VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Partner With Another Business - Get More Customers

A while ago I started my application for Clear. I travel a lot and with Clear I won't have to stand in security lines at airports. I'm sure I'll have to give up any and all identifiable information about me but I thought it was worth it. Yeah, I might be crazy.

So I only got through a part of this application and didn't finish the rest. You actually have to go to a Clear office or get to the airport early (never) to have them scan your eye, get your prints and give them your first born. This I've not done yet.

As a result I received this clever email marketing campaign around the fast-approaching Mother's Day, trying to get me to complete my application. Looks like they partnered with FTD.com for a 20% discount on flowers for Mom. 

Could you partner with another business around any given holiday and ask them for a special discount for your customers only? It might be just the thing to get them over the hump of doing something with you or buying your product or service. And as a result of the discount or special offer your partner gives, you both win!

March '09 Inc.com Article - Business Development, Is It a Boy's Club?

First of all, I'm pretty excited and flattered because Inc.com has chosen me to have my own new column called Girl Power: Female CEOs. I have to admit, I've been pretty controversial in some of the articles including this one, but it's only because of some real experiences I've had on the journey. The latest is a good read; "Business Development, Is It a Boy's Club?" It's meant to show the reality of how far we've come, but how far women have yet to go. And there's nothing better than great men to support us and help take us there. Enjoy!

How to Work a Trade Show

Recently I visited a marketing trade show here in the Bay Area. I always get excited to learn about new marketing technologies that help businesses grow so off the exhibit floor I went. What I found was kind of lame. It seemed like none of the companies exhibiting knew how to market their company and none of the people working at these booths knew the first thing about working a trade show. It's more than wearing a company shirt.

Sometimes I think it's the difference between someone who is working the show who actually wrote the check for it, versus a team of people that are a few steps removed from that person. If you stuck 100 small business OWNERS in these booths or people who were trained really well by the small business owners, they'd have out-worked any of these people.

Get The Business Card - First things first, you've paid to be at a show, you've spent money on your signs or booth (hopefully), the first thing you should do is ask for your visitor's information. In fact you should ask for it before you start to sell them if you can. That's what you went there for right? I visited no less than 25 businesses at this particular show, walked into their booths and took their collateral (if they had any) and not ONE person asked me for my information.

Print Collateral - Printing is expensive and it harms the environment I know. But you've got to give at least one handout about your company so that people remember you after they leave. Make sure it's on recycled paper! There were at least 5 booths I stopped by that didn't have ANY collateral, just goofy giveaways.

Tell People What You Do - If you've got a banner stand or a sign, make sure you tell people what you do on it along with your logo. Don't make people guess. It doesn't have to be too wordy, just get your main points across. About 25% of the booths I walked by just displayed a logo, nothing else. It doesn't necessarily make me want to stop and ask someone what it is they do.

Be Knowledgeable - If you send staff, make sure they are trained know what they're talking about. If they don't know an answer to a question they should not try to make anything up, they should just say "I'm not sure about that, I'll take that question down on your business card and follow up with an answer in an email." Then make sure they write it on the back of the business card. I stopped by one booth and asked the person in it a question about how their technology worked, not only did they not know how it worked, they didn't know who their primary customer was and they negated themselves about 3 times during a 7 minute discussion.

Be Approachable, Do the Approaching - A bunch of people from the same company standing around talking to each other the entire time isn't going to draw in a crowd. Your staff has to approach people and start the conversation. For VerticalResponse the starter question is something like "Are you sending emails to your customers?" That begins the conversation.

Pet peeve? If you have to make a call and you have other staff in the booth, step away and make the call. People don't want to come up to ask anyone questions if they are on the phone. My favorite? One booth had velvet ropes around the booth so you couldn't walk into it, only the people who worked there could and one person was inside the ropes on the phone!

Another pet peeve is having too much clutter around a booth. Stash your coats and bags under the table or behind the booth. No one wants to do business with a messy company. Maybe it's the Virgo in me.

These companies may be good at providing marketing technologies, but they couldn't bring it back to the basics of good marketing in general. I was walking the show with our head of operations and I said to him "Wow, this is really bad. You can bet that after any trade show we spend money on my first question is: 'How many leads did we get and when are we sending our first email to them?'"

Marketing 101.

Hand Delivery - A Customer Retention Idea

I was sitting in my office when someone from my team brought me a tiny pink bag decorated with festive ribbons, attached to it was very cool highlighter pen and it was filled with a bevy of candy inside. Along with the bag came a business card of a women I had done business with last year during our marketing conference (how did she know I liked Reese's?). She wanted to hand-deliver it to me but I was in a meeting. I thought it was a nice gesture on her part and smart for putting her card in front of me again, not to mention yummy chocolates. She didn't get to see me, but I'm sure she'll follow up with an email campaign knowing her.

I know not all businesses have the capacity to hand-deliver gifts to their customers, however if your customers have spent top dollar with you in the past year it might be a great idea and reason to get in front of them again, especially in this economy.

I think it's especially good if your customers bought big ticket items from you in the past (real estate, large hotel bookings, software, hardware). One more thing, it's really only going to work if your customers work in an office where they may be easily accessed, don't bang on their front door and have them answer it in their slippers, they might think...stalker!

How To Create a Great Online Survey

If you are intimidated to send a survey to your customers, STOP! Understanding what your customers like and don't like about your business can only make it better. Here is an easy-to-understand outline of how to begin your own survey.

What's the Purpose? Introduce your survey to your customers. Tell them why you’re sending it to them and what THEY will potentially gain from answering questions, whether it's better service or an incentive from you.

Public or Private? Deciding if you want your survey to be "controlled" can be important because you may just want your survey takers to be a specific subset of your customers. If you want input on something more broad like "how do you like our website?" then you might post the link to your survey out to anyone who visits you.

Make it Short and Sweet – Make sure you tell your recipients up front how long it will take them to take your survey. You're recipient's time is as valuable as yours. In addition, it's good practice to let them know where they are in the survey process (i.e. Page 1 of 5, etc.). This gives them a good idea of how long it will take and lets them know you think their time is valuable.

Ask Simple Questions – Ask short relevant questions. Write the questions clearly so there is no ambiguity. You want them to understand the questions, understand the answers and move on. Also, don’t guide your customers to tell you what you want to hear. For instance, I once flew Delta, and for every question the answers that were presented were "Excellent", "Good" and "Poor". For every question "Excellent" was pre-selected! Someone wanted job security.

Use the Correct Answer Types - It's important for you to present your answers clearly, but equally important is to give your recipients the proper vehicles to answer with.

If you have a list of answers where there can only be one correct answer: use a pull down menu or radio buttons.
    Example: What is your household income? How many times do you visit our store on a monthly basis?

If you want them to rank or rate something - Use radio buttons or pull down menu.
    Example: Rank our service on a scale of 1-5, 1 being "Needs Work" 5 being "Excellent".

If you want them to be able to give multiple answers: Use checkboxes
    Example: What did you like about our last event? Check all that apply.

Make it Flow – If you have questions that relate to each other, you’ll want to group them together. Don’t ask your customer in question 2 what kind of ice cream they like, question 3 what type of dog they have, then question 6 how many times do they eat ice cream per week. It doesn't flow and gets confusing.

Get a Second Opinion – If you’ve got other people in your company send them a test survey. It's great for them to act like the recipient, but they may think of a question you hadn’t thought of that would be important to know for your company.

Keep The Questions Closed – Try to think of any possible answer you can for each question you ask. Avoid too many “other” answers. It’s ok to have them in your survey but not for every question, it could get too difficult for you to analyze. They can be great for answers that you didn’t think of, especially for future surveys.  Also remember your recipient's valuable time; they may not have the time to write a lot, but they might have the time to check a box or to rank one of your answers.

Analyze Your Survey - Share Your Results - Act on what your recipients told you in your survey. Make changes to your product, website, service or company based on what your recipients said and don't forget to communicate these changes back to them. It will show that you're listening to them which goes a long way with customer loyalty.

Read 5 Places to Include a Survey Link for maximum results. Look at VerticalResponse Surveys.

Recorded Webinar: Direct Marketing that Gets Results

My friend, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, asked me to be on a panel for a free webinar,  Direct Marketing that Gets Results that aired this morning. We discussed ways to generate leads using direct marketing tactics such as email marketing, direct mail and direct response advertising.

The panel was hosted by John and I was joined by two amazing people Brian Clark of copyblogger and Anita Campbell from Small Biz Trends.

You can view the recorded webinar here or just have it playing in the background since there's not a lot to really watch.

After you register with BrightTalk you can also get access to two other webinars by John, Creating Marketing Materials that Educate and The “Truth” About Small Business Branding.

5 Ways to "Use What You Have" In Your Next Email Campaign

We posted about "new" reasons to send an email marketing campaign, but you've probably already got a ton of content for your email campaigns at your disposal that you may not be thinking of. Need just one more article for your newsletter or do you need a starting point for launching your first email campaign? Here are five things you can write about today!

1. Highlight One Of Your Customers

You should always be asking your customers how you're doing. You can do this using surveys. When you get some great feedback, make sure you reach out to that customer and ask them if they would be ok with you promoting them on your site and in your email campaigns. Nothing sells your product better than your customers, not even you.

One of our customers Infopia does a great job highlighting a "Success Spotlight" of how one of their customers is using their products.

2. Your Awards & Reviews

Were you given an award, reviewed or published somewhere? Your customers want to know that you're doing well. They want to know that businesses they patron are A-List players and will continue to grow so make sure you let them know.

Another customer Hand in Hand, does a great job highlighting that they won Best of the Bay, Best of CitySearch and Best Jeweler in San Francisco. They worked hard for it, now they're telling the world! People want to do business with the best.

3. Give a "How To..." or a "5 Easy Steps To..."

You are an expert at what you do and I'm sure that you have knowledge others want to learn about. So create a weekly topic that you can speak to that your customers will benefit from. Make your steps short and sweet and give them only a taste in your email campaign since you'll likely want to send them to your site for the rest.

4. Email Pictures About Your Event

If you hosted or attended an event and you posted pictures of your customers to YouTube, Picasa or Flickr, why not send an email about it! Highlight a few pictures in your email and write about the exciting event. Talk about great conversations that you had. It might get more people out to your event the next time you either have one or attend one.

5. Any Holiday Will Do!

Capitalize on any holiday you can! VR customer PetCamp emails about March Madness and April Fool's day and weaves the holiday message into their emails. They'll even create a promotion around the holiday. I challenge you, any holiday can be paired with any product or service. Hey, I've seen our customers selling Botox for Valentine's Day!

Got anything laying around that you might not think to talk about? Let's hear about it!

Tax Day Marketing Idea

I was walking in a neighborhood here in San Francisco and saw a great marketing idea from a retail clothing store. They had business cards printed and available as a "take one" right outside their door with a "Tax Free Party" message highlighted. Their event happens to be the day after Tax Day.

There's still time for you to do a "Tax Relief" sale for your customers in an email marketing campaign. Why not give them a discount on your products or tell them you'll pay their sales tax?

What are you doing for the dreaded tax day here in the US?

Direct Marketing that Gets Results

My friend, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, asked me to be on a panel for a free webinar, Direct Marketing that Gets Results, and I thought it sounded like a great idea. We will be discussing ways to generate leads using direct marketing tactics such as email marketing, direct mail and direct response advertising.

The panel will be Wednesday, April 15th at 9 am PDT. I will be joined by Brian Clark of copyblogger and Anita Campbell from Small Biz Trends.

You can join us by registering here: http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/3432/attend

After you register with BrightTalk you can also get access to two other webinars by John, Creating Marketing Materials that Educate and The “Truth” About Small Business Branding.

5 Reasons to Send Your Next Email Campaign

Sometimes we all sit down in front of the computer monitor getting ready to create an email marketing campaign and we're stuck. We don't know where to begin but we know we need to, because every time we write about something interesting, we end up reminding our customers why they liked us in the first place. I've written about writer's block before, but I thought more ideas would be great to get those creative juices flowing.

1. Create Your Own Stimulus Package.

I talked to the owner of Perry's Restaurant here in San Francisco who is giving away half price bottles of wine on his slow days, any bottle. He said it's working great for him. Now he's getting people in the door on what used to be slow nights and they're staying longer.

In a cursory check around the net, I've seen stimulus packages for tires, lingerie, jewelry, consultants, maternity wear and more. What are you waiting for?

2. Declare Your Own Holiday

• Nurseries - Plant a Tree Week - Give Back to the Environment.
• Spa/Hotel - Family Celebration Week - Offer activities around families from food to fun.
• Brew Pubs - A local brew pub here 21st Amendment declares the month of February Strong Beer Month where they offer hearty beers. They do it in the Winter month of February and they hype it in their pub, on their site and in their email newsletter. The place gets packed. They also had their own parade where they marched through the city on the day that prohibition was repealed and had a hundred people follow them down the street. That stunt created some real buzz and was picked up in the local media. It made a great story for their next email campaign.

3. Create a White Paper, Guide or Industry Report

White papers and guides can be great for B2B companies looking to promote their services to an industry. Create a guide of or white paper of a real world problem and how it's solved by your solutions. Since you are an expert at what you do put on paper and tell the world about it. Ok, maybe not the world but at least your email recipients.

4. Create an "Ask The Expert" Column

You can have a feature in your campaign where you probe your recipients to "Ask the Expert", CNN Money does a good job of this on their site. Then you can use that answer in your next email campaign, but always be soliciting more questions so you'll have content in the future. You can also come up with a question you get asked a lot about your industry, products or services, and make up a fake person who is asking the question. These can be useful especially if you will proactively answer some customer questions they may have down the road.

5. Create Your Own Customer Award

Do you have long time customers you'd like to reward? Why not have your own company awards. It can be as simple as sending them an email campaign, thanking them for their business. You'll want to define the criteria for your award, create a name for it and an image that they can proudly place on their site. It can be a great buzz-generator and who knows, your customers might tell 10 friends that they got your award which could turn into 10 new customers for you!

Got any other ideas for why you should send an email campaign? Bring it on!