Marketing Ideas!

As this is the very first post for the new blog, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the lost art of the “welcome.”

One of the single most important things we can do for our customers and prospects is to welcome them. When clients are added, they expect to be welcomed. Welcome letters say “we value you.” This not only simplifies and strengthens relations, but also creates a bond of mutual appreciation and value between the two individuals or organizations.

So, how do you welcome your newest customers? Do you just take their money and hand them a receipt? Do you send them a hand-written note? Hopefully you at least said thank you. Maybe next time you can send them an email.

A common myth about email marketing is that people receive too many emails. The fact of the matter is that people receive too many unimportant emails. According to a JupiterResearch/Ipsos Insight Individual User Survey (2006), 87% of people in the United States log onto the Internet to check their email. In other words, people are looking for and expecting email. They’re just hoping to receive something useful, is all.

If you aren’t welcoming your newest customers (and prospects) via email, you are missing out on a great opportunity to engage your community. A well-crafted welcome message can help set your customers expectations about how much you value them, where they should expect to find your communications (train them to look in their inbox) as well as showing them that you respect them by sending quality content.

What kind of quality content? Well, that’s up to you, of course, but here are some of our ideas:

• Inform them about some of the hidden gems on you site, like specials, partners, or the like.
• If you already have good, useful information in your corporate wiki, blogs, etc, this is a great time to invite them to those communities.
• If you have a Twitter account, or anything else that might be useful, tell them how to find you there. Amazon and Woot do a great job with using Twitter and engaging their customers.

The key, of course, is sending useful information. If you can do this, you are well on your way to building a solid relationship with your clients. And, since so few businesses (especially brick-and-mortar stores) do this at all, this could be a huge advantage for getting and keeping business this year.

If you are a brick-and-mortar shop, especially a small retailer, you MUST do this. And you can do it much more easily than the big stores out there. Get people’s email addresses and start sending useful emails!

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Here’s some more bits that I found interesting:

• Interesting bit from DoshDosh on what we can learn from email spammers.
• CampaignMonitor put together a rather comprehensive look at using various video technologies in different email clients. There’s a very useful chart there for reference, but the easy take away: if you must use video, use animated GIFs.
• And, lastly, if you don’t already know about this, check out Timebridge. It’s one of my favorite online tools for planning meetings of any type.