Marketing Expert Rob Scott Discusses Successful List Building Techniques

January 18, 2013 5 Comments

My partner, and marketing expert, Rob Scott, talks list building and how to turn prospects into fans.

- Watch the video and grab the Action Guide -

Filed under CRM, Customer, Customer Relationship Management, How To, Management, Marketing, Rob Scott, Small business, Video Tagged with , , , ,

14 Nice Things You Can Do For Your Customers

May 16, 2011 Leave a comment

By: Ian Lurie

I make no promises. But I suspect if you do some of this stuff, your customers will thank you. Or, they won’t notice the stuff that used to make them curse you:

  1. Make every page on your site load 1 second faster. Start by taking every image on your site and compressing it. Please. It makes a difference.
  2. Accept PayPal. Just because you hate it doesn’t mean they do.
  3. Do a little basic typography: Increase line spacing, use a bigger font. Make your site easy to read.
  4. Put no more than 15 words on a line. See above.
  5. Put no more than 5 lines in a paragraph.
  6. Break up your page. Use lists, images, subheads and such. Don’t give them one big blob of images or text.
  7. If they ask you a question on Twitter or Facebook, answer it.
  8. If they compliment you on Twitter or Facebook, say thanks.
  9. Instead of giving them a discount, give them a better product.
  10. Before you pay $45000 to redesign your web site, pay $4500 to make the existing site easier to use. Then use what you learned on the new site.
  11. Don’t even imply that your customers have to log in before they can buy. Put that stuff at the very end of the checkout process, on the ‘thank you’ page.
  12. Trade ‘elegance’ or ‘personality’ for ‘clarity’ and ‘obviousness’. Watch your sales go up.
  13. Remove one feature that you wanted, but your customers didn’t, from your site.
  14. Stop reading about marketing stuff and go do it.

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Filed under Brand, Content, CRM, Customer, Customer Relationship Management, Management, Mistakes, Small business, Tips Tagged with , , , , ,

Strategic Marketing Segmentation & The 6 Consumer Segments

November 2, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Josh Druck

Marketing Segmentation & The 6 Consumer Segments

Segmenting markets is a foundation for superior business performance. Understanding how buyers’ needs and wants vary is essential in designing effective marketing strategies. Segmenting markets may be critical to developing  and implementing market driven strategy.

Buyers vary according to how they use products, the  needs and preferences that the products satisfy, and their  consumption patterns. These differences create market segments.

Marketing Segmentation is the process of identifying and analyzing groups of buyers in a market based on similar response characteristics (like their frequency of purchase). Recognizing these differences in your consumer base, and how they change, better and faster is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage.

The most specific form of market segmentation is to consider each buyer as a market segment. This is the structure needed for better overall brand reputation management . Such fine-tuned analysis is now possible due to mass customization techniques, which offer an exciting new approach to serving the unique needs and wants of individual buyers.

Custom designed products now satisfy individual buyers wants and needs at prices comparable to mass produced products. The growing adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that integrate all the information about each individual customer into a single location provides amazing opportunities to lean about customer needs based on actual customer behavior.

Finally, it is important to recognize that segmentation has an international dimension nowadays in many markets.

Based on interviews about core values with 1000 people in 35 countries, 6 global consumer segments are considered to exist to a varying degree:

1) Strivers: Place more emphasis on material and professional goals.

2) Devouts: Tradition & duty are very important.

3) Altruists: Interested in social issues & social welfare.

4) Intimates: Value close personal & family relationships.

5) Fun Seekers: High consumption of restaurants, bars, & movies.

6) Creatives: Strong interest in education, knowledge, & technology.

The global study found that people in different segments generally pursued different activities, different products and also consumed/used different kinds of media. Be sure to consider this before choosing your market and consumer base to target.

Filed under Brand, CRM, Customer, Customer Relationship Management, Josh Druck, Management, Marketing, Segments Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Social CRM Strategy (CRM Strategy 102)

July 6, 2010 Leave a comment

Who Is the Social Customer?

  • The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook, favoring what their network has curated and surfaced as important information.
  • The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts their social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
  • The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in their social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets their needs at that particular moment.
  • The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where they hang out, listening to their feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
  • The social customer expects you to listen and engage with them, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when they need you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or they will either move on to a competitor, or tell their friends about their bad experiences.

Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, they expect everyone they talk to from your company to have the same background on the issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.

Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn their trust.

What Is Social CRM?

Paul Greenberg, an author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”

Michael Fauschette says: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”

In the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, they developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:

  • Listen to customer conversations
  • Analyze those conversations
  • Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
  • Act on those customer conversations

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Filed under CRM, Customer, Customer Relationship Management, How To, Small business Tagged with , , ,

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