One of the things I’ve always tried to focus on when putting together marketing materials for Topaz is not wasting anyone’s time. We send one e-mail a week, always on the same day (Tuesday) to our database. My goal is always to make it something relevant, something that could be potentially useful to the receiver and something I believe in. Being in a sales and marketing role sometimes you’re perceived as someone who will spew any information and hope someone grabs a hold of it and you can create a sale out of it.
One of the best ways I’ve learned about how useless “sales pieces” can come off is by receiving many of them in my own e-mail in-box and telephone voice mail. Every day I receive at least one sales e-mail or call from a representative at a company asking me to buy something or tell me more about it. These are a few of the things I notice from these calls and e-mails and a few mistakes I try not to make when marketing to our clients.
•Don’t e-mail or call me if I’m not part of the cliental that would ever do business with you. You have to at least do a little research to have a target audience. Don’t call me and ask me to buy a pool float when I audit corporate travel. I never fully blind e-mail or call anyone. I only contact those who are in our database from doing business with us, those who have contacted us or those who have a large corporate travel volume and who I think will genuinely benefit from our services. I also never call anyone before I’ve researched what they do and their previous business history with us. If you are going to blind call me, know something about me that is relevent to the call. I’m telling you, this extra quick research can make all the difference.
•Please make the subject line and at least the first couple sentences of your e-mail or phone call interesting. “Dir sir/madam,” “To whom this may concern” “Are you looking for any of the following….” DELETE. Use my name, ask me a relevant question specific to me, have a top 10 list….just something that at least makes me read the first paragraph of what you have to say! I try to focus on engaging our clients from the moment they see the subject line of the e-mail. There are many people that delete e-mails without opening them, so at least give yourself a chance by making the subject line worth opening.
•Don’t always ask me or tell me something, GIVE me something. I love getting free content, white papers, research, survey answers…..anything that I can use and learn from is clutch. I don’t have free content to send in every e-mail, but I at least send something of high value to my clients for free every couple of weeks. The weeks in between I try to at least ask them important questions, and communicate items of interest to them that they may not have known before.
•Let me unsubscribe! Don’t make me e-mail you and ask you to stop e-mailing me. Don’t waste your time e-mailing people every week that just delete your e-mails. Have an unsubscribe button so those not interested can do so in a quick and easy manner!
•Always have a call to action and multiple ways to reach you! If someone is interested in what you have to say they want to know what to do next. I always try to direct our clients of what to do next if they like what they see. I also list every possible way to reach us including e-mail, phone number, website, and all of our social media sites. The easier you make it for people to reach you, the quicker they will.
•Believability: If I think you believe in something and are sincere about it, I’m much more likely to believe in it also! It’s the language you use, the way you write, the way you format your e-mail…it all affects believability. Focus on this, even if it takes a little extra time!
I always want my clients to know that I am sending them something because I believe they may be truly interested in it, I’ve retrieved their contact information from a reliable source and think they are a good target for what I am sending. I want to grab their attention from the moment they see it and hope to creatively ask them the right questions. I genuinely enjoy giving them free content they can use because that is how you build relationships. Not by selling, but by gaining trust from those in your target market that what you do is valuable, the service you provide is superior, and that you genuinely believe your product or service can help them. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. If they don’t want to read our content, I will not be offended if they unsubscribe. It saves us both time and money! I actually appreciate it. The one thing I would add to an unsubscribe button is a “reason box” which asks why the client unsubscribed. I’m all for learning from your own clients! Listening to the negative to create positive change! I want all of our clients to find contacting us extremely simple. I want them to know I will always pick up a phone, return a voicemail, respond to an e-mail, respond to a question on Facebook or our website…whatever it is; I always try to respond as promptly and as informatively as possible. I believe in what Topaz does. I believe what we do genuinely helps our clients and is something that no one else can do as well as us. I hope that comes across in every piece of “marketing material” I send out. In the end, most importantly, I want to build relationships with our clients, not just sell. I think building those relationships eventually creates sales, as opposed to trying to sell someone and then have a surface level relationship to complete the transaction. I look forward to meeting new people, working with them, gaining their trust, and allowing them to see what I see in Topaz.
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