VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Inc.com Article: 6 Things Every Business Can Learn from Chef Gordon Ramsay

I've got a new article up on Inc.com for my column Girl Power: Female CEOs. It's entitled, The Business Chef: Gordon Ramsay. It's packed with 6 things you can learn for your business from this great Chef. Check it out!

Email Newsletter Survey: Small Business Email Newsletters Still Work

I recently saw results from a survey done by our friends over at Bredin Business  Information, a company that specializes in small business research. Although there weren't a huge amount of participants in the survey, I thought it was very telling for the state of email marketing and social media.

According to Bredin Business Information:

Our most recent survey asked SMB marketers how effective their email newsletters are in the "always on" era of Twitter, blogs, forums and social networks. The net: email newsletters continue to work well.

Of the respondents, 58%currently have an email newsletter for small and medium businesses. Here’s their take:

• Performance is on target. 53% of respondents rate their newsletters as performing on or above overall goals. 48% say their newsletter performance is improving slowly, and 38% report no change in performance – in other words, roughly nine out of 10 newsletters are holding steady or improving, even as social networking dominates the B2B press.
• Well perceived. 48% of respondents say that their email newsletter program has become seen within their company as more important in the past year or two; another 48% report its perception is unchanged. Only 5% of respondents say their newsletter is seen as less important.
• Strong by comparison. When all survey respondents were asked to rate the performance of a variety of online marketing tactics, email newsletters ranked fifth out of 13 options. 74% of respondents rated newsletters as somewhat or very effective, compared to banner ads (80%), SEO (78%), educational resource centers (76%) and SEM (75%). LinkedIn and YouTube were least effective, both 24%.

So how is your newsletter doing? The summer months have been pretty slow all around but brace yourself for the last quarter of the year. It's right around the corner.

Does Your Email Have Personality? Inject It with Some!

There is so much clutter in the adsphere these days, sometimes it takes some ingenuity to get heard. You not only want people opening and reading your email marketing campaigns, you even want them to look forward to it. One way to do this is to give your email some personality. 

I've been watching some TV commercials lately and I've noticed that even some of the biggest, most seemingly boring companies are starting to have personality. 

Intel - This microchip company has a couple of great commercials going on now. One of my favorites is one where the co-inventor of the USB is treated like a rock star by the Intel employees. He sashays into the uber cool lunchroom to cool rock star music, and Intel employees are fawning all over him. He signs a few autographs and gets his coffee. Then at the end they humanize the company even more by having employees sing the 5-note jingle. Impressive.

Travelers Insurance - This ho-hum insurance company has such a great commercial that I cannot turn the channel when it's on. A cute dog is worried about his "prized possession" (his bone) and runs around trying to find the perfect hiding place for it. He hides it in the laundry basket, gets worried and retrieves it. He hides it behind a pillow, gets worried, then retrieves it. He buries it in the yard, worries about it all night and digs it up. He takes it to a bank and puts it in a safe deposit box, worries about it and retrieves it. The final answer, insure it with Travelers and the red umbrella appears over the bone next to the dog. Brilliant, memorable and cute!

What can you do to inject a bit of personality into your advertising and email marketing campaigns? 

Restaurants - Write about funny stories of your owners and your patrons. Include some pictures. Have a 'submit your favorite recipe' contest and publish the winners.

Retailers - Make up a funny promotion. Declare your own holiday or celebrate another country's.

Consultants - Send an email about something going on in your industry and poke fun at it.

Wineries - Take it from Travelers Insurance, dogs work and more often than not a winery has one. Why not do a story about a day in the life of the winery dog or a story from the dog's point of view?

Ad Agencies - Why not point out the most ridiculous, best or worst ads of the week. You can always find something funny to talk about with an ad.

If you think about it, almost every day something interesting, funny or completely bizarre happens in your business. This can be content for your marketing messages. What are you doing to inject some personality into your next email marketing campaign?

Was the White House Spamming?

You may have heard the brouhaha about the Obama administration sending an email marketing campaign out to millions of recipients last week regarding the health care reform. During a press conference Fox News reporter Major Garret asked why the White House is sending unsolicited email to people who have not opted-in to receive email from the administration. Apparently he got one of these emails with the subject line reading "Something Worth Forwarding".

Funny enough, I'm on this list, and I didn't get this email. I'm on all candidate lists so I could monitor what they were doing during the election. However, this particular email came from "David Axelrod" who is one of the President's advisers. I have received emails from him in the past, so it's strange that I didn't get this one.

So as it turns out, the White House responded that they are going to redo their email rules and only send email to people who request it. An Obama spokesperson said:

“We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf.”

So are they suggesting that people are being signed up without their permission? It looks like it. According to the White House this list has been mailed to before but maybe not about this subject. Was it the content that got people angered? Who knows, but in any event I think the White House made a series of mistakes during this entire process.

Who is David Axelrod Anyway?

In my opinion their first mistake was to send an email with such highly volatile content and have it NOT come from the President himself. Yes, I know he's Barack's Senior Adviser, but he's not Barack.  I signed up to get emails from Barack Obama not David. Had I received the email from Obama, there is a good chance I would have opened it. I don't know why the administration uses other names.

Why Is It So Difficult to Send Email to Those Who Want It?

The second mistake is that the White House should keep track of who they can send email to and who they shouldn't. It's a pretty easy task to do. Then they don't risk upsetting their constituents and they won't have a PR nightmare (like it has become.)

Why the Deceptive Subject Line?

According to CAN-SPAM, the subject line should relate to the content of the email. The subject line "Something Worth Forwarding" crosses the line and does not really describe the email content.

Politicians Get a Free Pass in CAN-SPAM

Since CAN-SPAM regulates "commercial email", politicians kind of have a free pass when it comes to email marketing. Under the CAN-SPAM law they can pretty much send to the lists of people that sign up as well as lists of people that don't. Should they? In my opinion, no. They should be sending email to those who want it. It's better for their "brand".

Make sure you're looking at who is on your list and who you're sending email to. If you don't do it correctly (as the White House proved) you could damage your brand that you work so hard to maintain.

What are your thoughts on this?

Do You Have a Customer List in QuickBooks You Might Not Be Emailing? Use It!

We surveyed most of our customers and found out that over half of them use QuickBooks as their contact management/customer data storage. If either you run your own business or are in charge of marketing at your business, there might be some great customer information in your company's QuickBooks that you're not even aware of.

Why not ask the bookkeeper to give you a list of all customers in QuickBooks and see if in fact there are customers in there that you don't have access to, but would love to send email marketing campaigns to. If there are, then you should set this data dump up with your bookkeeper on a regular basis. You don't want to miss a great opportunity to contact your customers, all of them.

If you don't want to bug your bookkeeper, and you use VerticalResponse, we've got a nifty widget on the Intuit Workplace that you can use to port your customer list over. Once you've installed the VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace app and setup the Workplace Sync application, you'll find an Import Tool widget on your VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace Homepage. Use the widget to import your Customer records into your VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace account. It's a snap.

Get Ready for the Holidays with a Survey to Your Customers

Wait, did I just say get ready for the holidays?? I know, it seems like school just got out and we should be at the beach! But we all should be thinking about the holiday season. Now is the time to start figuring out your holiday marketing plans to capitalize on this very important time of year.

So what can you do now? You can certainly send your customers an online survey to figure out what their buying habits might look like around the holidays. With the economy the way it has been it's going to be very different from previous years, so it might be a good idea if you understand what these differences will be.

Here's just a few ideas of survey questions you could ask broken out by if you market your products to a consumer (B2C) or a business (B2B).

What will your customers be looking to spend this holiday season?

B2C - Will they be buying "bargain" gifts under $5, $10, $15 or more? This gives you an idea of the types of products you should be offering.

B2B - Business gift buying starts pretty early so make sure you're ready. You may find that if you give your customers incentives to buy early, you'll have more people taking you up on a discount.

For both B2C & B2B - Consider asking your customers to rank best sellers from last year with a few new products you might want to sell this season. This will help you define what you need to be pushing in your email marketing campaigns.

What's it going to take to drag them across your finish line?

B2C - Since the last part of the year has customers focused from "buying for me" to "buying for you" your customers will be encouraged by many things to make them purchase. Find out which ones they want from you by having them rank things like discounts, free shipping, last minute shopping deals, early bird discounts and bundles & baskets.

When are they going to start holiday shopping: September, October, November, Last Minute?

B2C - Having an idea of when your customers will start the holiday shopping season certainly gives you an idea of how early you can start your "early bird specials". Plus it might even allow you to get to know in advance how much you'll need to be scrambling towards the last minute of the season.

B2B - All businesses buying products to keep their business running look for special end-of-year/end-of-quarter deals. Plus many of these businesses might lose budget if they don't spend it. You might want to ask them when they think they'll be making a purchase of a product or service you offer. Then follow up with them and make it happen.

How do your customers like their experience with your website?

B2C & B2B - You might want to put a survey link at the end of a purchase process or in the footer template of your website asking your customers how they liked their experience.  Were there too many clicks? Do they need live chat or click-to-call functionality built into your site? Was the purchase process to onerous? Making changes now, will get you ready for the holiday season.

When will they start planning their holiday functions?

B2B - If you're in the event, restaurant or hotel business, businesses are looking NOW to book their holiday parties so you'll need to find out what they're looking for in order to accommodate them. A survey to customers who've had events with you in the past asking if they'll be having another event is a great way to get them thinking about you first. You might include questions like "How many people would attend?" and what any specific needs would be for their event. This helps you in a follow-up call or email to them with specific ideas around what they want. Take the work out of it for them.

Finally, you'll need to look at your survey results and make some decisions on what you'll be offering this holiday season. I know it sounds early, but planning now will help make the upcoming holiday season more successful and hopefully less stressful! Check out VerticalResponse Surveys if you don't already have a provider.

July '09 Inc.com Article - Breaking Up...With Your Customers

I've got a new article up on Inc.com for my column Girl Power: Female CEOs. It's entitled, Breaking Up...With Your Customers. It's never easy, but sometimes you just have to do it. Check it out!

Back-To-School Specials That Any Business Can Offer

It's that time of year again, back-to-school emails and ads are beginning to flood in and every parent is out capitalizing on those summer back-to-school sales.

If you're selling dorm room furniture, electronics, supplies, or kid's clothes, you've got a pretty good message to start with. And you better be starting now, especially if you have to compete against the big guys.

But what if your business doesn't offer an obvious back-to-school promotion? Never fear! I went "shopping" around the web and found some pretty cool ideas you might be able to put to work for your business in your next email marketing campaign.

A dental office offered pre back-to-school cleaning specials touting tooth decay as the #1 disease in children.

An auto repair shop offered back-to-school student specials for repairs. Don't all students drive clunkers these days?

A few hair salons were offering discounts on haircuts for kids before the school year begins. Everyone wants the perfectly coiffed kid!

I found a winery that offered a back-to-school shopping night!

There are so many non profit organizations that do back-to-school fundraising events to help children with clothing and supplies for the new school year. Here are two, one that helps military families and one that is called Operation Backpack for those in need.

A popular nanny service offered a 15% discount off of their placement fees.

A hotel in NY offered a back-to-school shopping package with a bag of goodies, shopping discounts and breakfast for two.

A hotel in Chicago offered a great package: a $50 gift card to The Container Store® for supplies along with a special edition college catalog with tips on how to organize a new dorm room and a 15% discount off the next stay.

I found a restaurant offering this back-to-school special: kids eat free for the month of September (except Saturdays, bummer!).

Everyone can participate in back-to-school savings, what's your idea?

Guide to Sizzling Summer Success

We've got a great free guide that might give you some ideas to jumpstart your summer sales, it's called Guide to Sizzling Summer Marketing, Proven Ways to Grow Your Business this Summer.

It's packed with ideas for winning back customers who may have left or having a "Christmas in August" campaign are just a few things packed into this guide.

It's free, it's a PDF, so download it.