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How would you sell computer repair services? Fast, friendly, and reliable? That kind of language speaks to the company's opinion of itself, not necessarily what it can do for its customers. Here's how to position yourself with your clients and customers when you are selling a service.

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Many companies equate Customer Experience Management with Customer Relationship Management. But they are not the same. So what's the difference between them? And why is it important to understand the difference?

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It's been called "selling the invisible"—delivering intangible services as a core "product" offering. But invisibility, or intangibility, is just one factor that distinguishes services marketing from product marketing. Along with inseparability, variability, and perishability, these four characteristics affect the way clients behave during the buying process and the way organizations must interact with them.

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If you think your customer isn't concerned about environmental issues, or won't pay a premium for products that are more eco-responsible, think again. You may just find an opportunity to enhance your product's performance and strengthen your customer's loyalty—and command a higher price.

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Most companies have a serious problem: Sales hates marketing, and marketing despises sales. Marketing is having great success generating leads and uncovering opportunity. But sales has no respect for what marketing accomplishes. They take leads grudgingly and when the leads turn into real opportunities they claim those opportunities were already on their radar. There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between these teams—they have separate goals, separate cultures, and different fears and motivations. But here is the story of one company that has managed to eliminate much of the typical animosity. Read how.

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Too many consultancies and agencies equate Customer Experience Management (CEM) with User Experience. They are not the same. User Experience is an important part of CEM. But like Experiential Marketing, it's a part of a much larger whole.

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Testing is the backbone of any solid direct response campaign and business. Whether your business is mature or still in the launch phase, testing is necessary to keep your approach fresh and your product valuable to your customers—and profitable to your company. Whether you're testing new audience lists, media channel, offer, copy, premiums offers, headlines, or whatever...a solid testing plan must be an integral part of your business.

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One of the toughest challenges you face as a brand marketer is, very simply, getting your brand noticed. You have to worry about not just your direct competitors but all of the other brands fighting for a customer's attention. Just breaking through and being heard in this over-communicated, noisy marketing environment is a victory. So you need all the help you can get. And one place you might want to look for it is at the top of your organization. More and more, senior management plays a crucial role in the success of a brand that breaks away from the pack.

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Customers—even bad ones—are our best loyalty teachers. In fact, the lessons gleaned from "problem" customers are often rich and long-lasting. Consider the following less-than-ideal customer types and some of the loyalty-making insights they provide. You might recognize some of these individuals!

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

If ever a winner-take-all match took place among the marketing heavyweights—direct mail, telemarketing, and the Web—our money would be on direct mail, without doubt. Simply put, the best pound-for-pound method for targeting a large audience and gathering data is direct mail. Armed with the right data, message, and creative, direct mail can be a lean, mean, marketing power puncher that can hit your target like a ton of bricks and deliver a substantial return on investment. But to be effective, direct mail requires the careful combination of three key ingredients.

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Sometime last fall, Google launched a major update to its search algorithm, shaking up the search engine optimization community—and millions of Web site rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently complete. The keywords that people used to find your site with in Google may not be producing as many visits any more, because the Jagger changes caused your rankings to plummet. If your site's rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you were or better in the post-Jagger Google world?

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Word of mouth marketing is an umbrella term for dozens of techniques that can be used to engage customers. Word of mouth includes viral marketing, blogs, communities, loyalty programs, and other techniques that get customers talking about your products. In many cases, WOM isn't actually "marketing" at all. It's great customer service that earns customer respect. There are five basic steps that all word of mouth marketing campaigns share.

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Do your salespeople still ask, "How did you hear about us?" when a prospect calls? Do you list your contact information on your homepage? Do you display the same 800 number for all of your Web site visitors? If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes," then buckle up. You are costing your business money by not using all of the available tools to monitor and improve your online advertising campaigns. Following thesr eight guidelines will help you to make better choices about which campaigns you should expand and which ones you should eliminate.

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Many people equate Customer Experience Management with Experiential Marketing. But in recent years, "experiential marketing" has become perceptually aligned with "marketing execution". This is because it largely focuses on developing highly visible, stimulating, interactive, and sensory-engaging environments in which products and services are showcased. Accordingly, experiential marketing is an important component of CEM, but it isn't the whole enchilada.

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It's been long known that preview pane and the blocked-images feature in email clients are problematic for business-to-business marketers. The majority of B2B readers are using both the preview pane and the default blocked-images functions to decide whether to open emails and block unwanted downloads. Companies that do not take steps to address these findings with their email design and format will be doing a disservice to their subscribers.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Blogging is ubiquitous. Marketing experts, the media and the influx of books on business blogging give the impression that we should all do it, or be thinking about doing it. But should all businesses blog? Is it always a wise use of resources and an asset to an organization?

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Keeping a campaign fresh and vibrant—and maintaining its breakaway status—is a major challenge. The competitive landscape is turbulent and consumer perceptions are constantly shifting. It takes courage and perseverance to sustain a breakaway campaign over decades.

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From the time you book an airline flight until that plane lands, your pecking order in the airline's customer hierarchy determines your travel experience. To the airlines, all customers are not equal—they are segmented and managed according to profitability, loyalty, and frequency of travel. Like the airlines, professional service and solution providers have embraced the concept of account relationship management, yet many struggle with execution. Account management is based on the premise that a subset of your clients will purchase most of your offerings, and so you should manage and market to them differently—and directly. All clients are important to your business, but some are more so than others.

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There are two big problems with today's purchasing departments. Most obviously, purchasing is incented to save dollars of cost, a mandate that too often means dollars of value are lost. And the other problem—which is interconnected with the first one—is that purchasing often operates by obsolete and counter-productive rules. So what can companies do to ensure that purchasing is not undermining other departments by diluting value and ultimately bringing down profits? Here are some tips.

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A growing number of books and articles are actively promoting the concept of Customer Experience Management, or CEM. There are also a growing number of agencies and consultancies claiming expertise in the field—all with varying degrees of involvement and expertise. While there's a clear reason to become a staunch supporter of CEM, there's a great deal of confusion over what it really is. As more individuals get on board the CEM bandwagon and build services in the arena, confusion seems to be increasing. It's time to demystify the hype.