IT MarketingNewsletters
made easy January 2006 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns
– “Electronic newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your
customers, prospects and referrals. But there's a technology component that you
need to master if you don’t have ready access to an IT department. Once you
have the software and have set up the newsletter, it’s easy to change the
content every month. Be careful, though: the newsletter should be sent only to
those who want it. Otherwise you will be blacklisted by the spam fighters. You
need to get permission and make it easy to opt out. There are many ways
to prepare and distribute a newsletter. Here, I will share with you some tricks
of the trade. First, maintain a database of contacts in a customer relationship
or contact management system. I use ACT! Version 8, which is fine but will require
more computing power than previous versions. (I actually needed to upgrade my
computer to accommodate Version 8.) CRM or contact management systems allow you
not only to store contact information in the database, but also to manage it.
You could use something more rudimentary but you will lose out on all the other
advantages associated with contact or CRM systems. Second, you have to develop
content. For my monthly newsletter, I use articles I have either written or read.
During the month, I save articles about technology, business processes and risk
management that I think would be interesting to my contacts. Third, you
need to publish the newsletter. Many companies use Adobe Acrobat to generate a
pdf file that can be read by their clients. Recipients of the newsletter just
need Adobe Reader, which can be easily downloaded at no charge. Other companies
publish their newsletters on the Internet using tools such as Microsoft FrontPage
or Dreamweaver. In April 2006, I tried something new — a blog (short for
weblog). One big advantage is that a blog is interactive: your readers can post
comments. Another advantage: it could attract new prospects to your website. I
use blogger.com, which was acquired by Google in 2003. It’s easy to update
the blog. The only hard part is incorporating it with the rest of your website
to give it the same look and feel. You will most likely need a firm that specializes
in developing websites to accomplish this. Last, you need to distribute
the newsletter. There are plenty of alternatives. Your objective should be to
personalize it and send it out in bulk (hundreds or thousands at a time). That
eliminates Outlook. Many customer relationship management tools include marketing
automation, which will allow you to do an e-mail blast. As ACT! does not include
marketing automation, I chose GroupMail from Infacta, which works really well
for me. I import contacts from ACT! and blast them out with GroupMail. With GroupMail,
you can quickly and easily import contacts, send professional messages that are
personalized for each of your recipients, and let it run while you are doing something
else on your computer. There is a free version of GroupMail that allows you to
send to a maximum of 100 users at a time. My contacts are busy so I try
to make it easy for them to scan for anything that might be interesting. I make
the e-mail very brief, including only the headings for the articles. Readers can
then click to access my blog for the details. The blog contains comments about
the article and often my view or opinion. This gives some value added beyond the
article itself. Readers can click again to see the whole article. Google
Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too October 30, 2005 from The New
York Times - "Those little ads - 12 word snippets of text, linked to topics
that users are actually interested in - have turned Google into one of the biggest
advertising vehicles the world has ever seen. This year, Google will sell $6.1
billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto,
an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper
chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said,
he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place
it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News
Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal
and Time Warner." For the rest of the article, click here. Enterprise
collaboration with blogs and wikis
March 28, 2005 from InfoWorld
- "To facilitate the exchange of information and to establish customized,
user-friendly data archives, companies such as Cisco, Disney, Hewlett-Packard,
General Motors, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft are turning to a new breed of collaboration
tools: blogs and wikis. Each helps fill the gaps left by traditional groupware
in a different way. “Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says
Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM
Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is
sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance
to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a
blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”
Robert Scoble started blogging four years ago when he worked for Japanese
technology giant NEC. Scoble’s ruthlessly honest blog -- he never shied from
criticizing NEC when he thought it was necessary -- soon became an online gathering
place for NEC customers, a place where people could get tech support and offer
product feedback. Now a Microsoft technology evangelist, Scoble has continued
to blog and often writes
about the best and worst of Microsoft’s solutions. Although straight-talking
employees can make some enterprises nervous, the credibility Scoble has developed
throughout the years serves Microsoft well. If Scoble defends his company, even
Microsoft-scorning geeks listen. Scoble is, however, careful to point out in his
blog that his writings “are not vetted by Microsoft and are not official.
Often they aren’t even correct.” Similarly, Sun Microsystems
CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog,
launched last June, is becoming a trusted source of inside information. Schwartz
occasionally attacks Sun’s decisions and business practices with almost as
much vehemence as he slams HP, IBM, and other competitors. “With enterprise
blogs, the prevailing wisdom right now is to avoid marketing speak of the sort
you’d find in a press release,” says Frank Gilbane, CEO of content management
technology consultancy Bluebill Advisors. “The strength of blogs and wikis
is that they provide direct interaction with readers. People don’t want to
interact with press releases, and if they don’t feel the content is real,
they’ll simply stop reading the blog.” For the article, click here. We
wonder if some people have too much time on their hands to be able to wade through
the blog and the wiki. Cold calls get warmer March 28, 2005
from the New York Times - "The idea of circumventing the drudgery of finding
potential clients helped inspire Mr. Fowler and several colleagues to start Jigsaw
Data. The company, based in San Mateo, Calif., is a marketplace of business contacts
that are all contributed by and, perhaps more important, vetted by the members.
Jigsaw then provides the online organizing infrastructure... "I couldn't
get the e-mail of the C.I.O.," said Mr. Jue, a sales executive at Fiberlink
Communications in San Francisco. "No one was allowed to give me his address.
So I said, let me check Jigsaw. It's a company in Alaska, for God's sake. Not
only did it have his e-mail, it had his direct dial. It kind of blew me away." Jigsaw
currently has about 5,000 active users and a database of 441,000 contacts from
nearly 45,000 companies. The database is growing by 3,000 contacts a day, Mr.
Fowler said." Click here
for the article. Click here
for Jigsaw. 15 Email-Marketing Best Practices From
Interspire.com - I was looking for some guidance on our own newsletter and found
an article that was somewhat useful. We don't follow all the so-called "Best
Practices", but thought that many of them made sense. However, I think there
are even more important guidelines to follow that are not mentioned in the article.
I believe that a newsletter should provide value to the reader and avoid selling
services or products. Click
here for the article. Americans are from Mars, Canadians
are from Venus July 15, 2004 from PROFITguide.com - This is an interesting
read from a Canadian perspective on the differences between Canada and the US,
which has implications to doing business across the border. "Most
people presume Canadians are just unarmed Americans with parkas and that there
really is no difference. It seems commonsensical — research shows that 90% of
both Canadians and Americans think the family is the most important thing in their
lives. Mind you, 90% of people in Iran think that too. But looking at
the structure of authority in the family, things are different. One of the aspects
we use to monitor this is the statement that the "father of the family must
be the authority in his house." What we find in Canada is that about 18%
of us in the year 2000 believed this to be true, while in the U.S. it was 49%.
Since 2000, these numbers have been increasing in the U.S and decreasing in Canada...
The American way is to have a strong father, a commander-in-chief, to whom you
give all the power and say "lead us to the promised land" — whether
that's in business or foreign policy. Down there, they are looking for leaders
to be leaders. They want someone with a plan who can identify the "enemy"
and can be followed to great success or until he and the company implodes. Canadians,
on the other hand, might sit down and figure out a plan together. It's much more
collaborative here and less hierarchical. When it comes to family and
business, we just think of things differently. A Canadian thinks "my family
comes first" so when the meeting that started at 5:00 pm and was supposed
to be over by 5:45 pm drags on until 6 p.m., the Canadian says, "My family
comes first I've got to go home and be with my kid." Whereas the American
says "I can't possibly leave this meeting at six o'clock and jeopardize my
standing in this company. I can't have people questioning my loyalty or I might
be overlooked for the next promotion." For the article, click
here. 10 tips on how to get your website noticed now December
22, 2003, Canadian Business. Do you wonder why you have so little traffic on your
web site. There are tricks of the trade. How else could you explain that 180 Systems,
a small company, could have the following keywords land us on the top of Google
- independent ERP consultants, erp buyers guide, accounting system differentiators,
accounting and erp systems, mid market accounting systems, business intelligence
differentiators... If you want some tips from Canadian Business, click
here. Send emailing to large groups of contacts According
to Tucows.com "If you maintain mailing lists or if you regularly send messages
to large groups of recipients, Group Mail will be your saviour". We agree.
Click here for Group
Mail's web site. The 5 Most Common Search Engine Mistakes
September 2003, from Darwin - "Given that 85 percent of Internet users
find websites through search engines, you'd better be sure you're using the search
engines to your best advantage". The article gives some good tips that may
not be obvious to you. For the article, click
here. Pay to be Seen on the Internet and Some Advice on Being Search-Engine
Friendly August 29, 2003, from InfoWorld - "More companies are
shelling out cash for top placement by Internet search engines" The article
includes some good advice on making web sites search-engine friendly. 1) "Come
up with narrow, specific keywords. "Mortgage" will not perform as well
as "South Florida, mortgage." 2) "Address your specific keyword
list appropriately in your metatags, bearing in mind that your title tag is most
important." 3) "Consider each page that you are optimizing as a potential
landing page for a visitor." I think the writer missed one of the most important
elements in getting noticed. You need to have other sites point to you and the
higher up in the search engine echelons, the better. For the article, click
here. Attend a conference or a seminar at your desk
Web conferencing, a collaborative technology allows you to share documents, PowerPoint
presentations, and demonstrations at your desk over the internet. The loss of
personal contact is offset by the savings in time and expense. For an article
from CFO.com, click here.
A source for market and competitive intelligence According to
an article written by itbusiness.ca, RocketInfo is being praised by some of the
most well-known names in the search business. These include Research Buzz, About.com
and SearchEngineWatch, which last year named the RocketInfo as the first-runner
up to Yahoo! in its annual awards program. Click
here for the itbusiness.ca article or
here for a link to RocketInfo. Should we publish the results of
our survey to customers of the leading accounting systems? We have
issued a survey to about 400 customers of some of the leading vendors of accounting
systems. The results were going to be published in the CAmagazine in February
and then in May, but we have now delayed until September 2002 because of concerns
raised by the vendors. The results are based on about 10-15 customers per product,
and there is the concern about drawing conclusions from a small sample size. The
other concern is that we are rating and comparing products that could vary significantly
in complexity, and the concern is that we are not comparing apples to apples.
Another problem is that many of the vendors did not realize what their customers
were thinking, and were surprised by the results. We think that not knowing what
customers are really thinking is a common problem. In past FYI’s, we have suggested
using a product from Perseus Development Corporation (http://www.perseus.com/)
to gather client information. If you would like assistance in gathering market
intelligence, we can help by introducing you to one of our marketing consultant
associates. Are you ready to send a survey to your clients by email?
It seems to me that many companies don’t always know what their clients are thinking.
There are tools that will automate the preparation of a survey, as well as data
collection and reporting. We have used the Survey Solutions product from Perseus
Development Corporation (http://www.perseus.com/)
and would highly recommend it. We would also be pleased to help you get started.
Who buys on-line? You would think that it would
be the younger crowd. Guess again. I have attached an article that was downloaded
from TechRepublic, which is a decent source of IT information. Click
here for a link to TechRepublic and click
here for an article on who buys on-line. Have
you attended a webinar? A webinar is a great technology that allows
you to be trained or attend a conference at your office. Using the internet and
your phone, you will see the PowerPoint presentation or the latest version of
a software product, and you will hear the speaker on your phone. You can even
ask questions via the internet. I have used PlaceWare a few times and it sure
beats getting on an airplane… Click
here for a link to Placeware’s web site. Are your clients satisfied
with your services? Technology can help you quickly and easily gather client
feedback that lets you know what you did right, what you did not do so well, and
what needs your clients would like you to meet. Click
here for more. Ever wonder why your company never appears in the
search results for search engines such as Yahoo or Google? You
may not care as your web site is only there to satisfy existing relationships
with prospects, clients, suppliers, investors… But if would like to attract new
business to your web site, click here for more.
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