I never take notice of those “text [number] to see if you’ve won” type competitions.  Nor do I enter competitions where there’s one prize (or very few prizes) and probably thousands of people entering.   Nor do I get suckered into giving away my contact details in exchange for some rubbishy little prize or giveaway.

But I am a sinner for I have missed out on a good one.  One that shows exactly how ‘big business’ should be doing it.

I missed the early part of the promotion.   Somehow it escaped me that if I had visited Pizza Hut between 14^th November and 3^rd January I would have got a “Don’t Open Me” envelope containing a guaranteed gift.

Then I got an email that started off like this …

And I scrolled down a bit and saw this …

Even though it would be quite likely (feeling pessimistic today!) that I’d be one of the 1.75 million people who won a food gift, just maybe I’d be in with a chance of winning one of the 2,100 good prizes or the 5,000 £20 Pizza Hut gift cards (worth having).

The point is that with such prizes on offer there is a huge incentive to enter the competition in the first place.  And even though most people would go back to Pizza Hut purely to get their envelope opened, a good proportion of them would probably eat there at the same time – brilliant marketing!

I’m not usually a fan of big business but the people behind this promotion have grabbed my attention and although offering such prizes isn’t possible for any of you readers, you can still use the concept on a smaller scale.  Give away just one iPad, plus 10 of something else, and 50 of something smaller.  It’s purely a case of scaling down from the reach of Pizza Hut down to the scale of those who would see your own competition.   If you think that 1,000 people may see your competition (e.g. via an email marketing drive) then make them feel that they’ve got a strong chance of winning at least something.  If you can ‘do a Pizza Hut’ and guarantee at least something to everyone (even if it’s really small) then everyone feels like they’re a winner in some way.

And do you know what the outcome of all this is?  I’m going to watch out for future Pizza Hut promotions because ones worth entering come along very rarely.   And if you have a future promotion offering prizes that you’re considering then feel free to try it on me and I’ll let you know what I think.

Apart from the cost of having one, I can’t complain.

But I’ve been on the receiving end of occasional bits of marketing from them and it never seems to quite hit the mark – it never feels ‘right’.  Just before Christmas there was a particular howler that highlights why every bit of a company needs to be ‘joined up in excellence’.  Here’s the email I received on 23^rd December …

Anyone notice the obvious error?

It probably needs to be blown up a bit …

Either Jaguar have invented a time machine that’s going to take me back a few days to before 20^th December or they’ve sent out an email (probably thousands of the same email) without realising that they’re promoting something that can no longer be bought because the date has passed.

From a one man band or small company, such things slip through sometimes.  From a big company wanting to be perceived as being excellent in every way?  That’s just sloppy.

However, I believe that we’re already at the point where people are inundated with things they could read and useful tips they could follow and while such methods carry a lot of value, it’s going to take a lot more to stand out from the competition.

I believe that in 2012 and beyond we may start seeing a much more ‘personal’ approach to interactions and one such method could be through electronic cards.

I’ve long been aware of electronic greeting cards but they have never featured heavily in my ‘things to focus on’ and it was only when receiving one at Christmas 2011 (thank you Sian Murphy) it stood out as being one of only a few ‘truly personal’ things received during the year.  OK, I expect other people got the card but the point is that it went beyond pure business and so struck a chord.  It made me suddenly more aware of the person who had sent it.

For many people in business, this may seem like a lot of hard work.  To those who don’t see it as a waste of time, there could be some value in reading on …

When you go to the website http://www.jacquielawson.com you find a large range of electronic card types that can be sent.  Birthday, Christmas, Get Well, Thank You … the list goes on and on.

The website makes it very clear (see http://www.jacquielawson.com/commercial.htm) that commercial use of the website is not permitted and sets the ground rules.   However, it also says that people within business can use the website to send e-cards on certain conditions (which all seem fair to me).

Many businesses (including Custwin) have clients where there is a more personal relationship – perhaps not ‘go down the pub for a beer’ in many cases, but more than purely a financial transaction.  For those types of relationships, a website such as this could be great for strengthening the relationship.  Here are some thoughts about how people in business could use such a website in a way that is truly personal …

• Birthdays – on each client birthday select and send an  e-card that most closely matches the personality of the client.
• Christmas – select e-cards that match certain types of client personality, ideally personalising the message on each one.
• Summer holiday time – send contacts an e-card that reflects your upcoming time on holiday, so that they know you are going to be away.
• Big occasions – if you know that a contact has a big event in their life (e.g. wedding, birth of a baby, or even something that warrants a ‘With Sympathy’ card), then there will be e-cards to match.
• Thank you – with life being so busy it’s all too rare that we take the time to thank people we’re in contact with.  A thank-you e-card could help.

When used in the spirit of how the Jacquie Lawson website is intended (i.e. not used for cold hard commercial gain), the use of e-cards can add a more personal element to the interactions you have with people that you know.  When you add that to the more ‘business’ way that you interact with people (e.g. email newsletters) and it’s totally genuine and personalised, then I’d suggest that this can be only a positive thing to do.

And the best bit of all?   In the UK it costs just £7.25 per year to send unlimited (obviously, within reason) e-cards.  If such a small financial cost plus your time to invest in sending personalised e-cards is palatable then you may want to consider ‘Getting Personal’ in 2012 and beyond.

The company made amends by sending an apology and a follow up.  That follow up didn’t say a lot but had an attachment (PDF) introducing the company.

Intrigued at how it could be possible to make two obvious mistakes, I looked at the company website (I won’t embarrass them here by naming who they are) and it was a one pager that did nothing to sell their merits.

I went to LinkedIn to find the person who had sent the email.  They have 6 connections and haven’t even set up their profile.

I searched Google for phrases related to their business sector – no sign of them in any shape or form, even within the free opportunities.

As members of the Chamber, companies are entitled to do sendouts to the membership base and although the Chamber (this could apply to any membership organisation) do provide a little bit of guidance, surely they should have something more stringent in place?   Surely the person who wants access to the membership list should have a check list that they’re supposed to tick off, that includes:

1. How to send the email so that all recipients aren’t identified so blatantly.
2. Creation of an email that contains the introductory information (rather than an attachment, which most people won’t look at).
3. Having a website that’s worth promoting (just the basics like client case studies, testimonials, etc.).
4. Having a LinkedIn profile that is at least to an adequate level and so doesn’t make them look like an amateur.

It would take a membership organisation a relatively small amount of time to create such a check list, giving links to other reference points where people can find out more (e.g. a link to a LinkedIn profile setup guide).   The company wanting to do the email out would confirm that they’re in agreement with what’s on the check list and that they have taken actions accordingly.  Only then do they get access to the membership list.

Taking that recent example, the outcomes are:

• The Chamber of Commerce look poor for not having stronger systems in place.
• The company who sent the email look poor for being so unaware of how to market themselves properly.

Maybe this is just the experience from the local Chamber and other Chambers of Commerce (or membership organisations in general) do it in a different way, so it’d be interesting to get any feedback on any shining examples of excellence?

A recent experience of a client, who had the sense to ask us, helps to highlight why certain steps should be taken …

The client was offered an email marketing list of people in roles that should be interested in his type of service.  It was reasonably priced for something that appeared well targeted.   We advised him to get some sample data from them so that we could assess the quality of it.   From the data samples received it became clear that the email data was way out of date – by chance, one of the people listed was known to the client and their role and location ceased to exist 5 years previously!

So we recommended that the client contact the email list provider to get clarification on how often the data is checked.  They came back and said that ‘We telephone verify the data on an ongoing basis and all records are less than 21 days old at any one time.’

Spot the difference: 21 days vs 5 years (since the data was verified).

So the client responded to the email list provider highlighting this fact and didn’t hear anything back afterwards.

Blatant lies from that provider of data (please do feel free to ask us who the provider company was!).

So what can you do to have the best chance of good quality data?  Here are some tips …

1. Ask any data provider for a good sized sample of data, including all fields such as email address, postal location, phone number etc.  If they want your business enough and are confident enough in their data, then they should supply that to you.
2. Look through the data to see if there are any contacts you recognise and then assess whether the data is accurate.
3. If you don’t recognise any of the contacts, enter some of the company or individual names into LinkedIn and see if you have any connections to them.  Then ask the connections between you and those people to give you a viewpoint on the data accuracy.
4. If you find data inaccuracies then ask the email data provider for confirmation of how old the data is.   If they claim that it’s regularly checked then you’ll know to avoid that provider of data (unless they’re going to give you a really good deal of course).

Can you still gain leads/business from an email list that has many entries that are out-of-date?  Yes you can – as long as your email marketing campaign is strong enough to capitalise on all the ‘good’ ones on the list.    However, your chances of success are higher in the first place if you properly assess the quality of data from the potential supplier.

Nectar is owned by Groupe Aeroplan, who is ‘a global leader in loyalty management’, of which Nectar is one of their companies.  They look pretty big.  Which would make you think that they have resources to ensure everything runs nicely.

The email received this week had a subject line of ‘Download the Nectar app for exclusive offers’, as you can see in the screenshot below …

Thinking that may be worth looking at, I opened the email but couldn’t find anything on the first screen …

So I paged down to the next screen …

And then the third screen …

And then the fourth screen …

At last!   There it is – a tiny little icon/link amongst others at the end of the email.   Doing a bit of basic maths I worked out that the ‘Nectar’ element to the ‘Download the Nectar app’ titled email represented about 0.5% of the total email space.

So what went wrong here?  Possibly an email that was intended to be all about the Nectar app but turned out to be a standard promotion?  Or was the intention to show a load of offers and think that people may work out that they need to go to the bottom of the email to download the Nectar app in order to get such offers on a mobile?

Whatever the reason for the mess up, it shows that even the bigger companies don’t have proper quality checking procedures in place.

1. The email contained a link to their website, that went through to a dead page.
2. The email contained typos.
3. When I worked out what website the email should have gone through to, the website itself was woefully inadequate and not able to convert clicks to enquiries.

The email was week 1 of a 3 week series and I couldn’t let the company make that mistake again.   So I emailed them to let them know of the problems (in a nice way), without any form of sales pitch that we could do it much better for them.

I heard nothing back.

On 1^st April (funnily enough, April Fools Day!) I received part 2 of the 3 week series – complete with exactly the same mistakes.

So I rang the Managing Director (who was named in the email) and referred to the previous email (which he knew about).   He didn’t seem very concerned that his company was being actively marketed in an inefficient way.  He did give me the name of the person who was responsible for the email sendout, who I recognised as being an external resource (people who I have previously identified as being inefficient at what they do).   So I said to him:

“I’ve just highlighted the problem to you – I suggest you speak to them directly”.   He still didn’t seem bothered.

Let’s see what happens when part 3 of the email programme comes out.  Gut feeling is that things won’t have changed – there’ll still be a rubbish website and there will probably still be errors in the email.

Do I believe that particular person should be in business?  No I don’t!

Is it the fault of the people who have created the email shots?   Partially – they should have double-checked everything and they should also have stopped the company from doing an email promotion when it’s blatantly clear that their website is far too weak to get any results.

However, the ultimate blame lies with the Managing Director – it’s his company and he’s been alerted to issues that he’s done nothing about.   In his sector there are many competitors and however good his company is at what they do, the marketing done is an appalling waste of time and budget, and also damages his brand (what there is of it).

Unfortunately he’s not alone – there are numerous companies out there making similar messes.  If they recognise it and do something about it then great.  But if, like this person I contacted, they can’t be bothered to fix the problem then, in my view, they don’t deserve to stay in business.

In exchange for me completing a short survey about myself I get entered into a prize draw and have the option to collect cash rewards for future surveys I complete.  The prize, on the surface, is tempting (an iPad or £500 Gift Card) but the chances of winning are not.

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands a similar email has gone to?   What would be my actual chance of winning the prize?   While I’m sure that WHSmith will get numerous people signing up, I wonder how many they’ll be losing out on because people will think “what’s my chance of winning that prize?”.

WHSmith are not a small company – they can afford to offer more in the way of prizes.  Surely it would have made more sense to offer a ‘big prize’ but also a series of other prizes.    Suppose they had the top ‘£500’ prize, 10 x £100 value prizes, 20 x £50 value prizes, 40 x £25 value prizes, and 50 x £10 value prizes.   Their expenditure would go up to £4,000 but people would work out that they now have 121 chances to win something and so are much more likely to buy in to joining their surveys database.

WHSmith have attempted to give people an extra carrot via the Cash Rewards system, which gives people rewards that they can redeem through PayPal every time they complete a survey:

However, the email is quite vague about how much people earn each time they complete a survey – all it commits to is ‘these can be redeemed through PayPal every time you reach £4 or more’.  So, do you get £1 per survey? 50p? 10p?.   It’s not clear, and so isn’t enticing enough.   Taking a wild guess (obviously, I’ve not signed up to join their surveys so can’t say), let’s say it’s 25p per survey completed.  If it takes 5 minutes to complete a survey then that values my time at 25p x 20 = £5 per hour.   While I accept that there are many people who are serial survey completers/competition entrants, which helps them fund aspects of their lives, I’m guessing that the majority of people receiving that email will think:

1.    What chance have I got to win that one prize?

2.    How much would I get paid per survey I complete, and how long would it take per survey?

And the end result of that is probably people at WHSmith scratching their heads thinking “hmmm, the signup rate from the email promotion wasn’t as good as we hoped for”.   If they’re a proactive organisation they’ll have Google Alerts set up to pick up on when people are talking about them so maybe they’ll pick up on this blog and think more deeply about what they offer in future.

Where’s the relevance of this to the majority of readers, who will be in organisations much smaller than WHSmith?   If you’re offering a prize draw (either online or offline) then think about what will be going through the minds of those who you’re targeting – will they be wondering what the odds are of winning?   Would they be more likely to enter if you had not just one main prize, but also a selection of other prizes?   Perhaps tell them how many people you anticipate will enter the prize draw – it may give them more reason to enter (e.g. “we’re expecting to get about 500 people entering this prize draw so there’s a good chance of you winning”).

And as always, when considering offering a prize draw, before launching, always get as many opinions (colleagues, friends, family) as possible, to see whether what you’re offering is really going to get people entering.

Hopefully you’ll have things set up so that you can identify the dates and times that subscribers have opened the email newsletter and when they’ve clicked through to more details on your website (if not, ask us how this can be done easily and cheaply).

But do you go any further than that?  Take, for example, the screenshot below, which shows the interaction of just one subscriber to the last Custwin email newsletter sent out …

What the screenshot doesn’t show you is the name of the subscriber who clicked through to the website, via a particular link, at 14:52 on 28^th February.   This in itself isn’t that exciting because the person just looked at the one article.   However, if you’re also running a strong system that allows you to dig deeper into website visitors, you get a bigger picture.

Each month, a week after the email newsletter has been sent out, we look at the website statistics to see whether any clicks in from the email newsletters have resulted in people looking at more than just the landing page.   Doing this helped us to identify the person who came directly into the article page, and who then went on to look at other pages within the website …

While we expect the majority of people to do no more than click through on links from the email newsletters, it’s interesting when people go on to look at more within the Custwin website.  Taking that screenshot above we can see that the person was mostly interested in what clients have to say about us.   By taking that revealing website entry time of 14:52 we can cross reference to the statistics from the email newsletter sendout.  This shows us that the person who clicked through on a link from our newsletter actually went on to look at other pages of the website.   And best of all, we know who that person is.

So, we know the name of a newsletter subscriber who clicked through from a link in the newsletter and went on to look at certain pages of the website.  If we’d looked at the newsletter sendout stats alone, that wouldn’t have told us enough.  If we’d looked at the main website statistics data it also wouldn’t have told us enough.  By combining the two together we get the full picture.

In this particular example, the implication is that the newsletter subscriber may possibly be in a position whereby they’re lacking in business (hence the initial interest in the newsletter article that discussed the challenges of getting a good Google ranking, followed by looking at the Custwin testimonials page as part of their website visit).    We won’t actually directly do anything with that knowledge but when/if we’re next in contact with that subscriber we may have the opportunity to open up a discussion about how things are going in their business.

You’re probably thinking: “blimey, that’s a hell of a lot of effort isn’t it?” and yes, that’s a fair point.  My argument would be that an email newsletter should aim to build trust in the company, with a view to gaining some business from that trust built over a period of time.   Without fail we gain at least one new client every month, purely from building trust through our email newsletters – that makes it very profitable.   Therefore, by better understanding how people interact with our email newsletters and website we put ourselves in a position where we understand our subscribers pretty well, out of which sometimes come opportunities.

So if you’re sending out email newsletters and aren’t already analysing not just those who click through from the newsletters, but how they then navigate further into your website, then you may be missing out on what could be useful knowledge and maybe even future clients.

That’s part of the email I opened, with a subject line of ‘Bargin Ballpens’.

It was such a simple mistake to make but it’s the type of mistake that can lead to lost business, especially when another part of the email contains:

As a recipient of that email I may be considering getting some branded pens done.  It’s kind of important to me that when I take delivery of the hundreds or thousands of pens, that the message on the ‘large branding area’ is correct.  So when an email promotion spells ‘bargain’ as ‘bargin’ in the subject line it sends out the message that the company doesn’t have good attention to detail and so it may not be wise for me to trust my wording/branding to them.

Of course, I could, and probably am, totally wrong – it was probably just a simple slip-up that may never happen again to that promotional products company.  But the damage is done when a typo puts doubt into the mind of the email recipient.    Do YOU send promotions by email but don’t get them double-checked by someone else, prior to final sendout?  For the sake of a few more minutes and a fresh pair of eyes, it’s probably worth it.