Relationship Marketing Must Be Sincere To Succeed

Many sappy cliches are associated with relationship such as "appreciation wins over self promotion" and "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care". Well, my advice is not to get involved in the relationship marketing aspect of marketing if you are not prepared to be sincere about it. You want people to like and trust you, yes, but then you must be absolutely sure that you can be liked and trusted. There is a simple way to get people to like and trust you and that is to show appreciation genuine appreciation. When you say thank you, you had better mean it. If you don't mean it, rather don't say anything at all.

You might think I am being melodramatic or too extreme when I say you should be sincere but it is a known fact that one of the two top facts that people stop using the services and products of a business are as follows: in the first place they feel their business was taken for granted. In other words, the sincerity had gone out of the business relationship. Let's face it, everyone says "thank you" to their clients on the conclusion of a transaction. It's when the evidence of gratitude is not present, i.e. the sincerity that things fall apart.

The second reason people stop doing business with other people is that they forget about them! After trying one's utmost to win a new customer once we have them we tend to neglect them. It's human nature. Yet it takes so little to write a personal card to someone reflecting sincere sentiments. Ask anyone when last they received a card from someone they did business with (not a birthday, holiday or special occasion) and it wasn't a business card or branded logo? The chances are no one ever has.

Relationship marketing means staying in touch with the people that you've done business with and showing sincere appreciation and gratitude on a daily basis. This does not mean sending out self-promoting mailings, email and newsletters. People don't care how great one or other product or service is. They only want to know how it can benefit them personally. What is more, they don't want their patronage taken for granted. If you are looking for relationship marketing techniques here are some and remember to be sincere. Otherwise it's better not to implement them at all.

1. Every day you should send out one unexpected card to a prospect or an existing customer. Remember you need to be sincere and it must be a real tangible card that goes by mail or courier, not an ecard. It must show genuine appreciation or gratitude. Forget about logos and business cards and don't even talk business. A thinking-of-you type card does just fine. Do this daily and see the results.

2. When you communicate with your clients ask yourself what you would do with the piece of mail, email, newsletter, if you received it. If you would appreciate it and keep it to show to others, then go ahead and send it. If you would throw it away then don't bother sending it. You should keep your sincerity detector working overtime. Really care about your customers and their businesses and you will have friends and customers for life.

About the Author

James Copper is a writer for http://www.marketinglinx.com

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Advantages and Disadvantages to a Few Advertising Mediums

In our bustling consumer society, we are absolutely surrounded by advertising--some effective and helpful, others superfluous and obstructive. But what business owners want to know is what types of advertising can really tap into their market base without crossing into the realm of propaganda or worse, obnoxiousness?

As we all know, there are countless ways to reach an audience. Let's go over some advantages and disadvantages of a few of them.

First, we have the inevitable advertising method that arose with the advent of cars and highways: the billboard. Depending on the location, renting a billboard for advertisements may either be very cost effective or extremely expensive. In the heart of Los Angeles, it may cost you up to ten thousand dollars a month, while in a rural location or a small town, it may be as little as three-hundred dollars a month.

The main reason why advertisers choose to use billboards is because they are huge and eye-catching. It is very hard for passersby to miss a huge, brightly colored sign. They are particularly advantageous on long stretches of open highway, where there is little else to look at!

Furthermore, there are now electronic billboards which are able to shift between advertisements. This has been a great technological advancement for advertising on billboards, making them more brightly lit and striking.

However, a billboard can say little, as any important information must be written in large enough print to be read from afar. This means that meaning is often conveyed through pictures, which also help to keep the advertisement interesting. But the more "artwork," that is included, the more costly the billboard becomes.

Another very large ad comes in the form of pre-movie showing commercials which are featured before the upcoming movie trailers. Like billboards, they have the advantage of being difficult to miss, as they are directly in front of potential consumers.

But one major disadvantage is that as movie-goers shuffle into the theatre, get settled, or get up again because they realize they really do want popcorn, it is unlikely that many people will absorb and remember anything advertised. Before a movie begins, many people are also unlikely to fix their attention to the screen.

On a smaller scale, a common method used for local advertising is the distribution of printed fliers. They are cheap and require no maintenance after they leave your hands. But the issue with this is that they so often get discarded.
One way to rectify this problem is to place a flier in hallways or public restrooms, with tear-off contact information for any interested parties. This wastes significantly less paper, which saves you money in the long run.

Another popular route is that of the advertising refrigerator magnet. Even in mass production, they end up being fairly reasonably priced, but do be mindful that if they are discarded, it would cost you more than a simple sheet of paper. Also, they take longer to produce, so if you are in dire need of an immediate advertisement, this may not be the solution for you.

But the great advantage is that many people do end up saving magnets due to their sheer usefulness. Even if they do not act upon the advertisement right away, they will have plenty of time to see it on their refrigerator day after day, and constant exposure is a great tactic in advertising.

About the Author

If you are interested in ordering a customized advertising magnet for your business, be sure to check out American Printing & Promotions (http://postcardmagnet.com/), the leaders in professional but cost-effective magnet making. Art Gib is a freelance writer.

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The Right Way to Measure Your Customer Experience

Attempting to measure the customer experience with a single metric such as customer satisfaction or customer advocacy is overly simplistic and risky.Instead, companies should dig deeper and establish a portfolio of measures that can determine how each touch point contributes to the overall experience.

The Total Customer Experience is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

The customer experience is a complex process that can consist of multiple touch points; a process that can be broad, long-running, span multiple channels, and can be influenced by any combination of internal and external factors.

Effectively measuring the total customer experience requires a more acute understanding of its individual parts.

The customer experience process does not begin and end at a store, sales representatives, web site or call center.It extends from the moment the customer becomes aware of your company and is comprised of multiple independent interactions, transactions, and contacts along the way.

Each customer experience is made up of any number of touch points and customer encounters, each of which should be measured independently to determine their contribution to the overall experience.An issue encountered at any one of these points can dramatically influence the overall experience.

For example, the quality of an automobile is an aggregate measurement of the quality of the individual parts combined with the integrity of the overall design and assembly process.If any one part fails to perform properly, the overall perception of quality is diminished.Likewise, even if every part is perfectly manufactured but isn't arranged or assembled in a useable manner - the perception of quality will suffer.Only when quality manufacturing is guided by quality design will the experience truly be maximized.

Although overarching metrics such as customer satisfaction and customer advocacy are quickly becoming standard metrics in today's companies, attempting to measure the customer experience with a single metric can be overly simplistic and risky.Effectively managing the customer experience requires effective measurement and management of a portfolio of metrics that will provide insights into what is - or is not - working.

Identify Your Touch Points

The customer experience is a collection of touch points encountered by the customer that includes the attraction, interaction, and cultivation of customer relationships.

Touch points may include advertisements or promotions, online and in-store shopping experiences, transaction and bill processing, and post-purchase delivery, usage, and support.

The total number of touch points that the customer encounters goes well beyond the point of sale.Establishing an accurate inventory of all of your company's touch points - both intentional and unintentional - can mean the difference between success and failure.

Defining when and where the customer experience begins and ends is perhaps the most difficult task facing any business.Too often, companies define the lifecycle and customer touch points too narrowly, leaving critical elements of the customer experience to chance.

A touch point is defined as any customer interaction or encounter that can influence the customer's perception of your product, service, or brand.A touch point can be intentional (an advertisement) or unintentional (an unsolicited customer referral).In this era of broad customer skepticism, the unintentional touch points often matter the most.Which would you trust more: a company's ad pitch or your best friend's personal referral for a product?Both are touch points, but one carries much more value than the other.

When your business interacts with a customer, it's often easy to overlook what is really going on; you are touching them in many, perhaps subtle, ways.When it comes to customer experience management, the right touch can make all the difference.To do it right, you must first identify all of your potential touch points and then work to measure and optimize each one.

Measure Individual Touch Point Effectiveness

Each customer touch point is typically designed for a specific operational purpose.

An advertising touch point may be designed to build brand awareness or to identify prospects.A point of sale touch point may be designed to execute transactions.A call center touch point is designed to resolve customer issues.Each touch point is unique and contributes to the overall customer experience in different ways.

Effectively measuring each touch point requires a holistic approach to understand the contribution to both operational and customer relationship objectives.For example, the operational side of an advertising touch point may be measured in terms of a conversion rate.The customer relationship side of the same touch point may be intended to influence the customer's perception or awareness of the company's brand.

Measuring the effectiveness of each touch point should balance both operational and customer experience objectives.Operational metrics are typically easily identified, while customer relationship metrics can be elusive.Ideally, timely and recurring customer feedback is collected and compared to operational results to provide a more complete picture.In doing so, companies can obtain a better understanding of how each individual touch point is contributing to the overall experience.

For example, let's say a business establishes a goal to achieve a 5% click-through-rate (CTR) with their pay-per-click campaign.If the actual campaign achieves 100% of that goal, they might consider it a success.However, customer perceptions might not be so rosy if the ad promised a product, promotion, or discount that isn't readily available or is difficult to obtain.As a result of customer confusion and aggravation, the company may achieve only 50% of their revenue goals for the campaign.

Measure the Overall Customer Experience

In order to effectively measure the overall customer experience, companies must accurately measure the contribution of each individual touch point as well as the overall level of customer satisfaction and advocacy.

At times, the results of one touch point may have an unanticipated affect on other aspects of the experience.

Consider how the individual touch points associated with a fictitious product launch might impact the experience at an electronics store:

* Product innovation: A key manufacturer is developing a leading-edge product that will be innovative in the marketplace.

The media learns of these developments and publishes reports that an amazing new product is coming soon.Consumer excitement and anticipation is driven to extremely high levels, although actual ship dates remain unknown.(Score: 10/10)
* Electronics Store: Employees at the store and call center are inundated with inquiries about the pending new product but are unable to provide any additional information regarding availability nor can they accept pre-orders.
(Score: 3/10)
* Marketing: The product launch date is set and marketing begins to actively promote the new product and its innovative features.
Consumer anticipation is again driven to new highs as the launch date approaches.(Score: 10/10)
* Product Purchase: On launch day, consumers flood the store and web site to get the new product.
Those customers that are fortunate enough to purchase one are extremely satisfied.(Score: 10/10)
* Out of Stock: Initial euphoria quickly turns sour as the store runs out of stock and thousands of customers are turned away without one of the highly coveted and heavily promoted products.
Customers are told to check back again in a few weeks.(Score: 1/10)

For a handful of customers who were able to purchase the product, they are extremely satisfied with their experience and are willing to tell all of their friends about their latest purchase.

Conversely, however, many other customers who were turned away empty-handed are now frustrated and highly dissatisfied with the experience.

Relying solely on customer satisfaction or customer advocacy measures may not illuminate how each touch point contributed to the overall experience.Simplistic customer satisfaction and advocacy scores may mask the underlying factors that either contribute to or detract from an exceptional customer experience.

Evaluating how each individual touch point contributes to the overall experience in this scenario can help to identify specific areas for improvement.While touch points 1, 3 and 4 scored high, touch points 2 and 5 clearly have room for improvement.

Focusing only on an aggregate metric without understanding or managing the contributing factors can yield unpredictable results.Companies seeking to improve their overall customer experience should establish customer experience measures that correlate individual touch point results to overall customer experience measures.

About the Author

Robert Howard is the Founder and Chief Executive of ClearBrick LLC, a leading provider of customer experience solutions, research, and online customer experience advice.

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Internet Marketing Education Tools

Internet has a wide market with numerous entrepreneurs battling the competition to survive. A well-planned marketing strategy is what you need to have to stay ahead in the Internet marketing race. However, there are many such online businesses that have failed due to poor marketing or advertising strategies. Many online companies come and go without even getting noticed. The reason for the failure is nothing, but their ignorance about the changing trends and avoiding the need to learn and understand the importance of Internet marketing. Thus many online courses have been chalked out to help the newbies to stay in the World Wide Web.

Internet marketing education tool is nothing, but a way or methods to learn about the marketing trends and to use the means available to become successful and financially stable. Here are a few Internet marketing tools that can help you get stability and profit on the widespread online market.

. Pay per click- this is one of the most popular Internet marketing tool. Over here, you simply have to choose a product and market it, in return of which you will get a good charge. You desire to prefer and publicize the style, so that you can earn a fee everyplace between 5 to 75 proportion. This depends upon your make and gorgeous entrepreneurship. This machine is still telephoned as the Information superhighway affiliate agenda. To be prosperous in this method, you hunger suitable exercises and education and of passage firm textbook without which you cannot accomplish.

. Articles- This is an extra positive and flourishing process to publicize your make or package. Take note of that almost about additional than 70 fraction employees peruse the Information superhighway in search of awareness around the goods or services. Authoring appropriate articles concerning your merchandises or services may possibly assist you to bring forth commerce and let employees appreciate almost about your total interest. For case in point if you covenant in garden equipments, you can keep up a correspondence countless proper articles on stuffs appropriate to gardening and furnish a link to the website that speaks near to your style or provision. There are numerous articles directories, where you can submit your pleased and therefore intensify the coincidences of attaining acknowledged.

. Blogs- it is one of the hot and coming about gears in the planet of World wide web advertisement. You can either pick to put up a banner ad on the certain frequent blogs or promptly put up a link to your online page. Writing entertaining and active blogs will abet you bring in hefty business. Blogs in itself is an educational device, as you can bring together lot of shrewdness on countless stuffs.

. Link exchange- if you are a new entry in the market and asked to make a correct commerce, you can exchange links plus the common web pages. This is one more prosperous World wide web sales promotion tendency. If you cant exchange, you can take to pay the ordinary online pages and put up your links. Except, the websites should have content germane to your brand or you will dishearten to promote it to the right auditor.

World wide web marketing plays a key role for your success in the online business. By mastering the art of Cyber web sales promotion, you can grasp to survive the competition and reach victory. The on top of Web commercial educational gears is in the midst of the common ones and will assist you in your affair to a immense extent. If you havent further educated yourself almost about Web sales promotion, its phase you did it.


Concerning the Architect

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The Keys to Developing Successful Marketing Strategies

A successful marketing strategy is judged by how effectively it can be used. Many people know that a successful marketing strategy puts a lot of different factors into consideration and uses these factors as a collective.

There are, however, five main keys to developing successful marketing strategies. Every successful entrepreneur will tell you that these five always play a part in the development of a successful marketing strategy:

1) Strengths - A successful marketing strategy always considers the various strengths that a company has. These strengths should be present within the company and the company should be able to use it in order to achieve the desired goal. It is clear that every company has strengths which it could use to gain advantages over the competition. These strengths could range from having more resources to having more experience. The strategy must utilize the strengths to the maximum. Every effort expended should be directed towards the achievement of the goal.

2) Weaknesses - Just as every company has strengths, every company also has its weaknesses. A successful marketing strategy needs to take these weaknesses into account and help people overcome them. A successful marketing strategy should be realistic regarding its weaknesses in order to truly be effective.

Successful marketing strategies have often turned potential weaknesses into strengths. Anything is possible with the right manipulation of a company's strength. By taking account of the potential weaknesses, a company will be able to find ways of coping for those weaknesses. They could actually remedy those weaknesses and make sure that they will not be the downfall of the company.

3) Opportunities - Successful marketing strategies have always taken advantage of every available opportunity for advancement. By taking account of existing opportunities, a company will be looking at the various stepping stones that it can use in order to achieve success. Various opportunities are always available in a market.

However, these opportunities are often shrouded and need a keen eye and a good sense to take advantage of them. In taking advantage of opportunities, however, the company must not lose sight of the main goal through which it can measure success.

4) Threats - Since the market contains opportunities for the company, it should also be mentioned that it does contain threats. People should be aware of any potential even that could bring a company to its knees.

Successful marketing strategies have always included methods of riding out these threats and adapting to them in such a way that they will endure them. The most successful marketing strategies, in fact, have actually been able to turn these threats into opportunities. Take BMW for example: when it was faced with the threat of being forbidden to manufacture airplanes, it took to manufacturing cars. That's a great way of turning a threat into an opportunity.

5) Implementation - A marketing strategy needs to be implemented in order to be successful. The implementation is the final test of how successful a marketing strategy actually is. It could be clever, it could be simple, it could be cunning, and it could be obvious. The successful marketing strategy is always implemented. Without this final test, the marketing strategy is just a marketing strategy. Success is determined by the use, not by the design.

These are the five keys to a successful marketing strategy. Mark them well, for they might help you to achieve success someday.


About the Author

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