Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression . . .
our job is to make you look good.

This has been a very busy year at KH Graphics. I have had the pleasure of working with many people in a variety of industries and businesses along with several different artistic designers, copywriters and programmers. Some of the new sites we have developed can be seen on our sample website page. Some new sites are proprietary and not listed.

I love the diversity of this business!

I hope you enjoy this ezine and find the tips at the end useful.

Have you bought a new car lately? My wife drives a 2000 Subaru Outback with less than 50,000 miles. We recently received a letter from Subaru telling us they have a demand for 2000s and are offering a great deal on a 2004. The sales person at the local dealership told me the offer ended the day I walked in so I had to buy that day. (Right!) This person then asked if I was interested in a new car. (No, I just want to waste my time and hers.) I told her if the deal were good I would certainly be interested. I was never made an offer while at the dealership. After I left with a brochure on the new 2005, there was never a follow-up call. I have to ask, do they really want my business?

In this book, "The Pawnshop Chronicles - Street Wisdom for the Business World," Jack Rossin relates some of the best marketing and sales stories from his youth that are relevant today in business. The book is full of great stories. Each chapter is summarized with the lessons learned that you can apply to your business today. Perhaps the manager of the dealership mentioned above should read the book.

Let me quote from Jack's book.

"Even if your business isn't retail, you still have a store window: it's located where the passing customer first notices you. Make sure that window is dressed properly at all times. - It's part of the process of building customers for life."

Email is your store window.

Printer friendly version of this article

Email Is Your Best Marketing Tool

In today's world email has become our most important form of communication. As a pure marketing tool it is used to communicate e-newsletters, special notices and specific content. As a sales tool, the way you send and answer email can make a difference between closing the sale or losing a potential customer.

I recently changed my Internet Service Provider and moved most of my clients to a company called Modwest. Why? I stumbled onto this company almost two years ago while I was in the process of looking for a new provider. At that time I had a generic email question I sent to prospective new providers. Some never answered me. Some took 2-3 days to return an answer. Modwest called me with the answer within 30 minutes. To this day, every time I send a support question by email I receive an answer back within an average of 15 minutes. One of their tech support people even worked on a problem from home over a weekend and was emailing me from his house.

That's service!

In my business it is necessary to deal with programmers. Aside from one local fellow who writes custom programs for me, I buy back-end programs over the Internet. There are many companies selling these programs. The programmer I always go to first for "off the shelf" programs is Will Bontranger. Will is another person who answers email questions within several hours, or at least no longer than a day later, depending on where he is at the time*. Will has been great helping solve problems and has even gone into a site and looked at problems on the server that were over my head. I am not a programmer. In one instance a couple of years ago, I had bought a survey program from Will and the client wanted a feature that was not included. Will liked the feature so much he re-wrote the program at no charge and adopted it in his "off the shelf" program.

That's service!

How well does your email serve as a marketing tool? Whether you are sending a new email or answering a request or replying to a thread, follow these 9 simple rules.

TOP OF PAGE

1. Use a signature that has meaningful contact information. If you have a website, be sure it is included in the signature. You can include one or two lines that either identify you with a professional organization or promote an ezine or a book. Don't make your signature a mini-brochure.
2. Use relevant subject lines. If someone answers you from an email with an old subject, change the subject before you reply. There are times I have deleted an email because the subject was old and irrelevant. The person sending simply found an old email and hit reply without changing the subject to the new one.
3. Keep the thread. Email programs allow you to either keep or discard the original message when replying. Often, someone may take several days to reply to an email and if my original email is not in the reply and it reads something like, "OK, go ahead and do it." I ask myself, "Do what?" Then I need to go to my inbox and resurrect the email I sent that this reply is relevant to.
4. Stay basic. Fancy fonts and strange colors are annoying. Using a font you think is cute may be hard to read. If the receiving computer does not have your cute font installed the email may be totally unreadable. Verdana was developed for reading on a monitor. Use it. Any computer with anything from Microsoft has Verdana. The second choice is Arial. Start all new messages in black. Fonts and colors are actually HTML. Not everybody has HTML turned on. If your fancy email is received by a plain text email reader all your efforts are wasted anyway.
5. Use the BCC box. If you are sending email to many people, send it to yourself and put all the other names in the BCC box, not the CC box. When I first started to send this ezine from my own computer I made that mistake and had several people tell me to take them off the list as they did not want their email address spread around and used for spam.
6. Address the subject. People do not like to read long emails that are a brain dump. Re-read what you write and delete anything that is not relevant or redundant. Think of the email as a "need-to-know" document.
7. Reply. I always reply to an email as soon as I receive it or as soon as I see it. If the question takes some thought and I am in the middle of something else, I always reply and tell the sender I will get back to them within a certain time frame. I hate when I send an email and do not hear back for several weeks.

   If a reply takes one line or even one word, don't feel you need to expound. Whenever I am asked to update anything on a client's website I always hit the reply button and at the top enter, "all set." This way they know the task has been completed.

8. Follow-up. The best part of email is that you can follow-up on a request. Doing this by phone, the person can screen out your call with caller ID. If someone does not want to correspond with you any more, at least you are being pro-active. Most people are likely to at least glance at the email before hitting the delete key.

   Once I have an ongoing discussion that seems to end, I usually send three follow-up emails spread out over a period of time. If these do not attract a reply then I feel the potential project is dead.

9. Be last. OK, here's the best marketing tip when using email. When you are in a discussion with a client or prospect, try to be the last one to answer and bring the discussion to a close. Devise a short answer that is difficult to reply to. This makes you more memorable and gives you control over the discussion. In other words, apply good sales techniques to your email. The best last reply can be a simple "Thank you."

Remember the quote from Jack Rossin's book above? Here's the end of it:

"(the window) needs to pull the potential customer from window-shopping into real shopping."

Whether you realize it or not, your personality is reflected in your email and your email habits.

*Note: Will now travels the country with his wife in a motor home with a very expensive satellite connection so he can stay connected to his client base. He publishes a wonderful weekly ezine for website developers. WillMaster Possibilities.

TOP OF PAGE

Email Tips

• Tip #1 - Spam Control

  Spam has become a way of life, at least until the industry adopts a universal email authentication scheme which becomes fully deployed and accepted by all providers. In the meantime we live with spam.
  (See the Ant-Spam Update below.)

  Modwest (remember them from my not above?) uses a third party spam control called SpamCop. I have all my domain email forwarded to my Comcast account. Comcast uses Brightmail, one of the best spam filters. So I get double filtering. Many service providers today use some sort of filtering method so check with your provider. Most just filter by default with the option of taking it off.

  I tell people who get a lot of spam to do the following: add a folder to your email called A-Inbox. The reason for the "A" is that most email programs have default folders you cannot change or move, like Inbox, Sent, Delete. The "A-Inbox will be next in line. Then when you look at 100 or so emails, move what you really want into the A-Inbox and simply delete the rest. That way you can delete most of the junk without ever having to look at it.

• Tip #2 - Sort your email

  Start a "To Do" folder. I actually have it named A-ToDo for the same reason above. This is where I move all the emails where people have asked me to do something or those emails that need constant monitoring for follow-up. I even create special folders under the A- ToDo for clients that are constantly active. This way I tend to lose or misplace very little important email.

TOP OF PAGE

Anti-Spam Update

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) has been called the most promising new weapon in the fight against spam e-mail may be message authentication, which can hold spammers' feet to the fire and slow the growth of spam to corporate e-mail boxes. [eWEEK]

Various ISPs already require senders to implement SPF so emails from their server are accepted. Some, like AOL, use the SPF technology to fight email address forgery and make it easier to identify spams, worms, and viruses.

The Sender ID Framework was designed by Microsoft as a way of confirming that received emails originate from their displayed domain. SPF1 compliance through email authentication, protects the reputation and privacy of legitimate email users against online fraud such as "spoofing" and "phishing." Various ISPs already require senders to implement Sender ID so emails from their server are accepted.

As of this writing, AOL has joined a growing list of major email providers that have said they will not adopt the Microsoft technology. You can read the story on ZDNet.

Featured Website

As New England's finest graphic arts finishers, Matheson Higgins Congress Press, Inc. needed a website to showcase their work and portray the personality of the company. This site was a collaboration with Margie Gallo Dana who wrote all the content.

TOP OF PAGE

My half or full day workshop,
"Turn Your Web Site Into Marketing Gold"
is available for your organization. Please contact me to schedule this workshop.

KH Graphics can develop a custom e-newsletter layout for your company. We design custom
e-newsletter layouts you can use, we publish your text in a custom or template layout, we publish
e-newsletters and add them to an archive on your web site. Contact us to see how we can help you publish your company e-newsletter.

Copyright © 2004 KH Graphics. All rights reserved. This publication may be freely redistributed if each article copied in its ENTIRETY. Our contact information, including email address, telephone number, and web address, must be included. Portions of this newsletter may be reprinted or published on the Internet with permission.