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!

EVERY ONE of today’s major industries had to emerge and evolve.  However, some have stopped growing.  Others have the shadow of decline looming menacingly.  Wherever growth is threatened, slowed or stopped it is not because the market is saturated.  Probably, it is because there has been a failure in customer relations and understanding: failure from the top.

   It is nigh on impossible to select a single major business category of today that did not go through a burgeoning era of being a so-called growth industry.  In each case, its assumed strength was attributed to apparently unchallenged superiority, with, it seemed, no feasible alternative available.  Yet one after another of such celebrated industries have retreated into decline.  More will follow, ad infinitum.

   In fact, there is no such thing as a growth industry.  Those that assume themselves to be riding an automatic growth stallion invariably fall off.  The history of the dying and dead shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.  It shows a disregard, or ignorance, of the need to mount markets and hold on tightly through innovation, change, choice and captured customer loyalty.

   Management, reaching out, must provide the customer-creating drive and customer-retention added value.  It must push this tightly focused awareness and action into every nook and cranny, exciting and stimulating colleagues each step of the way, rather than running a ‘bandwagon’ business.

   The organisation must think of itself not as one which produces goods or services, but as a conduit for developing customers – and doing those things that will make people want to continue to buy, remembering the fickleness in every marketplace.  Relationship management is all about making it easy for customers to stay, difficult to go.  The whole operation, top to bottom and back to the top, must be enthusiastically aware of the corporate style, direction, objectives, plus the needs of existing and potential customers.  If they do not know where they are going, they will never find the road to take them there. 

   Even with attitude and aptitude in place, there are dangers.  It is too easy to become obsessively responsive to fleeting customer whims and media-whipped fads; so often, there is a lack of risk-reduction market research and attitudinal surveying; sometimes, the back-office support provides insufficient ammunition for the front line troops; and within service industries in particular, there can be a tendency to reach ahead of the market, making offerings that are too complex or over sophisticated, trying to sell electronic shovels before people are familiar with using spades.

   Little in business is straightforward.  But to grow and sustain growth, managements must turn around to face their customers. 

   Professional marketing communications are crucial.  And yet saying so won’t make it so.  Products and services are selected by purchasers’ overall perceptions of the supplier, not merely by clever headlines, compelling imagery or high-sounding mission statements.  Successful marketing puts customers’ needs at the centre of every stage, every process, every activity of the business machine and its output – then presents to the outside world with unified, clear and consistent messages designed to persuade customers that they will be the beneficiaries.  (Out of sight is out of mind, is out of business.)

   This requires a totally integrated and rigorously implemented all-company approach, explained via skilled communications.  Nothing less will work.

OF COURSE you could have written that.  Everyone in business is expert at stringing words together on screen and paper, or so they think, if only they could find the time.  They know they can’t design the cover for the company’s sales brochure, update the logo, or build a new website.  These are mystical, creative vocations best left to experts.  But: writing?  Anybody can do that.

   Writing is the most undervalued of all communications skills.  It is the one to which least attention is paid – yet it is the most important.

   Believe it or not, professional writers have been trained.  Yes, they have latent talent.  In the case of yours truly, an English graduate, the preparation was in the hard-knocks arena of Fleet Street and then as a copywriter in exacting advertising agencies.  The process in the latter role would be to take a brief, research the subject and its objectives, come up with a string of headlines, narrow them down and then write the body copy.  The agency demand was for compression, precision, clarity, simplicity, rhythm and appropriate corporate style – grammatically potent, although not necessarily purist.

   This is starkly different from the writing that emerges from general business.  “I’d write it myself, but I’m far too busy,” and “Surely we have someone in-house who can write this, instead of paying for it?” are familiar-sounding remarks.  Undoubtedly, business managers spend chunks of their working days assembling words in the form of memos, reports and letters.  Secretly, they are likely to be proud of their prose and would be starkly horrified at any suggestion that their output might be written badly.  Nonetheless, to the professional eye, it is usually poor in terms of the assemblage of ideas and worse still in clarity of expression.

   Facets of writing professionally include being able to absorb – and to question – a brief, to define the most appropriate communications strategy, to create the concept, then to execute it in a tone which is compelling, precise, economical and true to the client’s corporate culture. 

   Always, the writer must transpose into the position of his or her readers, and to seem to be speaking their language.  Effective writing concentrates on those who buy the product or service, not those who make or sell it.

   This applies whether the writer is working on a total communications package or a single item.  Most certainly, it is not a task for part-timers, nor for those whose heads are filled with a plethora of other concerns.  It is not a job for the great untrained.

   You will not get through to an audience that is bored or restless.  Corporate communications programmes will never work at full power, nor deliver value for money, unless they are implemented by craftspeople who understand your corporate objectives and can help achieve them for you through the use of energetic, clear and digestible language.  Communications are not only about pretty pictures.

the chart widely used wrongly!

’93% of communication is non-verbal’.  How many times have you heard that one quoted on communication courses or by well dressed consultants? In the original researchers own words “Whenever I hear this misquote, I cringe!”

I said a silent ‘hoorah’ to myself yesterday when I heard Albert Mehrabian interviewed on Radio 4′s ‘More or Less’.  For every communication and many NLP courses that I have been on, the trainer has quoted that old ’93% of communication is non-verbal’ blarney. I have been telling everyone not to believe this for sometime now.  Of course, effective communication involves far more that just words – specifically tone of voice, pitch and quality of voice, facial expressions and other non-verbal language are critical in being understood.

But next time you are told that the words that you say only communicate 7% of the message that is understood, you now know that (officially) this is a misrepresentation of the original work and simply untrue.  Common sense tells us that this is not true: how can you possibly expect to instruct someone about how to bake a cake through non verbal communication? But we love to quote simple summaries of complex research and this asinine conclusion is exactly how our brains take a more complex and meaningful ‘deep structure’ and translate it into a ‘surface structure’ that is, at a best, a partial truth.

So, as we know in this deep to surface structure translation, there are deletions, generalisations and distortions: so what has been deleted in this study.  Well Albert Mehrabian’s study was purely done on single word communications to test the effective communication on positive, neutral or negative feelings.  For example, the speakers would say positive, neutral or negative words with a mixture of positive, neutral or negative tonalities and facial expressions. In this way, the study revealed that it was the vocal element (tonality etc) and the facial expressions that people believed (when it comes to communicating feelings), even if the words spoken completely contradicted the feeling expressed through vocal or facial expression. 

 So, let’s take the lesson from 41 years of believing half-truths: sometimes the complex cannot or should not be summarised into simple numbers and a memorable construct or we miss important learnings. 

Listen again to Prof Mehrabian on Radio 4 tomorrow at 8pm or on BBC iPlayer.