Getting up close and personal

In business today, especially in financial services, you have to do the WIIFMs (what’s in it for me?). You have to target and you have to try to lower your administrative load by capturing as much information about your clients online as possible.

Targeting is so simple with modern everyday software — the only real difficulty is capturing the information into a database.

Imagine if you could categorise your clients — near retirement, young family, business owner, employee, professional and so forth — and then send those clients personalised online newsletters. Believe it or not, it is possible and it can be as simple as having different articles as one of your columns of data in an Excel database.

Do a find and replace. This is relatively easy. Simply find the word ‘retired’ in your database and replace it with the text of the article for retirees. Do a find for ‘self-employed’ and replace with the text of the article for self-employed individuals. And the same applies for the rest of your clients in your database.

Then in your newsletter template, insert the merge field. With the push of a button you can send thousands of newsletters, each one completely personalised for each client. It’s easy as can be in XP or using e-mail merging software that costs less than $100.

If you want to know more about it, just e-mail me [email protected].

The more targeted you are in your correspondence and dealings with clients, the more valuable they’ll consider it and the more attention they will give it. More attention means more reading. More reading means more referrals. And all you had to do was be clever and use cheap, easy and effective technology to its best.

Twelve ways to really screwup your e-mail marketing

1. Mate, all I need is your e-mail address.

I want to send you my e-mail marketing material. I don’t care where you live, how old you are, what company you work for or what your interests are. I just want to sell, sell, sell to you.

Of course, those people outside of my location are interested in my services, even if I don’t work there.

2. E-mail is so easy. I thinkI’ll send another and anotherand another ...

Wow, this e-mail is great! I can send out as many marketing e-mails as I want and it costs me nothing! My clients would love to hear from me more often, and all about my products and services.

3. Decide against launchingan online newsletter.

Heck, why do I want to waste my time adding value and educating my customers and prospects? Why would I want to develop a relationship with them? It sounds like too much work to me. I really only want to sell! Sell! Sell! Sell!

4. I'll just e-mail everyone inmy address book.

Whoops. How did so many people get in there two or three times? Who cares? Whoops — they just reported me for spamming.

5. Ignore subject lines.

Why shouldn’t I write whatever I want? Why should I waste my time trying to be clever and imaginative? Why would I want to catch peoples’ attention? They’ll open the e-mail — after all, they know it’s from me!

And who cares that only 35 character spaces will view in their inbox? It’s my e-mail so they’ll absolutely click it open to see the whole thing anyway.

6. It’s my e-mail. Mine. Mine.Mine.

I want to talk about me. Me. Me. Me! My company and me are so interesting, aren’t we?

7. I’ll have them click throughto my web site homepage.

Why bother directing them exactly to what I’m talking about? They’ll hunt and search for the article/investment/ prospectus item for sure.

8. I’ll just PDF my printnewsletter for online use.

Oh, I just love my print newsletter. The pictures and graphics and formatting are just so nice. So what if it’s 600Kb? It looks cool and I want to keep it that way for my web site and e-mail.

What? The average consumer probably doesn’t have Acrobat reader? And if they do — if they don’t have the latest version (the one my PDF is created in) it won’t open? So what? It’s okay. They’ll download it so they can read my newsletter.

9. I just love those animatedgraphics. Give me more.

Who cares that they’re distracting? Who cares that the Poynter Eye Tracking Study found people don’t look at graphics? Who cares that most corporates have firewalls now that block the Active-x or Java script that they’re made of?

10. Fax me or mail thecheque.

I can’t be bothered with things like online or secure payments for my seminars or conferences. It costs around US$150 to get a Thawte Certificate. Hurrumph. I know my customers won’t mind faxing me their credit card details or writing and mailing a cheque. After all, they want to do business with me — don’t they?

11. Here’s the pen. Give meyour details.

Why on earth should I start a system to get information keyed in directly online? I have a personal assistant after all. Let her do it. Who cares that people have different handwriting styles and she might get a lot of the e-mail addresses wrong? Who cares that if people did it directly online I could have it go straight into my marketing database?

12. SMS. What the heck isthat?

Why on earth would I want any enquiries from my web site to come in as an e-mail and also a message to my mobile phone? What good would that do? And it would only cost extra. So what if it means that I can get a prospect immediately when they’re hot? I’ve got it in e-mail and I’ll get around to it when I am in the office next.

Debbie Mayo-Smith runs Successful Internet Strategies and isa specialist in financial servicesmarketing.