Beginning next Monday (which is Labor Day), I’ll be posting a month-long series of action items. Specific how-to-do-its that can help you get the word out about your products and create excitement among your new and existing customers.

Ready to ramp up?

Subscribe to my RSS feed by adding your email address in the box in the right sidebar. New posts will be emailed to you as they go live, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Your email address will never be sold, shared, rented, traded, given away, or used to send you anything other than new post notifications.

No spam, no sales letters. I promise.

What are the three mistakes they made? And are you guilty of any of them?

1. Sending too many emails

Once you have built a newsletter or mailing list, it’s really easy to bang out a new email every day or two. Why not blanket all those customers with information on what you have to sell, or remind them two or three (or more) times about an upcoming sale or a product you have on special?

Unless each email is carefully written, compelling, and useful, customers will quickly tire of seeing your name in their inboxes. First they will quit opening your emails. Then they will start to delete them unread, or set a filter to drop them into a junk folder automatically. In the worst case, they’ll start pushing the SPAM button when they see yet another “Come to my big sale on Saturday!!!!” from you. And too many SPAM markings, as you know, will cause problems with your email service provider.

Don’t annoy your customers. Send no more than once per week. Make sure that each email is informative and individually written (no copy and paste from last week’s broadcast). Most of all, make sure that each email provides some incentive for your customer to open and read it — information on new products, perhaps a free project they can create or a coupon good for a limited time. Make your newsletters something they look forward to instead of rolling eyes and hitting “delete.”

2. Sending the wrong emails

Late last year I joined a particular professional organization which offered a private membership site with information not available to the public. There were other benefits, such as monthly teleclasses and a print magazine. Joining this organization automatically put me on the “send regular updates” mailing list, and they did a good job of it — informative, timely emails, not too frequent, well-written and interesting.

Then, in midsummer…. The Mistake.

Perhaps this group purchased a list from somewhere else, or perhaps they compiled a list of prominent names interested in their particular topic. They made the unforgivable mistake of not checking this new list against their current subscriber list.

I began getting frequent solicitations to join the same organization of which I was already a member. Each succeeding email offered a better deal for joining, until the final one that offered a year’s membership at approximately half of what I had paid.

Up until that point, I had been reading the solicitations with a mixed sense of annoyance and amusement — how long will this mistake continue? When are they going to cross-check their lists?

With that final email, though, the amusement vanished. I unsubscribed to the regular membership list, I deleted the membership bookmark from my favorites, and I vowed never to darken their doors again. Mine was only one response to their marketing snafu — how many others did as I did and refused to consider renewing?

Cross-check your mailing lists before you start to solicit new customers, especially if you are going to offer deep secret discounts that will make your current customers feel as though they’ve been taken advantage of.

3. Take care in setting up surveys

In another mailing list, which sends informative and interesting technological news updates biweekly, I received a request to fill out a survey to help them decide audience interest and future editorial direction. I was willing to do that, so I clicked through and started the survey.

First, make sure you know who you are trying to reach. If you are a local business with a physical location such as a restaurant, you probably want to reach customers who live within a certain area. If your business is less location-dependent — for instance, if you sell goods by mail order or offer services online — then your target should be defined by those who could benefit from your products or services and not so much where they live.

But how do you let them know where to find you, especially when you have little or no advertising budget?

You do have a blog, right?

If not, go now and set one up. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I’ll wait. Two free, easy places to get started are Blogger and WordPress.com . I’d suggest starting with WordPress if you can, for reasons which will become obvious later.

Fill in your short bio on the About page. If you have a website, link to your site. If you have a physical store, put your address, phone number, and hours of operation there. If you only sell online, at least post your city, state/province and country. Time zone is nice too. Make it easy for people to find you and know when they are likely to be able to reach someone.

Now you have a blog, but what do you write?

1. Write an interview with someone interesting.

If you own a restaurant, talk to a local farmer who provides some of the raw materials for your dishes. What about the florist who creates table settings for you? A potter who makes one-of-a-kind tableware?

If you are an artist, talk to the owner of a local gallery or independent art supply store. Make it clear that you are interested in their outlook on the local art scene, not on getting your foot in the door for your own advancement. Use your interview to help promote their business and they’ll remember your name for sure.

If you are a service provider, find someone in an affiliated business who is not a direct competitor. If you offer web design services, perhaps you could find someone who specializes in logos and graphic design or copywriting services. Make a pitch to interview and write about each other so that each of you will get a visibility boost.

2. Review a book, a speaker, or a public event related to your business.

As a restaurant owner, you probably won’t want to do undercover critiques of your competitors, but you could go to a food trade show and talk about what you find there. What about food trends? Do you see a number of sushi restaurants opening in your area, and what does that say about the local dining out scene?

Artists can review new tools of the trade or new books about art. Have you tried out a new technique lately? Did it work for you, or not? Why? Is there a special exhibition or event at your art museum that might provide an interesting post?

3. Sponsor a giveaway.

Do this one after your blog has been active for a month or so. The giveaway can be fairly small, such as “Mention this offer when you come into our store and get 10% off any purchase!” A restaurant could offer a free dessert with mention of the blog. A service provider could offer a free half-hour phone consultation, or set up an “Ask the Expert” teleclass for potential clients to phone in with questions on a particular subject. Ask everyone to tell at least one friend about your giveaway.

 
What ideas have worked for you?

Leave a comment telling one thing that has helped to raise your business profile, and you’ll be eligible to win a copy of Little Black Book of Connections: 6.5 Assets for Networking Your Way to Rich Relationships by Jeffrey Gitomer.

To check on the ownership of your domain name, go to Domain Tools and type the domain name into the search box. You will see the registration information of record, as in this example.

You or your business should always be listed at the top as Registrant. It’s perfectly ok if the hosting company is listed under Administrative or Technical Contact — the Registrant is the actual owner and the one who controls what happens to the name. The Billing Contact should be the person or entity that actually pays the domain renewal fees each year. This might be you or it might be your hosting company. Either is fine.

Many hosting companies offer a “free” domain name as part of your hosting package, but there can be a catch.

Now look at this WhoIs information. This is a real domain registration, a domain name that is the name of a real quilt artist. I’ve changed it here to “FamousQuilter.com” for the sake of anonymity.

This artist signed up for web hosting from a large hosting provider which offers a free domain name included with the cost of their inexpensive shared webhosting. After some period of time she became dissatisfied with the hosting account and changed hosts, only to realize that the original hosting company owned her domain name. Her own personal name, and they owned it. Nor would they consider releasing it to her for any amount of money.

She eventually registered “FamousQuilter.net” and set up her new website under that name, but the first hosting company still controls the .com version. Legal recourse is possible but very expensive; the artist must first file a legal trademark for her own name and then, if trademark protection is granted, file a dispute with ICANN concerning the improper use of her trademark. These two actions would cost a minimum of $2,500 and could require several years for resolution.

Note well the annotations I’ve circled in red: “Client Update Prohibited” and “Client Transfer Prohibited.” The artist has no control over her own personal name, and she can’t do anything about it without legal action and much expense.

Not all webhosting companies will hold your domain name hostage.

Many web hosts will offer to register a domain name in your name as a service or as part of a webhosting package. With some hosts, transferring your name to your own account is easy if you later decide to change web hosts; with others it’s a bit more hassle. However, if your name is listed as Registrant, you have final control over the account. And if someone else is managing your domain name(s), you generally don’t need to worry about renewals and other behind-the-scenes minutiae. It’s included in your monthly or annual hosting fees.

Make sure that your webhost offers registration in your own name if you choose to register through them.

How much does a domain name cost, if you register it yourself?

Domain name registrars are permitted to set their own rates by ICANN, the international entity which oversees all domain name registrations worldwide. Here is a sampling of current registration costs for .com domain name from several major companies (all rates are for one year; discounts often available for multi-year registrations):

- GoDaddy $10.69
- DotEarth $25.00
- EnomCentral.com $34.00
- Network Solutions $34.99
- Register.com $35.00

Note that rates for all registrars are increasing on July 1 of 2010, by order of ICANN.

How much is your business name — and your personal name as an artist — worth? Make sure that, whoever registers your domain name, you are listed as the owner/Registrant.

Don’t make a costly mistake in order to save a few dollars at the beginning.

A talented writer and artist created a long, detailed blog postabout creating stamps for decorating fabric. Many people praised it and several asked her to release it in e-book form so they could download and keep a copy. Agreeing that it was a terrific idea, she published it as a Kindle book available from Amazon. She immediately found herself in the midst of a storm of controversy.

Some readers felt that she had no right to charge for the information that she had previously given away for free. One even went so far as to say that she now felt morally justified in “stealing” the material by copying and printing off the blog post. Others howled because they did not own a Kindle and thought they would have to buy a $250 reader device to download the book. Others howled because the Kindle is black-and-white only and the photographs that accompanied the article were in color. It’s also not possible to print from the Kindle, so the reader has no opportunity to create a hard copy for future reference.

Her readers were probably expecting a PDF ebook. Amazon ebooks are very easy to create and publish – just upload an HTML-encoded file (in which format the blog post already existed). Links remain links within the Kindle file. Creating a PDF ebook requires a bit more expertise from the author but would probably be worth it to the readers.

The author’s failure here lay in not educating her audience prior to releasing her product for sale. Kindle software which supports color images is available for PC/Mac, iPad, and iPhone, free from Amazon. No reading device is required. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem you can print from the Kindle software either.)

Until this little whirlwind occurred, I was not aware of the Amazon Kindle option for publishing ebooks. Creating both a Kindle version and a PDF version that could be sold directly seems to me to be a great pair of options for producing and distributing information products. Do both!

What about the free-vs-pay controversy?

Of course the author is entitled to charge for her work. The Amazon ebook sells for $2.99 and her royalty is about $1.00 per copy. Hardly highway robbery.

My suggestion would have been, once there was obvious interest in the information, to create both a PDF and the Kindle e-book, add a post to the blog about how to purchase them, and then take down the original post.

Those who howled about “no right to charge for it” would of course still howl. Most readers, I think, would have been very happy to pay a small amount to have it formatted and ready to print out without having to copy and paste from quirky blog software.

All it takes is a little education.

(Puts on hat of Mrs. Spurlock, fifth-grade English teacher)

Grammar counts!

I followed a link this morning to a blog post that looked interesting, on the subject of making your WordPress installation hacker-proof. The first two sentences read:

Today there is more and more security breaches than ever before. Web browsers seems to fall behind faster than they can spell to themselves and this really makes an online business or venture quite hard work.

Web browsers spell to themselves? Who knew?

The entire article was unreadable because of numerous subject-verb number disagreements. Simple homonym problems such as “boarders” when the author meant “borders.” Not to mention the usual suspects of “it’s/its” and “you’re/your.”

I must be fair. Since there was no contact information on the site, I looked up the domain name WhoIs to find out that the site was registered in Sweden. English is obviously not the writer’s first language. On the other hand, if he is writing for an audience who will read in a language not his own, it seems reasonable to have a fluent speaker review and edit the article. This reads like he ran it through Babelfish.

The writer of this blog post failed in his most important task — he did not communicate his ideas clearly. He was so muddly, in fact, that I have made a note not to follow any links to this particular website in the future. It’s just not worth my time to try to puzzle out what he means.

Spelling counts too!

CBS42.com, which really should know better, recently ran a story about former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and his ongoing battle with the courts over hidden assets.

Attorney for HealthSouth shareholders John Somerville was quoted:

”[The] IRS back in 2003 documented some 300 million dollars worth of property he had and that frankly a lot of it is missing. All the jewelry, 21 carrot diamonds, artwork is missing…”

Although the meaning of the sentence is still clear in this case, the absurdity of the mental image completely stopped this reader’s train of thought.

How many readers are you potentially losing because of unclear writing or poor spelling skills?

Only a little. Those rumors you heard about my not being able to see out the rear view mirror coming home are completely unfounded. I promise.

Because I was there on business and had to maximize the use of my time, I had to develop an efficient way to see everything and then to whittle down to things I was most interested in. I also have a mild sensory integration dysfunction, which means that I get overwhelmed really easily. I needed to create a checklist to keep myself on target.

Work the aisles backwards.

On your first visit to the show, go in through the front door and turn left. Eighty to 85% of all show visitors will turn right without thinking and will head for the booths starting with 100. If you turn left and start with the 3400s, you’ll run into a major crowd in the middle, but for at least the first half of your journey you will be much less crowded.

Go during meal or class times when possible. Or go late in the afternoon.

Most visitors to Festival are there for multiple days. They are eager to get started and will show up at the doors every morning before opening time. When class time rolls around, a number of them leave the show floor. Then it’s lunch, then lectures or afternoon classes, and by afternoon they are exhausted.

If you can plan to get there shortly after classes start, there will be fewer people on the floor. Late in the afternoon is another good time to visit the show floor. By that time, all the students are waiting in line for buses and don’t even want to think of walking another step.

On your first visit, make one very fast run through with the floor map in hand.

Don’t stop to visit, don’t shop — have your pen and your map in hand. As you walk the aisles, circle or mark the booths you want to come back to. Carry a highlighter and highlight the ones you especially don’t want to miss.

Once you get back to your hotel room, go through the list of vendors and see if you spot any names that you want to visit but didn’t mark on your first run through. Mark those as well. At this point, I would prioritize them: 1, 2, 3. I might have a dozen “1s” (don’t miss), a bunch of “2s” (really want to see) and an awful lot of “3s” (if my feet hold out).

Now have an adult beverage of your choice and hit the sack. Tomorrow’s another busy day.

On your second trip through, visit the booths you marked in priority order.

Pick up business cards or brochures to help you remember which ones you have seen. If the exhibitor agrees (and if the crowds permit), you could take a snapshot of the booth as another visual reminder.

Third time through, take your time.

This is when to do your major shopping, stop and talk to the vendors, take notes about what you bought and where you got it. Don’t get home and ask yourself where you bought those gorgeous buttons now that you know you need another four of them to complete your project.

But what about the quilts?

I used exactly the same system for the quilt exhibitions.

• Fast runthrough of the whole exhibit floor;
• Second walk through with map, noting ones to examine more closely;
• Careful examination of marked quilts, taking photos where allowed and notes on maker and techniques.

In fairness, I should note that with the advent of digital cameras and enormous memory cards, you could also go through the quilts once only, taking pictures of every one of them plus the cards with artist’s name and statement. That way you’d have a complete record when you got home. If you are anything like me, you’ll be completely brain-fried by the second day. A week after you get home, go through that 16GB of photos and you will see hundreds of quilts you didn’t even remember were there.

Have fun in Houston! And may Artemis, the Goddess of the Hunt, be with you.

When I asked politely for her to unsubscribe me because I hadn’t signed up for her list, she replied that I had to go to her website to unsubscribe myself, and then accused me first of lying about not signing up for her list and then of trying to use other peoples’ problems to increase my own web design business.

Obviously this person has some serious customer service issues, but let’s deal only with the email debacle.

Was it Spam?

The unfortunately named 2003 CAN-SPAM Act (shouldn’t it be “can’t spam?”), which regulates commercial email sent and received within the US, includes a checklist of acceptable practices for transactional and commercial emails. This one violated almost every single requirement of the law.

1. I had never visited the retailer’s website and did not sign up for the email notification.

2. She was sending these emails through her blog software. As a result, there was no link to unsubscribe within the email itself, nor was there a notice to unsubscribe by reply email or other action.

3. The blog software does not use a “double opt-in” system. You’ve probably experienced a double opt-in — you enter your email address and your name on a website form. Then you get an email that says something like “You’re almost there!” and a link that must be clicked to confirm your subscription.

There was absolutely no notification that I had been added to this list, so I was unaware of it until I received the newsletter email.

4. The law requires that the mailing list owner promptly remove anyone who requests to be removed from the list. This can be accomplished either by an unsubscribe link within the email itself or by manual removal when the request is submitted by reply email. Since I replied to the email with a request to be removed, the responsibility was hers to remove my name and email from her database.

5. The Act permits mail list owners to manually add addresses of persons who have done business with the company within the past 24 months. I have never done business with this company.

6. The Act also requires the sender to include a postal address (P O box is fine) and clear instructions on how to opt out of any further emails from the sender. This email contained neither.

7. The Act also specifically forbids “harvesting” of email addresses or obtaining the email addresses from a third party. Because of the address used to send this email to me, I strongly suspect that someone at the company typed in a list of names from a trade show I attended in 2007 — a trade show at which I had no personal contact with the company.

When you import a list of names to your campaign list, most email service providers require that you specify where you got the names and tell you what kinds of lists are acceptable and which are not.

Permission confirmation rules from Campaign Monitor: Click image for larger version.

To sum up: Yes, it was spam.

The email and the responses that I received from this company were in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act on several counts and legally fall under the definition of spam. I don’t plan to report it unless the unwanted emails continue, but the penalties are stiff:

Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, and more than one person may be held responsible for violations. For example, both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible.

What can you do to comply with the Act?

Make certain that you have specific permission from the person before you add their name to your list. If you attend trade shows and collect names, make sure you clearly label your signup sheets with “Sign up for our newsletter!” or a similar phrase.

Set up a double opt-in system, so that a third person can’t add a name to your list without notifying the one who was added.

Make sure that every email you send contains your mailing address and an easy way for the recipient to unsubscribe.

And the best advice I can offer — don’t annoy your potential customers!

Not a friendly way to deal with your customers!

This morning I received a blog post notification email. If you have a WordPress blog or have ever followed someone who does, you know what I mean — you can subscribe to receive an email when an update is posted. It’s a great way to keep up with blogs that you might otherwise forget to check on a regular basis.

Only one problem… I had never even visited this blog, let alone signed up for email notifications.

Make that two problems: The blog owner didn’t provide an unsubscribe link in the email. While this isn’t required by the 2003 CAN-SPAM act that regulates all commercial emails in the US, it is modern standard practice, and people expect to be able to hit the “unsubscribe” button and delete the email.

So I replied to the email with a polite note: “Unsubscribe, please. I have never visited your blog and certainly never signed up for your email notifications.”

To which I received a fairly chilly reply that this person doesn’t subscribe individuals and I should go to the main website page to unsubscribe myself.

This is not my responsibility.

Even if were not required as a matter of law, as a matter of courtesy the site owner should apologize and immediately remove the name from the mailing list.

Oh, but then it got worse. I went to this website to find out that it was using an outdated version of WordPress, known for almost two months to be subject to a serious scripting vulnerability. I notified the site owner that the WordPress installation was unpatched and that the site was possibly being used to send out spam. I received a rather ill-tempered response saying the site was not compromised, and again telling me that I needed to go to it and unsubscribe.

Even if I were interested in this site’s products, they’ve lost me as a customer forever. In addition to which, I’ve now written about it (although without naming the company) and several thousand more people now know about this bad customer management practice.

Be courteous not only to your customers, but to those who might be customers as well. It’s only good business!

UPDATE: I have received one additional email from the company’s spokesperson. I signed my last email with my full name, website address, and “webhosting and web design services” to indicate that I knew what I was talking about. The final email accused me of going out to look for other peoples’ problems in order to build up my own business. Definitely some ill temper going on there. And definitely some customer service problems.

So this one from American Science & Surplus really caught my eye this morning. (Highlighting added; click to enlarge photo.)

Did I click on that link? You bet I did! I mean, who doesn’t want 25,000 bonus frequent flyer miles if AS&S ever buys a surplus airline?

If I were running this campaign, I would add anyone who clicked to the preferred customer list and just let them all believe that they were in the first 250. I’d have a special landing page that the link goes to, with my very best product deals on sale. Customers have to click on the email link to get the deal — anyone else pays regular price.

Now I have no immediate need for a boxed set of Cosmos DVDs or a robot hamster wheel, two of the items on the sale landing page. But clicking the link got me to their site, where I might find something else I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it on sale, and reminded me again that browsing AS&S is just plain fun. And who doesn’t need a chuckle now and then?

What a great marketing tool!

American Science and Surplus

How can you use information like this in your next customer newsletter?