As more channels of communication become available to us, it is easy to get lost in the technology and forget the basics when it comes to customer communications. We need to communicate with our customers to keep them up to date with products and services, price changes, provisioning updates and of course billing. We also want to make it easy for them to contact us when they want to buy something. Check out these top tips to help you hone your communications and get back to basics.
Audience
Who are you talking to?
Review your mailing lists, magazine readerships and social media followers regularly. Are these the people you want to talk to? If not build the right list. It takes time but is worth doing to make sure you have good white lists and relevant followers. Is it worth sending customer updates via social media if your LinkedIn contacts are made up of marketing agencies, recruitment agencies and people wanting to sell to you?
Content
What do you want to say?
Keep it brief. Make the subject header stand out from other emails in the box and I don’t mean add importance or a read receipt request. Use relevant hash tags and think about your formatting. Answer any questions posed, give further information and a reason to contact you. Use web links to bring visitors into your web site and help them navigate through to your call to action. Titles, bullet points and images all work well to help format content.
Timing
Is everything.
You could send out a mailer on a bank holiday and it could get lost. Sending out emails first thing or close of day are easily deleted as people are busy with core tasks. The only way to work out what time is right for your audience is to test it. Plan your mails when your stats show you get the best open rates. With social media it is slightly different. Many of us won’t check social accounts until after work so planning later posts may work better.
Reporting
Is the most important thing.
Often you will send a campaign or come up with a theme for content, you check your responses and if you don’t get inundated you can feel it wasn’t working and give up. Having a plan for activity over a reasonable period of time, say six months may be a better time frame to assess how successful a campaign was. I am not saying repeat failed campaigns over an over but I am saying give people a chance to see it. At Jola we have found prospects have received five different touches from us before responding and this can take time.
What you report on is important. If you don’t set objectives or targets before you start a campaign you can’t really measure if a campaign was successful or not. Setting goals such as leads per £x spent and measuring conversations from leads to orders, helps to establish success. Also measures such as open rates, click throughs, shares and likes can all be useful. But refer back to point 1, if you get 50 likes or shares by an audience you don’t sell to, how has that helped you?
Jola is a channel supplier of internet and telephony services to UK SMEs via a channel of IT and Telecoms companies. Our ethos is about ‘partnering with’ companies and that is why we offer full sales and marketing support. To find out more…
