Do Business Well

It is fantastic to have your own business, but the greatest thrill is to see your “baby” grow!

At last - you’re in business! But remember that even though you may have the best product or service, if it’s not properly promoted it will not succeed. Many entrepreneurs put marketing last on their list while it should be a priority; this is an important reason for business failures. But, there are various relatively inexpensive ways to promote your product or service. Let’s look at some examples. Continue Reading »

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Getting focused on outcomes is one thing. Figuring out which outcomes _are right is something else entirely. So how can you define the right outcomes? Of all the things your people could be doing, how can you know which are the few things they should be doing?

Well, as you would expect, we can’t offer you a step-by-step solution. First, it takes a certain talent to hear the siren song through the clamor. Second, even if you have this talent, this talent to focus, to discriminate, then you will undoubtedly have your own way of deploying it. What we can offer you are some deceptively simple guidelines from some of the world’s great managers. Continue Reading »

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Service organizations will grow up that will enable demand for ordering and delivery to be met continually. Production will be the only variable. Let me explain. There is a relatively finite amount of purchasing power in the world at any one time. There is also a finite amount of time to view and order products. This means that if there was only one shop to order from it would be relatively easy to build a process and an infrastructure that could cope with the total demand for dealing with orders, complaints, payments, deliveries and returns.

This is how postal delivery services work. They know how many homes there are and organize delivery men to deliver each day to a certain percentage based on the general level of demand. Most of the time there is sufficient slack built into the system to cope with demand blips. This may just mean the delivery people working a little faster or longer occasionally. Continue Reading »

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External Activity

<CROSS-CHANNEL CONTACT HISTORY (MAIL, TELEPHONE), PENDING SUPPORT ISSUE, FIRST AND LAST SUPPORT CALL AND EMAIL, SUPPORT LOG/EVENT HISTORY, PRODUCT RETURN HISTORY …>

Data generated from your direct mail, telemarketing, customer support, and product return operations can be a critical part of measuring true customer value, cost to serve, and cost of customer contact and conversion. Linking this type of external data with your email marketing system will enable you to spot—and avoid— potential problems. Imagine, for example, that a customer has sent you an email complaining about a product defect. If customer service doesn’t let marketing know about the problem, marketing might send the already-angry customer an email offering the latest add-on to the product he or she is complaining about. Continue Reading »

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Purchase History

<FIRST PURCHASE DATE, LAST PURCHASE DATE, PURCHASE FREQUENCY, PURCHASE VALUE (ACTUAL PURCHASES OR AVERAGE PURCHASE), PRODUCTS PURCHASED, PURCHASE DRIVER (WEBSITE “WALK-ON,” EMAIL RESPONSE, BANNER CLICK-THROUGH … )>

Because past purchases are among the leading predictors of future interest, you should use the information contained in the customer’s purchase history to determine the timing, offer, targeting, and personalization of your promotional communication. If, for example, you bought book from BarnesandNoble, you’ve probably been identified as someone who’s interested in high-tech business books, which means there’s a good chance you’d be interested in Geoffrey Moore’s Inside the Tornado. Continue Reading »

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As we look at the different sources of profile data, keep in mind that customer or member profiles are dynamic: they’ll evolve as your relationship with the customer deepens. Your goal is not to collect all of this information at one time. Asking a lot of questions on a first encounter can be very off-putting. Imagine walking into a store and having someone come up to you, introduce herself as an employee, and immediately ask for your phone number and how much money you make. You’d probably react quite negatively and you might even leave. Asking for personal information on your website is no different. Continue Reading »

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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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What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:

• Consumer requests contact. A customer might sign up to receive a personalized monthly newsletter or send an email asking about a new product you’re selling. When a new subscriber signs up for eHarlequin.com’s newsletter program, she immediately receives a welcome message confirming what she’s signed up for and ensuring that she will know how to modify her personal preferences if she should ever decide to change the content she wants to receive. When eBags receives an email inquiry from a customer, a skilled customer service professional looks up any relevant information and answers all My eBags membership, product, or order-related questions by email within 12 to 24 hours. An inbound email from a customer regarding an order the customer would like to return even triggers a series of follow-up emails that are automatically delivered within a few days of each other. These follow- up emails ensure that the customer’s product return is picked up, and that a replacement order is processed satisfactorily.

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Imagine that you’re walking down a city street when a complete stranger suddenly approaches you. He tells you he’s just been transferred to a new position in Atlanta and has to move that weekend and asks if you’d be willing to help him load some boxes onto a truck. If you help him, he says, he’s got a refrigerator full of cold beer that he’ll share. Would you help? Would the incentive be enough? What if he said that he and his wife had planned a trip to Paris that they can’t take because of the move and he’d be willing to give you a pair of airplane tickets?

On the other hand, what if you got a call from a friend who’s making the same move and needs your help? You’d probably do it for nothing. She might give you a bottle of your favorite wine to show her appreciation. It’s not really necessary, but it’s still a nice reward. Continue Reading »

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One of the unique characteristics of doing business online is the ability it gives you to measure and track the success of your marketing programs. Yet success, as we have seen, can be difficult to define. At the center is the continuous-feedback loop of tracking, measuring, seeking insight, and informing the program— a process based on both science and art. Science because we apply analytic techniques to the huge amounts of data and information in order to structure it and understand our customers‘ responses and behaviors. Art because lasting program success also depends on creative, out-of-the-box program design and interpretation inspired by the insight that we gather from the data. Continue Reading »

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