VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Pick Up the Phone & Get a Customer for Life

I just read a recent tweet about VerticalResponse and it inspired me to write about it. It read:

"Just love it when a company quickly answers the phone, I can understand them and they answer my question - Way to go VerticalResponse!!"

Don't get me wrong, I love the tweet, but are we so "Web 2.0" that we don't pick up the phone and talk anymore? Why are people so surprised when someone answers the phone at a business these days? Sure technologies like email marketing let you send mass emails to get the word out but what about the personal touch. Have we lost it?

I saw a TV commercial the other day, I think it was for an online trading company, and the first words the woman said is "Why do I use XXXX? A human being answers the phone...a human being!" Sounds so crazy they made a TV commercial out of it!

If you've got a 2-man shop and you're juggling a million things, it's OK to ask your callers to leave you a message. Just be clear how long they'll have to wait for a call back and that perhaps they'd like to leave their cell phone number. Just make sure you get back to them as soon as possible.

If you get a lot of daily calls, you may need an advanced system that enables you to have a waiting queue.  You may need to "branch" your calls to better serve your customers like "press 1 for customer support, press 2 for returns." And if your system allows for it, tell your customers how long they'll be waiting.

Here are a few tips for your business on answering the phone whether you've got 100 employees, or you're working at home in your slippers.

• Answer the calls as fast as you can. Don't let them ring past 4 rings if possible.
• On the wall right near your phone, put a big sign up on the wall that says "SMILE". You'd be amazed at how a call can turn in your favor when you smile over the phone.
• Greet your callers. "Hello, this is Jane from Widgets, how can I help you?"
• Ask for a number where you can reach your caller in the event the call gets dropped.
• Never leave a caller with the impression that you don't know something, simply put them on hold and find out the answer to their issue.
• At the end of the call ask if there is anything else you can help your caller with.
• Call your own line every month to ensure quality.

I know it seems like this information might be "so Web 1.0" but if you make a habit of picking up the phone, whether its an inbound call or an outbound call, you might just have a customer for life.

May '09 Inc.com Column - The Power of the Apology

The newest article I've written in my new Inc.com column called Girl Power: Female CEO is "The Power of the Apology." Read how women spend their day apologizing!

How to Get Visitors In the Door & Phones Ringing - A Great Call-to-Action

If you build will they come? Not automatically. If your phone isn't ringing or people aren't coming to your store or site, then maybe you need to have a closer look at your call-to-action. What is a call-to-action you might ask? In simple terms it's what you want people who get your emails, visit your site or see your ads, to do.

Your call-to-action can be as simple as a "buy now" graphic on a web page or in an email, or a "Visit our website to get your 20% discount at www ..." in a direct mail piece, or "Call 800...for your free...". Any way you display it, it needs to drive people to act, and act now!

Here are things you might want to use with your own calls-to-action for your marketing campaigns.

Deadlines - Giving a deadline for your offer to expire will undoubtedly move your readers to do something sooner rather than later especially if it's truly a great offer. Make sure you outline what they'll be saving or getting by ordering before the deadline and remind them up to the last day that they can tap this offer.

While Supplies Last - If you've got inventory that will go away, promoting that this offer will end with the end of the supply is a great idea. You may even want to set "limits" on the number of products that can be purchased.

The Bobble Head - If you've got a free gift to give to your customers if they buy now, then promote it! The baseball parks get FULL when they give away gifts to the first 1000 people that come to the stadium. It gets people to the stadium early and gets them buying things.

Free Consultation/Free Trial - Why not offer a number of hours of your services free to get newbies in the door. If free doesn't rock your boat, then offer a deeply discounted rate for them to feel comfortable. Once they see the value, they're sure to come back for more.

Not Available in Stores - Wineries do a great job at offering their wines direct-only. And they focus their messaging on that fact that you can only get the wines from the winery. Some have such limited production that they have people on waiting lists to get on the winery list.

Risk-FREE - If your recipients won't have to pay or put down a credit card and they can walk away with no questions asked, then make sure this is largely displayed. 

Free Accessories with Purchase - Under the deadline, why not try promoting an accessory with the product you're offering. The accessory could even turn into another purchase down the road. For instance, if you sell face cream, you might want to add in a free sample of eye cream. If you sell jewelry, you might want to add a bit of jewelry cleaner.

One more thing, the presentation of your call-to-action is important. You'll often find bursts and buttons in red, orange and yellow because those are colors that command attention, yet used too much can be distracting.

Make sure you have your call-to-action in more than one place. If it's on your website, don't only display it at the end of the page, make sure you include your call-to-action within your text as well as graphics. As always, test a variety of placements and see what works for your business.

How to Use a Rating Scale in an Online Survey

After you've spent some time finding out what specific information you might want from a customer when you present them with an online survey, you need to decide what type of answers will best suit your needs.

If you're trying to understand how people feel about the value of specific products or services that you provide, then rating scales can be a great way to measure your questions. 

There are a few types of rating scales to think about when you're designing your questions, a rating scale and an agreement scale. Both are known as Likert Scales after the inventor.

Rating Scale

A rating scale is designed so that you can ask your customers to rate your product or service. For instance a popular scale is a scale of 1-5, one representing "needs work" and five representing "very good" with the number 3 being "average". You can use radio buttons or pull down menus and give numerical choices as well as choices like Excellent, Good, OK, Fair, Poor.

Agreement Scale

In an agreement scale you can give your respondents a statement and ask them to indicate how closely their feelings match the statement on the scale. One indication of the scale can represent a feeling like "Strongly Disagree," and the higher end of the scale can represent something favorable like "Strongly Agree."

Rating scales can be great for any business if you want to find out how your customers or your visitors really feel about you. You can ask them to rate many things or even just one! You can also put an open-ended question right after the rating scale and ask them to comment. Then you'll get to the real scoop of why they felt a particular way.

One last note: If you have a few rating scales in a single survey make sure you keep them the same throughout your survey so as not to confuse your survey takers. Happy surveying and look to VerticalResponse for your survey needs!

Your Brand is Everything You Do

I was thinking about how people perceive brands these days from the biggest brands like Sephora to the smaller brands like Birdy Botanicals. The word "brand" is usually used for BIG companies so I started thinking; what IS a brand and how do you know if you have one?

Well everyone has a brand, but the scary thing is, you don't own it! It is a harsh reality. So who does own your brand? Your prospects and customers that's who! Your brand is their perception of how they interact with you, your products and your services.

Your People Are Your Brand

Sounds scary right? But if you've got people working the front lines and they're interacting with your customers, your customers will have a perception of the type of persona your company has. They will form an opinion of your brand.

I was recently at a trade show and stopped by a booth to ask a question about the company. Nice enough guy, but didn't have a clue at what his company did, nor did he use the "I'm new" excuse. I thought wow, a company would spend all of this money to have someone here that clearly wasn't trained on the most basic question. My perception about their brand? Not so good.

What's your persona? Is it conveyed to your customers through the people that work at your company? What do they think of you? If they are face to face with prospects, what are they wearing? Are people tweeting about you on Twitter (using Tweetdeck it's easy to type in your company name in the search and follow what people might be saying about you) or Yelping about an experience they had? If it's negative, and hold onto your hats it could happen, you have the ability to change perceptions by changing the way people are interacting with you or your employees.

Your Products Are Your Brand

The products and services that you sell are also your brand. You may have a perception of a company like Apple as high-quality but they'll cost a bit more where a company like HP offers lower quality, lower cost items. Both still have positive "brands" and offer products that appeal to certain people. Apple has taken branding to a new level by not only having a brand for their products, but they've done a good job of attempting to brand their competitor's product line in their "Mac vs. PC" campaigns. The Mac being the cool kid and the PC being the older not-so-cool guy. This forced Microsoft to fire back with a great campaign "I'm a PC".

One more important thing to remember: set expectations up front about your products and make sure that any product or service you sell is what you say it is. When you start over-promising and under-delivering, that's where your brand might get into some real muddy waters.

Your Service is Your Brand

To this day when my husband orders a pair of shoes from Zappos on a Sunday night and they arrive on Monday morning he screams "I love Zappos, how do they DO that?". Service plays a huge role in any company. From the Dentist who calls her patients on the evening of their root canals to see how they're doing, to the person who gets answered in a live chat after only waiting one minute, it all makes a difference.

With everything going a mile a minute on the Internet, every business has to step up their game. So throw some lollipops into that next shipment to your customers with a hand-written thank you note and see how far that might actually go. Oh, don't forget, get the shipment there on time!

Your Marketing Is Your Brand

How you communicate to your customers is your brand. If you're advertising your law firm, your marketing better not be as edgy as a tattoo parlor. The way you write, the words you use, and your logo should say something about your brand. However you choose to advertise,  be as consistent as possible. If your email marketing campaigns start to look completely different from your website and any collateral you produce, people may get confused and think of you as a bit chaotic. An example of edgy and fun? Woot! Contrast that to Dell. You've got two very different and very good brands.

Do you have control of your brand? Kind of. If you care about these things that have an effect on how people think about you, your brand will follow.

BusinessWeek Article: E-mail Newsletters That Customers Actually Read

I was interviewed by Carmine Gallo last week about email newsletters and how to get customers reading them. It's a nice story, read it here.

8 Ways a Little Guy Can Compete Against a Big Guy

If you run a small business, you know how tough it can be to compete with your larger competitors especially when they're undercutting prices like crazy to get people in the door. Not to mention that a lot of them have huge advertising budgets for newspapers, TV commercials and radio spots. So how can you compete? You have to be tough like Rocky that's how! You have to be creative and you have to do some grass roots marketing.

Here are a few ideas you might be able to put to work for your business.

1. Give an extra discount just for getting an email address. Communicating via email marketing is far less costly than communicating in almost any other form of marketing and you need every penny you can save.

2. Give free parking. If you have a parking lot near you, find out if you can validate the parking fees for up to an hour. Making it as easy as possible for your customers to get to you and save could be paramount. They may just choose you for that reason alone over chaos at Walmart.

3. Give a $20 gift card for their next purchase. If your customers buy something over a certain amount give them more. A store here in the Bay Area was giving $20 gift cards for every $100 customers spent and they could only use them in the following month.

4. Serve snacks or coffee. You really can drive more business by giving your customers an excellent experience. I know of a car dealership that serves a full-on breakfast while you wait to have your car serviced. There's nothing worse than having to sit in a room waiting for an oil change, so they make it pleasant!

5. Have a kid-friendly shop or office. Keeping the kids busy while Mom or Dad does the shopping or the office visit could be the thing that gets them to your place. They've got a tough job as it is, if you can make it easier for them to come to you while giving the kids some fun, it just might get them to stop going to the big boys.

6. Buy your competitor's name as a Google keyword. If your larger competitor is spending big advertising dollars, you might be able to capitalize on people searching for their company name. Of course you can't make false claims in your ads and if it's a Fortune 500 player there's a chance Google won't let you, but if you type their company name into Google Search, and you see ads down the right-hand side, chances are you won't have a problem. One note on that, you can't use their company name IN your ad content.

7. Pick up the phone. When people are dealing with your larger competition and have to call them about something they usually expect a phone tree about an hour long and then another hour of wait time. You might have the luxury of picking up the phone when it rings or calling them back quickly if they leave a message. They might want to start dealing with that type of service rather than saving a few bucks to sit on hold.

8. Start Tweeting. It might sound silly to you but surely you've got customers and prospects that are following other businesses on Twitter, why not yours? VerticalResponse customer Due Maternity does a great job at this, and in no time they got 268 followers. It may not sound like much, but it's 268 people they can message at any given moment about their sales, content and site. The big guys are starting to do it, you may as well beat them to the punch!

Going the extra mile and being clever are the only ways to compete against a large company, but it's not impossible. A company like Due Maternity has a very successful website with many thousands of customers. They compete with a larger maternity brand with a website and 1000 stores but are still growing and successful. I know they use a lot of these techniques to help them keep growing!

A Mother's Day Tribute to Women in Business - Inc.com

Earlier this year VerticalResponse signed on as the lead sponsor for StartupNation’s “Leading Moms in Business” competition, because let’s face it, being a woman in business presents its own hurdles. Hence this column. Add kids, and there’s a whole host of other challenges women face. So, hats off to the 200 women selected – and Happy Mother’s Day!

Read the rest of the article on Inc.com in my newest column "Girl Power: Female CEOs".

New Guide: Real Tips for Growing Your Biz in a Down Economy

We get questions all the time, "how can I grow my list?", "how can I find new customers?" and most importantly "how do I keep my customers around?"

We've compiled a free guide with a great list of ideas for you to combat the economy we're in and grow your business.

Happy reading. Also check out this free recorded webinar How To Build a Newsletter that Works.

Email Idea: Friends & Family Email Exclusive

I got an interesting email marketing campaign in my inbox from a large retailer. I thought it was pretty catchy. I could either print out the email with the bar code for a discount in the store or use a promo code on their site. They also had a share with a friend link prominently displayed which I'm sure got passed around quite a bit.

I liked it because it seemed exclusive. The header looked like this.

 

Subject Line: 20% Off Friends & Family Event Ends Soon!

The expiration date is a bit hidden in the copy but all in all I thought calling this a Friends and Family event was a nice exclusive approach to a sale. See if it works for you in your next email campaign!