Email list scrubbing

Email Marketing for Business Growth

Your Customers Called…They’re Lonely

“Hey, it’s me… your old customer… remember me?

Customer disengagement happens when businesses stop communicating

I bought from you a while back. I’m in need of your service again, but I didn’t know if your business was even in existence anymore, nor did I even remember your company name. I decided to go with another company who actually cared about my business.” This is how the story goes. You celebrate over the fact that you made a sale to a new customer. Either a product is delivered or a service is performed. An order is filled out, and that customer now goes into a manila file folder in the office file cabinet. A year passes. As you wipe off the dust that has collected on your file cabinet over this period of time, you now ask, “What ever happened to that customer, and why haven’t I heard from them?” I’m here to give you a reality check. Most likely, that customer moved on because they simply felt that you didn’t value their business. They switched to a competitor of yours who actively took the time to continue the conversation, even after the product was delivered or the service was performed. In many cases, that breakdown happens quietly in the inbox. When customers stop hearing from a brand, they don’t always complain or unsubscribe—they simply disengage and move on.

This makes perfect sense when you consider that the majority of customers come to you because they developed a relationship with you prior to purchasing your offerings, or were referred to you by a friend or business colleague. When you fail to open the gates of communication and keep them informed of your brand existence, you no longer become the company that comes to mind when the need for your service arises once again.

The goal of marketing executives is to stretch their marketing budget as far as they can in an effort to gain the maximum benefit using minimal amount of resources. Without unleashing the power of marketing, any opportunity or potential for business growth goes out the window. However, our focus toward acquiring new customers is oftentimes so strong that we become blinded by the reality that 80% of your business is right in front of your face.

Instead of spending the majority of your time and resources going after new clients who must be persuaded and convinced that you are a reputable business and capable of delivering above and beyond consumer expectations, why not capitalize on those who have already chosen you over your competitors at least once before? Why not engage your customers with your business and continue the dialogue? Maybe It’s Time to Start Dating Your Customers. Before re-engaging past customers, it’s important to ensure that your outreach is going to real, reachable people. Outdated, abandoned, or invalid email addresses can undermine even the best engagement strategy.

Nurturing, retaining, communicating and maintaining the relationship with your existing customers is the key to keeping the sales rolling in, especially when, on average, repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers and are also more inclined to refer additional business your way.

It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require any strategic thinking or a reallocation of your marketing budget. It’s actually easier than you think. All it requires is a simple email every so often, or perhaps a follow up phone call every now and then will do the trick. Pick up the phone and start calling. Make that call just to say “Hi, how are you doing. I’m here if you need anything.”

Email newsletters are the most effective method of outreach to keep your customers in tune with news of your business, new products or services you have on the market, blogs or press releases that discuss insight into your field of expertise, or anything else that will provide a value-added benefit to your customers. Never underestimate the value of an effective, relevant, and informative subject line to capture the attention of your most prized asset, your customer database. Prior to launching re-engagement efforts, a practical hygiene step is removing known junk and high-risk addresses from your database. PureList’s email list cleaning service focuses on cleaning lists so re-engagement campaigns are built on accurate, current data.

So what’s the hold up?

Acknowledging that your imploding in the basics of simply generating sales and have been screwing up for the last year or so, will not get you any closer to your goals. Do something about it. You just blew your opportunity to increase your sales by 50%. Failing to simply keep in touch with your existing customers, is unconscionable. Now pick up the phone, and make that call. A good customer is a terrible thing to waste.

This article is part of our broader resource on email list cleaning and hygiene, which explains why maintaining clean lists supports stronger engagement and long-term customer relationships.

Mistakes & Failures are the Key to Success

How many of you think mistakes and failures are a good thing? I don’t see too many hands in the air. Most people usually view mistakes and failures as negative. I would challenge you to look at failures and mistakes positively.

We are often fearful of admitting our mistakes or making them to start with, because most feel it would make them look vulnerable, weak, stupid or a bad business decision maker. Making mistakes should be seen as something positive, because it shows that you have tried something new, different or difficult and didn’t quite get it right on your first attempt. Many successful people, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Henry Ford all made mistakes and had failures along their path to success. It took Henry Ford three times to get it right. He went bankrupt in his attempt to build a car company, then was fired from his second endeavor and finally made it on his third try. All of these very successful people could have simply given up after making mistakes or based upon their past failures, but they didn’t. They learned from their mistakes and failures, changed direction and blazed their own path to success.

I believe that most successful people look at mistakes and failures much differently than the average person. Most successful people don’t look at mistakes and failures as negative. They look at them as a learning experience and take what they learned, make the appropriate changes and try again. To be successful, we need to change our attitude and how we view mistakes. Mistakes and failures should not be something we are ashamed of. We should encourage people to discuss and admit their mistakes in an effort to learn from them.

Failures are generally valuable lessons learned by people that ensure they never make the same mistake again. Obviously, it’s not acceptable to make the same mistake twice, as all successful people are not afraid of making mistakes but they don’t make the same mistake twice. As an example, Thomas Edison’s attitude toward mistakes during his quest to develop the light bulb: “I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. It is exactly this attitude and his ability to learn from mistakes that enabled him to eventually succeed. Edison also said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

What is Success?The definition of success is:1. The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.2. The attainment of popularity or profit.

Is success understood as owning a large home or nice car? Are you successful if you make a lot of money or are the CEO of a successful email marketing company? Success can be interpreted by many different people, many different ways. You could be a great parent to your children, by learning from your mistakes, which makes you a success. You can have lots of money in the bank, be a mentor, help the less fortunate, or graduate from college. Being a success is what you understand the word success to mean and being successful in your own mind.

Without mistakes there would be no progress or success. Be comfortable in your mistakes and your failures in your pursuit of success. Don’t be ashamed of making mistakes, but be sure you learn from them and you don’t repeat them. And, of course, never give up on chasing your dream; no matter how many times failure gets in your way.

I feel that success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

Are you a Marketing Moron? What is a Marketing Moron?

Let’s dumb it down and look at the word “moron” first. I assume after we do that, most can determine what a marketing moron is.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia;

Moron is a controversial term once used in psychology to denote a category of mental retardation. The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community.

Origin and uses:

“Moron” was coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard from the Greek word moros, which meant “dull” (as opposed to “sharp”), and used to describe a person with a mental age located between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale. It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51-70, being superior in one degree to “imbecile” (IQ of 26-50) and superior in two degrees to “idiot” (IQ of 0-25). The word moron, along with others including “retarded”, “idiotic”, “imbecilic”, “stupid”, and “feeble-minded”, was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, but it is now deprecated by psychologists.

I have been in the Internet Marketing industry for more than 12 years. I have worked with some great people who know their stuff BUT the bulk of the people I see in this industry are morons. Now you might say to yourself, “how can he call such a large group of people morons?” Well, it’s easy. At our morning sales meetings, I usually discuss where we are with open IO’s from affiliate networks and a large portion of the time the answer is always the same, we are waiting to hear back. Communications is a huge part of any business and communicating with your clients and vendors is probably the most important factor in keeping good working relationships intact. Below is a list of common sense items in working with clients and vendors that most people in the affiliate world, at least 75%-80%, don’t do on a constant or continual basis. Are you one of those morons, I mean people?

Do you:

1. Return phone calls the same day
2. Respond to emails in a timely manner
3. Follow up
4. Deal with issues and concerns timely
5. Know your business and what you are selling

These are just a few things in a long list of common sense items when dealing with customers or vendors in any line of business. I guess my biggest concern about marketing morons is mainly pointed at affiliate networks. I am curious if most affiliate networks hire morons to fill seats versus hiring qualified people to deal with their customers and vendors. The biggest bitch from salespeople in my office is; “I sent an IO last week, sent 3 emails to follow up and left 2 voicemail messages and have heard nothing back.” My question is then, “Why did you send them an IO?” and the response is, “Because they asked me to during the numerous phone calls we had after going through all of the details and working out the terms of the deal.”

You may think my article is a little harsh or over the top by including such a large group of people in my definition of marketing morons. You should think to yourself, does this happen to me? Does it take me 3 emails and 2 voicemails to not get a response from an affiliate manager OR am I the affiliate manager who is not responding, am I the marketing moron?

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