Category — emailing

Staying in touch with your customer base is one of the most important things you can do to grow your business and increase sales revenue. At Optum Consulting we receive a lot of emails asking us “what is the best service we can use to maintain our customers’ email addresses?” That’s a great question. Currently we have been using the same service for about seven years. We receive no money from them for telling our clients about their services – this is not an advertisement. And in fact, I bet half the time they might never even know that we recommended them. The simple fact of the matter is that they are one of the best email database services out there for the price. Their system works and they are affordable.

We’ve done the research and we still think this particular company is the most affordable and best ‘bang for the buck’ when your company wants to stay in regular contact with your customers every month – which you need to be doing no matter what you are selling, whether it is goods or services. It is one of those “essentials” of good business. If you want to know the name of the company we use, please email us at info@optumconsulting.com, and we will be happy to tell you. I will post future entries regarding just how important building, sorting, cleaning, maintaining, and growing your email database is to any business.

In the meantime, let us focus on another issue regarding business which is just as important – responding to customer emails – or potential customer emails. When you’re in business, if you’re lucky, you are going to receive a lot of emails everyday. Some will be orders. Some will be questions. Some will be complaints. The most important thing you can do to grow your business and keep it growing is to reply promptly to emails from customers or potential customers. We have all heard the common phrase “If one of your customers is happy with your business, they will tell one or two of their friends. If they are UNhappy with your business they will tell FIVE of their friends.” Unfortunate but true. This is how you separate the men from the boys so to speak — to use an outdated and slightly sexist phrase.

So let us use a real world example and I will show you exactly what we are talking about here. We just received an email today from a new company in the “music business” that calls itself “Fanbridge.” Now new companies in the music business are not a new thing. Especially not NOW. In the new “renegade internet age,” a new “music business-related” company crops up every few hours claiming that they are THE THING that will help artists “skyrocket your career to the next level.” Why? Because let’s face it, it isn’t that difficult to start what “looks like” a new company in the internet age. You simply create a website and hope that people come along and lay down some money. Whether or not you deliver on the promises you make to your potential customers is an entirely different matter.
[Read more →]

One of the things that we do a lot of here at Optum is help individuals and companies with their web presence and email marketing systems. The advent of Web2.0 technologies has changed everything very quickly. And things continue to change at a rapid pace. Luckily we have a solid team of five who specialize in just that and are absolutely obsessed with technology. Not with keeping up - but staying ahead. 2008 is a special year for a few of us because it is the tenth anniversary for three of us. I hired two of these guys way back in 1998 and they are still working for me today ten years later. That says a lot about each of us.

Right now the Internet is changing at a faster pace than it ever has before and it is for a variety of reasons. One of them is because more and more people from all over the world have access to it. And number two, technology is becoming easier and easier to use and manipulate - therefore more and more people than ever before are creating software, platforms, applications, widgets, and operating systems than in the recent past when “software developing” or “computer programming” was a trade that was in the hands of the very few.

Now we’ve got “third-party apps” becoming the hottest property on the net in weeks being developed by teenagers at home after school “just for fun.” And the truth is, it is fun to see what everyone will come up with next each day. At some point we will cover widgets and third-party apps and all that other fun stuff i a future post. But in the meantime, if it all “sounds Greek” to you, shoot us an email. We will help. Whether it is building your website from start to finish, helping upgrade your already existing website to a more modern dynamic Web 2.0 platform, helping you promote it and gain more exposure and visibility, helping you start or maintain a customer email address database and start doing regular email blasts to your customer base, or simply helping you understand what all this stuff means, it is one of the many things we do here at Optum Consulting. We aren’t good at it. We are great at it. And we are great at it not because it is our job - but because we absolutely love it and therefore choose to make it our job. And in fact, as many are now discovering in generation x and y, the key is not to have ONE job, but to have many hobbies - things that you LOVE doing and being a part of that just also happen to make you money. Speaking personally, this is what Optum Consulting is for me. It was a passion that I turned into a business because the business was already there. It was already coming to me. So I simply opened the doors and accepted it.

It is the same for the other members of our graphics, internet, and technology team here. These are guys who eat, sleep, breathe, and live technology and design. These are guys who send you IMs at 4:30AM about a new blog plug-in that they just discovered - and disturbingly YOU also happen to still be awake and sitting behind your computer. That is passion. Which is what we bring to every client we work with.

Let’s cut to the meat of this particular piece because this is important stuff. I’m going to give you a quick overview of the paradigm, a few dos and don’ts and if you want more information just shoot us an email.

Number one and most importantly, if you own any kind of a business, and that means even if YOU yourself are the product - such is the case with web designers, models, actors, etc - then you need to be doing two things: staying in regular contact with your customer base, and constantly searching out ways to find new customers. Print ad campaigns and direct mail are the old fashioned traditional way of doing this. And yes we still recommend this method to some of our clients depending on their business model and customer demographics. But these methods have slowly been on a downward spiral because they are expensive compared to email campaigns and newsletters. Call them eZines, email blasts, webzines. It’s all the same. But it is certainly a less expensive alternative than snail-mailing a printed newsletter to thousands or millions of customers. As I said, it all depends on who you are and what you are selling.

If you are not sending out regular emails to your existing customer base, call us now. We will help you set it up. It is not expensive nor difficult to do and it is easy to teach you or we can do it for you. So do not be afraid of it. (i cannot tell you how many people I speak to on a daily basis who don’t do this simply because they are intimidated by “starting it.” Once i explain how easy it is, they feel much better and they off on their own in no time. It is an imperative aspect of your overall business plan.

If you are already doing this, here are some tips. There is a tendency today for individuals and companies to make one or more of several mistakes when sending out emails to their customers. One of them is to not send them out regularly enough. Bad move. Choose a date, perhaps once a month, bi-weekly, or every two months and implement a regular schedule. Do not waver from it. Your email can be something as simple as offering a few simple tips, offer a sale, or update your customers on your latest news. But you have to keep your name or your product’s name in the eyes of your customers or your potential customer’s eyes on a regular basis.

[Read more →]