Online CRM Solution

Many business use a sales process that is built around issuing a “Quote” to a prospect. After a sales person has initiated contact with a prospect, the quoting process begins. This includes determining what specific products the prospect is interested in and taking into account any variables in pricing to adjust the final quoted price. After the quote is complete, the sales person sends the prospect a final quote and then waits for a response… [crickets chirping]

Why send the prospect a quote, when you can just send them a unique Buy Now link? After the sales person has determined the final adjusted sale price (the quoted price), the sales person can just send the prospect and email with a time sensitive (i.e. good for 48 hours) Buy Now link. The prospect clicks the Buy Now link, they go to the shopping cart checkout page with the quoted price and all items pre-filled in the cart, and the prospect purchases and becomes a client. A Buy Now link is a much more persuasive selling device than a piece of paper or email with a quote.

If your business is built around a quoting system, and you can realistically sell items online, head over to the Fusebox and take a look at the opportunity management videos. Or click this link to check out an article on the subject (complete with screen-shots.)

FYI, If you are a current Infusionsoft customer, you likely purchased via a Buy Now link that was sent from your Infusionsoft sales associate…PWNED!

I read a great paper this morning concerning the use of online coupon codes. It struck a cord with me when the author described people abandoning shopping carts that ask for coupon codes because I’ve actually done this on several occasions. Several times I have gotten to the final checkout screen and the website asks if I have a coupon code. This is a psychologically distressing event because I feel that I am not taking advantage of a potential offer, so I scour the Internet trying to find a coupon code on one of those deal sites. If I don’t find one, I may completely abondon the sale. If I do find a coupon code, the intention of segmentation via price discrimination really didn’t work for the seller. There is some other interesting topics discussed in this paper and a bunch of fancy-pants geeky equations. Go here for the paper:

Price Discrimination through Online Couponing:
Impact on Likelihood of Purchase and Profitability

-Martin

The past two days I’ve had the pleasure to work with Thomas Barry and Mark Arnold of Secure Asset Preservation. They provide various financial planning services primarily to a mature (aka senior citizen) female market. We did the basic stuff like take his old ACT database and put into Infusionsoft. We put a basic plan together to start a direct mail marketing campaign with the intent to bring them to his website to download a free report. Pretty basic Internet marketing stuff. They are a great bunch of guys -very friendly and intelligent. We actually had a great time the past two days.

In one of our chit-chats between work sessions yesterday we were talking about our favorite beers and I mentioned that since I moved out here to Phoenix, I have really taken a liking to Corona with fresh lime. So this morning Mark and I were working on Tom’s website when Tom walked in with a huge bag of limes and said that he has something for me. At lunch, we all walked out into the parking lot and Tom opens the rear doors of this truck displaying five cases of Corona!

There is really no point to this blog other than to plug Secure Asset Preservation, and rub everyone’s noses in my gift. I won’t use this post as a platform to preach on how customer service really pays off. Honestly this was more of a pay-off for future services.

I guess there is one valid thing that I learned form this experience: I can be bribed VERY easily.

-Martin

Just thought I’d make a quick blog concerning a couple of great customer service experiences I had this week. I bought a new car from Power Chevrolet Arrowhead in Peoria. I walked in and drove off in a 2008 Aveo financed at 9.95% in under 2 hours…to me that’s impressive. I’ve sat at a dealership all day before, so to be in and out in that short amount of time made me very happy.

I was driving home and realized the car had a AUX jack in the stereo, so I stopped off at Target to get a jack for my Ipod. I was looking through their selection and found a Monster brand cable for $15…kinda pricey, but it’s all they had and I wanted to listen to some Master of Puppets! I brought the cable up to the counter and the cashier told me that he has some Philips brand AUX cables for $10. Why did this impress me so much? Because it was a few days after Christmas and the store was a madhouse. Yet he took the time to not only let me know they have cheaper cables, but he walked over to the rack and got it for me. In this day and age of strip malls and super Wal-Marts, this simple act of selfless customer service had a huge impact on me…and just overall made me feel special.

Yesterday, I got a call from Power Chevrolet Arrowhead saying that they were able to secure a better financing option. It was lowered from 9.95% to 7%, which saved me about $40 per month! I just got back from signing the new agreement and they asked that I tell my friends about them. I want to give a big plug to Power Chevrolet Arrohead (hence the three links directly to their website.) And if you buy a car from them, tell them I sent you.

These two very friendly customer service experiences will last a long time. The next time I buy a car, it will be from Power Chevrolet Arrowhead and the next time I buy anything else it will be from Target. Plain and simple. I’m a plain and simple kind of guy.

-Martin

Please note: Following these instructions may be against eBay’s or Paypal’s TOS and could get you in possible legal trouble. Consider this information for entertainment purposes only.

I was recently asked by a co-worker of mine if there is a way to use InfusionSoft (or any third-party email marketing software) to market to eBay customers. My co-worker has a client who primarily sells on eBay and wants to export his client data into InfusionSoft so he can run email marketing campaigns. Being a former eBay power seller, I was a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know the answer to this simple question. I do know that eBay offers an email campaign service for eBay stores. Unfortunately, it’s fairly expensive for large email batches.

I decided to search on the eBay forums and groups for an answer but quickly realized that most eBay sellers are completely clueless about email marketing. It’s almost comical. I decided that I would have to figure this out on my own.

I logged into my eBay account and started looking for reports that I could use to export customer information (name, email, address, etc…) I quickly remembered that eBay does not disclose any personal information  of other users inside of their system. eBay uses an internal messaging service to handle all communication. When your item sells, eBay sends you a “Your eBay item sold” confirmation email that does contain the email address of the buyer; however, the “reply to:” is ebay@ebay.com not the buyer’s email address. At this point, the only way to gather the email address would be to go into each individual email and copy and paste those email addresses into excel…painful.

The next thing I tried was to log into my PayPal account and find a report that extracts email addresses from buyers. If you click on “History”, you can export all your data into a csv file. The file contains all customer information and transaction information.

There is one way I can think to actually automate this, but I warn you it’s totally untested and only theoretical. When someone sends you payment through PayPal, PayPal sends a “Notification of Instant Payment” email. In Gmail you can set up a filter that forwards only the Paypal notification emails to another email address. This “other” email address can be an email parsing server that strips the contents of the email and submits them to a web form. Your parsing software will accept the email, strip out the contents such as name, address, email address, item sold, and whatever else you want and automatically submit them to a web form. Now, everything is automatic. Pretty slick if I do say so myself! The major drawback to this is that email parsing software is notoriously unreliable. You would probably have to develop your own parsing software. If you go to the Business Resources section of my website, I have a link to a programmer job bidding website if you want to outsource something like this.

-Martin

http://onlinecrmsolution.com

I recently came across a post in Linked-In where someone was asking what they should put on the back of their business cards. There were several posts that suggested a photo of their office, a map, reinforcement of their brand, football schedule of the home college team, etc… The poster was really looking for something of value he could put on the back of the business card. He noted an example of a Vegas-based business that put blackjack tips on the back of their business card. The poster noted that he has always kept this card in his wallet, because he actually used it!

Here is my tip: Put a juicy headline on the back that sends them to a squeeze page. For example:

Download My Free Report “9 Secrets to Wealth”

• Learn how to double your income on 30 days!
• Learn the “tricks” that the pros use.

www.onlinecrmsolution.com

Think of the back of your business card as a PPC ad…in fact split-test your cards and see which ads get the best results (I don’t expect anyone to actually do that, but it’s a fun idea!)

Another good idea is to offer a promo code for 10% off a shopping cart purchase, or send them to a discounted order form with 10% off your list price. The order form can say, “Hey thanks for keeping my business card. Order below and get 10% off the regular list price!”

Thanks for Reading,

–Martin

http://onlinecrmsolution.com