20 January 2009
Three weeks in and 2009 has that feel about it – that something good is going to happen.
Sure, there’s plenty of talk about how down things are – but that just means there are even more opportunities. There’s also plenty of people and companies struggling – but there are just as many new companies emerging and even more that are on the brink of something very exciting.
2009 is looking more exciting than ever for Xero as we start to break through the accounting and look at all the good stuff that can sit on top of a very solid platform.
2009 is also looking full of opportunity for Catalyst90, founded by Tom Reidy late last year in Wellington. With the current economic mood, there is a need more than ever to grow sales and that’s what Catalyst90 is all about – helping companies to establish sales and marketing protocols to fuel and sustain their growth. Catalyst90 is a 90 day program and is backed up by the CatalystQUE online quote and sales manager.
Something good is going to happen in 2009. Here are some tips to help you make it happen.
2 Comments | 
Business, Marketing, NZ Companies, Sales | 
Permalink
Posted by Andrew
8 August 2008
I’ve just finished reading Tuned-In, by the guys at Pragmatic Marketing and its a must read for anyone involved in productisation.
When developing good software, we focus the design and usability on the users, but we need to focus the roadmap and marketing on the buyers. The tuned-in approach draws your focus to understanding who your buyers are and making sure that you’re solving real problems that exist for them.
Even if your users and buyers are the same, the problems that lead them to buy your software are different to the problems they will experience while using your software.
How do you know if a problem is worth solving? It will be urgent enough for people to pay to solve and prevalent enough to give you a profitable market.
It makes me think of many ideas I’ve had and heard, including plenty that people were in the process of committing years of effort into, all of which solved a problem, but none of which solved an urgent or prevalent problem.
Its pretty simple stuff – and the authors have applied their own advice to how they wrote the book, so read it!
2 Comments | Business, Marketing, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
30 April 2008
mailPrimer is an email service, that takes your every-day email and slaps on a custom designed template – including your signature, logos and links to your website. Its a hosted service, so its simple to redirect all of your mail through mailPrimer to centrally manage your company signatures and to get consistent branding across all of your email – which is a high touch channel with your customers and prospects.
Now - mailPrimer allows you to include RSS headlines in every email you send, making your blog more visible to the people you talk to daily. Considering that 92% of people don’t read blogs, but most read email, this is a non-intrusive way of raising awareness of your blog and keeping people up-to-date with your latest news.
Talk to the mailPrimer guys at 0800 MAILPRIMER or support@mailprimer.com to get setup.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, NZ Companies, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
27 February 2008
Naill Kennedy has an excellent post about sniffing browser history to improve the user experience on your site.
Naill demonstrates how to use CSS and javascript to detect if certain pages have been recently viewed by the user. Based on this, you can infer some preferences of the user and target them with personalised advertising/cross-selling.
For example, if your desired path for your prospects is:
teaser -> website -> benefits -> signup -> demo -> purchase
then when someone visited your website, you could apply rules such as:
- If the visitor is new, then promote the benefits
- If the visitor has seen our benefits, then promote the signup
- If the visitor has seen our signup, but not our demo, then promote the demo
- If the visitor has seen our demo, then promote …
If every web-page (and every email you send) contained a personalised call-to-action, then much higher would your conversion rates be?
Of course, you can block or delete your browser history, but google analytics and companies like Calcium Software will soon be providing this same information and I don’t think this is a bad thing.
When you look at content publishing, our attitudes used to be “I’ll read what the publisher publishes”. Today, with content being so widely available (and with nearly everyone being a publisher), our attitudes are “I’ll read what I want to read”.
We’re on the verge of complete information overload, so our attitudes will soon change to “the publisher knows best what I want to read”. This assumes that the publisher, using a combination of my preferences and their expert domain knowledge, can best decide what content I want to read .
This also means that the publisher, using a combination of my preferences and their expert domain knowledge, can best decide what the next call-to-action is for me to guide me toward a purchase.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
25 October 2007
I recently installed foxmarks – a bookmark synchroniser for firefox and I like it. I don’t use bookmarks a lot (except for the bookmarks toolbar) but now I can bookmark a page instead of emailing myself the link between work/home/laptop.
I wasn’t looking for firefox plugins – and I’m sure there are other plugins that do this too, but I came across this company foxmarks, and was quite impressed by the bio’s of the two founders: Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick. I also liked their simple mission statement:
At Foxmarks, we’re turning web search upside down. Creating a better way to search that is community inspired and people powered. Getting you to the content you really want – faster and easier.
Our first product – Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – is just the start. Stay tuned for more. And more. And more.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
24 July 2007
Apparently, too many people print their emails and more and more mailPrimer users are adding tree-friendly ‘don’t print this email‘ messages to emails. This has impelled Tom from Calcium Software to launch a campaign to reduce everyone’s carbon-email-emissions to zero by sponsoring some dieing trees.
All you have to do to feel green for the day is click the banner and vote for the trees by sending an email to your friends from the site. All in accordance with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 of course.
www.saveatree.co.nz
A short note from dogbert:
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, NZ Companies | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
21 May 2007
The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act comes into force on 5 September 2007 and effects every business in New Zealand that sends email.
Here’s my summary, but if in doubt read the Act yourself!
The new law says:
- Before sending “commercial electronic messages”, you must get consent from all recipients
- All “commercial electronic messages” must provide a working unsubscribe facility
- The sender of all “commercial electronic messages” must be clearly identified and contact information must be available
- Harvesting emails is illegal
The definition of “commercial electronic messages” is a catch-all for email, SMS and instant messages (but not POTS, VOIP or FAX) where the primary purpose is to market or promote goods, services or business/investment opportunities.
There are exceptions of course – which pretty much apply to most day-to-day business email:
- If you are already doing business with someone, you are allowed to email them.
- If someone gives you their business card, or if you find a contact email address on a website you can email them (unless there is a ‘no spam’ notice with the email address).
- If someone asks for a quote, you can email it to them.
- You can let people know about their subscription or account, or renewal of a product.
- You can email people about upgrades to products/services that they have bought.
If you want to send email newsletters, offers, promotions etc – you should keep a double-opt-in database using a system such as Calcium Software’s Hot Prospect. Hot Prospect v3 was recently released and there are some good reasons for using it:
Save time - Hot Prospect will automatically manage double-opt-ins, unsubscribes and bounces, allowing you to collect email addresses from your website, or from offline and comply with the law. Sending email campaigns is fast and safe. Using Hot Prospect you can build a great looking email in minutes and know that it will only be sent to the people on your list who are currently opted-in.
Repudation - the Act states that the onus of proof lies with the sender. Hot Prospect provides full repudation by keeping an audit record of recipients being added and removed from mailing lists, including opt-in confirmations, changes of information and details of emails sent.
Results - its one thing to be allowed to send a marketing email, its another thing to be able to deliver the email through spam filters. The SMTP engine behind Hot Prospect is mailPrimer, which was designed to deliver daily 1-1 emails and therefore uses a number of unique techniques for optimising delivery. When used to deliver bulk email, mailPrimer gets the highest delivery rates that I’ve seen.
For more information on Hot Prospect, have a look at: Calcium, Red Running Man, Green Running Man
3 Comments | Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
