Tuesday 13 December 2011

Mass marketing via email

An effective way of marketing to an established set of customers has for a time been mass marketing via email.  You should always encourage your customers to include the email address when they register.  If you include clauses (with opt out buttons) that let you utilize 3’rd parties it will increase the value of your list.  Be careful though, you don’t want it to be a list of people that has banned you from sending to them.    
Genuine offers are required.  And they will feel extra good about it if they receive it before everybody else.  Like sending the email the night before the general release of the offer.

How to send to this list you have collated is a matter of choice.  If you are a regular mailer with knowledge of emailing I would recommend a self run packages due to its lower cost in the long run.  It also leaves you in control of the list.  A list that can have a value in its own.  If you contract out, be careful to have clauses in the contract that expressively say the list of email addresses is yours and yours alone, and is to be handed back if the contract ends.
A good one for self hosting is Listmanager form Lyris http://www.lyris.com  A very high capacity and fast mailer with response tracking facilities. Couple of hundred thousand an hour should be no problem.  It also handles spam filters very well. An important consideration for repeat mailing. You don't want all your efforts to be filtered away. A problem with free and cheap mailers. 
Lyris also has good support.  

Always send from a domain that can be looked up via reverse dns. This is the first test from most filters.  Also set up a real reply address where you can handle automated verification responses from spam filters, and answer spam complaints from the likes of gmail.  Be careful with having a opt out link at the end of all sent emails.
You need to carefully monitor your sending’s.  A good system should track the progress and put non successful conversations on hold.  However a general problem in the transfers can lead to a list where all is on-hold.  See to that they are not wiped off your list to quickly.  I would also recommend subscribe confirmations via email to verify genuine email addresses and sort out the mischievous.
Integrate your emails with your website so you can track the responses and uptake/sales from each mail.  A good package should have this included.

Creating a regular stream of similar emails can be a chore.  Some packages also offers automated help with the composing of the emails, allowing a daily marketing becoming somebody’s part-time job.  

Saturday 10 December 2011

The importance of selling your company name and logo

If you retail in the market for interchangeable consumer goods, it’s important to build up the customer knowledge of your brand.  You should take every opportunity to display your logo and just as important, your brand name.  It is easier to get shelf space in a chain of stores if their customers already request your product.  And the only way they can know it is by you marketing it to them.  This can take many forms.  Traditional advertising in papers, on tv or radio.  Or more modern forms like  website, Wikipedia, or social media like Twitter, Facebook or Google+  A combination is often required to reach momentum.
To get repeat custom they also need to know that it was your product they purchased.  That means displaying your brand name and logo very clearly on the product, and not be happy with a small mention in the nearly visible text on the pricing label.. 

It is surprising how many, that have worked a while in the same company, take it for granted that everybody knows about it.  The truth is that many times I where in contact with people from the UK who was asking Ryanair who, when I contacted them about something else than travel.  People might not associate the company if the query is unrelated to its most visible activity.  Also a company well known in a local area might be nearly unknown outside that area.  This can be an issue if your marketing people are local and you are trying to market nationally, or even globally.   

If you have a website, it’s important to visualise your product on it.  If they click the button products there should be pictures of what you can actually purchase, with proudly displayed logos and company name.  Try to find a way of selling your product on the web also.  There usually is some way of making a variant of the product that can have a longer lifespan so it can be shipped by cheapest way.  It will introduce them nicely to your product range and there will be no delay between seeing and purchasing.  Get good deals on shipping to as many destinations as possible and display them on your website.  You never know where the next purchaser might be from.  Selling online can be done very cheaply using established payment channels like paypal. and can take little effort to accomplish.  What is most important is that it gives you a way of better controlling the  presentation of the product.  On your site there is no big supermarket chain that sets a markup pricing you above your competitor, or give you inferior shelf space.

 If you insist on not selling directly, lead potential customers from your product page to outlets that will do your product.  And make sure regularly that they actually still do.  A customer will not like to travel to a store to get your product and then discover that they don’t stock it after all.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

IT a cost or a source of income

Is IT a cost to be minimized or a, sometimes in a roundabout way, source of income to be maximised.  For a long time companies has seen IT as a cost centre, a necessity.  IT started out as a way of giving your business an advantage.  As your competitors got the same or similar systems iITbecame more of a necessity than advantage.  This has lead to the thinking of coomoditating IT.  Seeing IT as a service that can be bought from somebody else sample in the recent growth of cloud services.  A way of hardware makers to sell you hardware without actually giving you the stuff. 
The people in IT then will want to redefine themselves.  This together with the need for IT directors ad CIO’s trying to gain entrance to the very top management means that they will try to make more of a mark.  Why not by, instead of being a cost,  becoming a source of revenue. 
Early attempts lead to the invention of internal cost centres.  The problem her is the word cost.  Now other departments see IT as even more of a cost.  Something that can be bought internally or sourced externally.  It brought the cost of IT to people that before wasn’t used to paying directly for anything.  And with that a backlash. 

If we think about it, IT is already a source of revenue generation for many businesses.  The growth of the web has seen to that.  IT runs websites that in some companies all sales goes through.  However this is seldom attributed to IT.  Even though they often sourced the system, organized all the technical necessary, and created the site itself. They are just the facilitator, and out of the goodness of their heart, or as a lack of being present at the top where these things are discussed, IT has let the company continue to believe that.  
There is many other examples on where IT is revenue generating.  Take the customer helpdesk or call centre.  Sometimes originally an extension of the IT helpdesk it facilitates the continued sale of your products.   And at some companies at a cost of contacting.
 
What IT becomes in a company often depends on the person in the IT director role (+his/her team)  some times, but not necessary, combined with the interest the CEO has of the area.  If your IT management is inventive and has a good business acumen they see the potential in the new trends of the market in areas like social advertising, network building and customer interaction.  With the current development rate IT has not yet reached the stage where it cannot bring business advantage for the inventive that can redefine the market by their differentness.  To state anything else is to say the world has come to its pinnacle of development and there is nothing more to be done. 
For the rest maybe commoditation is the way forward.  There is certainly enough internal naysayers, and external forces, that sees profits to be made, for that to work too.  But then you have given away a potential avenue of making your offering different from everybody else.  If you sit down and wait, eventually a competitor will seize the advantage.

Sunday 4 December 2011

Social media a faux pas danger or advertising possibility

In the last years social media has become a way of “normal people to express themselves on the internet.  Before you had to use forums, where mostly other people set the order of the day.  Today you have a number of possibilities like blogs, twitter, facebook and now also google+
Modern websites needs to keep up with these new media by adding interaction to them like +1 and like buttons to allow you communicate directly with the people, = potential customers, that interact on these site.  

Many new and smaller businesses do take it up.  It is probably easier to organize if you don’t have to go through several layers of corporate bureaucrazy for a decision to use the media to be made.  It also takes somebody with an interest, yes nearly a passion for it, to keep up with the constant changes needed.  The modern web is about constantly changing content and interaction.  No longer is it enough with a single page with your product and contact details.  The more you interact the better your site will be responded to and the more potential customers will know about you.

More established companies are more afraid of what it can do to their current reputation than what potential it brings with it.  Some companies insist that no should be done by anyone that isn’t authorised, meaning the company spokesperson or the ceo him/herself. In the day of the social media that person just becomes 1 though.  So even with a powerful voice and a lot of resources behind them they will have problem reaching as wide as the whole companies thousands of employees could.
Instead of trying to stop this potential, one should look into better ways of spreading the word in a controlled fashion.  In a way it has been tried in the past where sample, companies would invite their employees to vote for them in award competitions.  And I don’t just mean “employer of the year”.

The company that don’t follow the customer risk being left behind.  For some years the way of advertising n the internet was with email campaigns or advertisements placed on webpages like  or internet search engines like Google.  Now even large companies consider stopping using emails, switching to other forms of communication.  There is speak of a move from search engines to social sites like Facebook, which could be one reason Google has shown interest with it’s + 

In the internet age we move fast and newcomers can quickly become the established for so to be overtaken again.  They who don’t follow can easily be left behind.  Ignore at your peril.

When did the full dump ever help

Most advanced systems will automatically do a dump of their memory, or challenge you to do a dump if they recognise a failure has happened.  Some os software vendors also love the dump. Problem is that if the system was able to recognize the cause of the crash, it wouldn’t have crashed in the first place, and a dump is usually just a snapshot of what is in memory at that exact time and tells little about the action prior to the problem. 
If a system was able to recognize a crash situation it means the vendor when building it knew this could happened and included a way of logging it.  If they had known it could happen they would have put in measures to prevent it in the first place.  Most crashes is due to unforeseen circumstances and can therefore not be logged.

A downside with dumps is that they usually become very large and take a long time to extract.  If you successfully extract them the tools to analyze them are either longwinded or difficult to interpret the results.  This means you usually have to upload them to a os or hw suppliers site.  And internet connections have increased a lot in size but the amount of data in these dumps mean you will be clogging a link for a long time.
 
After all that 99% of the time you will get back, nothing found.  I will advocate that it is a lot better to do targeted log extracts.  As an admin you will usually have an idea on where the problem lay.  Work with the developers or suppliers of the application your run for finding the best tool for logging what is going on.  Then play with the parameters of the logging tool at the same time as you put load on your system.  This may take some provocation, like artificially increasing the load or reducing the capacity of the system.  Easy if you have a multi computer system – turn off some of the resources.  But even on a single system you can sample limit the number of processors used or run up an additional load (can be from an additional dummy program). 

There can be many different causes to system crashes / malfunctions.  I have experienced amongst other missing non-public patches, bent processor pin, bad programming and the reaching of system limits.  These last can and have been in  os, db, app and hw.   What I haven’t experienced is that any of them has been diagnosed correctly and the solution found from a full system/memory dump.