Do Business Well

A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »

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Some businesses reach the size or position where a great deal of internal communication and contact are necessary. Hand in hand with the increase in necessary internal communication grows a plethora of less necessary and even superfluous communication. A business may reach a stage where the extent of internal communication and reporting has got out of hand.

1. Eliminate unnecessary internal communication and reporting

People could be asking for information for the sake of it. It may take five minutes to read a report but it may take the writer and secretary hours or even days of research to produce it. They are expensive people — don’t waste their time. Continue Reading »

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The best way to learn to write a report is to consider the circumstances under which it will be read. Whom are you writing to? Busy people have reams of written correspondence to wade through daily. They want access to the essence of the report at a glance and then quickly refer to specific points and relevant information in the report. So follow the next six stages.

1. Jot down your ideas

What are you writing about? Gather all fife necessary information and documentation, such as minutes of meetings, statistics and correspondence.

Ask colleagues to submit their own reports and data timeously so that you are not delayed when you want to start writing. Continue Reading »

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Write efficient memos

Want to get information up, down or across your organisation? Send a memo.

Memos are the ideal way to transmit your ideas and suggestions for approval, pin down decisions that were made orally, keep all the members of your team informed of developments or offer or seek instructions or advice. A memo is an efficient way to request help or co-operation from colleagues in another department. Management uses memos to introduce new procedures or policies throughout the organisation.

Most organisations have preprinted forms for memos. If you have none at hand, use a word processor to create a basic format and keep it on the word processor for duplication. Here are practical guidelines for efficient memo writing: Continue Reading »

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Have you ever postponed a pressing written communication — a letter, memo or report — until the very last moment? I have. Talk, which comes so effortlessly, is so much harder to commit to paper.

Even writing the briefest thank-you note is often a painful and time- consuming process. The result is that you keep postponing the arduous task.

Yet written communication, together with interpersonal and public communication, is an essential part of organisational life. Writing a report at the end of a project, drawing up a proposal tendering goods or services or writing an appraisal of a colleague’s work may be your most important task today. Continue Reading »

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As I write this at the beginning of the year, there are ten taxicabs in San Francisco that are painted bright purple and yellow and sport a big Yahoo! logo. Each has a computer onboard that offers customers wireless Internet access. For no extra charge you can browse the Web, check your email, trade stocks, order your groceries, look up directions to a restaurant or bar you’ll be patronizing that evening, and so on. Within a couple of years, every cab in San Francisco will have Internet access.

Otis Elevators recently announced that it would begin equipping elevators with Internet access. As passengers ride up and down to their offices, hotel rooms, or meetings, they will be able to read the latest news, check the stock market, or take a quick look at the web- site of the company they’re about to visit. Continue Reading »

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One of the most powerful ways to teach and communicate is through stories. And one of the best ways to engage your customers is to think of your communications as a narrative. Even the blandest material can be spiced up by giving it an engaging rhythm and making it familiar and involving. At the same time, even the most exciting information can be made boring by presenting it as a list of facts, without any personality or tension. Like a good storyteller, you have to consider how your story will engage your audience. Now I’m not proposing that you try to disguise your marketing and sales messages as gripping drama. Customers are too savvy for that and they’ll call your bluff. But you can still include a narrative thread to draw people in. An online health products retailer could, for example, includes a storyline in its email communication that features real people and the impact that health products have had on their lives. By following the lives of a cast of characters over an extended time period, readers become engaged in the story and follow it. The important thing to remember is that people like stories, remember them, and enjoy telling them to others. Continue Reading »

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We will now consider more specifically the benefits and drawbacks of ethics to online marketing:

Ethical benefits

• Online marketing has the potential to remove prejudice and barriers, as transactions are carried out via disembodied computer screens.

The lack of need for a physical presence in a particular place allows the inclusion of people whose physical needs make working in an office environment difficult.

Internet-based business activities are opening up markets, thereby improving information provision and freedom of speech about different products, including non-corporate information (see Hamelink 2000: 139-164). For example, typing ‘Nike’ into a search engine also finds sites about Nike products alleging human rights abuses by the company. Continue Reading »

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