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

Writing Memorable Newsletters: Spreadability

Spreadability is the ease with which your ideas spread from person to person. It's two basic modes are newsletter forwards and workplace conversations. For readers to deem your newsletter of high value it needs to provide ideas that readers can use. Ideas that readers can apply in their own workflows, share with others in their organization or share with their professional networks are ideas that will keep subscribers reading each and every issue that you publish. Once you have the content ideas and you are properly using Themes with Focus and good Summaries it's time to make sure that those ideas are spreadable.

Practical Tips:
Tell Stories: Tell stories of how readers have used, discussed and spread your ideas. Use a sidebar column to profile readers and what and how they are learning from your newsletter. Readers will see how others are benefitting from your newsletter and be inspired to do the same.
Encourage Forwarding: Always include a forward to a friend mechanism. Readers may not use it but it plants the idea in their head that it's OK and a good thing to forward your newsletter to colleagues. Users may forward your newsletter using the forward function on their email application. While this isn't trackable through your email newsletter application it is the spread of your content and newsletter branding.
Blog Them: Continue the discussion about your ideas and content on a corporate blog. Once you move your readers from your newsletter to your blog it's just one click to move them to your corporate site. A blog is a good place for more information about your email newsletter content. You can receive feedback via comments, conduct polls, and drive other behavior through a blog.

Related:
Writing Memorable Newsletters: Summaries

Writing Memorable Newsletters: Focus
Writing Memorable Newsletters: Themes
Writing Memorable and Spreadable Email Newsletters
Storytelling vs. Story-Crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter

Technorati Tags: B2B | comments | communication | content | corporate blogging | customer communications | email | emarketing | forward | interactivity | marketing | networking | newsletter | permission marketing | promotion | stories | storytelling | subscribe | summaries | word of mouth

Writing Memorable Newsletters: Summaries

Summaries also called blurbs are important for newsletters for several reasons. Effective summaries serve readers well because they allow readers to skim the headline and summaries of several articles “above the scroll.” Analogous to above the fold for newspapers. Many email publishers simply past the whole text of each article into the body of the newsletter. They assume people will read from to to bottom. While easy, this approach is overwhelming to busy readers. Multi-tasking readers are much more likely to skim and cherry-pick the content they are most interested in. Your newsletter will serve readers better by supporting this behavior. View the top screen of your newsletter as a table of contents with headlines and brief summaries or teasers for your content elements.

When writing these summaries keep in mind that what you are writing should be the two or three talking points that a reader will use to begin a discussion of the ideas in your article. These talking points are what comes after “I just read an interesting article about...”

If you want your email newsletters to add value to your readers lives it's important to write them in a way that makes it easy for readers to discover content they are interested in and help readers remember and talk about the ideas they read in your content. Relevant ideas they can talk about with their colleagues and coworkers are what will keep readers subscribed, forwarding your newsletters and valuing your company as a source for valuable information and know how.

Related:
Writing Memorable Newsletters: Focus
Writing Memorable Newsletters: Themes
Writing Memorable and Spreadable Email Newsletters
Storytelling vs. Story-Crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter

Technorati Tags: content | customer communications | email | emarketing | marketing | newsletter | newspaper | permission marketing | newsletter content | skimming | summaries | talking points | writing

Writing Memorable Newsletters: Focus

Once you have properly identified a theme for your newsletter issue it's important to stay focused on that theme. Many newsletters will contain one article on theme and then go on about filling the issue with a laundry list of scattered unrelated elements. Your readers are more likely to remember your newsletter as a valuable resource if all the elements of an issue support a particular theme. Everything from the subject line to the graphics, and pictures needs to play a supporting and reinforcing role.

Many publishers feel that each issue needs to “have something for everyone” and so they offer articles on a variety of subjects and themes. In doing this each topic is only addressed on a surface level and from one perspective. A focused newsletter issue provides multiple voices and perspectives and more in depth information. A focused newsletter can easily be labeled and filed for future reference or more importantly forwarded to friends and colleagues who your readers feel would benefit from the theme.

If you want your newsletter to demonstrate your companies thought leadership and industry expertise you should definitely do email newsletters with clear themes and focused content that supports and reinforces those themes.

Related:
Writing Memorable and Spreadable Email Newsletters
Writing Memorable Newsletters: Themes

Storytelling vs. Story-crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter
Surprise and Delight Customers with Easter Eggs

Technorati Tags: B2B | communication | customer communications | design | easter egg | email | emarketing | howto | marketing | newsletter | permission marketing | writing

Writing Memorable Newsletters: Themes

Remember, a theme for a newsletter is a one word or phrase that encapsulates or summarizes the subject of a given issue of your email newsletter. The theme helps in two ways. First, it helps you develop and filter content elements for the issue. Second, and more importantly, a theme helps your readers to grasp the value you are imparting to them. A well defined theme helps your readers remember your content and consequently your company.

Most publishing teams map out issue themes well in advance. Often times months in advance. This is a by product of the long lead times that traditional publications have. Magazines and print newsletters often require weeks and months for production, printing and mailing. But it's a new day. With electronic publishing it's possible to move much more quickly. In order to deliver the greatest value to your readers the more relevant and timely your theme the better.

How do you develop a theme? Ah, the key question. While many sales and marketing people would be quick to map out a schedule of themes based on the messages and stories that the company wants to broadcast this I think is a mistake. This turns your e-newsletter into an advertisement or worse spam. The best practice for developing email newsletter themes is to get elbow deep in the information and issues that are important to your readers. It's your customer intuition at work. The theme of your newsletters need to come from your knowledge of what your customers/readers want or need to know, not what you want them to know. How you weave your message and offering into that theme is your value as a producer/writer of your newsletter.

Practical Tips:
Talk to your customers - ask them what problems or issues keep them awake at night.
Monitor you customers - Use the Customer Intuition Tools that I blog about to monitor what's happening with your customers, their companies and their competition. Google Alerts and RSS feeds are your friends. Set up folders for each major customer in your newsreader.
Poll you readers - Consider using your permission marketing assets(email lists) to engage your readers in a poll or discussion about issues and topics that are relevant.
Talk to your Sales Department - Develop practices to discover what your sales people are hearing from their customers and prospects. Consider developing a group blog or wiki for capturing this information. Customer concerns questions and objections are a rich source of content ideas for your newsletter.
Monitor the Competition - Subscribe to as many of your competitors newsletters as you can so you can zig when the zag. You want to stand out and provide uniquely relevant and memorable content that will have your readers opening, remembering, using and forwarding your content every issue.

Related:
Writing Memorable Spreadable Email Newsletters
Storytelling vs. Story-crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter

Technorati Tags: customer | customer communications | customer insights | email | emarketing | newsletter | writing

Writing Memorable Spreadable Email Newsletters

Go to a coworker who subscribes to(but isn't involved in producing)your email newsletter and ask them what the theme and two or three key ideas are from the latest issue. If they can tell you you're on the right track. Now, call a customer and ask them.

If your coworker can't recall and articulate the theme or key ideas of your newsletter how can you expect your customers and prospects to remember what you have to say. I'd argue that two ideas that are remembered are worth much more than five or six that well presented ideas that aren't remembered.

Spreadable ideas are what increases the value of your newsletter in subscribers minds. If your idea is what follows “You know, I just read about...” when a reader speaks up in a meeting or around the lunch table chances are your open rates and “forward to a friend” rates will be increasing. Information, ideas and stories that readers can share and apply to their own lives is the definition of relevant. Relevant is what keeps subscribers reading and talking about your newsletter and your company.

So how do you do it? How do you craft relevant newsletters? Here are some ideas to get us thinking:

• Themes - Think of themes as the one word or phrase summary of your newsletter issue. This is the answer to the question “What was the last issue of the newsletter about?” For example: The October issue of the BeTuitive newsletter (subscribe here)is about “Storytelling”
• Focus- Every element of the issue should reinforce the theme. Craft every article, summary, news item, graphic, link, subject line etc. to in some way relate to and support the central theme. Too many newsletters are not memorable because the theme isn't clear.
• Summaries - We all know that people skim online content. Your summaries or blurbs need to capture your readers fleeting attention. More than that your summaries become talking points when readers talk about your ideas and content. They literally can be the two or three memorable sentences that follow the “You know, I just read an article about...”
• Spreadability - There are technical and structural issues about constructing email newsletters that aid their spreadability. Most people are very familiar with how to forward email. It's still important to include a “forward to a friend” link because it plants the idea in readers minds and gets them thinking subconsciously who in their relational network could benefit from this content.

I'll look at these ideas in more detail in the days to come. In the mean time go as that coworker what they remember from the last newsletter.

Related:
Storytelling vs. Story-crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter

Technorati Tags: B2B | communication | customer communications | email | emarketing | newsletter | word of mouth

Writing Memorable Spreadable Email Newsletters

Go to a coworker who subscribes to(but isn't involved in producing)your email newsletter and ask them what the theme and two or three key ideas are from the latest issue. If they can tell you you're on the right track. Now, call a customer and ask them.

If your coworker can't recall and articulate the theme or key ideas of your newsletter how can you expect your customers and prospects to remember what you have to say. I'd argue that two ideas that are remembered are worth much more than five or six that well presented ideas that aren't remembered.

Spreadable ideas are what increases the value of your newsletter in subscribers minds. If your idea is what follows “You know, I just read about...” when a reader speaks up in a meeting or around the lunch table chances are your open rates and “forward to a friend” rates will be increasing. Information, ideas and stories that readers can share and apply to their own lives is the definition of relevant. Relevant is what keeps subscribers reading and talking about your newsletter and your company.

So how do you do it? How do you craft relevant newsletters? Here are some ideas to get us thinking:

• Themes - Think of themes as the one word or phrase summary of your newsletter issue. This is the answer to the question “What was the last issue of the newsletter about?” For example: The October issue of the BeTuitive newsletter (subscribe here)is about “Storytelling”
• Focus- Every element of the issue should reinforce the theme. Craft every article, summary, news item, graphic, link, subject line etc. to in some way relate to and support the central theme. Too many newsletters are not memorable because the theme isn't clear.
• Summaries - We all know that people skim online content. Your summaries or blurbs need to capture your readers fleeting attention. More than that your summaries become talking points when readers talk about your ideas and content. They literally can be the two or three memorable sentences that follow the “You know, I just read an article about...”
• Spreadability - There are technical and structural issues about constructing email newsletters that aid their spreadability. Most people are very familiar with how to forward email. It's still important to include a “forward to a friend” link because it plants the idea in readers minds and gets them thinking subconsciously who in their relational network could benefit from this content.

I'll look at these ideas in more detail in the days to come. In the mean time go as that coworker what they remember from the last newsletter.

UPDATE: Now with link goodness

Related:
Storytelling vs. Story-crafting
Why a Reader Forwards an Email Newsletter

Technorati Tags: emarketing | email | customer communications | newsletter | B2B | communication | word of mouth

Storytelling vs. Story-crafting

These days marketing is all about the story. It's the story of the idea that lead to the creation of your business, the history of your company, the creative uses of your product, the experience of your service, the transformation that results from your experience. Whatever it is, it's all about the story and thus the storytelling. The storytelling techniques and venues are constantly changing. Just as mass communication grew through newspapers to radio to television the new media is evolving communication and storytelling. Electronics and internet connectivity are changing the game from mass communication and storytelling to individual communication and story-crafting.

Story-crafting is different than storytelling because the listener takes an active participatory role in how they consume the story. User generated content builds on the base framework created by marketers to create new narratives that are much more powerful and relevant to consumers. A forum or blog comment section that collects customer experiences, tips, recommendations, reviews, suggestions etc. is much more relevant to consumers than traditional marketing speak generated by the in-house copy writers. Trust has shifted. Consumers believe their fellow consumers perhaps more so than the company line.

Today customers or fans self organize into different levels of loyalty and devotion to your product, service or experience. In so doing they seek out different levels of connection to your brand. Some just buy your product, some refer you to friends and colleagues, some subscribe to your email newsletter, still others read and subscribe to your blog, a few subscribe to your podcast and somewhere out there somebody wants to tatoo your logo on their body. There's a hierarchy of brand loyalty and devotion. The examples are obvious and oft written about. Apple, Microsoft, Volkswagen, Disney, Harley-Davidson, Tom Peters, Starbucks, etc.

What's needed today is a comprehensive integrated approach to the use of the new tools and communication channels available to today's marketer. The tools keep coming. It's too easy to just grow haphazardly from email newsletters to blogs/RSS to audio podcasting to video pocasting with wikis, forums, chat rooms thrown in along the way. We're seeing some dazzling failures along the way as companies attempt to use these tools without understanding how best to integrate them into an overarching story-crafting strategy.

Today's marketers need to understand new media tools and just how they can and should be used to allow customers and prospects to enter into a participatory relationship with your brand that allows them to connect at a variety of levels with your ongoing stories. Not everyone will utilize all of your communication channels but their needs to be a strategy so that all the elements move the story forward and don't frustrate customers by simply duplicating messages across different media.

That's why it pays to consider outsourcing your customer communication like email newsletters and blogs to a company like BeTuitive Marketing, LLC because we bring a lot of experience and understanding of these new media tools and can help you craft overall strategies for building your relationships and sales with your existing and prospective customers.

Technorati Tags: story-crafting | Tom Peters | Volkswagen | wiki | marketing | newsletter | tattoo | customer | stories | permission marketing | newspaper | customer communications | email | customer focus groups | customer insights | BeTuitive | B2B | Disney | Podcast | podcasting | B2C | history | storytelling | outsourcing | emarketing | communication | blog | Apple | Starbucks | Harley-Davidson | interactivity

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