Do Business Well

Should your company build its own email marketing programs from scratch? Should you buy and install software products and hire and train your own email marketing staff? The answers may not be obvious. With the advent of a host of new Internet business models the real issue is whether or not you should outsource the entire operation to an email marketing service provider.

Traditional offline wisdom says that outsourcing happens late in an industry’s life cycle. But online, it’s just the opposite. Thanks to the Internet, there are a number of new models of technology and service outsourcing that can save your company time, resources, and money. Outsourcing critical business functions that are not part of your company’s core competence has become the accepted way to rapidly expand your infrastructure and gain access to best-of-breed technology and service. Continue Reading »

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A number of different providers can help you solve your email customer communications and marketing needs.

Email Marketing Service Providers

Over the past few years a new breed of company has grown up to meet the demand for complete solutions to companies‘ email marketing needs. Providers offer a wide variety of marketing services, technical capabilities, and focus. The services these companies (the three leading players are Post Communications, Message Media, and Digital Impact) provide range from customized email marketing programs and high-volume email delivery to one-off direct email campaign execution. Naturally, prices vary considerably. Most still charge based on the old direct marketing model of cost per email sent, while others have introduced new pricing models that are based on managing the customer database and optimizing the value of the client’s customer relationships. What they have in common is that they allow you to out- source all—or at least a large part—of your email marketing solution. Continue Reading »

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Yet today most companies organize their inbound and outbound functions separately. To avoid this, the engaged organization must organize all its marketing, customer service, and support functions into one department. This way, customers visiting the company’s website or receiving email see a single company and a single brand.

There are two primary reasons why it makes sense to combine customer service support and marketing into one department. First, organizing different functions under the same department lets you align their goals and measures of success. When the goal is to build and nurture lasting relationships by engaging customers in an ongoing dialogue, it makes intuitive sense that the inbound and outbound parts of that dialogue come from the same place. Continue Reading »

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Forget thinking about your role as a marketer as a day job. When your website is up, or you send out an email, customers expect you to be open for business. They expect to be able to tell you what they want and get a response right away. The engaged organization actively communicates with and responds to customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And real time is the only time. As the marketing function moves away from the onetime campaign focus of the past to the continuous communications focus of the Internet, the new marketer has to be able to demand real-time access to data, information, and results. To be successful, online companies are trying to support the new demands of 24-7 marketing—and the effects are rippling across entire organizations. Here’s what customers expect and the impact of these expectations on your engaged organization. Continue Reading »

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If you want your customers to have a consistent experience and develop a loyal relationship with your brand, you must clearly define your organization’s communications and relationship management responsibilities. Normally, marketing is responsible for managing an email direct marketing program, but it is not the only part of your organization that will engage with customers. Customer service, support, sales, and perhaps even e-commerce groups may also communicate with your customers independently.

To avoid any confusion, I propose that if your company is communicating with thousands, perhaps even millions, of customers, you put your marketing department in charge of managing and coordinating all customer communication, regardless of where it originates, and that the “relationship czar” discussed earlier be responsible for this initiative. Marketing’s role in the engaged organization is to ensure that your company’s email communication have a consistent voice, that they are focused on servicing the customer and effectively coordinated across all points of contact. To do this requires the following: Continue Reading »

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