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Building relationships with email newsletters

Building a relationship takes time. It cannot be achieved by sending the occasional newsletter or advert. Whether you’re focusing on new or existing customers, there needs to be a regular flow of communication that attracts attention and gets them engaged in your brand.

If you think about the relationships you have with your family and friends, they are not built by only one person talking and the other listening. Relationships require interaction. You need to find out things about each other and understand the type of person they are.

E-newsletters help to do just that with customers. They can increase brand awareness as well as the value proposition you provide to them. The following tips explain how you can create effective e-newsletters to help kick-start or develop customer relationships.

1) Adopt a personable approach: When you send an e-newsletter out, use a person’s email address as the sender not an info@ or sales@. Let the writer’s personality come through in the copy – although you want to remain professional, don’t always limit your newsletters to ‘business speak’. Keep it personable, simple and easy to read.

2) Provide information of value: Fill your e-newsletters with details about what your customers are going to enjoy from your product, services etc rather than how great your company is. As I mention in my previous post, you need to keep asking “what’s in it for them?” To help kick-start a relationship ‘special offers’ i.e. 10% off, save £100 etc are good incentives, especially if the customers are unknown.

3) Keep the communication flowing: Relationships cannot not be built by the odd newsletter sent out here and there, keep your communication regular. It usually takes six communications before generating a new lead. One newsletter a month is the least you should send, any fewer and people may forget that they signed up to receive it and will see it as “spam”. On the other hand, sending too many newsletters will risk you losing customers because they can’t keep up with the amount of information.

4) Get your customers to interact with your brand: As much as a customer may want to find out about your goods/services, you need to find out what they need. In order to offer the best product or service, your customers have certain requirements. The way you can find this out is to include links to polls, surveys or discussion forums so that they interact with you and they can tell you what they need.

These are just a few tips to help you build relationships with your customers. In Part 3, I will focus on how you can put a newsletter together and the most effective ways of sending them out.

If you can’t wait for Part 3 and you would like to speak to one of us here at Changeworks, please call us on 01785 247588 or email info@changeworkscom.co.uk

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Are you listening?

IN TODAY’S allegedly sophisticated information age, the need to communicate clearly has never been greater.  Information is valuable only when shared.  And to be shared, it has to be delivered consistently, in a manner which is readily identifiable and easily understood.

 By and large, all of us can speak.  But it is not necessarily shouters who make the most telling contribution.  Voices should not merely be heard, but listened to as well.  Complex issues must be delivered in simple, clear language.  The overriding challenge is to minimise communication breakdowns.

 The requisite proficiency does not always come naturally, but when executed well it will be a key factor in corporate success.  Skilled public relations specialists have a pivotal part to play in this process.

 Business managers take on wide-ranging responsibilities for communications, starting with internal requirements.  Their actions are also scrutinised by people outside the organisation – customers, suppliers, investors, regulators, competitors, commentators and other opinion formers.

 Tasks include improving understanding, widening acceptance and enhancing reputations.  By speaking clearly and consistently, from a united and uniform base, business aims and objectives will be so much easier to achieve. 

 Notwithstanding that different audiences will need differing styles of presentation and degrees of selectivity in content, corporate messages must never be fragmented nor massaged for the sake of effect.  Say it as it is and the identity will register positively and constructively.

 At the heart of all this is the quality of the public relations effort, keeping the cogs of business lubricated.  The primary purposes of professionally-led PR are to drive behaviour, add value and strengthen results.

Talk to Changeworks Communications about how to add value to your PR efforts, we listen!

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Listen to Changeworks’ 60 PR Podcast on this now

A recent HBR article talks about Hiring for attitude and training for skill. Employees who are in sync with your values are assets because they will contribute to making your organisation different. And differentiation is critical to survival in the competitive economy we live in. If you recruit for character, over and above credentials, you will more likely be able to build a team who are passionate about making a difference to your clients and to your brand. However, this is the hardest thing to get right in the recruitment process and requires a Columbo-like persistence and flair at asking questions!
 
Whilst character is critical,  in PR an ability to write is an equally important trait. A trait implies a fixed quality rather than a state that can be taught. And from what I have seen in 20 years of working in the industry, writing talent is more innate than taught. Some senior PR expert say it comes from early childhood exposure to critical reasoning and precis writing at an early age. If, like Columbo, you can put people under the spotlight, test them, whilst putting them at ease; you will likely see their natural talent. (We do a writing test like this).
 
Of course, having some experience is also a huge asset for any new hopefuls, because working in PR is uniquely demanding: creativity and detail; big picture and organised planning; mental toughness and strong sensitivity for relationship building. In fact, experience is so important in this competitive field that the PR industry itself has gotten itself some bad publicity lately, in the furore over unpaid interns. But, like Columbo, it is best to not get caught in the ‘trappings’ of experience: after all, someone will have 14 years’ experience but may have learnt nothing at all, yet another with a year’s meaningful work could have embodied every minute into his or her ‘muscle memory’.
 
So when it comes to PR recruitment there is a double edged sword. Attitude is vital in securing people who can be flexible, creative and organised;  with strong interpersonal skills to handle your clients well. At Changeworks we demand the best. So we test for a key level of skills and experience but we become PR Columbos at  looking for what makes people who they are. Which boils down to behaviour. We don’t recruit on values, or attitudes; we recruit on behaviour. We have identified six non-negotiable behaviours that are essential to our vision of success. We recruit on these, we manage on them, we align our PDR process around them. (And we’re not telling you what they are, you’ll have to guess!).
 
Attitude consists of three components of existence: thoughts and values/beliefs; emotions and emotional reasoning;  and behaviours. Behaviour is the only directly observable, therefore measurable component. So whilst in our recruitment process at Changeworks we have a three stage process that involves psycho-metrics (MBTi and MTQ48), skills tests and (usually) two interviews. Our favourite tack is Columbo-style questioning: “…. and one more thing …?”.  We weave the subtleties of the meta model and other techniques drawn from NLP to do this (almost) as well as Mr Columbo (we hope).
 
Find out more about Changeworks Communications.

SITTING in the press office at an international boat show, chatting with a friend who edits an important trade magazine, calm was disrupted as he tried to hide face behind hands and bemoaned: “Oh no, here comes that dreadful tense whore.”  “Tense whore,” I puzzled?  “That awful Hortense from that equally awful public relations outfit on the south coast.” 

 I did not know Hortense but I was about to see her in action as she swarmed over my defenceless pal and gushed adjectives at him, eulogising about her client’s wondrous new widget, which we all knew was the old one repackaged.  Shiny sales leaflets were thrust at him, along with a hastily personalised invitation to an afternoon press conference and champagne bash to relaunch the not-so-new product. 

 She asked me who I was.  When I told her, she spun on her heels and flew off in search of the next hapless victim.  I was reminded yet again of the chasm between journalists and many PR practitioners: so often, there is no loathing lost on the part of the former, and scant understanding shown in the case of the latter. 

 Down the years, countless books have been published giving advice to so-called PR professionals on how to work successfully with the media.  To surprisingly little avail.  ‘So-called PR professionals’ because it is not yet a profession – it is an occupation.  A pre-occupation with client-driven drivel, some might argue.

 It is not difficult to claim to be a PR person.  There are no barriers to entrance.  PR skills are not exclusive.  The knowledge base is defined loosely, with no standard model.  In spite of the efforts of the 60-years-old Institute of Public Relations and bodies such as the Public Relations Consultants’ Association, it has been inordinately difficult to enforce a regulatory framework or sufficiently high educational standards.

 Nonetheless, while ‘spin’ is the aspiration of many, successful PR builds reputations, improves understanding and can influence decisions far more effectively than advertising.  The harnessing of opportunities provided by the press, radio, television and new media can be a highly effective and cost-efficient means of communicating with and influencing target audiences.

 To succeed, it is necessary to build working relationships with the editorial media.  Taking time to understand what and how journalists write, then offering PR as a resource rather than a deflection or hindrance are ways in which trusting partnerships can evolve, with substantial payback. 

 Tell it as it is, not as you might like it to be.  After all, no business is perfect.  If it is a case of needing to return to the drawing board to improve the company, product or service, tell them how you are making it better.  Keep it simple: avoid jargon and insider terminology.  Look for and spell out the drama, allowing any genuine excitement to shine through.  Shorten it and get to the point, quickly.  By all means put on your best face, but remember that saying so won’t make it so.  Be a good listener, too.

 Top-of-the-league public relations practitioners know precisely how to enlist the support of editors, producers and compilers; they know how to provide them with the material they require in the formats they demand; they match or surpass the abilities of those with whom they are dealing.

 Quality PR also calls for in-depth knowledge of – and sympathy with – clients’ needs, their culture, aims and objectives, and the relevant marketplaces.  It requires innovative thinking and consistent strength of purpose.   Furthermore, in an industry that does not employ comprehensive standards, adopting strong ethical principles is vital.  Then, PR has the potential to become a profession.  Some day …..

Part Five – Using a presenter to tell your story:

How to tell a story using voice

With a rapid increase in the popularity of online video, how can you get your message heard above all others?

With the advances in mobile phones and digital cameras, video making has become widely accessible. Anyone can pick up a camera, shoot some footage, string it together using a basic video editing software, but the finished result (more likely than not) will not utilise the professionalism needed to make a marketing video stand out.

Part five of this blog series offers practical tips and advice for using presenters to tell your story. Novels are often written in the first person with the author taking on the task of telling his/her own story. Biographical works use a third person style. But what about video? A further dimension is added here as we can also see what is going on.  Although it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, often it is useful to have spoken words to link pictures together or bring something to life. Here are two examples of how you can use the spoken word in your video:

Telling your story with words:

• Voice over/Presenter: A voice over can provide additional information to the piece or explain something that may too be difficult to understand in a visual sense. As an alternative to a disembodied voice-over you might like to consider using someone to front your video – in other words, a presenter. Breaking the words up between presenter and voice over adds human interest and provides continuity even when the presenter is not seen on screen.
  
  

  How to use voxpops

• Vox Pop: Vox pops are commonly used in advertising and documentaries to sound out popular opinion using informal comments from members of the public. Think of aquestion related to your film and carry out street interviews with lots of people. Vox pops require the minimum of two people; one to ask the questions and two to do the filming. Shoot your interviewee close-up and facing slightly to the left or right. Make sure that you get a variation of angles for when you edit your video as shooting them all one way will not make a professional looking film. If you do shoot your interviewees all at one angle, your video editing software may feature the ‘horizontal flip’ filter enabling you to flip your shots around.

If you would like to find out more about online video, please visit our Changeworks website