Making Your Customers Feel Special

 The idea of marketing to a specialized niche of very active customers and then using that base to recruit in a viral way is new to the internet but one that goes way back in the non internet world of marketing.  It is well known that if you create an elite group of dedicated customers, they will become a recruitment army for your business and become your marketing team that works for free without even knowing they are doing so.

This approach to marketing is not as focused on email communications as many of our internet marketing efforts were ten years ago.  But that is a good thing for two reasons.  The first reason is that dynamic marketing, meaning selling through a relationship model is far more effective and yields a higher per sale basket total as well as a much higher incidence of repeat sales than cold call selling and it is far less frustrating. 

The second reason is that using email as the backbone of your sales program has become more and more problematic because of the influence of spam and spam filters which have made the free flow of marketing emails much more difficult to manage.  Because spam filtering has become so aggressive and so successful, email delivery of marketing material is harder to do and takes a greater investment of time and ongoing knowledge that pulls you away from your customers and from your businesses.  So the migration to dynamic selling and away from cold call and mass marketing email techniques is a natural evolution of the internet marketing model in the new century.

So the online experience of your customer takes on a greater importance in your marketing plan.  But you will find that devoting more time and money to building a web "place" that your customers participate in actively will be far more rewarding than any scattershot approach to email marketing could ever be even before the eruption of spam which made email delivery such a nightmare.

One way to give your customers the feel of being part of your organization is to build a specialized membership area of your web site that customers must make an extra effort to become part of.  In fact, many online retailers actually charge a small fee to be part of this membership site.  That is effective because the fee gives your members the sensation of being part of a closed community and the revenue is good for your cash flow.

Your customers who chose to become part of the membership area of your web site should get some special privileges and rewards for their elevated status.  So you might create a discount card that creates a desire to spend more in your online store only for those customers who are part of the elite membership area.  Your customers will think they are getting something very special when in fact, all you are doing is exchanging a small part of your mark up for greater volume of sales which is always a good trade off for you as a retailer.

One of the big values of creating a membership area is that those who populate that membership can become part of the team to make contributions about future product or service offerings.  This is tremendously valuable to your development teams because the more you "pick the brains" of your customers, the more you will offer products or services that are going to be a success when they hit the market.

You will see a greater sense of brand loyalty grow out of the people who enjoy exclusive membership in your reserved area of your web site.  Make it a point to make that part of the site look elegant and luxurious.  Its all just graphics but in cyberspace, graphics have a reality all their own.  And don't take your eye off of the goal of using the membership area for recruitment of new customers through referrals or to take marginal customers and make them devotees as well.  A few gift memberships can go a long way toward accomplishing those goals.

Monitoring Email Deliverability

 The world of business communications has changed dramatically in the last two decades and with it the way you go about marketing your products has changed too.  In this new century if you are not assured you can be successful with internet marketing and to do so using email, you are behind the curve in getting to the customer base you need before your competitors too. 

For many companies the only way to reach the volume of customers you need to reach to reach your financial goals is through mass email advertising campaigns.  But the services you can subscribe to are costly.  If you pay a price to deliver 100,000 emails to potential customers and only 5000 actually get to those email inboxes because spam filters are catching your advertisements first, then you have wasted a lot of money. 

The only way you can really know what percentage of emails are getting through to the customers is to find a way to monitor them.  That is why employing an independent agency that can help you track your emails makes sense.  If that company can deliver to you a report that shows in detail and by ISP what percentage of your emails are being trapped by filters and conversely how many are getting to customers, you have what you need to make some decisions about how to spend your internet marketing budget in the next quarter.  But that data has to be reliable and usable to you and it must be graphic so you can use it in presentations to current management to illustrate the problem and what you plan to do with it.

It makes sense to look into the top email delivery monitoring services to determine if they can provide you with those statistics.  An example of such a service is DeliveryMonitor.com.  This service makes it possible to see in detail how many of your emails are getting to their intended email inboxes, how many are being diverted to spam filters and how many vanish entirely from the internet (presumably automatically deleted by spam filters).  This information is reported by major ISP so you can quickly spot if your message is  being caught more often by one ISP than another.

Armed with this kind of information, you can dig deeper to find out what spam detection rules the ISPs in question are using and then tailor your next mass communications email so your message is approved by the ISP filters and goes on to the customers.  The outcome is that if the service is accurate, within a matter of months, you will have what you need to fine tune your email marketing plan and see a significant improvement in successful delivery of your advertising to customers. 

When you see that percentage start to go  up, you will immediately see a corresponding increase in inquiries about your product or services followed by an increase in sales.  That kind of refinement of your marketing program is exactly what needs to be done every week and every month by your marketing department to assure long term success in this modern world of digital commerce.

A good email delivery monitor provides two important services for your business.  The first is the one we just described.  By giving you the data you need to evaluate why your emails are not getting to the customers email boxes, you can make changes to fix the problem and see a dramatically higher rate of success for your marketing dollar.

But the second service is just as valuable because the reports, statistics and graphs that are given to you are crucial both for your management of internet advertising and for communication with corporate management.  You are going to be held accountable for the success of your internet marketing programs.  This data will help you be able to show both where you are successful and where work needs to be done and to show management the path to success you have planned.

This is not a commercial for any one service but DeliveryMonitor is a good example of how they work and a good starting place for your evaluation.  But be a thorough business person and evaluate the field of services so when you do budget to bring a email delivery reporting service on board as a vendor, you know

Bringing the Customers to You with a Contest

Internet citizens and anyone who has used email for any length of time knows that they have to be on the alert for unwanted emails.  This suspicion is one of the reasons it is difficult to use unsolicited emails for internet marketing any more.  Instead a far more effective method is to create excitement in customers you already know is through some promotion that they want to hear about in their email box.  And when they are excited to see your emails arrive, they will be sure to add your business email address to their favored email contacts list and you will have circumvented the spam software problem that has been the cause of your email delivery problems all along.

There are many ways to generate excitement in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your customers as a contest.  For the cost of a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest.  And by structuring the contest so the customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email communications for future promotions and marketing.  That alone might be worth the price of the prize.

The great thing about creating a contest is you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the customers want to be part of.  A contest, along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention. 

Do you have a blog that isn't getting enough traffic?  Hide a clue on it and challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue.  Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put the clue on your affiliates page.  The clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket.  You can often cover the costs of the promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site entirely.

An online contest can also help drive business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web presence to support.  This is a wonderful way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest, they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you are looking for.

A contest that you set off via email is also a powerful viral marketing tool.  Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the contest.  And as more people hear about the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming through your online message services.  Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their favored contacts list too.  In that way you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web site. 

You may find that once you get started having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often.  The increased traffic, sales and expansion of your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this marketing tool often.

A Good Mailing List for a Bad One.

If you have ever used a mass mailing email marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services.  The appeal is that, in theory, the service has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will go to real  potential internet customers.  For a fee, they will take your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage will become paying customers of yours.

There are two problems with this marketing model.  The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer.  Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers.  But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person. 

Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted.  So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place.  Ironic, isn't it?

The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value.  For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails.  The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low.  You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.

A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales.  This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.

That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you.  This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.

You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts.  Through referrals, viral marketing, contests  and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well.  Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.

This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails.  Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.