davidpoulos.com

Category: Management

  • Under-promise and Over-deliver – Good Customer Service is Tougher Than it Sounds

    Under-promise and Over-deliver – Good Customer Service is Tougher Than it Sounds

    Had a good customer service experience that I thought tied into my theme of customer service as marketing device. I’ve written several articles on the value of good customer service as a marketing tool, so when I run across an instance in real life that proves the theory, I like to recognize their efforts.

    I drive a gas guzzling, over-huge SUV – since I don’t commute regularly, my annual mileage is about 8,000 a year, about 1/3 of the national average. Unfortunately it has the same maintenance needs as if I drove it 20k a year – except for the frequency of things like tires, brakes, and other wearable parts, that still wear out on schedule just my elongated version.

    In 2006, on vehicles that size, now on virtually all of them, the manufacturer installed special valve stems that have the ability to measure the tire pressure on each tire, and a sender to tell you what the pressure is on a continual basis. As you might expect, these little marvels of modern technology are a bit costly, especially compared to the $.49 cent stems they replace. At $125 a whack and you need 5 of them with a full-size spare, that adds a bit to the bottom line when you buy it, and a lot to your tire bill when you replace them. They are also rather fragile, and if you put anything on them to cover them up, it must be made of plastic – metal covers apparently react with the metal in the stem and corrode them away in rapid fashion, causing them to leak and need replacement. I found this out the hard way and had to replace all four at a cost of nearly $600, something I’ll not repeat for quite a while with any luck.

    Thanks to these sensors, I noticed that one of the tires was losing air consistently, so since I just had the stems replaced, I took it back to where the work was done, thinking one of them might have been defective. I walk in the door to a Mr. Tire location near my house, tell them my saga, and they promise to take a look at it, but that there were a couple of people ahead of me – indeed for mid-week in late August, the waiting room was remarkably full, and some folks looked like they’d dug in for the long haul.

    I waited only 45 minutes before I saw the car come around the front and a ticket with my keys and lug lock land on the front desk. I didn’t even finish watching the day’s episode of “The View” before they were writing me up – they had rebuilt the pesky little sensor valve, replacing a seal and the core, and remounting the valve, replaced the tire and buttoned it all up. They had under promised the waiting time by being vague, and had over-delivered by not just replacing the expensive part but by saving me lots of money by rebuilding the existing one.

    What do my tires have to do with marketing? I’m now an evangelist, an auxiliary marketer for Mr. Tire – I’ll recommend them to friends, I’ll tell people about my experience (blog about it), use it as a landmark when giving directions, etc. Think what would happen to your business if all of your customers behaved this way about your product or service. The growth rate would be incalculable, your popularity unchallenged, your brand ubiquitous, your pockets forever full.

    If you’re a marketer, get out from behind your desk right now, take a stroll down to the customer service department and say a hearty “Thank You” to the folks that REALLY provide your reputation for you to customers. They are the real heroes, who do the job every day and don’t get to have the creative fun that you do. They deserve a tip of your cap!

    If you found this valuable, sign up to receive my blog sent right to your mailbox, above. don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Sometimes the Question is More Important Than the Answer . . .

    Sometimes the Question is More Important Than the Answer . . .

    There are times in a marketer’s career when asking the right question spurs the next great idea that turns into a campaign that turns the corner on profitability and launches a whole new direction for the company or the product.

    Having the curiosity and the courage to ask that question – although to you it might seem obvious, so obvious in fact that you’re sure someone else must have thought of it, analyzed the result and discarded it as unworkable – is what good marketers do. How many times have you been in a meeting and another employee asks a seemingly innocent question, and suddenly the room is on fire with ideas, and more importantly, positive feelings and agreement to trying the idea immediately. Have you kicked yourself for not asking the same thing? Why didn’t you – because you thought it was too obvious. It was obvious to you, because that’s the way you were trained to think – but most of the other people in the room were not trained that way, and that’s what makes you special!

    Think it through quickly, end to end, and go ahead and bring up the obvious – you’ll be surprised at the reaction you’ll get. Curiosity and courage linked together will get you a long way in marketing. A famous marketer I know is fond of saying that there are no bad ideas, just those that don’t work under the current circumstances. His approach is to try almost anything that appears viable, and if 6 out of 10 of them fly, he’s a winner! Indeed the margin on a good idea is pretty high, so it doesn’t take much for a good idea to bring in far more than all the bad ones waste. Remember the old campaign,”Try it, you’ll like it”? Not a bad mantra in these tough times. Businesses are desperate for good paying customers, and ideas that will attract them are in short supply.

    Step up, state your idea, and let the chips fall – you’ll likely be applauded and the chips fall your way – if not, at least you put something viable forward, and if it doesn’t work now, circumstances will forever change and it might work at some other time.

    If you found this valuable or insightful and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog above. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Internet Not The Only Media – Yet

    Internet Not The Only Media – Yet

    In a recent study of college freshmen, it was revealed that the skills we once assumed to be vital for business success – research using books and journals, proper grammar when writing letters, crafting informational documents or publishing and the like – are now obsolete, and that over 90% of college freshmen don’t possess them. They also noted that e-mail communication is already deemed “too slow” by today’s college freshmen, who have no concept of television with less than 250 channels, having been born in 1992, long after the cable expansion and the introduction of satellite TV.

    These same freshmen have never possessed a record album, or conceivably a pre-recorded music CD, having come into their teens after the original MP3 file format was introduced. Fax machines are obsolete antiques, land-line phones passe, and with them phone etiquette similarly out the window. Pay phones are a mystery, a story told around campfires . . . you get the picture. Technology, especially in the communication world, has accelerated at a remarkable rate, leaving behind what seemed to be perfectly viable formats and forms of communication.

    These same college freshmen, who don’t know from cassettes, will be entering the workforce in four short years, and a small percentage of them potentially taking on tomorrow’s marketing challenges. By that time, full media integration that has been trumpeted as the be all and end all of communication technology may be in place on a national or global scale, and there will essentially be one, web-driven media, all played wirelessly through whatever monitoring device happens to be handy, be it a plasma TV, the screen in the car, or the front of the refrigerator. Everything will have an IP address, from the phone to the washing machine. Everyone will have to be a web producer, a video producer, or designer, and every speech or form of communication will be measured in megabytes or terabytes, not in pages or words.

    Grammar is already slipping at an alarming rate, with proper forms of English dropping off the cultural map like electronic flies, to be replaced by slang, initials, acronyms and emoticons – we’re slowly sliding back to early Egyptian hieroglyphs. How do you diagram the phrase “LOL :)!” ?

    The ads of the future will only have to be produced for electronic consumption, and will be a mix of images and scrolling, hopping, swinging and fading text, compressed down to the smallest file size possible and distributed through 3 big outlets. Print will be an anachronism, copywriting a dead art, direct mail reserved for senior citizen newsletters and billing inserts in large print, with ads flashing on big, wall sized screens in all the retirement homes, which will automatically change to match the information emanating from a chip in their forearm as the seniors walk by, ala Minority Report. Well, maybe not that last one in four years, but you get the idea.

    With only one medium to consider, media buying will consolidate into a government function controlled by the FCC, and time will be bid on in auction style on E-Bay. Marketers will no longer have to consider paper stock weight, envelope size, postal rate case, number of sheets on a billboard, magazine doubletruck gutters, facing page competitors, color fidelity, dot gain, screen density, and a host of other routine, mundane production detail-oriented skills required by the marketers of yesteryear. Freed from those details, will the ads be more persuasive, more effective, more targeted, more efficient? They will certainly be trackable, which is an advantage, but my guess is that how that tracking can be used will have to be heavily regulated to prevent rampant abuse.

    I’m not much of a futurist, but I am a student of history, and you can easily compare the current communications integrity status to that of the latter stages of the Roman empire – I’m breaking out my fiddle as we speak . . .

    If you liked this and found it valuable and would like to read more like it, subscribe to this blog and receive it weekly in your inbox. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Networking Events Can Produce Results, But Common Interest Cements Relationships

    Networking Events Can Produce Results, But Common Interest Cements Relationships

    We’ve all been there . . .

    You go to an event, be it a conference, a seminar session or annual meeting, and you meet different business people, discover some common ground outside the theme of the event, and you keep in touch for a while after the event, but unless you work at it and nurture it, that relationship fades into the background, not serving either party. Occasionally, you run into someone that really has a lot in common with you, has some business reason to stay in touch and that relationship grows and flowers and produces solid business gains for both sides and lasts years. What made the difference?

    I have a theory, and statistics gained in our work promoting events will back this assertion up to a certain degree: “The more closely aligned the business goals of the parties are, the less likely they are to form a longer-term relationship.” On the surface that may seem counter-intuitive, but keep reading.

    What drives business relationships is gain – profit, cash flow, commerce. Each side has to have a clearly defined role and those roles need to be complimentary, not unidirectional, for the relationship to be productive. Gains are made and money moved when something is sold or bought. Seven times out of ten, what drives that relationship is the desire to sell to the other guy! Two salesmen can get together and banter and share a beverage, but chances are that relationship will develop a competitive or adversarial nature. But if one is a salesman and the other is a mid-level executive in another role, something can be sold there, business moves, transactions done, and the relationship works for both.

    Two top executives can get together and share common issues, maybe even work on the same committee to solve an industry problem, and if there’s no chance of them being in a competitive situation, and with nothing personal underlying it – tough conditions to fill – that relationship might come in handy from time to time, but it probably will not be terribly productive. No chance to sell to the other one! No chance to beat the other one, either.

    Networking meetings in general have been overused and relationships forced upon business people for a long time, and they still serve a useful function, especially for those new to an area or industry. But without the quantity of time required to care for and nurture those relationships, and a good business reason to do so, in today’s superficial and time-starved environment, most are short-lived and unproductive. The way to get the most out of networking meetings is to introduce yourself to a few key people, or better yet, have someone else introduce you to a few key individuals, and take the time to investigate them further, see if they are worth pursuing, and take the lead in keeping them fresh and alive.

    If you meet ten people and stay in touch with just one really solid business individual and keep that relationship growing, you can consider that meeting a success. At that build ratio, you’ll need to attend a significant number of meetings to start a functioning network from scratch. But if you put in the time, make the investment in your own business future, you’ll find it pays off in spades over the years.

    The best technique that we’ve seen success with is to let such relationships develop naturally through outside interests other than business. That fellow soccer coach, that neighborhood association committee member, that dinner companion of a college friend, that last-minute fill-in in your golfing foursome, that guy who has season tickets right next to yours at the stadium or the theater – that’s how relationships get started, and have no surface business purpose, but after getting deeper into them, you find common business ground if you’re open to discovering it. It’s old-school, but it works! It’s less contrived, less forced, more comfortable for everyone, and you don’t have to go out of your way, or wear a name tag for them to be productive!

    Next time you’re at a networking function where the specific reason for attending is to meet other people to do business, think back to other similar situations and count the number of people you regularly do business with, and ask yourself how many of them you met at such an event. The answer will likely be Zero! Now examine those same people you regularly do good business with, and ask how you met them initially. The answer is usually that you were introduced by someone you both knew from somewhere else.

    Try this at your next social outing or sporting event: try and steer the conversation you’re having so that it includes no clue about what your job is or what business or industry you’re in. You’ll be amazed how difficult it is, and how intriguing it makes you to others. But think of the information you’ve gathered.

    Now you know more about them as people, and can make a more informed decision about whether to pursue that relationship further, and find some common business ground. My guess is that the resulting business relationship will be stronger and last longer than the one derived from the forced, contrived situation at the hotel.

    Write to me with your networking stories, we’ll compare notes . . .

    If you found this helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and get more weekly right in your inbox. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Converting Prospects to Members (or Customers)

    Converting Prospects to Members (or Customers)

    One of the biggest challenges non-profits and other small to mid-size businesses face is converting leads to sales, or for non-profits, a common challenge is to convert prospects to members. There are many different ways to approach this issue but they usually have a few things in common.

    If you have a good list of well-qualified prospects, compiled recently, with a high-deliverability quotient, and fresh information, you’re already halfway there. If not, but wish to start compiling one, there are several good ways to do that, including referrals from current members, industry indexes and directories, publication lists, and prospecting campaigns at tradeshows.

    If you have e-mail addresses, this might be the least expensive place to start. If not, you’re left with mail or phone campaigns to reach out to prospective members. If you have a really solid profile of your members, based on research, and can categorize them accurately into industry segments, title profiles and other segmentation to make your communications more specific. One factor to consider when making your selection is based on that profile, how do your current members like to be communicated with? Are they tech savvy, do they stay at their desks all day and have constant access to e-mail or social media? Do they only read e-mail at home? Do they get their mail at the office or did they give you a home address? The method deserves almost as much consideration as the message, in these highly overloaded, busy times. It’s to easy to delete, discard or filter out messages delivered in inconvenient ways.

    Once you’ve decided on the best medium, now you have to craft a message that resonates with this group or groups. Your research profile will be of great use here, as it tells you what they are likely to be concerned about, what issues hit home for them, what keeps them up at night. Once you’ve discovered that key issue, now you can formulate a message to deliver that shows how their membership will take care of that pesky problem, solve that challenge, meet that need and make joining a solid investment. Solve a problem, and you’ll get them to join up just for that – show them the unique value of your organization in solving that problem, they’ll stay members for years.

    Now you just have to mate the message with the right medium at the right time and deliver it cleanly, accurately and in timely fashion. But before you hit that “send” button or pull the trigger on the mail drop, make sure your customer response, receipt, fulfillment and registration infrastructure is in place, and ready to accept the new influx of calls/e-mails/hits/members – there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving inquiries or orders and not being able to activate them or monetize them – it’s a woeful tale of opportunity lost. It’s not overly optimistic to expect good response to your offer after taking the time to craft it so thoroughly and specifically. The better your homework and more thorough your preparation, the more likely you are to generate significant response and you have to have the structure in place to accept them.

    Find your best list, do your homework, know your prospect, find out what they need, show how your organization can solve their problems and make life easier, get them the message in a form they’re receptive to, and make sure you can accommodate all the requests quickly and efficiently. If you can pull those elements together, your chances of success soar, and so will your organization!

    If you found this article valuable, you can have more like it delivered right to your inbox, free every week. Subscribe to this blog above. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Does More Pay Equal More Value?

    Does More Pay Equal More Value?

    There has been a lot of talk recently regarding and considering CEO compensation, especially in the financial sector, where the numbers compared to the average person’s income are literally astronomical. In my mind, it comes down to contribution.

    Some companies are so well-constructed, that you could put almost anyone in the corner office and they would continue to run things profitably. Some are so inherently dysfunctional, that the most brilliant leader would founder in the effort to right them and run them logically and practically. But the average firm can benefit from strong leadership to set the tone, strategic direction, and operational efficiency that leads to success.

    Typically this is a seasoned individual, with a good education, a strong network of colleagues and contacts, and enough political awareness to work his way into the job. There are some, especially in the tech sector, that don’t seem to fit this mold, but the vast majority of brick and mortar, bread and butter companies have an executive vet at the helm, one who is compensated handsomely for their work. But what do they really contribute on a daily basis?

    Some lead by example, and therefore contribute as a role model and exemplar just by arriving and communicating within the headquarters office or division facility. Some lead through growth strategy implementation, working with M&A attorneys, brokers, bankers and business owners to grow the company through strategic acquisition of other firms, either to help shore up weaknesses within the firm’s core competences or expand into new affiliated or related markets. Some lead through mentoring, employee relations and succession grooming within the ranks, training and educating younger executives to move through the company with the goal of one day paying back that investment by leading the firm to greater profitability.

    Those may seem like intangible approaches or qualities, but they contribute in numerous ways to the success of the company. In the case of some of the more high-profile financial firms, I’m not entirely sure the millions and in some cases billions that the CEO receives in compensation is proportionate to their contributions to the firm. In some cases, reported ad nauseum in the media, the same executives responsible for driving the profitability out of the firm are the ones now reaping even greater rewards, while the stock holders and general public flounder trying to make ends meet.

    There has been a theory advanced that the CEO shouldn’t receive more than ten times what the lowest paid worker receives. For manufacturing companies that outsource production work to third-world countries, that compensation could be very low indeed. While the mechanics of the theory need some fine tuning, the sentiment is borne out of an innate sense of fairness, an internal gauge of “rightness” and correctness that we all possess when assessing such things. If you still go to the same office I do every day, do basically the same work, maybe among a more wealthy group of people, do you really deserve 100 times more than I do in compensation for it? – not likely.

    Someone ought to do a correlative study cross-referencing the national journalists list of the top 100 best companies to work for, against the top 100 highest compensated CEOs, and see if there is a correlation between compensation and how the workers rank the company. My guess is the correlation would be rather low, and here’s why. Companies that are “Great” to work for usually provide a wide range of outstanding personal benefits, ranging from free child care to extra days off, to paid education, to personal loans, to flexible hours or work-at-home options to help better balance personal- and work-lives of the employees. Those benefits sometimes have expenses attached to them. Places where the CEO is extremely highly compensated are driven by profitability and sales volume, rather than work-life balance for the rank and file – different motivators, different cultures, different definitions of the word “Company”.

    Let us know what your definition of the word “Company” is from a cultural standpoint and whether yours is a “great” place to work, and how much your CEO is compensated, and we can compile the results and see if our theory holds water. Can’t wait to hear from you . . .

    If you liked (or disagreed with) this post, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and it will be delivered to your inbox for free weekly. Don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Sharpen Your Skills Before They Rust Away . . .

    Sharpen Your Skills Before They Rust Away . . .

    We all develop skills as we go through life and get older and more experienced. Some of those are of a more temporary or cyclic nature, and some are used daily and are at peak performance. Skills like coping with change, or a sudden occurrence, get used when needed and then left off the menu until they are needed again.

    Some are annual, like “How did I put these lights on this Christmas Tree last year?” And some need to be constantly honed or updated, in particular, computer skills. This is a tough one, and in an increasingly computerized world, those who don’t keep up will certainly be left behind to one degree or another.

    I’m not exempt from this phenomenon, either. Skills I learned about computers 20 or so years ago are long gone as they are obsolete, and certainly those learned 30 years ago are useless (try finding punch cards or teletype tapes today!). Modern computer skills in particular need to be practices and updated almost weekly in order to keep up to speed. Once I mastered the use of a server and printer, then the Internet and E-mail came along.

    Once I got the hang of those to some degree, albeit not mastery by any means, then texting, social media and ads came along, and a whole new set of skills was needed. There’s always something new coming along that needs to be learned and understood, but if you don’t make a conscious effort to find out about new developments, they won’t find you and you’ll get left behind. And nobody likes to be left behind.

    I have a theory that there’s a place in everyone’s life where that curiosity diminishes, and you stop making the effort to learn new skills. That date or age is different from person to person, and I suspect there are plateaus that each of use arrives at and must make a conscious decision to either surmount them and climb to the next level or stand pat on what we have and stay there. This date may be strongly influenced by the level of skill needed to maintain the status quo, and stay within our daily comfort zone. When the technology advances so far that it affects our daily functioning and pushes us out of our comfort zone, we are forced to learn new skills.

    Everyday things like banking, shopping, finding services and vendors to meet our needs, all have changed and computerized to the point where it’s difficult to interact with those businesses without some level of computer savvy. Even reading the daily paper is a very different experience than it was even three years ago. There are now lists of “most read stories on the Internet” and stories have links and the columnists and staff writers open themselves up to rebuttal by publishing an e-mail address – in the old days, you had to write to them care of the paper, and they could decide whether to acknowledge receipt and reply. You could just delete the e-mail, true, but that kind of direct access gives them immediate feedback on their work, and they can sense and even quantify the reaction to their efforts almost instantly compared to the week or so delay of years earlier.

    The moral of the story is that as soon as you lose curiosity, and stop learning new things, you are doomed to lose contact with a segment of our culture, and the more of those you lose, the more isolated and irrelevant you become, in the cultural scheme of things. AS in business, if you’re not moving forward, your dying, piece by piece. Maybe it’s time to return to some previously used skill and update it today – sign up for a class, go to a lecture, read a new publication, find a new book (e-book if you prefer) and keep that curiosity burning . . .

    If you liked this train of thought, or if it derailed yours . . . if you’d like more like this, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Sometimes you want to go . . . where everybody knows your name

    Sometimes you want to go . . . where everybody knows your name

    Everybody wants to be wanted, or at least recognized. I have a few places where they know me on sight when I walk in the door, but that kind of permanence and stability has been rare, especially since I grew up outside the Nation’s Capitol, where there are very few “natives” and the population is extremely transient. Too, I went to a very large university in Boston, where much of the student population was composed of commuters, so the typical school experience was very different, more focused on studying and less on social life, especially after dark, when a majority of the student body left for their own homes in the suburbs.

    Business relationships are often like that, too: you meet, you greet, you follow up, maybe even work on a project or several, and then drift apart. Relationships like anything else have to be nurtured and tended to in order to survive and thrive. The relationship with your customers is just that way. It takes effort to nurture them and to keep customers aware of you and to keep your business top of mind.

    Marketing can do that for you, but it must be sincere, and it must at least appear as much as possible to be PERSONAL. Your customers are humans, whether it’s B-to-B or consumer market, and they deserve to be treated as such. Good marketing, especially direct mail copy, should appear to be written specifically to YOU. That DOESN’T mean you just use the word “you” a lot in the copy – there’s an art to it, and if you’re not feelin’ the art, have a pro write your copy for you – its worth it.

    Customer service is often as simple as answering a question quickly and accurately. It can go as far as going above and beyond and addressing a long-standing problem and turning that complaining customer into an evangelist.

    I was the recipient of some tremendous customer service last night, at a business networking mixer, at the Intercontinental Hotel here in Baltimore. There is one place where they know me when I walk in the door, and this is it. Before I had gotten through the lobby into the bar proper, the top notch bartender, Elizabeth, had my “usual” beverage prepared for me, ready to go without me asking or even looking in her direction.

    Now in reality, I have only been a guest there about 6 times in the last year, but it’s always for the same event, the same time of day and the same day of the week, and our schedules collided on a regular basis – but she took the time and energy to remember after just a few small interactions who I was, what I looked like (winter and summer mind you, no identifying scarf or coat to help) what I liked to drink, and how I liked to get the evening started.

    Terrific! Kudos to Elizabeth for taking the initiative and providing outstanding service – and kudos to Arpad and the staff at the Intercontinental for realizing that sometimes employees need to be empowered to go above and beyond to REALLY please customers, and for allowing them the latitude to do it. I’m sure preparing a drink before the customer asks isn’t in the InterContinental’s policy book, but Elizabeth knew that I would be pleased and she was right. Thank you.

    Write about your good customer experiences here, be glad to pass them along . . .

    Did you find this interesting? If you’d like to read more like this about marketing, customer service, branding or other topics, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • E-Mail Effectiveness Boosted by Data Availability

    E-Mail Effectiveness Boosted by Data Availability

    How many e-mail messages do you get every day? How many do you really read? How many get discarded based on the sender alone? Note how the numbers indicate a trend?

    I receive at least 100 on most days, 80+ get discarded based on who sent them, even if it’s something I’ve signed up to receive! I just don’t have time . . . The other 20 go to the preview screen for a quick glance, and the top 10 of those get read and responded to that day at some point. Here’s 5 tips for making it to that Top 10:

    5) Make Sure Your Subject Line Has Some Relevance To Me. Aside from what the excellent spam filter dumps off, subject lines with words like NOW, FREE, TODAY float through here and the urgency is not as desperate as the author would like. Worse are the ones who feel that I need their software so badly and that it’s so present and ubiquitous in my mind space that you can open up with the inside jargon and terms you’ve coined in your dorm room right at the get-go, and I’ll know what you’re talking about – NOT RELEVANT.

    4) DON’T Waste My Time. If your subject line is intriguing enough for me to open in preview, be sure you’ve got something to say that I can understand at a glance – if I have to go to five links to get the info I need, we’re both wasting time – you by writing e-mails that are more complicated than they need to be, you might just as well send me the series of links with no text – the result is the same: DELETE.

    3) If You’ve Got a Good Headline, Don’t Bury it in the Image Art, Because I’ll Never See It. Thanks to the preview screen and firewall software, along with Microsoft’s inherent wisdom, anything with an image is held back until I purposely ask for it, to save me from intrusion and overuse of bandwidth. If you put your headline in the image, I see a blank white box – DELETE! Any hope you had of that long-worked-over and clever headline grabbing me are immediately gone.

    2)If You Can’t Use the Data You Have Correctly and Clean Your List Completely, DON’T USE IT! I get mail addressed to one of the many websites I have currently live, about various things, but they assume that putting the web address in the subject line will peak my interest, but the subject or offer have nothing to do with the website they’re using to “get to me”. My favorite is the Chinese granite counter top purveyors sending me offers of cheap product, thinking I’m a contractor or granite wholesaler, based on the name. The did a search for the word Granite and scattergunned an e-mail out to the whole results list – the Doctor says: DELETE

    1) If You Have My Name on Your List, Use it Correctly – Get Your Technology Act Together. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I get with the wrong gender, the use of both names in the wrong order “Dear Poulos, David” and other idiocy of technological laziness. Don’t let the ‘chines ruin your marketing program, proofread your list! Some simple data processing, at roughly $1 a name, all told, will avoid all this and make your list much more useful, to boot. Be a professional, spend a little money, and watch your response rates skyrocket! It’s my name, I’ve had it for decades, you don’t think I’m going to find it first and check that you’re legitimate by it’s use? DELETE!

    Now you know what it takes to get past my barriers. Now it’s up to you to produce technologically savvy, legal and smart e-mail messages if you want to reach me effectively and make me a customer – Good Luck!

    If you found this valuable and would like to read more like this, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”