BeConnected

Customer Managed Relationships

Seth points out that Disney is thinking differently about CRM. They see it differently. Customer Managed Relationships. CMR replacing CRM. “...our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them.” Now that's understanding permission marketing. Who among us enjoys it when a marketer manages our relationship. We'd much rather manage our relationship.

So what's a marketer to do?

Be on all the Channels
Think about the relationship you want your customers to have with you. That's slightly different than thinking about the relationship you want to have with your customers. What channels of communication do your customers want to hear from you? You probably don't know so maybe you need to use multiple channels and let customers choose what's most convenient for them. Some customers will like email newsletters, some will like direct mail, some will like an RSS feed from your blog, and some will like podcasts. The point is that it should be the customers choice. The choice you have as a marketer is to populate the available channels with your message.

Track, Tweak and Be Respectable
When you offer multiple channels respect the choices of your customers. Don't assume that those that listen and respond to one channel will want to hear from you on other channels. For example don't assume that email newsletter readers will want to hear your podcast. It's ok to let them know you have one but it's not OK to send the podcast file in an email. At every opportunity Test and Tweak your message so that you continually improve your use of each channel of communication.

Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it? That's why you should consider outsourcing your email newsletters and blogs to a provider like BeTuitive Marketing where all the Tracking and Tweaking are respectfully handled for you by experts in permission marketing.

Technorati Tags: BeTuitive | blog | communication | direct mail | Disney | newsletter | permission marketing | Seth Godin

Cellphone Accounts Way Up in India

The world of mobile computing and communication is changing. While Americans learn how to text message the rest of the world is adding users at an astounding rate. Consider this report from Textually.com:

Nearly 2.5 million Indians are buying new cellular phone connections every month, making the South Asian nation one of the world's most promising markets for mobile phone service providers, a senior industry official said Friday. [via The Associated Press].
“The number of cellular phone users in India totalled 65 million at the end of September, up 53.5 per cent from a year ago, said Sanjeev Sharma, who heads the Indian operation of Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia Corp.

Your global marketing plans better include a mobile marketing strategy. Do you have a mobile version of your email newsletter? Have you segmented your mailing list to send a BlackBerry optimized version?
Textually.com:India Adds 2.5M Users A Month

Related:
How to Send an Email Newsletter
Marketers Need to Segment and Customize Newsletters

Technorati Tags: BlackBerry | cell phone | cellphone | email | emarketing | marketing | mobile phone | newsletter | permission marketing | India

Basics of Reading Customers: Birds of a Feather

Does your sales staff complain that marketing isn't sending them high quality leads? Maybe they need to know what good customers look like so they can better qualify the leads they are generating.

Do your CRM systems let your marketing people know what your best customer organizations look like? Often sales and marketing get very territorial about their separate data and systems. Shouldn't marketing people know what the current good customers look like so they can go find similar prospects? If organization A is a good customer it follows that organization B which looks just like organization A would be a good prospect. These organizations may be in different businesses but with similar needs or they may be in the same business yet different geographic markets.

Grouping your customers and prospects into different “flocks” based on criteria that is relevant to your business positions you to begin segmenting your mailing lists so that you can better speak to customers and prospects based on the scale of their operation, value of business they represent, geography, language, etc. Once you have a properly segmented list you can further target your communications to each different segment. Picture a trade show. You talk to each person differently based on what you learn and observe about them.

Properly managing an email newsletter program with numerous versions going to a number of segments of a mailing list adds significant complexity to your email marketing operations. But it's really the way to go. At BeTuitive our systems are set up to handle literally hundreds of different versions of client newsletters. We're finding it maximizes the ROI on email newsletters.

Related:
Basics of Reading Customers: Patterns
Basics of Reading Customers: Tone of Voice

Technorati Tags: email | sales | marketing | segmentation | permission marketing | emarketing | customer | BeTuitive | newsletter | design | B2B | Good Customer | customer insights | CRM

Book Review for Email Newsletter Publishers

If you haven't seen it already the latest BeTuitive Book Club review is up over at the BeTuitive Blog. I am not saying what it is but if you are doing an email newsletter or considering it you don't want to miss it. That Susan Fisher knows her stuff and gives a worthy review.

The BeTuitive Book Club is part of the ongoing effort to bring you high quality relevant content for our own monthly newsletter. If you find that concise easy to read book reviews are valuable guides to help you know which marketing and business books are worth your time, you should sign-up for the free monthly newsletter.

Technorati Tags: book review | newsletter | BeTuitive | book club | Susan Fisher | book | email | emarketing

Webinar Q&A and Building Permission Email Lists

I just sat in on Todd's webinar. Fantastic information but even better was the Q&A that Todd had with attenders from all over the world. One caller asked a good question about building an email list. Todd gave him some good advice about the usefulness of using an opt-in list broker. There's not much ROI to be had there. Better to partner with industry trade publications who maintain smaller yet more targeted lists.

One of my favorite techniques for building an email list is to extend your hand full of value for your potential subscribers. Give them a free taste of your expertise through a blog or a white paper that presents your unique viewpoint or approach to solving problems for your customers. A well written white paper properly promoted can drive traffic to your website and subscribers to your email newsletter. Once you have a high value article or white paper it makes it easy to ask clients and prospects to visit your website to download a copy. On the download page you can offer to register them to hear from you regularly through an email newsletter. The download needs to also include a link to subscribe or opt in to receive your newsletter.

That said I want to encourage you to be a part of Todd's next webinar coming up on October 5th at 1 p.m. central time. Be sure and be ready for the Q&A time. Want to be sure you get a reminder alert? Sign-up for the BeTuitive Newsletter and you'll hear more about this and other upcoming webinars. Of course if you don't find value to the newsletter after a few issues you can always unsubscribe at any time.

Technorati Tags: BeTuitive | email | emarketing | list building | newsletter | presentation | promotion | permission marketing | Todd Smart | webinar | writing

Four Steps to A Fantastic Email Newsletter: Free Webinar Today!

Todd Smart, President of BeTuitive Marketing, LLC has been giving talks lately on Four Keys to Creating Fantastic Email Newsletters. Today at 12 CDT he's doing a free webinar talking about the four keys and more. A great way to spend your lunch hour.

Free Webinar
Today 12 CDT
Four Steps to Fantastic Newsletters
Todd Smart

Sign Up for the Webinar by email

If you haven't done the Webinar thing, come on along it's easy. Simply email Sarah and she will send you a URL, a phone number and pin number. At the appropriate time you go to the URL and dial in on the phone number. You'll see graphics on the website and hear the audio on your phone. Cool, no?

Related:
Todd Smart: FAQ on Email Newsletters
How to Send an Email Newsletter
Sign-up for the BeTuitive Monthly Newsletter

Technorati Tags: BeTuitive | Todd Smart | webinar | Sarah Eaton | newsletter | email

How to Send an Email Newsletter

A lot of people are getting started with email newsletters. It's because permission marketing e-newsletters work. Not only do they communicate important information about a company and their offerings or promotions they can provide a wealth of information if they are tracked properly. Many new email marketers are challenged by success. Most marketers start with a smaller list and simply use rudimentary tools to create and send small scale bulk email newsletters. The challenge comes when you need to scale your list and your sending capacity. Common tools like Microsoft Office and Outlook can only handle limited lists.

When you are figuring out how to send email newsletters don't forget that a successful effort will lead to growth of your list and the importance of the content you include. When your list grows significantly one of the opportunities you have is to segment your list based on identifiers of your subscribers. Why should everyone receive the message in the same way? If you self publish, this can complicate your life dramatically. You need to compose multiple(perhaps hundreds) of different versions of each issue of you e-newsletter, you need to segment your list and send those different versions to the different segments. You can see how this complicates the administration process.

While that's taking up your time you need to produce high quality content that performs. If you are struggling to keep up with a successful newsletter you certainly don't want the quality of your newsletter to vary from issue to issue. If your quality dips subscribers will unsubscribe in droves. Producing and writing a consistent high quality email marketing newsletter takes a lot of planning and time.

All of that and we haven't even talked about the opportunities for specific sales lead information. Properly designed email newsletters can provide trackable click streams that can be interpreted to determine real sales leads for your sales departments.

All of this gets overwhelming. So you look for solutions. One option is to get some more sophisticated email software that has some increased functionality for sending email newsletters. These can be extremely costly for individual companies and present new administrative headaches as you now have a new learning curve to deal with.

A better option is to go with an outsourcing company who can utilize state-of-the-art software to compose, manage and send your newsletters. An outsourced solution to your email marketing can provide a full solution from list building, segmentation management, content creation, bulk email sending, sales lead mining, performance reporting, etc.

Sure you could add staff and sophisticated software or you can get started and achieve your ROI targets faster by outsourcing your efforts. We're not talking about off-shoring, we're talking about taking just three minutes to request a pricing quote from a group of email newsletter professionals in Chicago. Requesting a price quote simply begins a dialog about how BeTuitive Marketing LLC can create a solution that helps you grow your relationships and build your business.

Related:
FAQ on Email Newsletters
Top 5 Reasons to Outsource Email Newsletters
Marketers Need to Segment Their Lists

Technorati Tags: newsletter | emarketing | segmentation | subscribe | delivery | promotion | excellence | customer communications | permission marketing | BeTuitive | writing | B2B | email | outsourcing | customer

Todd Smart: FAQ on Email Newsletters

Hey, no kidding, I am more and more impressed with the BeTuitive Newsletter. I am not on the team that publishes that baby so every month I get a chance to read it fresh just like everyone else who has signed up for it.

This month's issue has several great items in it. I am going to link to one of them but if you find it valuable you should take just two minutes and make sure you sign up to receive future issues directly.

In the August issue Todd Smart, President of BeTuitive, presents some insights into the use of email newsletters for marketing. It's a great piece responding to several frequently asked questions about email newsletters. Here's just one answer that I found interesting:

How do we decide on content?

Todd: You must make the recipient's life better in some way with the information you provide. It's different with every business. The surest way to go about it is to ask referral sources, prospects and customers what their pain points are. Ask them: “What information would be so valuable to you right now that you'd be willing to pay for it?” Create, find or buy that information — and then give it to them for free to grow your relationships.

What content to put into your newsletter is only part of the whole picture. Is also important to understand how your newsletter can work for you:

How do you turn what people are reading into leads?

Todd: What I know for sure is this: What people read is a leading indicator for future purchasing.

Take me — I'm not a car guy, and I don't seek out information on cars unless I'm in the market for one. Then, when I'm looking to buy, I buy magazines and look up all kinds of information to help me make the right decision. Anyone with the power to track my reading behavior would know that I'm looking to buy a car.

For instance, we have a client who wants to measure interest in Voiceover IP. So, we run articles in their newsletter with headlines like, “Pre-planning for VoIP.” That information[click-thrus] can easily be fed to sales as a lead.

Todd has more valuable nuggets to share. Read these and also find out four keys to doing a great newsletter.

Technorati Tags: email | BeTuitive | emarketing | customer communications | B2B | Todd Smart | marketing | customer insights | newsletter

Top 5 Reasons to Outsource Your Email Newsletter

Sarah Eaton has been doing a great series on the top reasons to outsource your email newsletter. This is great advice. She's only part way through her list so you'll want to grab the BeTuitive blog feed so that you can read the rest as she post's them.

And the number five reason why it's a good idea to outsource your newsletter?  It combines elements of some of our previous ideas (as seen below).  <b>You get a designer, an editor, a writer, a list manager, a strategy team.  You get all of those things, for the price of hiring one person to work on your newsletter for you in house</b>.  That's right: a whole bunch of brains for the price of one. 
5.  Multiple brains for the price of one.
4.  Design that pops and complements the custom content.
3.  Professional writing and editing services at your disposal.
2.  You're working with experts; you can let go of the worry.
1.  Because you're so flippin' busy

This is great advice for anyone just starting out to create an email newsletter or anyone looking for a way to work smarter not harder. The first step is to check out BeTuitive and request some Pricing to see how outsourcing can save the day and better serve your customers.
Multiple Brains for the Price of One

Technorati Tags: subscribe | Sarah Eaton | outsourcing | productivity | blog | emarketing | syndication | B2B | writing | BeTuitive | newsletter | email | permission marketing

Tips for Email Marketers

Clickz has a nice article on some backend basics for email newsletter publishers. These are the kind of things that complicate the whole process of doing an email newsletter. There is a lot more to it than just writing a newsletter and then pushing send. List management and ISP relations are a great reason to outsource your email newsletters to a trusted partner who can bring experience and expertise to your interactive marketing.

Clickz on important bsics for email publishers

Technorati Tags: clickz | marketing | emarketing | outsourcing | list management | permission marketing | BeTuitive | newsletter | email | promotion