Bad Email Practise!

It is recommended practise that when contacting people by email for the first time you provide an 'opt in' to future emailers rather than an 'opt out'. Whilst not all companies follow the practise almost all do at least provide a simple 'opt out' or unsubscribe option.

One publishing house seems to have taken a different route - it appears to create a new emailing list for every emailer it sends. Each emailer it sends me has the facility to unsubscribe but I still receive another emailer from them most weeks - and then have to unsubscribe from this list.

Whilst the publishers may think they are being very clever, in my view this is extremely poor practise and does nothing for the image of the business or to encourage me to read their emailers. Indeed I now normally delete them or mark them as spam without reading and don't bother to click on the unsubscribe as it appears to have no effect.

Do you have any other examples of poor emailing practise?

Where have all the IT companies gone?

A phone call from a prospective new client last week led to a discussion on where have all the mid-sized, generalist IT companies gone to.

When I entered this business 20 years ago names such as ISTEL, Systems Designers, Scicon, Logica and Hoskyns were all significant players in the UK market. Now they have all disappeared, with the exception of Logica which has grown substantially through acquisition, as they have been acquired and become absorrbed within major corporations.

I then began to consider the implications of this for customers - where do they go to if they don't want to to deal with the likes of IBM, EDS, CapGemini or Accenture? There are clearly vertical market and application specialists but few generalists of a significant size appear to exist.

Do you have a view on how the market has changed and who are the rising stars - if so I would be delighted to hear from you

Looking Differently at your Business

Have you considered looking at businesses which touch on your areas of expertise, not as competitors, but as collaborators?

You may find - like 4sight - that even where there is overlap, as long as their 'centre of gravity' is different from your's, you can potentially work together to your mutual benefit.

Sometimes we just need to take a fresh look at our business, not just at our competitors, but also at our customers and at ourselves - you never know what opportunities you will uncover!

A Service to Others

Over the last few years we have undertaken many on-line surveys for a range of customers. This has made us realise that we could offer this as a service to other companies who perhaps only need to run 2 or 3 surveys a year for their clients.

For these companies we can offer our expertise in the development, implementation and analysis of surveys as well as the investment we have made in the technology to deliver the surveys to respondents.

Already have interest for several marketing , advertising and PR companies and hopefully this will lead to new business opportunities for us all. If you know anyone who might be interested in this new service then please put them in touch!

Profiting from Quieter Times

With many contacts and clients away on holiday in August it can become a quiet month for activity. I decided to use the opportunity to catch up with associates that I had not been in touch with for several months.

It has been good to re-engage and the chance to bounce ideas off each other has already helped me to crystallise a potential new business opportunity which had been at the back of my mind for some time. I shall be pursuing this actively in the coming weeks.

Keeping in touch is never a waste of time and you just never know what will be the outcome of your next conversation.

Take a good look before you write off the opportunity!

Just completed a client project looking at the training market in the UK. Clearly like much of the UK economy this market has been hit by recession but, by looking at the needs and drivers of different industry segments it is still possible to identify real areas of business opportunity.

This must be case for many sectors - those companies that are prepared to properly assess and understand the opportunity and then tailor their solution to meet customer needs are able to develop profitable businesses in markets which others have written off.

It is very easy to write off a whole industry sector based on a single piece of information yet you may not need to dig very deep below the surface to find real nuggets of opportunity.

Taking Action

An interesting report has just been published in the US by the Business Marketing Association. The 2010 Customer Engagement Survey conducted by SPSS found that 69% of organisations use customer surveys as a source of customer information. However B2B organisations are better able to capture customer information than they are to analyse it for actionable insights! http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2010/3697/b2b-customer-engagement-high-priority-low-marks

We at 4sight have often come across customers with large quantities of customer information but without the time to do anything with it.

Another reason why when we undertake a customer survey for a client we always provide analysis of the results including actionable recommendations.

Take a Fresh Look at your Marketing

Having recently returned from a break in wonderful North Devon we have taken the opportunity to review the business with refreshed eyes.

This can be hard when you are totally immersed in the day to day and the tendency is to continue doing the same things and thus continue to get the same outcomes.

In fact one of the benefits many of our customers mention is that 4sight takes a new perspective on their business and helps them to see it in a new light. Often we unearth things that they have been doing for reasons which whilst relevant several years ago, are no longer - the world has moved on! In particular there are many new opportunities such as Blogging and Twitter, yet many companies have not even thought about how they can contribute to their marketing activity.

Try to take the opportunity to remove yourself from the day to day and look at your business with refreshed eyes - if this is not possible then consider asking someone else to do this for you!

Getting the Benefits of Hindsight

Several 4sight clients have now undertaken on-line Customer Surveys for the third year running and are reaping benefits from the analysis of 3 years information on customer needs and perceptions.

It can often be hard to justify your first survey particularly if you are also planning other major marketing spend e.g a re-branding. However, how will you be able to measure the success of your new marketing activities in changing perceptions etc. if you do not know what the starting point was?

Implement your first survey now and not only will it give you valuable information to drive your activities today but also in years to come you will have data on which to review the effectiveness of your marketing on an on-going basis.

Key Words

Finding out how people search for the products and services you supply on the web is an important element of Search Engine Optimisation.

At 4sight we have started to introduce a question on web searching into our customer surveys and this has already given our customers new insights into the key words and phrases they should include when optimising their sites.

There is an excellent article on Key Words by Gareth Edwards an e-marketing specialist at the National B2B Centre http://www.nb2bc.co.uk/articles/marketing_online/?id=163 .

Try out some of the techniques mentioned here and I am sure you will see an impact on the performance of your website.

Killer Questions

When I am preparing a new survey there are often one or two questions which I usually include and which invariably provide great feedback. The one which always seems to work is

'What is the one thing we can do to improve the service we offer?' This has provided valuable, actionable information for many clients.

Last year one client, against my advice, changed the wording to 'What are the three things we can do to improve the service we offer?' - thinking they were being really clever and would get three times the information. In fact they got no useful feedback at all.

Questions should be clear and easy to answer - this was asking too much of respondents!

What are your killer questions?