The problems of small start up businesses entering new markets with a new product is legendary for its list of failures some quite spectacular.

This has been highlighted further in a white paper produced at Aberdeen University Which investigates the successes and failures experienced by 80 companies.

It is easy to be too carried away with the products being super complex and therefore requiring some special tailored formula for marketing. The simple fact is that regardless of what it is you have, invented or produced it has to be explained in the simplest of terms and the customer must be able to get-it almost immediately.

One past example is the Anita electronic calculator. The first electronic calculator in the world invented in the 1950’s by Bell Punch in England. When this product went on sale no one apart from the electronic engineers who invented it knew how it worked yet it was immediately a success. By the late 1960’s it was causing a sensation at office equipment exhibitions and in no time the Anita and other competitors soon came along and replaced the old mechanical adding machines that had ruled for over 20 years.

A high technology product produced by a company known only for making excellent mechanical devices for punching tickets on buses and a superb mechanical adding machine they should have owned this industry - what happened?

Well technology happened. An article in the journal ‘New Electronics’ of February 17th 1970 describes the ANITA at its zenith and as the bees-knees in calculators. This was however, looking-over-the-shoulder-time and signs of change in the form of the “Integrated Circuit” was on the horizon - a new device that replaced 200 individual transistors. (Who are they?) The word Japanese is mentioned and at the end of the article a prediction was made that, “perhaps one day the Anita would be made small enough to fit into your pocket!”

The point of this history lesson is that here was a product instantly recognisable, very useful and requiring minimal marketing since once it was demonstrated to customers they got-it. Most of the early Anita calculators were sold to businesses and like the photocopier market; they relied on renting them out. Not particularly well designed by modern standards, but it replaced a mechanical object and did a lot more in less time. I’m being quite unfair to Bell Punch. The Anita calculator quite literally revolutionized the way we calculate mathematical problems in a way comparable to the Chinese Abacus still used today and probably in use a millennium earlier. Just imagine where we would be if bank workers and accountants didn’t have these sophisticated tools to work with, making sure they get their sums right!! (For the benefit of future historians reading, this article I’m writing at the height - possibly not - of the worst global recession thought to have been experienced and brought about by foolish accounting - in spite of calculators.)

So a superb product, the Anita with its 25 printed circuit boards and hundreds of individual electronic devices was doomed. Not by the emerging technology, they could and did adapt to this, but by the inability to move away from an office product where their business was rooted and to become a consumer brand - leaving others to exploit this market.

Jumping forward to the next millennium, it has taken companies with iconic brands to lead the way in marketing high technology. Apple for example can be compared to Bell Punch. Their original computers targeted a niche market of technically aware people. Loosing the battle for the mass market, they went on to establish a profitable business selling on the strength of their design and unique features. Appealing to publishers, graphic designers and the arts world in particular, they have led by superb product design. Apples iconic brands, the work of Englishman and IPod designer Jonathan Ive, are instantly recognisable around the globe.

Therefore, my conclusion is it is vital when planning the marketing of a new high tech product to take account of the background of the management team involved in the project. History tells us it will be their experience and culture in addition to their technical expertise that lead them down a preferred route. The problem here is making sure customers agree with them.

In the case of Bell Punch, it would have been very difficult for people in that culture at that time to make the switch in to consumer electronic products. However, for Apple, from their earliest days employing Pepsi Cola’s marketing man as their CEO, and despite a foray into the B2B sector, they never lost sight of their original roots. Calculators became the size of modern day IPods and in the same way the Japanese scored with product design, Apple have managed to achieve this producing their own iconic brands - albeit with the help of…..an Englishman!

Several factors will determine the cost of your email broadcast:

• Time of Broadcast
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• Personalisation
  Allows you to add the recipients name giving your email campaign a targeted, personal touch.
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  The more emails you send the lower the cost per email
• Lists Being Used
  Prices vary depending on source of list.

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Customers want to do business with companies that share their values — and customers look to how organizations behave in difficult economic times as a test of how solid they are.

During last years, election campaign President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said you should never let a crisis go to waste. Meaning this is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. He was talking about how governments must take advantage of our current economic crisis. However, the same idea applies to each of us, as individuals and as business leaders. In other words, do not waste this crisis.

It will be very easy for business decision makers during this present economic crisis to become afraid of taking any new risks and to focus entirely on cutting back instead of searching for opportunities to grow the business.

Whilst this is a natural response—it could be a huge mistake and in making cuts the direction and goodwill created with customers is lost amongst the menagerie of survivors left to run the business. This economic crisis has focussed our minds on expenses, labour costs, capital spending and marketing budgets.

When orders and income drops on the scale we have seen in the past few months then someone, something has to go. The only alternative is to lose money and dig deeper into reserves. Instead of all gloom, this can be a challenging time for the people left behind. Help them to be more creative and think of new ways to develop more sales by tapping into new revenue channels. Moreover, most important do not lose contact with your existing customers.

The good news is it does not have to be expensive or take a lot of time. A regular newsletter pointing out the new vibrant shape of the company, phone calls to the 20% best customers on a regular basis even if it’s just to say hello. You need not be selling the whole time, make an honest enquiry as to how they are doing. Is there anything you can do to help them get through the coming months – assuming it won’t make you go broke! People buy from people and a small gift, birthday card or gesture of goodwill is going to keep your customers loyalty. It is certain commercial suicide to stop selling and as the man said - don’t waste a good crisis when you have one.

The idea of using email to sell products and services is undoubtedly a very attractive idea. No fulfilment or postage charges and no stationary costs - it seems like a no-brainer so where is the catch.

It makes sense to keep in regular contact with existing customers one way or other both by email or phone. However, expanding this list using your own resources and by adding registrations will take quite a long time. One technique is to send a regular newsletter and allow new prospects to register. Eventually this list should grow and after a lot of effort, you will have your own list.

Given that, time is short and you need sales now the delay building your own list is not financially viable. In addition, you have to be sure to keep the newsletter appearing on a regular basis and have something interesting to say. Therefore, the next alternative is to consider using another owners lists categorised by business or organisations, which match your own requirements.

While the idea seems attractive, there is a big trap waiting for anyone pursuing this course of action without care. The important issue is how you come to obtain that bulk list of email addresses. In addition, here we distinguish between renting a list (list rental) and buying a list.

List rental

There are two kinds of list rental the first is dispatched on your behalf and whilst you don’t physically get to see the email list you do have the benefit of only paying for the ones that actually are sent. A percentage of emails bounce back - usually because of SPAM filters and despite the fact that the email records we use are all classed as “Opted-in” some still fail to arrive with at the recipient. Our fees include reports detailing the number of email actually sent and the percentage opened by the recipients.

The second kind of email rental is where we supply certain categories of list for you to send. These do have certain restrictions the main one being you can only send them the once - unless you have paid for multiple-use. In this case can supply a license where you can send them as often as you like for 12 months.

Buying Email Lists

The alternative is to buy a physical copy of a list of the email addresses. After you pay the purchase price, there are no further fees to pay. You can send your promotional message as often as you like to the list with no restrictions.

MTELS Direct will provide some email lists for outright use with no restrictions. We will always be very clear informing you of the advantages and disadvantages using outright purchase. The laws governing sending unsolicited emails in the UK and Europe are clear. Get it wrong and taking a shortcut can lead to real problems.

The discipline comes from not abusing the list by emailing to often since people will soon stop responding and may report you for sending spam. If there is, no control of the list or even what types of emails people send then the response will be poor.

For these reasons, we do not offer to sell you bulk email lists (1 million email addresses for £99) that type of thing. It’s almost certain that most these addresses will have been used excessively now are blocked by spam filters.

]]> http://www.mtelsdirect.co.uk/?feed=rss2&p=11 http://www.mtelsdirect.co.uk/?p=8 http://www.mtelsdirect.co.uk/?p=8#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:29:53 +0000 admin http://www.mtelsdirect.co.uk/?p=8 New SEO (search engine optimization) techniques are being offered on a daily basis to business owners. Telesales people generally open with the now familiar “We can get your company listed at number one on Google.” If I’m in a mood I generally reply, “No, you can’t.” A response guaranteed to start a lot of back pedalling and a debate.

The fact is that no one can guarantee you a number one listing on a Google page – apart from Google that is. So what can you do without spending a small fortune?

It makes sense to do the easy things first. The title line of your website needs to describe its content. This will be the first information Google will see when they catalogue your site’s content. If you have a rarefied type of business that does not have thousands of competitors then you may not need to do very much more than this to get a high page rank. The title section is at the top of the main web page usually called index.html or similar.

<title>Market Research | Mailing Lists | Email Marketing |</title>

Many SEO’s still incorporate Meta tags below the title enclosing other key words but its doubtful Google take any notice of them. (Yahoo may still do). Google likes wordy pages with plenty of description and paragraphs describing what you do. The algorithm used will be seeking links from other websites to your site that demonstrates to Google how well you’re regarded in relation to the topic under search. There is no doubt about it the more links to your site the better. In theory, these need to be credible links from sites with an equal good standing - measured by the number of people linking to them in turn. All this may sound confusing but the bottom line is - search engines are committed to deliver the best results for the person doing the search – not getting you to number one position.

So first of all “What is SEO?”

Two key factors dictate where your website will rank:

Competition – The web is fiercely competitive. When you search any given term, you may come up with millions of hits, displayed on hundreds of thousands of pages. What good does it do if your page ends up on page 862, if people are not going to look past the first few pages of hits?

Search Engine Technology – Search engines have their own rules. Some of those rules keep changing, but a few are pretty logically set and won’t change. In order to optimize, you have to understand how the search engine sees and rates your page, and then help it to see your content more accurately. As I explained in the first section the title and description must match as accurately as possible – what topics people are searching?

Search engines see text. They do not see pretty pictures, and they mostly ignore colours (except in a few instances). No matter how gorgeous your site looks, it won’t mean a thing to your ranking unless you have elements that the search engines can see and interpret correctly.

I mentioned the use of Meta Tags or keywords that people go to huge lengths optimising. The fact is that if 10,000 websites all have the same key words it would still be 10,000:1 your site is at the top or 1000:1 you appear on page 1. Clearly, it is more complicated than choosing a right key word. If for example you sell wide shoes, they may search “wide shoes”, “e width shoes”, “hard to find shoe sizes”, etc. Those are all keywords, which may in fact be phrases, not just words. Some people get anal about keywords; as though the whole search, engine world revolves around getting just the right ones.

Google and other search engines use a filtering system based on page rank numbers. These are similar to votes for your website and depending on where you rank this will determine how high you’re listed and the sites with the highest page rank naturally appear first.

Page rank is determined by the search engine’s evaluation of your site’s popularity. It measures that popularity by how many sites out there have links to your site. The more sites you have linking back to you, the more popular they think your site is, so the higher they rank the page.

Search Engine Optimization involves two types of strategies:

Internal strategies, which focus on improving the code and content of your pages so that the search engine can “see” them better and more accurately, tell what the site is all about. The external strategies, involve getting links, back to your site to improve page ranking. However its still not that simple since each search engine has different sets of rules.

Therefore, before you part with hard-earned cash based on the promise of a guaranteed place on page one of Google. You need answers to the following questions:

1. How do they propose to do this?

2. I mean you need to know exactly how. It can only be by adding (possibly hundreds of links from other websites back to yours. Trust me no amount of key word optimisation will do it unless they are three words no one is likely to use.

There are strategies, which are simple to implement, and make a huge difference. There are small things which don’t make much of a difference, but which make sense to do because they are so simple to do. There are ot

We need to keep it in context since crooks use other conventional methods to steal from people including direct mail, credit card fraud and distraction burglaries. This of course has happened throughout history from the earliest times. When coins were made from all gold and silver it was a common fraud to shave tiny slithers off each coin defrauding the owners by selling the shavings as bullion. Shaving money off your credit card is remarkably similar. How is this different crime from rogue email and breaking into your computer? The facts are that whatever methods we find useful to reach customers and to transact business services and goods - then a criminal element will exploit these same techniques to steal from people.

What this means is that we shouldn’t end the practice of selling by email on account of crooks no more than we stop using credit cards or selling by direct mail. So how can you use email marketing legally and effectively?

UK law on email marketing

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Whilst the intention behind the law is clear, the regulations only apply to UK businesses and do nothing to prevent spam originating in countries where the relevant laws are less strict or, indeed, non-existent. For genuine UK businesses seeking to increase sales of their products to a targeted market, the effect of the law is essentially more red tape. The regulations apply to unsolicited commercial e-mails and text messages (SMS) sent to individual subscribers, rather than to company addresses, so much of the business-to-business e-marketing is not affected. However, under the regulations the term ‘individual subscriber’ includes sole traders, non-limited liability partnerships and their employees.

So in brief there you have it. You can send email to Limited companies addressed to info@ or sales@ quite legitimately. Provided you include your business details and the opportunity to unsubscribe. You can also use any lists you have compiled where people have registered or opted-in to receive your email. You will often see claims made by companies that they have thousands of opt-in email addresses. I’m pretty cautious about these claims since when you drill down they will not be all genuine. Probably one of the largest lists of genuine opt-in emails in the UK is owned by Thomson Directories. The rental cost of these is quite similar to a traditional mailing list but far less effective in my experience but then of course you don’t have the additional postage cost.

However, this may be a good time to start using direct mail once again since the number of mail shots I receive are far fewer than a few years ago and do you know what – I tend to read them now.

Okay, so let me declare an interest here. My primary business called MTELS Direct supplies mailing lists and organizes direct mail campaigns using both post and email. So am I biased - just a bit? However, that said I do believe in the genre and after more than 20 years peddling the media have had my fair share of successful campaigns. The main piece of information useful to you is that despite my efforts to use all the other media we have available – direct marketing is the only consistent method I know of turning in regular results. And yes I have tried email marketing (more on this in another article) and very successful it was. But it just isn’t as consistent campaign after campaign.

You have to face a simple fact that year on year your customer base is naturally shrinking. Replacement customers won’t automatically beat a path to your door and the task of finding new ones has to be an on-going challenge. The important thing to consider is that despite all the shiny new ways now available to attract new business its vital you don’t abandon you’re tried and tested methods – they do still work. Stuffing envelopes is very low tech we know and writing successful sales letters can be a challenge. But if this is how you have built your business over many years – at a considerable investment cost - then the sudden introduction of the Internet is not going to takeover immediately. It will require the same investment, planning and mistakes to be made before this media reaches an equivalent level of success.

The reason businesses change their suppliers can range from your main contact literally having died, through to the competition pitching in with a better offer. Whilst it makes sense to expend a lot of time and effort keeping existing customers happy you must keep topping-up. With all the pain in the financial services sector it seems likely that we will be receiving even less invitations to have another credit card or take a loan and this may work in your favour if you are not involved in the finance sector and can benefit from less mail competition.

Effective Profiling

One obvious way to use direct mail to replace lost customers is to clone new prospects based on a profile of your existing customer base. This is done by carefully drilling down and examining every one of your customers looking for clusters of the same type. These could turn out to be schools, medical, construction, recruitment companies. Next we can look closer at the geographical regions and make sure you are addressing the right areas of the country and not wasting time and effort. Once the profile is complete we can compile a list of new prospects based on these existing customers and mail or phone them.

You don’t have to stuff envelopes of course since this can all be arranged for you surprisingly cheaply. Even the postage services are improving with alternatives to Royal Mail. I recently negotiated a deal with TNT for one of my clients - a small business – that has saved them close to £4,000 per year and for a very modest number of mail shots. With these kinds of savings and the use of outwork the promotions can be kept in the background while delivering a steady stream of new sales leads.