February 5, 2010
Blogs, Email Communications, Email Newsletters, Twitter, Website Strategy
3 Comments
We’re coming up for the Kent 2020 exhibition in April 2010 and it’s started …. the stream of emails and phone calls from companies trying to sell exhibitors their services. This could be printing, exhibition stand stuff, gimmicks, whatever.
Like local political party reps at election time, they come out of the woodwork expecting to gain business. To be frank, it’s insulting, opportunistic, and in today’s climate, just plain stupid.
The winners in business in the future will be those that create an ongoing, but non-invasive awareness of themselves. Does Custwin want to buy new exhibition popups etc. for Kent 2020 this year? No. Would we need to next year? Possibly. Would we be adverse to getting a blog feed, Tweets, or an occasional email newsletter from companies who supply such products, over the months? No, we wouldn’t be adverse. In fact, it would help to build up trust, it may even lead to us meeting the suppliers at some point, and it’s got a much stronger potential to turn into business for the suppliers at some stage.
Taking another subject, a company was pitching chocolate fountain hire for the Kent 2020 exhibition. As a cold introduction to 100 people it’s possible that very few may respond. But as a warm drip feed over a longer period of time, the percentage of buyers will increase. HOW that drip feed is implemented is a subject all of its own but it’s not rocket science.
The focus here happens to be on an upcoming business exhibition but the principle applies for any type of business that wants to gain new clients, particularly at times of the year when those potential buyers are more likely to need such services.
Those businesses that don’t embrace the concept of drip feeding their message into potential clients will soon find themselves losing out to their competitors who understand what makes potential clients tick.
February 22, 2009
Email Newsletters
No Comments
Most of us receive various email newsletters on a regular basis. Many of us also create email newsletters to be sent out to clients and others who are interested.
Today I saw something that created a negative impression due to the quality of what I saw.
The email newsletter I opened was something called ‘ActionSTEPS’ which is sent out by someone I don’t recall meeting but still, I don’t mind receiving it. The newsletter looks fine design-wise, had three core articles, and some other links. It soon became apparent that the articles were created by business coaches who are part of this big ‘ActionCOACH’ business coaching franchise worldwide. It sort of makes sense – buy a franchise and then use articles created by other franchisees to promote various subjects. And indeed, the subjects were of interest:
- 5 areas you should focus on during this recession
- All hands on sales deck
- 3 steps to keeping your clients longer
So I clicked on the first link to view the ‘5 areas you should focus on during this recession’ article. That took me off to the page http://www.actioncoach.com/business-coach.php/5+Areas+You+Should+Focus+On+During+This+Recession.
Feel free to read through that article before reading further ……..
Finished?
Then you’d have picked up on what I did – glaring typos and grammatical errors.
Let’s see if we can spot the missing word in the sentence ‘I believe that are five basic areas to focus on first.’.
Yes, it would look so much more complete with the word ‘there’ after ‘that’.
And the sentence ‘This no time for Chicken Little thinking, invest wisely, but first on yourself and our mindset.’ would perhaps read better with an ‘is’ before ‘no time’ and ‘your’ instead of ‘our’.
The object of this is not to point out every error in that article and indeed, the content of the article will be useful to some people, but my point here is about attention to detail.
The person who sent the email newsletter would have selected the article (or at least someone would have approved it’s inclusion). How hard would it have been to identify the errors, politely bring them to the attention of the article writer, and move forwards?
What’s happened in reality is that I, and other people, would have a negative impression of both the original article writer and also the person who allowed it to be included in the email newsletter. Without wishing to be too pedantic, attention to detail is important and although some mistakes do slip through, the more mistakes that appear in a single publication, the higher potential of a negative impression being created.
So, the simple message here is: if you’re using other people’s content, linked to from your own email newsletter, then it’s worth investing those few minutes to double check to ensure that there’s nothing that will create a negative impression of you, or the article writer.
