Don’t Make Me Like You

Posted on July 12, 2011May 5, 2015 by MD

Image by striatic via Flickr

Facebook is a large part of many marketing campaigns which truly is no surprise. People who are on Facebook are engaged and like to interact with friends, family and even brands. However, while as a marketer I understand the marketing tactics involved such as using the Like as a gatekeeper, as a user I truly detest it. A feeling I am not alone in.

I don’t want everything linked to my Facebook account. No, I don’t want to tell my friends. No, I don’t want you sending me status updates and posting on my wall. I use Facebook how I want to use it. Stop trying to force me to use it your way.

A Like is only as valuable as the person behind it. If you make me Like you to enter your contest or view your conference agenda, I can just as easily unlike you and even block you once I’ve gotten the information I want. What value is there in that? When you force a Like, it’s like having your mother tell you you can’t go play with your friends until your chores are done. You didn’t like it as a kid and you certainly don’t like it now.

Now, I’m not saying don’t lock content behind a Like, just give me more value for the transaction and quit forcing it. If I want to connect with you, I will be happy to do it but on my terms.

The same goes for Twitter, Google+ (once brands become more prominent), or one of the other smaller social sites or sites that just don’t exist yet. Anytime you try to force your customer’s to behave how you want them to, you’re potentially losing that customer. Unfortunately for you, you won’t know how valuable they were or weren’t until they’re gone.

Seasonality is an Excuse

Posted on April 27, 2011May 5, 2015 by MD

I hear a lot of people say their product is seasonal and I see a lot of companies treat their products as such. But in many cases, is your product really seasonal? Or are you simply using that as an excuse?

I won’t deny it, some products are definitely seasonal. Most people don’t shop for Easter candy in June or Christmas trees in September, but outside of holiday specific products, is it truly seasonal?

Take for instance the sport of lacrosse. It has a definite seasonality, right? After all, lacrosse isn’t played year round. The National Lacrosse League plays from January through May. Major League Lacrosse plays from May to August. High school and college have two seasons with girls playing in the fall and boys in the spring. Many cities and organizations hold summer tournaments.

Wait a second. That looks like lacrosse is played year round, doesn’t it? So why is it treated seasonal? Because that’s how those involved treat it. If it’s not NLL season, teams don’t tweet or update their Facebook pages and news is virtually nil outside of major events like draft day.

Does that mean fans quit looking for relevant products? In some cases, yes. You will always have a group of customers who also view your product as seasonal, either because they’re ready to move on to other things, or because they’ve been conditioned to view it that way.

Others find themselves frustrated because a product they want is no longer available. Many lacrosse blogs and news sites go dormant for the season, gear becomes hard to find unless you are lucky enough to have a lacrosse specific store nearby or shop online. Sometimes even that doesn’t help. Just ask a lacrosse playing girl whose gear, to save valuable real estate may only be stocked ahead of the season and cleared out immediately after.

Do you really believe anyone heavily involved in the sport quits thinking about it simply because it’s not lacrosse season? A lot of opportunity exists but is overlooked because lacrosse is seasonal.

So now, is your product really seasonal? Or is it only seasonal because you view and treat it as such?

5 Ways to Kill a Sales Lead with CRM Software

Posted on October 21, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

Image via Wikipedia

I know many of my posts lately have been focused on the automotive industry, but personally I feel you can learn a lot from other industries that can be applied to your own. As my last actual car buying experience (not including curiosity excursions onto car lots and test drives) was 11 years ago I am definitely finding the experience very interesting.

One thing that seems to be a constant factor though is an over reliance on CRM Software (Customer Relationship Management) which because of one dealership in particular has inspired this post.

1. Automate every exchange

You’ve just been given a sales lead, now what?

Apparently the thing to do these days is to add it to your CRM software and let it do all the work. After all, you’ve spent all that time drafting emails and set them to send at specified points in the sales cycle, what else do you need to do?

Yes, we live in a technology heavy world, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t personalize your content. Yes, it’s more time consuming and it won’t result in a sale every time, but in a sea of automation, guess who stands out?

To me, since my initial interest was sent through a website, an initial automated reply letting me know who you are and that my contact information was received is fine. However, you should take the time to send a personal email as a follow up. It doesn’t have to be long.

One of the internet managers I’ve dealt with sent a note that specifically mentioned comments I made on the contact form as well as tried to sell the product. This is a stark comparison to my inspiration. He took three emails before he introduced himself. Although, I wasn’t surprised as this was just one in a long line of uninspired auto-populated emails.

2. Inundate the customer with emails (and phone calls)

This definitely seems to be prevalent in the automotive industry. Rather than wait for you to respond, I’m going to keep contacting you until I make a sale. The thinking behind this seems to be that if they don’t pester you, they’re no longer on your radar and so have lost the sale. The problem though is it’s very easy to cross the line and be seen as spam. You might be surprised at how many customers won’t respond at all but will simply click the button in their email marking your emails as spam. Get enough spam complaints and you’ll get blacklisted. In some cases, it might not be just your email that gets blacklisted, but your whole company’s, especially if you have several salesman taking this approach.

So far since August 11, I have received 16 emails from my inspiration salesman. At least 14 of them were before the car was available. 7 of them were within the first week including two in one day. I’m just very thankful that despite his emails claiming otherwise, I did not provide a phone number.

3. Provide plenty of evidence that the email is a form letter

I am contacting you in reference to the 2011 Nissan Juke that you inquired about online at NissanUSA on 8/11/2010.

We have several new arrivals in stock here at that fit the description of the car you were considering. Several of these may be a different color and/or have additional features compared to the one you requested information about. However, one of these vehicles may surprise you and be just what you are looking for!

I would love to talk to you and see if one of these new cars might meet your needs. Please reply to this email or call me at , be sure to ask the operator for (name removed).

This is just a portion of one of the emails I was sent. I am quite impressed that despite all odds, they were somehow the only dealership in the United States to score several Jukes a full month before they were shipped to dealerships. And no, I didn’t remove the information after call me at. Glaring automation errors that left nonsensical blanks was pretty much the standard in his emails.

4. Cite your desire to provide personalized service while using nothing but gap ridden form letters

My name is (name removed) and I am the dedicated Internet Sales Manager assigned to you. My job is to give you the personalized attention that makes the buying process here at so unique. I would like to speak with you regarding the Juke in which you expressed an interest.

This is from the 8th email I received from him. Needless to say, his 7 prior emails (nor any of his subsequent emails) did anything to convince me of his genuineness.

I’m all about personalized service, but actions speak louder than words and if all your contact is via impersonal auto-populated emails, I’m not going to find it very believable.

5. Try to force a sale before the product is even available

If your product isn’t yet available for purchase, realize that while some customers will want to know every little detail about it, others won’t be interested until they can physically see and touch it. Yes, quite a few people are willing to buy a brand new car model sight unseen, but that’s the minority. Don’t drive off your sales lead trying to sell them a product that isn’t available yet.

5 Reasons Zappos is Killing Customer Service

Posted on April 3, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

: Image by George Eastman House via Flickr

It’s hard to not have a conversation about customer service and not mention Zappos, but I have to say, they’re wrecking customer service.

1. They make you expect a real person when you call instead of numerous levels of automation hell.

2. Not only do you expect a real person, you expect someone who is friendly, speaks your language and is knowledgeable about their products.

3. You expect your issues to actually be dealt with rather than shunted from person to person until someone finally “accidentally” disconnects the line.

4. You expect your items to arrive within a timely manner.

5. You expect to be treated as a valued customer.

Customer service is truly an important part of every business, but entirely too many companies cut corners and think of it more as a side note. What kind of experience are you providing your customers?

Why You Should Understand Domains

Posted on February 24, 2010May 5, 2015 by MD

Why in the world should I care about understanding domains? I’m not an IT person, I’m a [fill in blank].

Understanding domains is important for more than your tech team for a number of reasons, not the least of which is so you don’t get taken advantage of.

Communication
Having even a basic understanding of domains will help you to communicate with others who do need to deal with them. The more you know, the better you can convey what you want, or when you need it by. It can also help you to recognize when someone might be taking advantage of you. For instance, if you know how to change your DNS or add a CNAME record yourself, than you’ll know someone is blowing smoke when they try and tell you it will take them hours to get it done.

Strategy
Understanding domains will help you to better evaluate strategic moves whether at the business level, the marketing level or the product level. This will also help you to understand what issues you may run into or what steps you should take to avoid issues. For instance, imagine your marketing department has come up with a great new name and campaign for your latest product? What’s one of the first things you should do? See if the domain is even available. Honestly, this should be done even sooner in the process but I digress. It’s scary to me how many companies completely develop and launch products without a second thought only to find afterward that the domain is already registered and they’re unintentionally sending traffic to a completely unrelated company or product, or worse, a competitor.

Ramifications
It seems like an obvious question, but do you know what happens when domain is not renewed (or is not configured correctly)? I’m not referring to the details of what happens at the registrar level, but what happens at the other levels. Your website goes down. Possibly your email goes down. You potentially lose customers who suddenly can no longer find you, or can’t find you for the first time. Sometimes registrars will put up some kind of a notification alerting visitors or a place holder page such as coming soon. But more often than not, especially on misconfigured or non-configured domains, they may put up a page advertising that your domain may be for sale or use it to host relevant Google AdSense links (or similar). As these ads are often automatic and keyword based, you may drive traffic to your competitors.

7 Sins of Email Marketing

Posted on December 6, 2009May 5, 2015 by MD

Email is part of our lives and part of most marketing plans because of how inexpensive it is. Yet, as important as email marketing is, people still just seem to overlook the obvious. Dive in to my 7 sins of email marketing aka enormous pet peeves.

1. Bad From or Subject Lines

Think about how your email appears to your recipient. You only have a few seconds so make them count. What you think is creative or cute could very well look like spam. Make sure you have something in either the From line or the Subject line to make it clear to your customer that it is something they want to read. If you have an employee name for the from line, then make sure it’s clear in your subject line why they want to open it. Not a day goes by that I don’t get legitimate emails that I can’t tell what they are. The low end risk is they simply hit delete, but the high end risk is you get enough negative hits that you get blacklisted.

2. Bad Links

Usually if you’re sending out a marketing oriented email, you have an end goal in mind – don’t ruin it up by messing up your links. The absolute worst is having links that don’t work. You’ve just wasted your time and resources with nothing to show for it. Having generic links aren’t much better. If you send out an email highlighting a specific item but you drop your customers off on your home page, in most cases you’ve lost them. Very few people are going to take the time to search for the item that they just clicked through on. Make it easy for your customers. Before you hit send, assign specific links and double check them. It’s also not a good idea to use pictures of products you no longer have available on your site in your email.

3. HTML Assumption

Repeat to yourself – Not everyone can read or wants HTML emails. Don’t assume that everyone is going to be able to view the email as you intend it. Is your email just a giant image or group of images? Uh oh. Many email programs block images and if your customer is already unsure of whether or not to read your email, you probably just convinced them to hit the delete button. As Smart Phone usage continues to increase, more and more people are reading their emails on their phones but the majority are still limited to text based emails. Make sure your email is readable. If they have to scroll through a bunch of links in between all the text that is actually important they’re going to delete it. The best way to get around it? As part of your sign up process, ask them if they would prefer HTML or text emails and separate your list accordingly.

4. Deadlines Issues

While it’s a good idea to have a deadline in your email to encourage timely action, be realistic. A common complaint I hear from people is how they hate getting an email for a “Today Only” offer only to realize they’ve received it after the deadline. Depending on several factors such as the size of your email list and your email blast program, it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for your emails to be received.

5. Redundancy

Make sure you’re not making it easy for your customers to tune out your emails. Are all your emails virtually identical? Templates can be useful to keep a consistent look and feel to an email so they are consistent with your branding, but if the only thing your swapping out is a few details like the date and subject line, so otherwise it’s virtually the same, your customers will cease to open your emails. You’re not giving them any reason to pay attention and in fact you may cause them to feel like you’re wasting their time. Give your customers a reason to open your email and react.

6. Frequency Issues

How frequent you send emails will depend on a lot of factors, but ensure you’re not getting caught up in the mentality that you have to send them daily. For some companies, a daily email is necessary, but for others a biweekly schedule works better. The important thing to consider is if your email isn’t providing anything useful or relevant, you probably shouldn’t send it. However, the reverse issue also should be considered. Do you send out emails so infrequently that your customers forget they’ve even signed up to receive them?

7. Email Ownership

Do not assume that because you have been given a customer’s email address that you can use it however you want. It’s tempting to cross promote your other products/companies to a customer, but just because you’re not violating CAN-SPAM does not mean it’s a good business practice. If you have multiple newsletters, allow customers to choose what additional emails they would like to receive from you. Taking liberties with a customers email, can cause unintended repercussions. Yes, you may get some increased business, but you may also find yourself blacklisted from customers reporting your emails as SPAM because they’re not aware of why they’re received it.

I have a personal example of this exact thing occurring. I’ve played in some 3 on 3 mini-lacrosse tournaments over the years and as part of their registration, they request an email address. Shortly after, I started receiving a multitude of emails I didn’t want for Rapids games, 3 on 3 soccer tournaments, and a few lacrosse oriented organizations. How do I know for a fact they were related? The same misspelling of my name across all of them. Needless to say, it was just one more factor in them losing my business.