Do Business Well

“Loyalty” is an overused and often loosely defined term. There have been several attempts to introduce a more precise financial definition of loyalty so that its impact on a business can be measured and quantified. In his The Loyalty Effect, Frederick F. Reichheld does a superb job of describing the economics of loyalty by demonstrating the unquestionable financial impact of increased customer retention. Still, many people wonder whether loyalty programs actually work. Futhermore, when success is no longer driven exclusively by ⁽⁽cost of contact,” we must be able to measure our “return on loyalty” related investments in order to determine the sucess of a program. Continue Reading »

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Level of Marketing Service

On one end of the service continuum are the broadcasters who simply merge the text copy you give them with a list of names and blast it out. Some may also provide such basic services as canned response reports to track click-through information. At the other end of the spectrum are the full-service marketing consulting and service bureaus. These companies run their clients’ marketing functions in much the same way as traditional marketing and advertising agencies do. Here are the services to look for when choosing a marketing service provider. Continue Reading »

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Is email direct marketing an industry unto itself? Not at all. The principles of service-based marketing and communication are essential to the success of any online marketing initiative. And email is a mission-critical tool that plays an integral role in the e-marketing and communications mix for all online merchants. But as we’ve touched on earlier, email itself is just one of a large number of electronic communications channels that e-marketers will be using in the future. Furthermore, marketers ultimately won’t want to manage relationships with a large number of different service providers.

That may be why there have been so many industry consolidations. Netcentives acquired Post Communications in order to broaden its technology infrastructure and provide a wide range of relationship marketing services, from customer acquisition programs and customized email relationship marketing programs to loyalty programs and promotions. Continue Reading »

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Open up distance networks

One of the wonderful things about network marketing is that you can open a network anywhere. For example, although you may live in Cape Town, a friend in Johannesburg could be interested in network marketing. When you next visit Johannesburg, talk to your friend, build up her enthusiasm and sign her up.

Network marketing companies supply goods to their distributors anywhere, so she would order directly from the parent company, but her sales would become part of your overall sales. Because you signed her up, she would fall into your network.

Get the biggest order possible

Here are four proven techniques that build sales turnover: Continue Reading »

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We considered some of the new business models that are developing online. One of these was the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) model, upon which online communities are based.

These communities have evolved considerably since the early days of news groups and chat rooms. They offer a simple means of overcoming the lack of human contact online and hence can meet consumers’ social activity needs. Consequently, online communities can now represent a significant commercial opportunity. According to Kozinets,

Online social interaction is therefore a unique public—private hybrid never before encountered in human history. Changes in capitalism, social thought and new technologies have imploded the boundaries between home and workplace (and production and consumption). CMC [computer-mediated communication] offers ordinary people access to a mass medium, a stage before a global audience. . . . Opportunities abound not only to broadcast one’s own private information, but also to partake publicly in the private information of others, and also to commoditise and commercialise these relationships. Continue Reading »

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