Whenever we sit down with a client to plan a customer-contact campaign like an email newsletter to the client's database our campaigns are based around contact at three-monthly intervals. That frequency isn't chosen at random: 90 days is the magic number, and this is something backed up by decades of marketing research across a range of industries.
Read MoreThe recovery might be well and truly underway, but new figures from credit agency Dun & Bradstreet have highlighted the need for companies to continue to closely watch cashflow.
D&B's latest analysis of payment terms shows it now takes an average of 53.2 days for a business to get its invoices paid, up from 52.1 days this time last year.
As usual, it's smaller companies getting hit hardest.
Read MoreOver recent months we have worked on a number of projects with a fixture of Adelaide's home-improvement industry, Homeplus Improvements. We have been able to assist Homeplus Improvements with a number of behind-the-scenes technical details - the sorts of things we touched on in our post "Know your domain details" - in order to launch a new website to support Homeplus Improvements's salespeople and sales activities.
Has it worked?
I have long retained one leftover from my time living in Sydney: membership in the NRMA. When my household acquired another vehicle recently, I contacted the NRMA -- hey, I'm a customer! -- to make sure that the vehicle was added to my account so that I would still receive roadside assistance if I ever found myself in a tight spot. The operator I spoke to informed me that I would need a new membership specific to that vehicle, effectively doubling my payments. When I queried this policy and pointed out that a membership in South Australia's RAA would cover me regardless of which vehicle I was in, the operator suggested that maybe I should just cancel my NRMA membership seeing as I lived in South Australia anyway.
I was gobsmacked.
"Let me get this straight. I've been with you for over ten years, a regular paying customer, and you're saying... maybe I should just swap to another provider?"
The operator replied with some indifference that I might as well. I replied that if the NRMA didn't care if I remained a customer or not, I didn't care to.
Here are some things I might also have pointed out if I thought that the operator cared:
But I didn't. So I didn't.
Suffice to say that I am now an RAA member :)
If anyone from the NRMA is happens to read this, you need to talk to your customer service representatives... they're not helping your organisation!
Kelly Wright
Since last October (when we asked rhetorically "Social Networking – what’s it all about?") we've fielded a lot of enquiries about Internet social networking and how exactly such services can help small businesses and their operators. We've found some great resources at UK site Marketing Donut for getting started using online social networking to help you as individuals, to drive sales, and to form stronger relationships with your customers.
LinkedIn is a free business-focused networking platform that seeks to replicate the ‘real-life’ process of word-of-mouth introductions between trusted contacts. It has a global reach, with 8.5 million members, and straddles a great many industries and sectors.
Facebook is a free networking website which enables friends to keep in touch with each other by acting as a hub for a range of online social activities. ‘Friends’ - ie people who opt into each other’s networks — can post short ‘status updates’ about what they are doing or feeling, share photos and videos, recommend other websites, leave messages on message boards, have ‘real time’ online conversations, and much more besides.
Twitter is a free online ‘micro-blogging’platform that enables you to send punchy messages (‘tweets’) to other Twitter users. Messages are limited to just 140 characters and can be read by anybody else on Twitter, even if they are initially directed at members of your personal network (your ‘followers’).
So what are you waiting for? Jump in!
--Simon
Use of Internet Social Networking - sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others - in Australia is exploding. Online Social Networks are changing how people spend their leisure time, and it's changing the way people work as well. Want to know more?
Read MoreI was having one of those "over coffee" meetings yesterday in a small cafe. We'd never been there before but the decor was inviting. After the preliminaries of who was having what had all been taken care of, and I had indicated to the waitress behind the counter that I was paying, I stepped forward with credit card in hand. I vaguely recall hearing the cafe's landline phone ringing off to one side, but I didn't pay attention because, well, I was in the middle of paying for my group's tea, coffee, and snacks. The waitress serving me evidently did pay attention, because she picked up the phone and answered it.
Read MoreWhen my partner first moved to Adelaide, our house very quickly filled up with bottles of lovely wine from various wineries around the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa Valley. It’s not that we are obsessive wine collectors; it’s just that, being new to South Australia, he had wanted to see the sights, so we visited a number of the wineries for which the state is rightfully famous. The thing was, if he had done a tasting and sampled some wines, wherever we were, he was utterly incapable of walking out of the cellar door without buying something. He just couldn’t do it.
Read MoreBased just south of Adelaide in McLaren Vale, Chilli Chocolate Marketing is a boutique marketing agency with a particular focus on email marketing, customer retention, and relationships.
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