BOOK MONDAY: Customer Information Management

All good things come to an end. So does the coverage of my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

The chapter “Customer Information Management” is the last one in the book and so we will close this reoccurring series with this one as well:

Information management has always been crucial to business strategy and learning to determine its value always underestimated.

One of these things constantly neglected is customer relationship management (CRM) and the information included therein.

The information has always been around and has been taken more of less seriously by the company owners even though it is very important to the success of a business.

This is immediate information and its value lies within the possibility of increasing sales simply by utilizing the information we hold about our customers.

The first and foremost important information are their contact details with which we can establish points of contact. These contact details would be – in order of costs involved in contacting – postal address, phone, and email.

Email, as pointed out above, will be the cheapest and thus most effective form of contact. Yet mailings are always a hard way to go because your customers have to opt-in or give their permission to be mailed.

The emails you send them should not consist of direct sales pitches, but rather of sales pitches hidden inside seemingly valuable information you give them for free.

You have to gain their trust on the signup page for the newsletter, and you have to explicitly point out that you will not spam, harass, or otherwise misuse their email address. Plus of course, you have to mention what differentiates YOUR newsletter from all the other ones, of which most are “evil”.

This will increase your chances that they will send this email they got from you to a friend who will then again sign up for your newsletter because it’s information their being fed with instead of sales pitches (of which they probably get hundreds a week).

Although I very well know the power of conventional mailings and phone acquisitions, I will not go into further detail because these topics are not really web related and go too far off topic.

Down the line, and if your business is ever up for sale in case of a merger or acquisition, the amount of information you hold about your customers and competitors will significantly improve the position you will be negotiating from.

The reason for this is that buyer of your company will be able to get business started immediately instead of having to search for new prospects, buy new leads lists, etc.

Another important thing to mention is that measures like these will significantly increase customer loyalty to your brand.

This will make sales way easier to begin with because if your sales staff can prepare themselves for a sales talk by reading the customer’s purchase history, maybe even preferences, chances of closing the sale will skyrocket simply because the customer has a better feeling.

The reason I asked the question when your customer’s daughter is turning 18 in the tag-line is because of an assignment I had a while back.

A car dealership for luxury automobiles wanted to increase sales.

It’s not like they were struggling but the CRM (customer relationship management system) they had in place was not really able to handle all the information they needed to increase sales.

Amongst others, I had them add fields to their customer database, which would capture the names and birthdays of their customer’s kids because of an experience I had while on the contract.

The daughter of a loyal customer came waltzing in one day as we were in a meeting. She was the typical spoiled brat yet her father was a wealthy personality, as most of their customers were.

As she started to look around the most prized models this dealership had to offer, it struck me…

“Since most of their customers were of that social class, and it is fairly easy to get your hands on the information of their kids names and birthdays during a sales talk, why not use this opportunity, save this information in the CRM and do a follow up with a presents basket and the offer for a free test drive around the time the kid turns 18 and get their drivers license?”

And this is only one of the things I worked out for them with the consequence that they not only drastically increased sales but also went way up in terms of customer satisfaction, which made them the number one dealership in that country.

So you see that the customer relationship management is a very important aspect of generating (e-) business and can be integrated into simple and easy to use web platforms.

Of course, everyone would be doing it if it were that simple. And like almost everywhere, we have a bottleneck. In this case we have the problem of convincing the sales staff to feed the CRM with the information you need to get this whole system off the ground because there is no immediate increase of profit for them.

I hope that you’ve not only learned a lot and gotten the chance to obtain a copy of my book but also had some fun reading through the lines I put together.

I don’t want to conclude this post without mentioning again that you please don’t hastily try to put together a web campaign by yourself. The reason is obvious as it is simple: there are professionals like myself you have a profound amount of knowledge about the topics we have touched in the last couple of weeks and who can help you to achieve leadership or polepositions on the web.

It would take years for someone to acquire this knowledge and a few more years to figure out which instruments work together how.

This brings be to the closing words for this post: if you intend to start an eBusiness campaign keep in mind that the instruments we have learned about are only successful if they are fitted together properly. No one instrument is going to significantly boost your business.

In that context – and if you haven’t done so – please buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) and read it closely to boost your business.

Lars

BOOK MONDAY: Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior

Welcome back.

Last week we started with the introduction and are now moving on to the first chapter which is called “Diversifying operation risk of domestic market behavior” from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle )

E-Business can be the specific thing you have been looking for to make your operation independent if – for instance – your “home-markets” screw up.

While the recent recession struck the US and devastated a vast amount of market segments, other parts of the world remained pretty relatively untouched, some even totally intact.

Before we go on we have to differentiate though because the memory of the masses is pretty widely subjected to Alzheimer’s.

In the 1920s we’ve had a similar situation on the global markets. Back then the governments and banks decided to take money out of the market to stabilize the system which proved to be wrong as we can all see in the history books with awe; the outcome being the great depression.

In 2008 when the situation reoccurred, the governments and banks, which had learned from the devastation they caused in the roaring ’20s, are starting to flood the markets with money in hopes that this will help the world stay out of disaster.

This opposing reaction can be the chance for your business to take off.

More money in the markets means that the buying power of the people is secured. It will of course have an effect on their buying behavior, but will lead to the fact that there will always be money in their pockets for necessities. And this covers the first group, the middle and lower class.

The upper class of course was hardly affected by the recession because they were able to diversify the investment risk through spreading their wealth to several investment channels.

This leads us back to your business.

When I say operational risk this includes a vast variety of factors. Some of which you can influence, most of which you can’t. So let’s be realistic about diversifying your operational risk.

The conclusion of the above mentioned could be to go international which will leverage the risk of a domestic market screw-up significantly.

Meaning, that if you’re a retailer in the US and with your operations limited to that specific region, you will probably be pounded by a market downturn in the US.

The fact that the economic downturn in the US has happened will also lead to a destabilization of the dollar in comparison to other currencies which will make the margin on the products you have in stock even higher.

So let us for a short while, imagine that you would have already made the investment and your website or e-commerce portal available in the other major languages around the world, which are Spanish, French, German, and now: Chinese.

You would instantly have access to the markets speaking those languages because if someone were looking for the products there they would not care where the product they are buying is from if they’re looking to save an extra buck.

Of course you’re right – I only mentioned the retailer in the US but this model can be applied to pretty much every business vertical in these times.

This chapter contains several examples of applied eBusiness models. If you want to read more, please consider buying “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

10 Indicators that your Web Designer may be an Idiot

Although I officially started my web career in 2006 the internet and all associated to it has been my passion since I got my first connection to the world wide web.

The more skills and knowledge I ascertained about the internet, the more anger arose in me whenever I saw poor presentations on the web.

Yet it wasn’t particularly the anger at the presentations themselves but primarily the outcries of the owners who were desperate to earn money off these presentations looking like crap.

This presentation (CLICK) contains the most common errors made when creating a web campaign and solutions on how you can improve yours.

Among many others it addresses the topics

• search engine optimization,
• user interface design,
• the importance of web analytics,
• etc.

Happy easter holidays

Lars

Why NOT to quit email but rather educate the people surrounding you

There are several experiments out there currently which promote that the solution to email problems is to quit it totally.

Since I do not agree on the motives exploited because of the fact that most of them are based on convenience I took a closer look at email in this podcast, addressing some historical points of view and proving that email is still worthwhile. And of course offering a simple solution about how to get email in line.

My conclusion is that Email still has it’s place in most of todays corporate communication – both organizational and inter-organizational. Along with the fact that it is more valuable and beneficial to educate the organization members and people around you about how to use email efficiently thus cutting down hassle of communication.

Really looking forward to some interesting discussion,

 

 Why NOT to quit email but rather educate the people surrounding you [5:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

5 Factors To Significantly Increase The Success Of Your CRM Campaign

In my fairly short time as a consultant I have seen about 2 dozen CRM campaigns fail because of a variety of factors which I found to be “common sense” not being implied.

Here are some of the most crucial mistakes being made:

1 DON’T start with Step 2!
Step ONE of every successful CRM campaign is determining and documenting the business processes inside your organization. Although you are one of several dealerships in the USA, your business and the things taking place are unique. And this since the first hour! The processes you have developed have to be figured out and have to be brought to paper.
This could include the “free oil change coupon” your customers get for their birthday, the special newsletters they receive if you have sales on vehicles or units they prefer or whatever else is going on.
Thinking about changing something in your work-flow to improve customer satisfaction, etc.? The time is NOW! Because after the CRM is in place the effort to do so will be incomparably higher and more costly. So things you my consider are, whether you also want to include the next generation of customers. See 5. about what I mean.

2. Choosing the right CRM system AND! vendor
Now, that we’ve invested this considerable amount of time into jotting down how our business works and interviewed every staff member about what they do all day long, it’s time to interview even more people. The CRM vendors. Each and everyone will promise you heaven on earth. So you have to evaluate which product suits your business best. Talk to colleagues and which system they have and then place your decision wisely. Why is the vendor more important than the system you’re going to install? Simple: the vendor offers you the support you need if you don’t have the tech-staff in-house to solve immediate problems.

3. Fill the empty shell
Sitting in front of a system with no content is depressing. And has other downsides like the question you’re going to get from your employees:”How does this thing work?”.
Since you have already invested a lot of money into the system the best way to go is to drop the change to have someone import or manually create the existing customers your company has. This will most likely lead to a higher acceptance of the system by your staff and thus to a higher ROI. Trust me, if your staff is motivated they will figure out how the system works.

4. Motivate the team to contribute
Now that we have filled the shell with information about customers we have to convince our team to continuously contribute to the system get them to understand the value of information.

5. What information is valuable – or: See the customer behind the customer
Birthrates are rising again. So a constantly growing amount of households you call your customers has kids. Seriously: do you know when they turn 16 and get their drivers licenses? Why not make the information available with a follow up. Even if it’s not for you it’s for the success of the sales person which follows in your footsteps. And of course mandatory for the success of the whole organization.
Another example would be customer’s birthdays and using this opportunity to generate business. This could very well a coupon for discounted or complementary oil-change or whatever you prefer to give away to loyal customers. Have a customer with a special birthday? Give them a special present.
And why not write down which type of vehicle your customer prefers? Whether it’s a sedan, suburban/truck, sporty limousine. You thus generate tons of opportunities to re-establish post-sales contact opportunities to these people!
Bottom line: the more valuable information you have about your most valuable assets, your customers, AND! the people they know, the more likely it is that you generate business out of it.

Thank you and I hope to see you here again soon

Lars Hilse (download full resume here)
Web Strategist | Speaker | Social Media Expert | Entrepreneur
USA +1 206-203-5212 | UK +44 (0)870 9749050 | Germany +49 (0)1801 5557775788 |
For other contact methods please click here.

Video: How to beat the recession using the Internet in 9 Minutes

I made this video just as I was heading out the door in regards to the tons of questions I received about the recession and how to beat it.

Using the internet (not only) as a point of sale can be one way.

Have fun and a nice weekend and feel free to call me if you have questions.

A CMS: many or few buttons?

You have to consider more than just the general opinion for this one. Reason being: if your targeted group of website visitors focuses upon an older generation you definitely want to go more towards usability. Same of course applies for inexperienced users.
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Who has developed a wiki?

The problem is not setting up the wiki. Further more, it’s not about designing one. Any web designer with poor knowledge can set up a wiki in about 30 minutes.

The problem consists of designing the policies by which the information is to be entered into the system Read more >>

How do I integrate online ordering for my restaurants?

I ran across a solution in Dubai where the restaurant sent a text message to the customers about an hour after they had eaten/ordered, asking them to participate in an online survey (one ipod was given away per month).
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B2B market and Web 2.0?

B2B is an exceptionally interesting factor for Web 2.0.

Let’s just move away from the my favorite, the mass collaboration aspect, here for a short while.

Web 2.0 is also about making frequently changing information available in formats that are recognized by a number of systems. I’m addressing compatibility here. So what about defining a standard which will comply to RSS is some way and make constantly changing pricing information of a wholesaler available to his retailers around the globe? I’m not going to start the discussion about email newsletters, ok?

Read more >>