July 2009

So far we’ve been seeing good traction with our email marketing program for Investment Advisors. Slowly but surely more Research Capital IAs are seeing the value in communicating with their clients via email on a regular basis. This is great to see.

The focus of my email today is to give you a tip on how to increase the returns you get from using email to communicate with your prospects and clients.

Today’s big tip is: Break up your list!

What do I mean when I say break up your list? Breaking up your list is what marketers refer to as segmenting. Segmenting your list is simply the act of dividing up your list into groups of people who share similar characteristics so you can communicate with these groups in a more relevant way.

Why bother? Well, for one, the more personal and relevant your emails are to your clients and prospects the stronger the relationship you are going to form with them. Another benefit is that when you send people messages that are highly targeted and relevant to them, they are more likely to respond and more likely to stick around and stay on your list.

The first two lists I suggest you create are:

1. clients
2. prospective clients

The thing I recommend you look at doing is breaking down your client list into 2-3 groups as follows:

1. Best clients
2. Good clients that you could do more business with
3. Inactive or former clients

These are just suggestions. You may decide to look at this another way and create a list of Retirees for example or clients who hold XYZ stock. These would also be meaningful segments to create.

So if you would like to build stronger relationships with your list and do more business as a result, break up your list!

If that makes sense and you want to learn more, get in touch and we can discuss how to go about putting this into action.

Until next time.

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Looking to learn more about Twitter’s business strategy? For an in depth look at what this social media giant in the making has in store, take a look at this post at TechCrunch in which loads of “secret” documents are covered in detail including strategy outlines, to do lists and strategic responses to Google and facebook are all laid bare.

A must read for anyone interested in what makes social networking services like Twitter tick.

Full article here.

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Recently, while giving a presentation on social media marketing to a local Vancouver company the question was asked about big brands using social media marketing and what results they have been seeing. This was a smack my forhead with my palm type moment where I was thinking “Of course a case study would have been a good idea to bring.

In response to that moment I did a quick search on Google and came up with a few case studies that will help those of you interested in learning about what the big boys are doing in regards to Twitter, Facebook and social media in general.

I particularly like Dell’s story because they got off to a rocky start with their foray into blogging and were able to recover and then create some big wins with their Idea Storm site (run on the Salesforce.com Ideas platform which I recommend checking out). If you’ve read “What Would Google Do?” then you know what I’m talking about.

Here are the Case Studies:

• Dell and Social Media by Brand Autopsy
• Coke Gets in Sync with Social Media & What Coke knows about Social Media That You Don’t
• Why Ford is Winning on the Social Web

Comments welcome as always and don’t forget to Tweet This!

UPDATE: I posted presentation on July 17th from Blog World that covers three more social media marketing case studies. Enjoy!

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Google announced this morning that they will be launching an operating system named Chrome that could potentially challenge Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market.

Chrome may sound familiar to you as it’s the same name Google chose for its fast, easy to use web browser which I happen to be a big fan of.

This statement from Google’s blog hit a chord with me, no doubt because it’s based on customer feedback that Google has collected:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

Amen. All hail Chrome!

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