I received an interesting E-Marketing message today, and it underscores an important "get ready" strategy. Whether you have current plans for E-Marketing, let alone an active E-Marketing strategy, you can still get started collecting customer and prospect email addresses.
This E-Marketing message was from a service department at a local Ford dealer, reminding me that my car may be due for service. Their mileage calculation algorithm is off a bit -- the car has 75k miles and this message said "Your xxxx (car model) is due for a 36k mile service". Nevertheless, this kind of reminder no doubt brings in some service business (and the mileage guesstimate could be easily fixed).
How do I like my Ford, you might ask? Deal is, I don't drive a Ford. In fact, I've never been in the Ford dealership or the Ford service department. So, how did they get my email address and my car model? Turns out, these guys have the best body shop in the area, and I've had some minor body repair done there -- at least 4 years ago. Apparently they had a "collect customers' email addresses" strategy in place going back that far, and they're now capitalizing on that knowledge base with an E-Marketing campaign.
If your organization is not actively collecting email addresses of customers and prospects, today is a good day to start. Make sure you have a skeleton plan for doing this, such as a database or spreadsheet accessible to all users. As a kickoff strategy, you could get an export of all your employees' Outlook (or whatever client they use) address books, and then combine those into a starting point.
E-Marketing will someday be important to your business, no matter what it is. Start now collecting the raw material (contact information, including Emails) so you'll be ready for that party whenever you decide to throw it.
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Terry WeaverCEO
Chief Executive Boards International
http://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
Solid, practical, actionable advice. This is what I love about CEBI.
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