Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

rjaiya,

If email will be your primary contact method then I suggest you plan on releasing your emails in small bursts of 100 to 500 and spend as much time as possible first with the subject line. Test and retest this element so the open rate is as high as possible.

Hope that helps,

Hi rjaiya

I have to assume that you’ve not let us know your URL for the business site because its not yet ready. That’s a pity because even in beta format, you would get a lot of feedback from our web experts and a more focussed response from the rest.

First impressions from your description of the on-line presence are that it seeks to do rather a lot of diverse things for a single business person to be able to run with competence – or do you have a team working on it? To offer excellence in a given area of strength can be easily portrayed in your marketing. Offering excellence in two areas is tricky, but if you have the expertise and the areas are related, it can be a benefit. To offer 4 services which are only loosely associated in their core business attributes, have only vague similarities in their potential target markets and all require a different staff / client interaction is challenging, to say the least. Many prospective customers might be unimpressed by this unless you can demonstrate that your enterprise commands the relevant skills, delivered by a competent team.

Also AIDA is pretty handy and in my view (I’m an unreconstructed salesman!) it is as relevant to selling today as it was in the 1950’s when the acronym was invented. It is worth pointing out, however that AIDA works best when there is a salesperson there to ask the questions, listen to the answers and advance the close on the sale through the four stages. To expect a website and passive promotional literature or emails to do the same is expecting too much from AIDA alone. You can’t handle objections by website interaction!

Business directories are great, especially if they will appeal to an affinity group of viewers. The affinity might be by geography, profession or like-needs, but you must be aware that there are literally thousands of free to list business directories on the net which already act as a shop window for small firms. You might find charging for an entry rather difficult unless you have some unique selling points to offer to your subscribers. To put it rather brutally, you will have to succeed where Alta Vista failed.

Design Studio services are also well represented on the web. I’ve just completed a project to allow one of my clients to sell through design creative agencies and studios in the UK. 12 months on, we have established contact with over 5000 of them. All without exception have a web presence which varies in its style from shop-window or gallery through to fully commercial, lead and enquiry generation and even full DIY commissioning of jobs with the ability to place an order and pay for it. Competing against the likes of these will again require some distinct USP’s and as our more business-speak inclined members like to say, a valid value proposition. You are going to have to prove to your subscribers that listing on your enterprise site will give them some level of credibility and exposure that their web site alone could not.

Seminar and Event Management is a wonderful growth area and I work with a number of clients involved in this field – they are heavy users and substantial spenders on CRM systems, training and consultancy. Why? It’s because the common thing between them all is that no matter how good their web sites are and no matter how professional their literature, they fill their events by someone selling the seats at them over the telephone and often face to face. We have succeeded so well in this arena because we have been able to put the entire event, information about it and the booking plan on the web, connected to a Maximizer Enterprise eCRM system so that the customers can book their places at the event live on their screen, pay for it and modify their requirements in real time as the event date approaches.

This is an area where truly interactive websites have come into their own, with a strong link to a CRM database and the necessary financial packages which will allow quotations, ordering and invoicing. Are you prepared to go that far or do you have a lesser objective in mind. It would be useful to know.

Blogging is now so ubiquitous and freely available, that I can’t see how you can make a turn by offering to charge people for that which they can get for free. Of course there are many revenue models which pertain to Blogging and if you’d tell us what you intended to do, and how you intend to make some money from it, we might be in a better position to advise you on how to refine it and succeed at it.

Please don’t read this as a load of negatives – I just want you to be aware of what you are up against so that you can refine your offer and perhaps select your market niches such that you will be able to succeed. With more information from you, I’d probably not have written half of the above, but in the absence of any specifics, that’s it, warts and all!

Regards

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions