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.

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.

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!

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.

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 VR 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!

Using Scarcity to Get More Business

You see them all the time, offers in stores and online that have limits attached to them. Whether there's a limit of one per customer or three, it does catch your eye, admit it! Using scarcity to motivate people to not just buy a product in the first place but perhaps even buy more of a product can work for any business. Perhaps a customer was only going to buy one item from you, but you've only produced 300 of them. Do you want to sell them all? Of course, so why not try telling your customers only 300 were produced and they can only buy four. You may have just increased your average order size by 3 times.

In a book called Going Broke: Why American's Can't Hold Onto Their Money, by Stuart Vyse, a study in Iowa showed that when consumers are given a limit, in this case 12 cans of soup vs. 4 cans of soup, they bought significantly more when presented with the 12 can limit than with the 4 can limit.

Due to Popular Demand

Many businesses limit just one per customer. You'd think that by doing this you wouldn't necessarily increase your average order size. However, limiting one per customer could make more consumers want to be one of the "elite" to have this and perhaps they'll buy something else while they're on a website or at a location.

Here are some highly visible successful scarcity examples...

Automotive Industry - Mini Coopers and Smart Cars - Only a few thousand were to be released in the US when they first came out. Waiting lines started at these dealerships and waiting lists were established. I know a couple that flew from San Francisco to Long Beach just to have one of the first!

Fashion Industry - Louis Vuitton constantly has waiting lists for upcoming bags and accessories and requires a credit card to be put on the list in many cases. When you're name comes up there's no waiting for them to ding your card! And you get your lovely new purse!

Wineries do a great job of this. Some wineries have waiting lists to get into their wine clubs. Then they tell you how many bottles you WILL buy each month.

I did a quick search online and found offers all over the board using limitations to give you just a few ideas on other offers using limitations.

• $19 Bath and body lotion, limit 4 per customer.
• $13 thumbdrives, limit 3 per customer
• $4.99 Bakers Iced Zoo Biscuits, limit 2 per customer
• $29.99 box of Huggies, limit 2 per customer
• $95 Blue tooth headset limit 2 per customer

So you see there are plenty of different products with varying pricing levels that all take advantage of this tactic. Do you have a product or service that you could test this out with? Let's hear the results!

Make a Referral Week - 200 Referrals Made on Our Way to 1000!

We've just passed 200 referrals and need your help to get to our goal of 1000 for the "Make a Referral Week - Small Business Stimulus Package."

We've already referred a few businesses on the list so match up a few businesses you know and like with people or businesses today!

Skittles Replaces Website with Social Media

In a bold move to spark some word of mouth, Skittles has changed its entire website and turned it into a social media extravaganza. Yesterday the Skittles home page was their Twitter stream, and today the home page is now their Facebook Fan page. They appear to be rotating through all of the social media outlets.

To get to different areas of their site you're now presented with the hovering navigation box. For instance, now when you click on "Media" you're taken to their You Tube and Flickr pages. Gutsy move especially if they don't always monitor these highly trafficked pages.

They do present visitors with a screen that asks their age and tells the visitor that there might be content not suitable for kids.

If anyone Tweets the word Skittles it will appear on the Skittles site in the Twitter stream.

In an interview with AdWeek, Carole Walker, VP, integrated marketing communications for the brand, had this to say, "Skittles' brand positioning was a border zone . . . Skittles lives in a world that is unexpected." 

Seems like instead of pushing marketing messages out to their consumers, they're letting consumers do it on their behalf.

Bold or crazy? I don't know. But I did see on their Facebook page they have 585,000 fans and growing, they've got 1,500 wall posts of people talking about Skittles, they have 16,000 pictures that match the criteria "skittles" on Flickr and countless Tweets by the minute. They are targeting their exact market with the tools that this market lives and dies by. Seems like they may have tasted the rainbow on this one but you tell me!

Day 2 - Governor's Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to participate on a panel with David Fischer, VP of Online Sales, Google, moderated by a fantastic young speaker Arel Moodie. Arel is also a great motivational speaker on the college circuit, getting college students excited about the possibility of being an entrepreneur.

The questions we got from the crowd were really prevalent to small  business. We talked about how small businesses can use online tools to help them be a more global business. Questions came about like: "Why should I blog, what will I get out of it?" and "Tell us what we need to do to get noticed by the Google search engine" and more. I'll post the video when it's available.

Lunch was served and I sat with some really great small business owners including, to my surprise, Mark from PetCamp. You may have remembered my blog about his great business and all of the marketing he's doing.

Facebook & WIRED Magazine

revenue will come from in the future. More and more small businesses are looking to other vehicles like Facebook and Twitter to drive more customers. He also spoke about the risk you take from doing something with Facebook is worth it, however I disagree, I don't think it's risky at all, in fact I think it's easy. He did say that because of the transparency that Facebook offers, now small businesses need to be authentic, build a better product, and be real. I couldn't agree more.

Louis Rossetto then spoke. He started WIRED Magazine (and now has the chocolate company Tcho). He showed us his rocket ride to stardom, which was pretty powerful as WIRED has been a real cornerstone of the tech movement for the past 10 years. He touched on the complexity of the new network since he started the publication 5000 days ago. He also talked about how millennials are the largest demographic in the US and it's really their destiny to make the web even more than it is today. He previewed this fantastic Coke video to show the power the millennials have with this new network. It's a great example of millennials in fast action.

Marty Keller, Director, Office of Small Business Advocate, brought the house down with his moving speech about how small businesses should be awakened and get stronger with the power of all of the new collaboration tools to enable us as a group to rise up and take advantage now. Believe it or not, the crowd was teary eyed.

VOTE

Then it was time for the recommendation of issues from the previous day and a vote from all of the attendees.

Using remote voters, we all voted on the issues to put forth to the governor enabling small businesses to have their voice in CA. The lobbying got crazy! 

The day ended with the top 11 issues small businesses are facing today. Here are just the top 3 to give you an idea of the types of issues that are important.

1. Restore investment in programs the support small business.

2. California Air Resources Board needs to assess costs for AB 32 (the Global Warming Solutions Act) while assessing how it effects small business.

3. Small business need to be a larger part of the regulatory process.

The day ended with a wonderful bevy of speeches from small businesses on how this conference could and can change our lives. There was talk about doing this every year and growing it beyond belief because the business power in our nation is in the hands of the small businesses.

I met a ton of great people that I'm sure I'll keep in touch with.

Marty, let's do it again next year, I pledge to bring 20 people!