Once you get around to actually blasting out your campaigns either on your own or through a vendor. Things to monitor are:

1) EDM open rate – how many people actually opened up your edm

2) Among the undelivered, how many EDMs were hard bounces and how many were soft bounces.

whatis.techtarget.com defines the 2 as:

hard bounce

A hard bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is invalid. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn’t exist or because the recipient is unknown. When the recipient’s name is known, e-mail may be rejected because the sender’s mail box is full or for other reasons.

soft bounce

A soft bounce is an e-mail message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full. A soft bounce message may be deliverable at another time or may be forwarded manually by the network administrator in charge of redirecting mail on the recipient’s domain.

3) The days and timings that the majority of edms were opened. – This could help you time your next campaign

4) You can also set up tracking for the links in your edm to see which content is most popular with your readers.  Also you will be able to feature better tailored content in your next campaigns.

5) Unsubscribe rates: If you have an unsubscribe function you should monitor the unsubscribe rates as high unsubscribe rates may mean that your content may not be interesting enough or tailored to your target blast group.

Last of all make sure your your edm complies with anti spam laws. There are also steps that you can take to prevent your edm from landing in peoples junk mail folder.

More on that in the next article.

Shawn

Going forward I hope to discuss more on eDMs. For now below are some situations where you might consider applying eDMs:

Promotions:

Customer Relationship Management:

Data collecting:

Adverts: (must be tailored to the database please!)

Just a warning when using this tool. Spamming should not be done under any circumstances. If the culture of spamming is allowed to spiral out of control I believe this mode of communication between consumer and company will be rendered useless.

S.V

SV

Also changes in your Clicks, Click through rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC) or Ad position could be affected by a new competitor entering/leaving the Adwords market. For example, if one of your closest competitors stops advertising you will see a surge in Clicks. So do keep track of your competitors online PPC campaign moves. – That would be a wise move.

REMEMBER THAT CLICKS MEAN NOTHING UNTIL COMPARED WITH CONVERSIONS.

This is a dangerous way to lose precious marketing dollars as a campaign which generates tons of clicks and visitors may not be generating any real revenue for you. Also it is not in your best interest to consider this as branding. In my opinion Adwords main purpose is to generate conversions and sales revenue. It is not a branding tool. So dig one step deeper when performing a campaign effectiveness evaluation and you may find gem campaigns.

I would like to confess – I am a toast box coffee addict. Usually coffee joints located in shopping malls try to serve you up a cup of stale tasting coffee for an above average mark up. (there is a certain donut-cum-coffee store which once served me the worst cup I have ever tasted) I would like to say that the marketing and product development guys down at BreadTalk (the parent company of Toast Box) have done an exellent job.

The first time I stepped into a Toast Box outlet (yearsss ago) my first impression was that their kampung style ambience- chairs which were not as confortable as the other outlets and old kampung decor- would not work. Now Toastbox has become a store which I frequest at least twice on week ends and a few times over the week to get my daily dose of caffeine.  I would like to go into more details on the little details that in my view makes Toastbox such a success but I shall end it here for now with the conclusion that with vision and great products tremendous things can happen in a short period of time. Now im off for a late night cup of  coffee – to bad Toastbox isn’t open.

Reviews:

• My Little Food Blog
• Hungry Go Where

1) Make the customers problem your problem:

Nothing frustrates a customer more than a lack of empathy. If a customer feels neglected you will lose that customer or loose the good word of mouth that he/she could pass on. Should you not be able to handle the problem politely apologize and get the help/advice of a superior that can help you resolve the issue. The customer will appreciate your honesty and sincerity to help.

2) The customer is not always right (but you have to explain him why in a very tactful and information manner)

Some (difficult) customers could insist on thing being done a certain way because they think that it will benefit them. If you know better politely advise why your method may benefit them. Give them a choice and then if they still choose to pursue things their way then let them do so as long is adheres to the companies policy.

Remember the faces:

3) Nothing makes a customer feel more connected to your brand/company when they feel like they are remembered. This will increase their loyalty and CLV (customer lifetime value). Also expect better word of mouth when you are able to connect with your consumers on a personal level.

*Personalizing and tweaking your customer service skills to create brand loyalty and good word of mouth is vital to increasing the customers lifetime value. (CLV) Increasing CLV justifies a larger marking spend to acquire potential leads.

In the “old days” monopolies dominated the TV and radio airwaves dumping most of the marketing budget and covering all prime time time slots so that the mass audience could not escape the reaches of their marketing campaign. Now the power is in the consumers hands and marketing heads need to crack their head on how to reach consumers with to many different mediums and marketing channels to cover.

One solution was to enable better tracking of offline campaigns. In my view – today’s marketing activities are vastly more “trackable” and measurable then before.

An old school tactic revamped:

One old method was to use separate phone lines for different mediums. The newspaper add led the prospect to call the different telephone number from a prospect who watched a television commercial that communicated the same message on the same product. Leads could be counted by keeping track of the number of calls to the different lines. Also orders could be tracked back to which medium they came from enabling the marketeer to view which campaign had a better return. This is done now through the use of unique website URLs that allows the marketing department to track online and offline campaigns as well using basic web analytics.

With improved tracking ability marketeers can track the exact returns of their campaigns. This leads to “sales-performance marketing” which could one day lead to marketeers demanding commission / bonuses. A very profitable career indeed.