Mobilize Mail Opinion

Listening to the feedback you get from your customers is key to winning, and retaining business.

The frequency of feedback from your customers on your services and what what you choose to do with the information can make or break your business. The key to keeping your customers close is to seek their input by asking for feedback on your services and products regularly.

Of course asking for feedback is only part of the process. Your customers will want know what you have done with the information you got from them so how you respond is also a vital part of your customer service.

How can you get regular feedback from your Customers?

Create and Deliver a Survey via Email

1. Create a Survey - click here to learn how to create a Survey using your Mobilize Mail account
2. Set up an Email Auto Message to Deliver Your Survey – and in that message include a link to your Survey. The message can be pre set for delivery. We call this process ‘set and forget’ email marketing.
3. Set Up a ‘Thank You’ Auto Message – including the incentive or bonus points earned for providing the feedback.

For more information on our Survey and Auto Message Features – contact us

The key to getting regular feedback is to ‘make it easy’ for your customers to respond to you. Limit your survey to under 10 questions and ensure your survey includes at least one question with a ‘free text’ box so your customers can say what they want to say openly over simply responding to your multi choice answers.

Finally ensure you have included an incentive so your customers happily complete your Survey requests. As Sir Francis Bacon uttered in 1597 “Knowledge Is Power” – ultimately what you do with the knowledge from your customers will determine your ability to win and retain business.

A recent report on what the major spam filter’s flag as possible spam states that by a long shot any emails that have a higher ratio of images to text will be flagged as spam.

Also in the report there are some interesting findings of other text or phases that can greatly penalized your email content by the spam filters:

1. The phrase “extra inches” will get you a score of 3.1 spam points by SpamAssassin. Which sends your email very close to the 5 points needed to mark your email as spam!
2. Using “Dear” as your initial greeting for example “Dear Bob”. Using “Dear” will get your email awarded 2.7 spam points. That’s halfway to the “your email is spam”. Instead use something like “Hello” or “Howdy”.
3. Be careful on your unsubscribe message as well. Having “Stop further distribution” as your unsubscribe message will get you 3.1 spam points! For Mobilize Mail clients you do not have to worry as the unsubscribe message we automatically add to the footer of your emails is the least likely to get spam points.
4. “You registered with a partner” – yesh! This smells of unwanted and unsolicited email. Chances are if you are adding this statement within your message you are not using a permission based mailing list.

As you can see you may not be a spammer but if your message contains phases and text that spammers use there is a very good chance your emails will be marked as spam.

Keep your message clean from spammy phases and text for example:

Tips for your email content:

1. Refrain from adding too many images to your email
2. Spam-like words – Free, guarantee, credit card, no money down, financially independent or free etc…
3. Watch your subject heading
4. Red text – Get the red out. Red is a loud color and can be hard to read. It is also a spam tactic that may trip an email filter.
5. All capital letters
6. Excessive punctuation
7. Excessive use of “click here” especially in all capital letters
8. Excessive use of $$, and other symbols
9. Misleading (or missing) subject line

Read our article on 10 ways to improve your email marketing

A panel of email marketing professionals were interviewed recently who work closely with SMEs. A key question was asked: why should an SME put scarce resources into email when times are tough? Here’s some answers that emerged…

Easy low-cost entry

Email marketing is something businesses have done without breaking the bank, starting off with a simple approach and ‘testing the waters’ before committing more resources to it. The cost of sending email through an email marketing service, like Mobilizemail, is very low these days.

Great ROI – if it’s done right…

It’s been well established that email marketing – done appropriately – brings in the money. Its ROI performance gets a lot of good PR, even though it may decrease in times of recession, it has still ‘blown all other direct response methods out of the water’. But… poor results have been experienced by businesses who don’t know how best to use email marketing to further their business success. ROI doesn’t even count the value of email as a long-term relationship builder…

Valuable potential business grown from existing customers

Many small businesses rely on the personal touch and great customer service to build relationships and sustain business… commonly a differentiator over bigger companies. Regular contact with customers and clients through email newsletters and campaigns has effectively enabled this.

It has been well established that the cost of finding new customers is up to five times higher than up-selling or cross-selling to existing customers. Email marketing has been found to be a solid business marketing tactic for this as it is extremely low-cost to market to contacts already in a business database. Email marketing trends emerging in 2009 show a focus on improving relationships with current customers to build sales.

Quickly measurable results enable adjustment for improvement

There’s an old saying in marketing – “I know I wasted half my advertising budget, I just don’t know which half.” With the measurability of email marketing, businesses don’t have to live with this hit-and-miss syndrome any more. Depressed economies have encouraged more careful use of scarce dollars so businesses can zero-in on why their advertising worked (or didn’t) faster. As businesses learn more about their audience, they can adjust their marketing pitch accordingly to increase sales.

Getting ahead in recession

Recession has been shown to be a great opportunity for smart businesses who know how to capitalise on the situation to do really well and out-do those who are retreating…