Do Business Well

If they say they will mail it right out, mark the date that you both agree it should reach you on their file. Keep a record of each phone call by time, date, contact person, and details of discussion. Also keep a copy of all correspondence in the file.

B. Responses to wrong answers. Many times you will be told that they did not receive your copy by mail. Immediately send out a copy of the letter and invoice by certified mail, return receipt requested. If the amount is large enough or important enough you may want to use an overnight service. The key is to use a system that requires a signature. This will quickly eliminate this excuse. Follow up again with a phone call on the day you figure the item has arrived to confirm with your contact that they now have the invoice copy. Continue Reading »

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Finish the application with a requirement that the president or majority owner sign and date the document, acknowledging that the above is true to the best of their knowledge under penalty of perjury.

B. Call the references. It is so common for companies to go to the trouble to compile this application and then not make any calls.

When you call, have a prepared form ready to fill in the information that you receive a credit limit. It is a very good idea to send them a letter congratulating them on being granted open account status and informing them of their credit limit. You may want to suggest that if their account is paid promptly, you will be happy to evaluate the situation later for possible increases in the credit line. Continue Reading »

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Types of Media

1. Direct mail. Direct mail can be very effective, though you’ll be fighting hard for attention in a medium that is saturated with highly sophisticated competition. What follows are some general rules for reaching a list of known customers, whether business to business or consumer:

A. Start with the envelope. Print something intriguing on the outside that will make your target curious about the contents. One mass mailer who sends our company at least two or three mailings per week puts “personal and confidential” on the envelope. It’s amazing, but folks are actually more likely to open that envelope first. Continue Reading »

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Web site display advertising: You can place an interactive display ad on one of the popular Web sites. For example, you can place an advertisement on the Yahoo search engine. When people access Yahoo, they see your ad. If they want to see your site, they simply click on the ad. The cost of running a Web ad can range from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands. It all depends on the amount of traffic generated by the host site. As I’ve contended a few times, I believe this kind of online advertising should be billed based solely on results. In this case, you should only pay for the number of visits you receive from the host site. If you don’t get any visits, you pay nothing; if you get thousands of visits, you pay more. If you can, negotiate this kind of results-only program.

Web site links and pointers: To generate traffic on your Web site, you want people to discover your existence on other sites. For example, if you have a site about fishing supplies, you want to be listed on all major sites frequented by anglers. Continue Reading »

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Data security and encryption: Data security is one of the central issues of digital marketing. Because the Internet is a public highway, the information which travels through it can be picked up and read by anyone who has the knowledge and capability to do so. If security measures have not been taken to scramble the data, or code it, the information is totally unsecured. In many cases, people don’t care about data security. When you send an e-mail message to a friend, you usually don’t care if someone intercepts it. It’s no different than someone at the post office opening up your letter, or someone listening to your conversation on a cellular telephone scanner. You take that risk. But when you want to send a confidential e-mail to someone in your company, or give someone your credit card number on the Internet, it’s a different matter. You want to send a secret message which only the recipient can unravel and read. That’s where data encryption comes in. Continue Reading »

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There are dozens of methods of contacting prospects. The following are the most popular methods:

Over the phone

The quickest and most cost-effective way to get around is by phone. Although this has a down-side — you can’t see the customer, his face or his expressions — the phone should be used to obtain interviews where you can sell the opportunity.

Just bear in mind that a telephone call can be unwelcome. You are intruding on the prospect’s time. So make what you have to say short, relevant and of interest to the prospect. Your phone call must, within seconds, convey a benefit which will be of interest to that prospect.

Do not try to explain networking over the telephone. This rarely works. You want a face-to-face interview lasting just 10 minutes with the prospect to drop off material. If you can obtain that, and the prospect is interested, you can be sure that your appointment will last considerably longer. Continue Reading »

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A further challenge suggested by the Forrester research is achieving the delicate balance between frequency of campaigns and response. Finding the right touch strategy is important to maximize the value from an e-mail list while at the same time not annoying customers or losing response owing to too high a volume of e-mail.

Consider the example where a retailer is broadcasting a fortnightly e-mail and finds that, through running a test, increasing the frequency to weekly also increases sales. It then rolls out at this frequency to the entire list, but over time the negative impact is felt with decreased sales, increased unsubscribes and a negative perception from list members. What approaches can be used to resolve this dilemma? Here are some suggestions: Continue Reading »

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An appreciation of lifetime value (LTV) is key to the theory and practice of marketing and customer relationship management. However, while the term is often used loosely, calculation of LTV is not straightforward, so many organizations do not in fact do it. Lifetime value is defined as the total net benefit that a customer or group of customers will provide a company over their total relationship with that company. Modelling is based on estimating the income and costs associated with each customer over a period of time and then calculating the net present value in current monetary terms using a discount rate value applied over the period.

There are different degrees of sophistication in calculating LTV. Option 1 is a practical way or approximate proxy for future LTV, but the true LTV is the future value of the customer at an individual level. Continue Reading »

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Spammers work hard to understand why their messages are not read and find methods to avoid being blocked. Here, legitimate e-mail marketers are much like the spammer, since they and their suppliers also need to understand what is stopping their messages getting through and identify solutions to this. There are four general points where spam or legitimate permission-based e-mail is identified, and which can stop e-mail being read by the recipient:

1. Inbox identification by the user. The simplest way that spam is identified is by the recipient; if it looks like spam from the header, it will be quickly removed using the delete button. Alternatively, recipients can report spam to their anti-spam software and, if enough people do this, there is the danger that may be added to a blacklist. Continue Reading »

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1. Applications. These are various types of productivity software that run on higher-end mobile phones which run the Symbian operating system or Windows CE. They can be used in a business-to-business environment for inventory and order tracking, as well as time management.
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Through combining some of the techniques above, such as offering mobile content for incentives and text messaging for communications, mobiles can be a useful element in a wider CRM initiative. It can help build relationships with consumers who don’t have ready access to e-mail, or who simply find mobiles more convenient. The cost per message makes mobile CRM quite effective too, varying from 3p to 10p per message, according to volume.

Continue Reading »

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