Sep 15, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Small business
Cold emails are usually no more welcome that a cold phone call. However, For small businesses, the emergence of email marketing has transformed the opportunities they have to communicate, but so many fail to do some pretty simple things before embarking on a campaigns, so screw it up, and often give it away as ineffective.
Email marketing has become subject of some very good automation software, integrated in highly sophisticated platforms like Salesforce, and the Adobe marketing cloud, but for SME’s without the financial and management resources to make the investments these require successful, there are still very good low cost packages, like Mailchimp, which at the basic level is free, Aweber, and others at about $30/month.
However, the key to success is not the software, it is how you use it, so some simple market tactics to use.
- Find a connection to the recipient. You have a much better chance of not just getting the email opened, but also read, if you can establish some meaningful connection with the recipient. A common former employer, people you know, interests you share, or some project type you may be working on. This takes some time and research, but the investment pays off. LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for uncovering these connections.
- Nail the email subject line. If you fail to do this, the email will not be opened and read. We are all too busy to open emails that do not immediately touch some chord. The challenges is to do this in a very few words that communicate the value the email will deliver, and why it was sent to you. The subject line is in effect the headline of your story, so make it compelling to the potential reader, or they just become at best, a passing browser.
- Keep the email short, simple, and with a clear call to action. The recipient must understand easily what the message is all about without having to interpret blocks of text. Remember that many of them will be opened on mobile devices, making the clarity even more important. At the end of reading it, which should be a very short time, there must be no doubt about what you want them to do with the information.
- Be respectful. If the recipient gives their time to read, and hopefully respond, that gift needs to be respected, and even if they do not immediately respond, following up too quickly, or too aggressively will rarely be appreciated. You are asking them for something, be respectful of their time and expertise, and the simple fact that it is you doing the asking, not them. Disrespect is about the quickest way to turn off somebody from responding I can think of short of being rude.
- Never be desperate. Desperation is not a pretty sight, and will sway most people away from responding. Desperate people have little to offer back to a time poor person with the power to say yea or nay to you.
- Never, never, never promise something you cannot deliver.
As a final catch all for email marketing success, it is essential that you have a list. This is one case where bigger is actually better, the more accurately segmented and targeted the better, and the greater the level of active “opt-in” by those on the list the better.
Like all marketing activities, the better you are at it, the more targeted to the message recipients interests, problems, and situation the activity, the better your results will be. See the email you are about to send as if it was you that had just received it, and be a harsh judge.
Sep 8, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Small business
www.strategyaudit.com.au
In 1968 a seminal Book called “Consumer behaviour” Engel, Blackwell & Kollat described the 5 steps in the marketing process that dominated marketing thinking for the next 45 years.
It is clear that they are still as valid now as they have been for all those years. It is just that the tools we now have to manage the process are at once way more sensitive, and way more complicated than they were.
The 5 steps are:
Problem recognition. Not much has changed here, although we are way more sophisticated at discovering when someone may be seeking a solution to a problem, and can step in and assist, but essentially, the recognition of a problem to be solved remains where it has always been, with the consumer. In B2B, the sophisticated sales approach has evolved to what Neil Rackham calls “situation questions” that lead to unearthing and defining a problem, or opportunity for improvement the buyer was not immediately aware of.
Information search. Here the world has been turned upside down by the search tools available to consumers. In addition, sellers now have the opportunity to recognise an information search, and try to engage in the process with the searcher to deliver valuable information, and perhaps progress the sales process in their favour.
Alternatives evaluation. Perhaps this stage is where the greatest changes have occurred. Pre-web, it was the sellers who had most relevant information, and they were in control of the timing, type, amount of information, and how it was given out to a prospect. Now, the power is with the consumer, and in most cases this 3rd process is well advanced before a potential supplier has any idea that the buyer is in the market. However, it is also here that the tools available have exploded, from personalising the web site delivery of information to rapidly evolving promotional and informational mobile apps, emerging geo location mobile promotions, product and service review websites, and more .
Purchase. Amazon and Ebay turned the retail experience on its head, aided more recently by the penetration of mobile. However, when you look at the numbers, the percentage of a consumer total purchases made on line is not more than about 5%, but the spread is uneven across categories, and there is all sorts of research that offers a different, nuanced view. Just ask your local bookstore of music retailer if you can find one. In addition, new ways to purchase have evolved. Apple for example built an entirely new purchase eco-system with iTunes, which in itself is now being disrupted by Spotify and other subscription models.
Post purchase. The notion of the purchase transaction being the end of the game is also over. Lifetime value of a customer is now a really important consideration, as is the consumers opportunity to express their views post purchase via social media. Businesses that ignore the value and opportunity of the post purchase period, indeed the opportunity of consumers to express views on virtually anything, will probably not live long enough to fully realise their mistake.
These 5 steps still “step out” (sorry) the process, it is just that the tools being used have changed radically. It does not matter if you are the corner store, or Walmart, the steps hold true in almost every consumers approach to a purchase more significant than a box of paperclips, sometimes even paperclips.
Human behaviour is too hard wired to evolve at the speed at which the tools have evolved, so the manner in which the tools are used fits with the established behaviour, and changes it over time, rather than radical changes in behaviour emerging as a result of the new tools. Even the most widely adopted tool set of social media is just automating existing behaviour patterns, enabling the existing behaviour to be more effective, rather than introducing new ones.
Sep 2, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Governance, retail
Last night Media Watch on the ABC did a piece on the “news report” done on one of the 6.30 current affairs programs on a commercial station. The “report” was a 15 minute advertising free expose on the sourcing of the fresh produce the retailer sells.
It was a prime example of so called “Native advertising”.
Native advertising is just a term dreamt up by marketers, aided and abetted by commercially desperate media owners to make excuses for polluting the so-called news with favorable commentary. In this case, the channel concerned had a share of the retailers very substantial advertising dollars way in excess of their audience market share, and the “report” was nothing less than a glowing tribute to the quality and freshness of the produce.
Smells like advertising to me.
The “news” already seems to have been so polluted by the populist lowest common denominator “cat up a tree” stories that seem to dominate alongside sensationalist claims about today’s brand of extremist, that why would a puff piece on how fresh a retailers produce is make a difference?
Simple answer, because it is nonsense.
The retailer concerned does do a good job, works hard to deliver produce as fresh as they can given the constraints of their mass market model, competitive pressures and profitability objectives, but to put as much lipstick on the pig as the report did is really going too far.
You can watch Media Watch’s (the segment starts at 8.45) commentary for a while on the ABC’s iView, but if you are still confused about the line between advertising and journalism, and the chance of our institutions and enterprises being held accountable by the media, have a look at this satirical video by John Oliver that presses the point.
We are pretty savvy consumers of media these days, question is, are we savvy enough?
Aug 28, 2014 | Customers, Governance, Leadership, Management, Small business
Small businesses make up the vast majority of business numbers, make a huge contribution to economic activity and health, but most do not last 5 years.
Over 20 years of observing small businesses as a contractor and consultant, I have seen a modest number of factors that the successful businesses, those that last the distance and deliver good financial returns over an extended period, set out to manage in a very deliberate way.
- Your time is the most valuable resource you have, and is non renewable, so outsource as much as you can to free up your time. It does not matter if you outsource to an employee, or to someone in the eastern bloc, it gives you back your time. Always ensure you retain control of the things that are at the core of your value proposition to customers, that is where your valuable time should be spent.
- Make yourself redundant. When the business runs without you, it is successful, You can then do what you want, but have the income stream coming in to allow you do what your want. The old cliché of working on your business rather than in your business is a cliché for a reason.
- Deliver value to customers first. Most business owners earn the most from their business the day they sell it, so do not become too emotionally involved with the idea of owning the business, be in love with what it can do for you by delivering value to customers.
- Find a niche and own it.
- Leverage the talents of others, there is always someone who can do something better than you, find them, and leverage those talents. On the flip side, do not allow low performers to persist, as it not only enables under performance in their role, but it sets a low bar for the others who can see that non performance is acceptable.
- Automate the day to day stuff as much as possible, and it is possible to automate almost everything these days. This requires time and effort up front to ensure there are robust and repeatable processes, but pays off in spades in very quick time.
- Always be curious, about what your customers are doing, and why, what your competitors are doing, why and how, and what is happening in domains outside yours that may be applicable to your domain in some way.
- Be generous. It pays off. Generosity engenders a feeling of obligation, and in this day of commodities and transparency, having someone feel they owe you a favour is very valuable.
- Have a plan, so at the very least, you know the point from which you have departed.
- Interrogate your business model routinely, as the pace of change is such that the optimum way of extracting value may not be the way your are doing it currently. The Business Model canvas is a great tool, and it is not so silly to keep drawn up on an A3 pinned to your wall to take post it notes with thought s as they occur to you, and others.
- Measure progress to wards objectives. Too many measures are as bad a too few, the challenge is to get the right measures, measuring the things that really measure progress, not just that something is done.
- Watch and manage the cash.
None of this is easy, or comfortable, but as I look around at successful SME’s, they are all employing at least 5 or 6 of these strategies. I would recommend that you do a relatively simple assessment of each parameter, measure yourself, and use that measure to identify areas to target for improvement. Simple spider graphs are very useful as a visual tool for recording progress.
Happy to have a yarn with you about how an outside resource may be able to assist the process.
Aug 26, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
The word recidivism is usually heard in the context of those convicted and punished, going on to re-offend. The objective is to reduce the rate, ideally to zero.
Not in the context of marketing and sales, where the objective is to raise the rate.
Think about your own processes, and sales and marketing funnels.
Most are messy, illogical, emotional pathways with all sorts of traps along the way, very few are the orderly, and sequential progressions that are usually reflected in consultant drawn funnels.
During the process, the objective is to bring as many of the wanderers from the path back into the funnel as possible, and help them to the end point, a transaction, or at least keep them in the funnel until such time as they are ready to progress.
The “recidivism rate” is an enormously valuable measure of the effectiveness of your sales and marketing processes, and can be applied at all points in the process, irrespective of the form of the process, from a simple spreadsheet to complicated CRM and lead generation software.
Would some help figuring this stuff out help?
If so, call me, now.
Aug 18, 2014 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
18 years ago running an ingredient supplier to the food industry as a contractor, I sponsored a project of quantifying a range of ingredient specifications against a matrix of organoleptic, and cost outcomes given a range of processing parameters.
Our objective was to be able to demonstrate on the spot to a customer the impact of apparently minor specification changes of the ingredient and/or processing conditions on the operational, taste and viscosity outcomes, and costs of the product. We did many hundreds of bench trials in the lab, carefully documenting progressive changes of all the parameters, their impact on the product outcomes, and recording them in a database that enabled us to call up the information at any time. This turned an ad hoc, iterative, time consuming, and inexact process requiring expensive lab time that had often taken months to complete, into one that could be done in front of the customer with a few mouse-clicks. Real time outcomes that we were confident could be replicated in a factory trial.
The impact on customers the first time they saw this capability was profound.
I was reminded of this project again recently talking to the manufacturer of extruded plastic components. His sales process involves extensive iteration on a 3-D cad/cam package following usually extensive design and problem definition discussions, and then still pretty expensive models that need to be validated before “cutting steel” for extrusion dies.
It seems to me that in the next very short time, all these processes would be able to be done in real time, in front of the customer with 3-D printed prototypes.
The intersection of sales and technology is ignored by many, for a host of reasons, but pretty clear when you think about it for just a moment. The scary part is that you no longer have to have the resources of a multinational at your fingertips, this stuff is available off the shelf at your local tech vendor, and if you are not doing it, the competitors you may not even know about probably can.
Writing this post, I also realised that we missed a really important parameter in the exercise 18 years ago, one that is the focus of my esteemed “e-mate” Howard Moscowitz‘s work. That missed parameter is what the consumer really thinks, rather than what the marketer with whom we were working thought they were thinking. This discrepancy has been made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s celebrated TED presentation reflecting on Howards work in the development of Spaghetti sauce.
This is a whole other area where sales, marketing and technology are increasingly intersecting
