GEEWIZ NEWS – APRIL 2002 – MORE GREAT OPPORTUNITIES

Here is [copy of] the new look Geewiz newsletter that has been personalised. This shows you what can be done with a very simple application of personalised direct marketing to your e-newsletter.

Don’t get carried away with your e-newsletter, with lots of graphics or too many colours, because it’s the content that really counts in the newsletter.

News of Richard’s Success

My new business website, www.successful.co.nz, is now up and running, and it’s good to see some success stories about New Zealand business on the site, and successful New Zealand people who are having some great business success out there. Let’s share your success story – it’s free to load it onto the site, and it’s free to read any information on the site, and what’s more important, the media do visit the site to get good news stories. We also keep informing the media about some of the successful stories. Take advantage of the opportunity.

Great news for those of you who purchased a copy of my book "Practical Marketing in New Zealand", published by Brookers. I can now announce that my next book "Practical Sales Management", which will be published by CCH, is currently at the editing stage and will hopefully hit the market in August/September of this year, with lots of practical, how-to ideas on running your sales team.

This will be a soft cover book, around about 350 pages, covering every aspect of sales management. Watch this space, there will be news about it on my website and also you will get the opportunity to get a special preview to buy the book prior to publication. Plus also the details of the Launch Function ……

My winter project will be to update and rewrite "Practical Marketing" and we will be republishing this in a soft cover early in 2003.

More good news for my Wellington, New Zealand seminar clients – my new partner in Wellington is the EMA (Employers & Manufacturers Association) Central, who are pleased to have me as a partner presenting sales and marketing courses to their members and also to the many Wellington business companies. Special thanks to all of my loyal Wellington Chamber clients, who over the last five years have attended my many seminars at the Wellington Chamber, and I look forward to you sending your staff and your employees and attending my seminars based at EMA Central in Wellington. Check out their website for course dates, or my website for dates, and of course you can book online on www.geewiz.co.nz for any of the seminars.

Now for some marketing thoughts. I’d like to get you thinking about the value of e-marketing, and how you can apply the practical principles of marketing to success in your e-marketing and e-commerce endeavours.

E-Marketing – Is it a Myth?

Exciting, enticing email, or email newsletters, that entice you to read more! Sound like a myth, does it sound like some terrible marketing disaster? Is it some mysterious new innovative way to communicate to clients?

Just like when black and white television became colour, radio could be heard on an earpiece, cellphones could receive emails, and you had wireless communication, the idea of e-marketing has been abused by the poor users of marketing tools, has been damaged by the company failures within the e-commerce world, but as a communication media choice it has no parallel.

Where else can you communicate en masse to your entire customer database, or to selected portions of it, in a personalised manner, within seconds, have the ability to use colour graphics and type fonts to create an interesting communication message?

The important ingredients of success in e-marketing are as follows:

Database

As in any other business record, you need a database of your clients email addresses, and this can be in many forms, with perhaps the most popular in address book form on a simple program like Outlook Express through to the more complicated customer relationship management programs like ACT or the various versions of Excel spreadsheets that have customer details and contact communication information.

The most important thing is that you have a database of clients who wish for you to communicate. The Privacy Act requirements require you to have the ability to take off clients who no longer wish to be communicated with. You are only required to take off people who specifically ask to do so, you can add people to your database by any means and as often as you like, as long as you have this removal mechanism in place.

You, of course, do not have the permission of your database to sell it or give it to other people without the permission of the members on the database. Of course, many marketing people would never, ever, consider giving their database away to other people, on the basis that it would damage their credibility they had with their clients. Make sure you have a system for regularly adding updates to your database, and also for making corrections as required.

Remember, this database is going to be used no differently from when you used it as a fax-out, direct mail merge letter, or specific segmented mail out.

Preferably keep your mailing addresses in groups of no more than 500, so that you don’t end up being accused of "spamming" by your internet provider when you go to send your emails or your e-news.

Email

Perhaps the most common form of communication, the simple email, which is just an electronic version of an ordinary letter, memo, or handwritten note, being sent to your client’s email address, is a cost effective, fast strategy for keeping in touch with clients. With emails, it’s always a good idea to have your signature on the bottom of every outgoing email, along with contact phone numbers and a point of difference or USP statement as part of the body of the signature.

Emails also have the ability to be "carbon copied" (Cc), or "blind carbon copied" (Bcc) which means a copy can be sent to another email address without the person knowing that it was being sent on to a third party.

The biggest improvement to emails is to make sure that you spell check them, grammar check them, and look at the layout and presentation, and choose your font style to make it easy for your client to read.

The use of "html" as a font style is becoming more and more acceptable, but there will be some clients who will not be able to read html emails. When you are advised by your clients that they cannot read html, just put their email address into a separate address book, and send them, along with any others, ordinary email communication.

Emails should be short, quick to the point, easy to read, and the layout should be exactly the same as any letter communication that you would send to a business client, that is, people read paragraphs, no paragraphs longer than 7 lines, and personalise the email with the person’s name at least twice within the body of the email.

Remember to constantly check your computer date and time for accuracy, otherwise your emails will go out with the wrong date and time. Many older PCs, particularly those with 386 or 486 based hard drives, have a battery in the internal clock which will become slow and will quite frequently cause your date and time to become out of sync with actuality. There’s nothing you can do about it, as you can’t get in to replace the battery, all you have to do is keep adjusting the date and the time, until you get around to buying a new computer or hard drive.

E-Newsletters

The most exciting way to communicate to your clients is the use of a newsletter. Providing the newsletter is interesting to read, highly personalised, with lots of communication about people, and relative in its news content to your business, it will be read.

Newsletters need to be interesting for people to read, and ways of making it interesting are as follows:

• Stories about people – personalise your newsletter with how you have helped people, how your business or organisation has worked in with people, and where possible the individual people’s comments about how well they valued your service.

• A good 4-paragraph formula for a newsletter is Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

• E-newsletters should contain lots of free information, free news, free tips, and in fact give something to the reader for taking the time to actually read your newsletter. The communication back to you will come based on the free information that you give, and the buyer or client wanting to know more.
• Within the body of your newsletter, do not put "click on links" back to further information about the story – newsletter readers do not want to have to log back onto their system unless they happen to have Jetstream, and go back and click on to find out further information. Rather, shorten your story to give the key facts and put it in the body of the newsletter, rather than have them have to go somewhere else to finish it off.
• The frequency of sending your newsletter out should be based on effective communication to your customers without annoying them.

• An e-newsletter is not a substitute for any form of communication, it is an additional aid to your normal voice communication and physical visits to your clients.
• Make sure your newsletter has contact information; your email address, your website address, your phone and your fax. Of course it may contain some promotional information about yourself and new products or services that are available, but an easy guideline is 80% news and information, 20% self promotion.

E-marketing is not a myth. E-marketing is a good method of keeping in touch with your customers, when you manage the use of the media tool correctly.

Sales Thoughts For You –Guarantees….Warranties…Service….

We hear an awful lot about warranties, guarantees, service standards. I wonder if you’ve ever really thought about how much difference this can make to your business. Here are some thoughts.

Promise of Performance

Many organisations look for differences to help segment their position, or differentiate themselves from other suppliers in the same marketplace. A very simple, easily recognised definition of difference is that of offering some sort of guarantee or performance of service strategy to your customers.

Communicating to your customers expectations that they can receive as a result of picking up the phone, sending an email, forwarding you a fax, generally revolve around time. They are extremely effective, for example some of the following statements of service expectation work well:

• Your email will be answered within 60 minutes during normal business hours.
• If you phone this morning, we will quote this afternoon.
• Your call will be answered by an experienced, professional adviser who understands what your needs are.
• If we don’t get your request satisfied within 24 hours there is no fee.
• You have our guarantee of satisfaction – we will get your request completed to your satisfaction every time.
• Rule No. 1 - the customer is always right. Rule No. 2 – re-read Rule No. 1.

These sort of service performance guarantee standards serve to really reinforce to your client what they can expect in dealing with you. In today’s modern, busy email-filled world where time is of the essence, having a company that stands up and says, "you can expect to have us communicate back within an agreed timeframe," and then deliver that timeframe, is quite often a reason for doing business with that organisation.

Guarantees, or in the United States where they are known as warranties, are another form of wording where you emphasis the performance that can be expected in dealing with your service organisation.

All guarantees needs to be carefully worded, because we have in New Zealand the Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Guarantees Act, which are, in their written format, a style of guarantee as to what your product or service will do, and what it has been advertised, promoted, or communicated as able to do.

A guarantee can generally be presented as everything from the Hubbard cereal "My personal guarantee of satisfaction", through to a specific guarantee as to the life of the toaster, radio, or computer, providing certain conditions have been met.

Guarantees are only worth the willingness of the company to honour the guarantee. If the supplying company uses guarantees as a way to avoid customer satisfaction, then the guarantee will never work. If you apply a guarantee you have to be prepared to stand behind the guarantee, and in many cases go further than what your words actually mean, because of the power of word-of-mouth communication to other customers if you get it wrong.

In financial services, there is the Financial Planners Act, which of course warrants what may be said to a client, what may be promised to a client, and what sort of follow-up there must be in place. Remember, this Act has real penalties for people who transgress it.

The most simple form of guarantee, that many service providers operate, is a guarantee of performance – if you’re not satisfied I will redo the job until you are satisfied.

Many customers, of course, are far more aware of customer service performance, the 24 laws in New Zealand that govern sales and marketing activity, and as such use them to their advantage to make sure that they extract every last amount of energy or reward out of somebody when they have gone wrong.

If you haven’t already got a copy of the Fair Trading Act, and the Consumer Guarantees Act, make sure you go to a Bennett's Government Bookshop and get yourself a copy, approximately $6.95 each, and read up on them and make sure you do not transgress them.

Some leading New Zealand retail companies, and oil and fuel companies, have been caught in the last 12 months and fined severely for transgressions of the Fair Trading Act.

The effect of offering a guarantee or a standard of performance as part of your sales benefits to the customer, is generally outstanding. It really differentiates you from many of the other suppliers in the marketplace, and helps the customer understand very carefully that you perceive them to be important.

The offering of a guarantee indicates to the customer that you value their business. If you value their business they will keep returning, and generally introduce you, through referrals, to their network of business associates.

Guarantees about price are always going to be difficult. Pricing strategies by New Zealand marketing managers are generally short term, and designed to move product or services in a short timeframe to meet some financial criteria, and as such are un-winnable if you get into a competitive marketing strategy fight on price.

Claims such as, "if somebody else can do it cheaper, show us and we will cut the price by a further 10%", indicate that you are a price merchant and are not particularly concerned with adding value or benefits.

Price discounters rarely survive in business, and if you want to go down the strategy of offering price discounts you need to carefully examine your marketplace to see whether this is the best strategy for you.

Money back guarantees or refunds, are all governed by the Consumer Guarantees Act if you are dealing with the public, and in most situations you don’t actually have to give a refund or give money back, you can generally provide an alternative service or provide an alternative product.

A little bit of market research around the websites of the other suppliers in the marketplace will quickly identify for you any service performance guarantees, warranties, or points of difference that are being offered. You can then easily craft your service expectations, warranties and guarantees.

Remembering that in business, it is people doing business with people, my final comment would be that the issuing of a warranty, guarantee, or service performance statement, has to be effective when the people performing the service or supplying the product understand the expectations of what it means to meet your guarantee, warranty, or service performance statement.

Get your staff and your team to buy in to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer interaction performance, and ensure that your people want to do business with the people who are your customers.

New Seminar - "Powerful Presentations"

Of course, in the seminar presentations you are always updating your seminars and adding in the latest information, however a new seminar I have created is attracting a lot of attention. This is a one day seminar - Powerful Presentations. This seminar is aimed at sales people, managers, supervisors, in fact people who have to make presentations either to customers, staff, or to community or business interest groups.

In this one day, you not only learn all the techniques of professional speaking presentations from how to stand, how to project your voice, how to get interest in your presentations, but it also covers practical tips on use of PowerPoint, visual aids, and sales aids, and you get the opportunity to see yourself recorded on video and have it played back to you so you can see how much you improve over the day in your ability to present.

This seminar is receiving great reviews from the people who attend, who go away fully confident that will make a very powerful presentation next time.

For further information check out my website for details about the next public Powerful Presentations seminar, but if you would like to have one of these created and personalised for your own team, talk to me now by email, richard@geewiz.co.nz.

What seminars are coming up that I can send my sales team to?

During May/June, the following seminars are taking place, and you can book them on my website or at the relevant Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or Tauranga locations.

MAY / JUNE SEMINARS

Richard’s Recommendations

You might like to check out these websites of companies that I can recommend.

www.videopromotions.co.nz, contact Steve, a great innovative video production house.

www.adacab.co.nz, contact Wayne, innovative taxi top advertising media.

www.leasecar.co.nz, contact Sandy, personalised car lease and finance company.

www.portlandhotel.co.nz, contact Ric, a great place to stay when you are in Wellington.

www.kinetics.co.nz, contact Andrew, a brilliant computer engineering services company.

www.distributiondiagnostics.biz, contact Naomi, a really great new professional consultancy that specialises in reducing your internal distribution and logistics costs.

www.fluvax.co.nz, contact Jo, keep the colds and flu away with a fast, personalised, in-company flu vaccination for your staff.

www.sportsandleisure.co.nz, contact Justin, runs a great school holiday, children’s sport, academic and leisure entertainment program.

www.academic.co.nz, contact Luke, a specialised secondary school subject coaching one-on-one business.

What’s new on my website – www.geewiz.co.nz

New, free articles on e-marketing, financial marketing, sales tips, professional selling strategies, guarantees, and much more!

More photos of seminar attendees – do you remember who was on the seminar with you?

Lots more referrals of great companies to do business with.

New seminar dates for 2002 and 2003.

Special offer to purchase the book "Practical Marketing in New Zealand" – was $330, now just for the next 3 or 4 weeks while this last edition’s stock runs out, only $99 – first in, first served! Order on the website. [www.geewiz.co.nz]

Link to www.successful.co.nz.

New seminar descriptions for seminar updates and new seminars just released.

Some interesting articles for free downloading from some of our National Speaker Conference presenter friends passing on tips on time, customer service, and much more – free for you to download.

This issue of Geewiz News is sent to you because you are a great friend of Geewiz News, having attended either a seminar, or met me at a conference presentation, or have asked to be included on the Geewiz News list, or have been recommended and introduced by a business associate. My personal guarantee to you is that this email list is never loaned out, sold or used by anybody else, and should you wish to update any details please forward me an email to richard@geewiz.co.nz.

Have a great day!

Richard P. Gee
Marketing Consultant, Sales/Marketing Trainer and Conference Speaker,
New Zealand’s first interactive author, and self-styled Sales and Marketing Guru.

Enjoy your day!