Do Business Well

Forty-one percent of households purchased florals and plants for indoor use during 2003, down slightly from 44 percent in 2001. Cut flowers are a popular gift item, especially for Valentine’s Day.

Floral and Greenery Industry Snapshot

The retail market for cut flowers and florist items is said to be $15 billion by Chain Store Age magazine.

In total, sales of flowers, seeds, and potted plants (including both indoor and outdoor plants) was $18.2 billion in 2002, according to personal consumption data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. This represents a 1.4 percent increase over sales of $17.9 billion in 2000. Continue Reading »

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Here’s what to keep in mind when preparing the visual part of your presentation:

1. Everyone in the group should be able to see and read the visuals easily. Think about the size of the group. The number of people will determine the technology you should use.
2. You want to be able to keep a tight focus on what is presented when. You don’t want to display too much information at any one time. Keep to three or four main ideas on each sheet. You don’t want your audience to get confused or overloaded.

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What is yet to be determined is how well the holding companies will grapple with the challenge of integration of their services. Over the years, they have bought up a wide variety of companies in different aspects of the marketing business, but there has not been a great deal of coordination among the various disciplines. Continue Reading »

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Demand high standards from your service representatives

Make people smarter! The abilities of real people delivering service to the e-customer services person will need to increase so they can add value to what the system already provides. If service representatives are left innumerate and illiterate, unable to organize, disaffected and reluctant, they will probably not add anything positive to the service experience. The bar is raised for those able to justify their involvement in the process. It has already started to happen.

Is there a future where we will go to one man to buy everything? A man who is wired into the complete network and is fantastically adept at manipulating the available tools to get us what we need. He may be able to serve and support thousands of e-customers because each needs personal involvement so seldom. Continue Reading »

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The human touch is going to come back into fashion. It will (yet again) become the differentiating factor between services. Computers can deliver lousy service pretty much on their own. The very best of humankind needs to be coaxed and coached out into the open. People need to be showcased and supported.

On the way to the virtual world some businesses have a lapse of memory — it’s a kind of ‘Honey, I forgot the people‘ approach. Others adopt an Animal Farm like ‘machine is good, people are bad’ approach. If they adopt the attitude of pigs they should expect to end up as bacon.

Every business should understand that at heart the internet is not a machine, it’s the interaction of millions of people. In the end someone still says ‘I have something for you to buy’ and someone still replies ‘I would like to buy it’. The technology simply represents one set of people trying to sell to another group of people. Continue Reading »

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So open up your heart and hear this.

The whole business world needs a good slap around the back of the head. Someone holding its head down shouting, ‘What is that? What do you think about that?’

There is no joy to be found in doing a half a job and there’s very little money either. You need to get into the mind of the real e-customer. And he’s legion, multiple, distinctive, and ever-changing. Continue Reading »

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Whether an internal service group operates your email marketing program or you rely on an outside service provider, there’s only one way to get accountability: Define clear success criteria. Let’s take a look at some of the mechanisms you can put in place to evaluate the service organization responsible for operating your program:

1. Define and monitor success criteria.

• Clearly articulate program goals and performance expectations.
• Agree on turnaround times for new programs, campaigns, or messages.
• Ensure that the service provider can be flexible and responsive to your ever-changing needs.
• Ensure that you understand what a service provider offers and what it expects others to provide and manage.

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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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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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Unlike a traditional, direct marketing campaign, an Internet direct marketing program is a tightly integrated combination of marketing service, technology, and 24-7 operational support. Separating these three components by, for instance, engaging a marketing services group, building an in-house operations team, and purchasing offthe-shelf products is a definite possibility, but the lack of tight integration may limit the level of sophistication the program can achieve. Continue Reading »

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