages are refreshed (not a few months old) and that they make sense - that they are relevant to the customers transactional path.

Three simple things to consider - first put forth a sign on your site that says - 'tell us who you are so we can serve you better.' Second, do offer something of value to the 'identified consumer.' Third - be genuine about treating them better - genuine service goes a long way.

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Three Important Facets of Twitter

Here are three useful articles on how to leverage twitter to enhance your communcation strategy.

First, keep in mind that you need to consider the three personalities for twitter - the concept of a master, the proponents, and customer service. Done right, each personality actually supports the other driving interaction amongst themselves and if done correctly engages followers effectively.

http://www.emailyogi.com/2009/05/twitter-twitter-everywhere.html

Email & Twitter are an effective combination. There are a few who have excelled and it is still a great way to keep communication channels open. Again, the engagement is through relevant content tweeted in a timely fashion.

http://www.emailyogi.com/2009/03/email-twitter.html

The greatest power of Twitter (in my humble opinion) is the ability to facilitate real time updates across two channels - web & mobile. As a reminder, I actually turned off the news (yes CNN included) and was following events on Twitter. What was covered in Mumbai was amazing - to me it really showed the potential Twitter brings to the table.

http://www.emailyogi.com/2008/11/power-of-twitter.html

I am sure the channel will continue to evolve and we will continue to find connections both into our real & virtual world. Would love to hear your thoughts - do tweet to EmailYogi.

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Avoiding Fraud: How not to get Kabooshed!

Simply said, Kabooshed is something I coined a while back to talk about systematic fraud. This is how it works –

Things start with a value exchange – you sign up for email from a company because they are giving you something
The first two to three transactions are all about service and building up trust
Then as you transact, there is a strong bonding program where you are receiving transactional messages
You soon start getting partner offers – this is affiliate marketing at its best
You may even get an elaborate survey with feedback – they learn more about you and get you to trust them even more
You can start having cross channel conversations, a postcard could drive an email message
Then you get hit – first a little skimming, before your card / account gets taken to the cleaners.

If you look at everything listed above – those are perfect steps taken by any good email marketer. This is really the mantra to engagement. So what can an email marketer do differently.

Here are three suggestions –

First, emphasize the security factor – remind your customers who you are and what your company stands for. Tell them what you send and what information you ask for. Make sure your email is indeed secure.

Second, train your front line and your sites about fraud and how to respond to it.

Third, create a strong bond with your customers – ‘a first responders club’ so they can quickly make you aware of offers that might not be yours.

Those scam emails keep getting better and better – but this is your channel and you have to take the lead to control it.

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Go Fetch! How to find out more so you can serve them better!

My good friend Jeff Greene spoke to a group of financial institutions earlier this week about thinking and acting differently to boost their businesses. Here are some of the things he highlighted that I think we can apply to our own businesses.

Jeff's methodology to engage the consumer in a dialogue was to take ownership of prefered information gateways (the channels the consumer wants to use) and to cultivate trust. Trust isn't just about the security of the transaction or even your institution. Trust is also about making sure that you are listening on each of the channels you use to communicate. His whole notion is about empowering reverse exchanges - where the consumer was in control of both the information they provide and the channel they used to communicate with you.

Here were some other points of interest -

Most FI's work very hard to take care of 1:1 interactions with the 12% of people that visit their branches. (Look at the opportunity that exists on how you can communicate with the others!)

Eliminate anxiety by removing asterics or as Jeff called them 'Yikes' buttons.

Investors will not trust Avatars, leverage the information to have real people contact the consumer.

38% of consumers don't trust their financial institution, so if you don't follow up quickly it looks worse.

Discover people's passions - ask them about what they aspire to be and leverage that information into your dialogue with them. Ask people about issues with a purpose, i.e. lead them so you know how to serve them better. Most people tell you exactly what they are looking for, now all you have to do is to serve them.

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How to Accelerate Insight

Organizations from across the globe have descended in DC to engage in an active conversation on how to Accelerate Insight. Teradata Partners is an annual event that brings together people in a discussion around data and how best to leverage it into actionable information. Some of the more interesting workshops this year that appealed to me are as follows:

Using consumers as the information point, this focus by John McKean is about how one can leverage information within our organizations to talk to the knowledge empowered consumer. It is not like the consumer is looking for information - they already know, they are now there to evaluate you. His session offers practical ideas on how you can rethink making offers to the empowered consumer.

Suresh Vittal from Forrester talks about looking at your customer across multiple channels rather than looking at data in different silos. Now granted this increases the amount of data that you have at your fingertips, but what if you were to focus quickly on recency? A good friend of mine owns a restaurant and he always remembers the last dish you ordered. That recognition makes his customers feel awesome and they allow him to order for them. Suresh offers valuable insight about how to look at your results.

Then there is the session by Volvo. Did you know that 15000 Volvo cars send back data to servers each night? This data is then used to evaluate performance, and create predictive models about the future. Their goal is to be accident free in 2020. That is one smart car!

These sessions are only some of the many at this event that all strive to provide the organization with valuable information to use in their interactions with the consumer. As marketers, and with everything that we do with Social Media - we need to anticipate and be ready to create interactions with the empowered real time consumer. Email & Social Media can talk, but knowing what to talk about certainly helps.

You can follow my friends at Teradata on Twitter at PartnersUserGrp. Make the most of your data!!

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Celebrating New Year (Already)

Consumers & businesses are rejoicing the festive occasions of Diwali in India. Diwali, the festival of lights brings on the Hindu new year which is celebrated with prayer, sparkle, and festivity by over a billion people across the globe. Being in India a couple of weeks ago gave me an opportunity join in some of the preparation and participate in some of the festivities.
Here are some very interesting email campaigns.

A 103 year old financial institution was one of the first to wish its customers. They sent out an email greeting on the eve of Diwali. Customers were invited to any branch office to come join the bank for both prayer and celebration. A major retailer offered to take pictures of you in the apparel you tried and even offered you tasty delicacies in their stores. Airlines were quick to follow with messages at the speed of light - super deals if you book now.

A few banks focused on practicality by offering something very creative. They actually encouraged their customers to print out the email and bring it in to purchase gold bars! Yes, authentic gold bars as they are considered to be a better investment than jewelry, gifts, or even holding on to cash. Imagine the ROI on your email campaign - one email leading to the sale of a few gold bars!!

More people sent greeting cards through email and mobile messages than ever before. The power of digital has been tremendous. The economy has experienced double digit growth as a build up to this season and the next month promises to be even better. Even Bollywood joined the celebration like no other. To me it almost seemed like a coordinated effort to boost consumer spending!

Happy Diwali to all, as businesses across the world hope that this upsurge in consumer spending will translate into more consumer spending across the globe.

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Celebrating Diwali

Consumers & businesses are rejoicing the festive occasions of Diwali in India. Diwali, the festival of lights brings on the Hindu new year which is celebrated with prayer, sparkle, and festivity by over a billion people across the globe. Being in India a couple of weeks ago gave me an opportunity join in some of the preparation and participate in some of the festivities.

Here are some very interesting email campaigns.

A 103 year old financial institution was one of the first to wish its customers. They sent out an email greeting on the eve of Diwali. Customers were invited to any branch office to come join the bank for both prayer and celebration. A major retailer offered to take pictures of you in the apparel you tried and even offered you tasty delicacies in their stores. Airlines were quick to follow with messages at the speed of light - super deals if you book now.

A few banks focused on practicality by offering something very creative. They actually encouraged their customers to print out the email and bring it in to purchase gold bars! Yes, authentic gold bars as they are considered to be a better investment than jewelry, gifts, or even holding on to cash. Imagine the ROI on your email campaign - one email leading to the sale of a few gold bars!!

More people sent greeting cards through email and mobile messages than ever before. The power of digital has been tremendous. The economy has experienced double digit growth as a build up to this season and the next month promises to be even better. Even Bollywood joined the celebration like no other.

Happy Diwali to all, as businesses across the world hope that this upsurge in consumer spending will translate into more consumer spending across the globe.

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No Money, No Problem!

I just returned from a business trip to India. I landed in Mumbai on October 2nd, a Friday and accidentally locked my ATM card up by re-trying the wrong pin over and over again. October 2nd was a bank holiday in India (Mahatma Gandhi's birthday). Cashless, and concerned I went online to my Indian banks web site and filled out a 'desperate request' for cash.

Within 15 minutes a branch manager called me up, empathized with me about my situation, and came to my hotel room an hour later with some money. This man made a personal loan to me from his own bank account. I felt like absolute royalty and ended up repaying the manager on Saturday morning.

'Rajeev' the bank manager has been promoting his online & mobile banking sites to his customers. Since he has a personal stake in good service, he gets alerted anytime a request for service is filled out for his branch online. He monitors this and the email requests that he gets. When he got my request, he simply saw my account, confirmed that I was good for the money, & then made a personal decision to help me out.

He said he does this to show his customers that online is effective and there are people who are paying attention to what is happening and not just providing lip service. I was merely expecting a note from the bank that would have said they understand my situation, but since it was a bank holiday my issue would be resolved the next business day.

Incredible service! And yes a very good lesson for marketers - monitor your feedback, it will drive the success of your marketing programs.

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How I sold my home in ONE day!

Not too long ago, I put my house upon the market. I wanted to move to a different school district and closer to the rest of my family. Rather than go through the standard call a bunch of realtors for an interview and see what they could do to sell my home, I decided to leverage the internet to create demand.

I took a lot of pictures and created online curb appeal. The blog was full of information, as was Flickr, and also a few good You Tube clips that showed the house – inside & outside, the neighborhood, useful stores, and the close by schools. I had pictures across seasons as well as lots of information that I felt would be beneficial to a prospective buyer.

Next I started advertising my home to real estate agents. I called and emailed a group of them and as I spoke to each one I followed up with an email giving them a preview into my online repository – I didn’t publish all of my pictures yet. I told them some of the story leaving room for intrigue and my final launch. I ended up having many agents visit and propose taking my business. They also gave me a number of ideas that I kept implementing. I was successful in creating a buzz in the real estate community having many of them pre-selling my home.

I finally chose one, put the home on the market, and they brought someone home that evening. The visiting couple made an offer – the deal was done. So what are the lessons for an email marketer?

Grow your list, but grow it correctly – my target market included select real estate professional and not just randomly growing my list. If you run contests ask questions before you add people else your list will remain non-responsive.

Send the first message immediately – right after each conversation, I was able to send a message to the real estate agent. I was still relevant and they were anticipating my message.

Leverage user generated content – I used real pictures, you should do the same – ask your customers to provide you with images of how they have used your products / services. This is good / real content that is appreciated.

Create intrigue & excitement – I was building my list and giving previews to what was about to come. You should use bonding programs to build up towards the big announcement.

Set a deadline – I had promised the agents that I would be making the announcement on a particular date. That helped and I also know that many of the agents were also telling their customers about a home that was about to come on the market.

Email marketing is about creating interactive conversations. Do it right, and you can yield good results.

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When Your Channels Don't Talk (to each other)!!

It was just past 5.00 pm, my mailbox received a tempting invite from a pizza place - $7.99 large inlcudes one free topping - pick up only! The image was phenomenal - it inspired me to order one. The price was pretty good too. I called the store, placed the order and drove by on the way home. I was really impressed by the timing of the email too.

As I drove into the parking lot, I saw a huge bill board advertising the same large pizza with three toppings for $6.99. The store called it their Monday special. I asked to speak to the store manager and was not too surprised to learn that he had no idea about what corporate marketing was doing to promote his store. It took a few clicks and of course, I did get the cheaper pizza, also, they had to bake me a new one as the one with one topping had to be tossed.

A few lessons for email marketers - first, make sure that your stores are on the email distribution list, second - make sure they pay attention to your campaigns, three - try to coordinate your specials to coincide with store events, four - why not consider an upsell for the follow up to go to the consumers in-box, & five - why not use the store sign to get people to sign up for email specials!

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How to attract customers, engage them & keep them coming back

I am really enjoying a new hobby of backyard birding and have learned a lot over the past few months about how to attract and keep birds coming back to my yard. I got a few feeders, a couple of bird baths, and some really good bird seed to get things started.

It took a few days for the first bird to find one of the feeders. Within a few hours, many more birds showed up, and it has been fascinating as the birds start eating and chirping from dawn until dusk. I even learned a couple of good lessons – make sure the location of the bird bath feels safe for the birds & keep the feeders full, else birds stop showing up. You have to retrain them to find the food. My yard now is full of Goldfinches, Cardinals, Titmice, Mourning Doves, & the very friendly Chickadees. My next goal is to get the Chickadees to eat out of my hands.

I got this started by luring them, engaging them with food and water, and of course getting them to come back (retaining them) by making sure that the bird bath was full and clean & I had enough seed to feed the birds. I even started mixing seeds to only to learn that it keeps the birds really interested and flying from feeder to feeder.

Marketing is about the very same principles – you have to attract / lure your prospect. You have to keep them engaged to make them a customer, and you have to learn how to bring them back. It doesn’t matter if you are working with email, direct mail, or even social media. The very same thing applies – lure – engage – retain – the magic mantra for your success.

Have a little reminder at your desk - attract - engage - retain. Look at every campaign and make sure you are thinking about all three elements in your marketing campaigns.

If you would like to join the Backyard Birder group, it is on LinkedIn.

You can also become a fan of another backyard birding club on Facebook.

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Why do people transact with you?

As we prepare our campaigns and plan our communiques with our lists here is a quick recap of why people transact – bank / make purchases. Broadly speaking people purchase / transact because –

1. They need it,
2. They find it of value,
3. It is something aspirational.

If you walked into a grocery store to pick up milk, eggs, & cereal for breakfast – you are satisfying a need. As you walk through the store you may see beer or soda on sale so you decide not to pass up on the good deal (value). As you are walking out of the store you eye that water fountain – it looks wonderful and sounds so serene & soothing – you think about purchasing it sometime soon – now that is aspirational.

A checking and saving account is a need, so is a credit card. Opening a six month CD for 3.25% interest would be something of value today, planning a purchase to redo your kitchen is something aspirational.

Three basic shirts from your clothing cataloger might be a need. Picking up two more to waive the shipping might be of value. Getting the shirts monogrammed or switching to French cuffs with cufflinks might be aspirational.

The key here is that the consumer gives us these opportunities to try and connect to them. As marketers we need to watch and plan for these connections. Your email strategy should take advantage of the need to showcase value, ultimately up-selling you on something aspirational.

If there are campaigns that you have liked feel free to share them with us at sundeep.kapur@gmail.com – I will post them for others as well.

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How to measure the success of your email program?

While there are many formulas around ROI per campaign, ROI on the program, reduction in direct mailing costs, speed to launch to market, or even consumer engagement (I am sure there are few dozen more) – the best way to gauge the success of your own program is through some introspective questioning.

As we talk to different marketers from the Panel of Peers – here are five measures that a lot of people agree on –

Cheap
Quick
Track
Personalize
Multi-channel

1 – Cheaper than paper – your company does email because direct mail costs are higher and email helps subsidize those costs.
2 – Quick way to communicate – it is a very fast way to get your campaigns out of your door into the prospects inbox.
3 – Track effectiveness of campaigns – you are concerned about measuring success of your other channel campaigns, so you are interested in seeing what is really working effectively.
4 – Personalize your messaging – you want to track what people are doing, place them in segments, and personalize each message uniquely (or strive to) towards recipients.
5 – Ability to leverage information across channels – you are using email as a means to build preference repositories and create a two way dialogue with recipients across channel.

Assign yourself a number for each one of the bullets above – most marketers have moved from two to three and some are beginning to reach stage four. There are a few companies that are in stage five.

Usually, the higher your number; the higher the level of your sophistication.

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Email Absolutes from 1997 – Are they still important today?

Our first event brought together 22 companies to talk about email best practices. The agenda that is listed below is something we all agreed were issues that were critical to the industry then.
1st Annual Panel of Peers
“Meetings of peers to share ideas, exchanges experiences, and create a powerful learning network through round table discussion.”

1 - Managing your customer relations across all channels

Being one face to the customer across all channels
The ability to recognize and reward your customer appropriately

2 - Using the Internet to drive business to your other channels

What is the best way to promote various aspects of your business?
Effective means of 'intimate customer communication.'
One to one marketing

3 - Growing your e-mail list effectively

Should you buy a list?
How can you leverage other channels to grow your list?
How do you personalize your communications?

The three themes that were huge then are still big today – first, do you recognize your customer or prospect as they approach you across channels, second and very important – are you really using the internet to push people to other channels as well – using email as the facilitator channel, & three how to keep your list big and responsive.

Two other points here – first we never spoke about deliverability issues and then the rest of the story.

Five of the 22 participants are Presidents of their companies today – a simple message that if you do this correctly, you can run the show. Do join our group on Linked In and also stay in touch with us through our monthly calls, the Panel of Peers is a grassroots organization we learn from each other and we would be delighted to have you.

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How to learn more about email marketing?

When email marketing was still in its infancy a few of us were looking for the best way to learn more about the industry and understand how to apply these best practices to our own marketing campaigns. We looked up a few major email marketing & direct marketing events and decided to interview the people who were going to be conducting these workshops.

What we learned was that the ‘teachers’ were really still ‘learning’ and that these best practices that were going to be shared were a combination of what we were already doing or what we wanted to do ourselves. So rather than subject ourselves through the travel, the exorbitant fees, and the ‘pitch’ we decided to meet and discuss best practices in a round table discussion.

In 1997, 22 companies across different industries and parts of the world decided to meet in a rather large living room and we brainstormed for two and half days. We shared our vision, our challenges, our opportunities, and tried to put together use cases to help us achieve our end state. We decided to share these ideas with each other and even though some of us competed, we decided that we would collude on our learning. The learning was absolutely electric and this is how the Panel of Peers community (http://www.panelofpeers.com/) was formed.

We liked this format so much that we decided to meet by phone every month, one hour every month to share in our learning and focus on a topic that we had picked. The calls usually ran over and it gave these marketers a great way to communicate with each other. Anne Holland from then President of Marketing Sherpa actually interviewed us about these calls – we called them Service in Action (http://www.serviceinaction.com/) – event based marketing at its best. Our goal here was simple, keep tabs of what is current in the industry and connect to discuss how we can do it better.

Both the Panel of Peers & Service in Action have evolved into large groups but the vision is still the same – learn about email, learn about consumers, and always anticipate what is next. We still meet annually, plus through regional workshops, the calls are on each month, & yes there is the blog that supports this learning network.

Come tap into this network, there are no sales pitches, just natural conversations on best practices amongst peers. Tomorrow, we will share the agenda from the first panel of peers – you will be surprised what was hot in 1997.

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Online Marketing as an Interactive Conversation

I met Jerry Rouleau & Scott Stroud who are key stakeholders with BuilderRadio.com at a conference for builders. We spoke about marketing best practices and ideal ways for the busy builder to stay in touch with those they served. Really, marketing hasn’t changed much – it has always been an interactive exercise: message, call to action, response. What has changed is the method of interaction – online becoming dramatically significant.

We spoke briefly about the seven primary channels of online communication and how they can impact your day to day and long term marketing efforts. Here are some short snippets.

Blogs – Create a blog with the goal of making it easy to put up pictures and text that will both engage people and get you the advantages of natural search.

Twitter – Leverage twitter for announcements, best practices, & customer service. Best of all use it to merge both online and mobile.

Online Personas – These give you an opportunity to connect with the recipient where they like to hang out – Linked In & Facebook are two examples of personas.

Community – This is a hangout for members where they can find answers to questions, and be able to ask questions to experts.

Pictures & Video – The power of image works really well – people can see things for themselves. With technology being relatively cheaper it is easier to post FAQ’s as images for people to understand better.

Email – This is the connection channel. Powered with all the other channels this gives you the ability to communicate with the customer effectively.

There is really very little difference between how a builder markets to his flock versus how other marketers do. Keep this in mind, marketing is about creating conversations with people you serve. The entire article plus podcast is available at BuilderRadio.com

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How to 'Listen-React-Reflect-Act' Proactively (Effectively)

I visited a travel agency once where the CSR's (customer service representatives) were busy tabulating surveys that were filled out by customers who had taken a trip. It seemed really impressive - most customers filled out the survey that they mailed.

A clothing retailer encouraged their customers to fill out a survey and mail it back to them. Miss Edna at the switchboard would diligently capture their responses during her lunch hour and turn them in to Mr. Steve. Once a month, Mr. Steve would take the people who were upset and send them a personal letter.

A rental car company used to perform a phone survey - the reps usually called from India and the Philipines. If you were not satisified they would escalate the issue to their elite service desk in the US.

Many financial institutions conduct an annual survey to measure the satisfaction level of their members and customers. People who are not happy are contacted immediately.

The travel agency shut down, the retailer filed for chapter 11, & the rental car company got acquired. Many FI's are taking a hard look at the value of the annual survey - it asks the right questions, but all at the wrong time.

In all four instances - people want to be heard when they are upset. If the company had responded in real time and even given the consumer to vent in real time - each company would have identified potential issues that could be addressed for other customers.

Unfortunately, most people conduct surveys as one of or single channel surveys. There is also no real plan to follow up. And it is rare to see the concept of a proactive survey.

Email & surveys empower us to listen in real time, so we can react to the needs of the consumer while they are upset. Mr. Steve wanted the customer to cool off before he contacted them. We should also be looking at the survey responses not as individual surveys but across time so we can reflect on what might be a bigger issue. The other thing to do is to keep encouraging innovation amongst your team by proactively reaching out to your customers or members to engage them for feedback.

This really comes down to integrating your surveys into your preferences and incorporating the concept of a rolling survey in all your campaigns. Also, survey responses (specially when bad) should be routed in real time to real people so they can be addressed.

Do read Friday's post as well - it is about serving customers well.

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Mahatma Gandhi & Marketing

October 2nd is a holiday in India to honor the life of Mahatma Gandhi, he was born in 1869. 'Maha'-'Atma' or Great Soul - the man made great contributions not only in India but to mankind as a whole.

For a man who was able to galvanize an entire nation and then the world, Mahatma Gandhi was probably one of the greatest users of creating good buzz around viral marketing. Imagine the early 1900's - how this man spread his 'good word' amongst people was absolutely incredible.

His branding was phenomenal, and so much power in it that Mont Blanc has launched the 'Mahatma Gandhi Limited Edition Writing Instruments' worldwide.

One contribution very few people talk about in business is Gandhi's credo on the value of a customer.

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so."

The important thing to do for marketers is to build use cases around customer scenarios and work to fulfill those scenarios. Having a customer satisfaction program doesn't mean anything if you are going to reflect and react. Consumer concerns can be addressed in near real time, in fact the ideal way to do this is to practise the art of listen-react-reflect-act. And if you do act, do so 'pro'actively. I will offer some specific ideas on Monday.

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Why do you use the web?

Last week I tracked why I turned on the computer to surf the web during my free time and these are the top reasons I got on:

Look at news,
Look at email messages from family, & ‘friends,’
Look up homework assignments & grades of kids, Find directions & weather,
How to fix things in my garage,
Look up information on medications, &
Look for deals on a new home entertainment system

I felt empowered as I had the opportunity to seek things quickly and I paid attention to what was clearly presented. As a consumer I wanted to be in control, I appreciated information that was well laid out, and absolutely loved the ability to find testimonials / ideas on how other people have leveraged the information that I was seeking.

As email marketers, we need to focus in on the same simple steps:
Grab the recipients attention
Lay information out clearly,
Include the ability to search for things,
Leverage user generated content,
Provide the recipient the ability to give feedback on what they want, i.e. control.

I realize that our marketing calendar and needs force us to keep the consumer engaged at all times with deals and specials – we can still do all of that, however remember if you let the consumer feel empowered – they will be more participative.

An empowered recipient is a happy consumer, and more likely to work with you as you create interactive conversations with them.

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