Now I’m looking at Janine Popick’s list of ways to win back old customers via email.
Step #1: Make sure the account you’re sending to is a live one. It helps.
Popick is the founder and CEO of VerticalResponse. She knows her business. Early on she says “I'm sure you are great at what you do, but I bet at some point you lost customers to a competitor or they just vanished without so much as a ‘goodbye’."
You may not think email is an effective way to win them back. Popick begs to differ: “We've seen businesses who have won back as much as two percent of their clients given the proper segmentation, messaging, and great offers.”
Businesses can get so focused on getting new customers, she says, that they forget about keeping the good ones around and getting them to be more active.
Read more here.
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Hey, contact centers, how’s the budgeting for the 2012 budget season coming along? All those questions -- new locations or increasing offshore or home-based agents? Marketing new products, developing new service offerings or entering new industries?
These are some of the issues identified in a recent LiveVox blog post identified as being on the minds of contact center officials these days. Can IT analyze customer data to identify opportunities and drive revenue? How can you differentiate yourself from the pack?
Not too long ago, as LiveVox officials say, and veterans will remember these days, IT groups were locked in an expensive, endless cycle of “replacing end-of-life hardware with newer, more expensive hardware because it was the only option to keep the contact center churning.”
Read more here.
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If you’re a B2B marketer doing email marketing, you might be interested in a recent Responsys study noted on the Komarketing Associates site finding that over 50 percent of companies send emails to essentially dead accounts.
“Dead,” defined as “inactive for more than three years.” Otherwise defined as “complete waste of time and money.”
The study is fairly comprehensive in scope, looking at how 100 major retailers “managed inactive subscribers to help companies define, re-engage and re-permission inactive subscribers, eliminate the remainder and achieve better overall return on email marketing tactics,” according to the company's site.
The study was simplicity itself. As Komarketing officials describe it, the researchers merely “subscribed to the email programs of more than 100 major retailers using fictional personas, initially opening all emails but then stopping for a 40-month period.”
Read more here.
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So guess what else happened November 14? That’s right -- the removal of the UK Financial Services Authority's exemptions for mobile phones in communications.
Are financial services firms sufficiently prepared for their brave new world? Industry observer James Rundle recently posted some interesting thoughts on that.
The regulation says firms involved in investment advice must monitor and record all mobile phone conversations from their employees directly related to the practice. As Rundle says, you’d think that with a year to get ready, companies would have been ready to hit the ground running.
You’d have thought wrong.
"If anything, I think some companies have underestimated the new nature of the technology. They've been lulled into a false sense of security with other recording solutions on a fixed-line basis," Rundle quotes Paul Metcalfe, head of voice trading at Orange Business Services– Trading Solutions, as saying.
Read more here.
