We fully understand the frustration of trying to design and code your email layout without it breaking all over the place when viewed in your inbox. Your email design is important to your company branding and you’ve worked really hard today – why add more stress? This Friday, we’re going to help you out and lessen your headaches. We’re giving you free email templates.

Because we love each and every one of you, you’re more than welcome to use these email templates any way you see fit. If you’re a customer of ActiveCampaign, we’ve even added some personalized tags and conveniently included an XML file for import. If you’re the creative type and you’re not scared to get your hands dirty, these two email templates comes with a PSD Photoshop file. Don’t like the colors or the shape of a button? No problem, you’re free to change it.

We hope you find these email templates useful as it has been fun for us creating them for you. Happy Friday!

You’re much more likely to buy a product or a service that you hear about from a trusted source such as a friend.  Your friend has no reason to lie. When a product or service is offered to a customer it’s only natural for someone to consider the source before taking the plunge. The more positive experiences that a customer hears from their peers the more likely they are going to be swayed toward a similar course of action.  Face it.  There’s no sales pitch that’s so great that it hasn’t been heard before in some form or another.  After all we live in the information age. People are inundated by messages coming from every direction.  Audiences have gotten a lot smarter and a whole lot less trusting of messages that come directly from the marketer. Word of Mouth Marketing is an umbrella term for a number of marketing approaches such as buzz, viral marketing, influencer marketing, blogging, loyalty programs, and leveraging social media.  They all rely on word of mouth to some extent and they take advantage of existing networks to facilitate exponential growth.

Networks begin when people form connections with others.  The strength of a network is based on both the reputation of the members in the network and the sphere of their influence.  For word of mouth marketing to work in an organization’s favor they must earn respect through instituting transparent policies that eschew anything that can be perceived as deceptive or manipulative.  Word of mouth can work both ways.  It can be positive or negative.  Transparency is important because it establishes trust by showing your customers that you have nothing to hide.  If you are perceived as being deceptive or manipulative then you will not be brought into any network with any considerable amount of influence because the mere inclusion of you lessens the value of that network.  Permission based Email Marketing is an ideal way of generating good word of mouth because you begin with a network in the form of a list of opted-in subscribers. The key words here are permission based.  They are already receptive to your message or else they would not have opted in to your list.

Word of mouth marketing in emails often relies on viral components such as forward to a friend links at the end of a message.  While viral marketing may sound scary its actually a good thing.  In marketing its any strategy that encourages people to pass along a marketing message to others in their network.  The term viral is unfortunate because people often associate that word with computer viruses.  Computer viruses are bad.  Viral Marketing is good. A message goes viral when it creates exponential potential for exposure by taking advantage of your subscriber’s existing networks. Like a virus… For a message to go viral however it is not enough to simply add a forward to a friend link to the bottom of the message.  The message must be worthy of being forwarded.   Think about subjects or material to use in your mailings that are likely to get people to want to forward your material to their friends.  Also think about what is likely to get people to talk.  The great thing about forward to a friend is that it is trackable.   You could include a forward to a friend link through your email marketing software and then use A/B split testing to test multiple campaigns to see which one generates more word of mouth.

Keeping risk factors low is essential for positive word of mouth.  This includes offering incentives such as discounts.  For example you could send out a mailing that includes a discount for your subscriber and for the person that they forwarded your mailing to.  Just be sure to cap off any incentives that you offer to prevent a customer service nightmare.  Avoid rewarding people based on how many people your subscriber forwarded your mailing to.  Such practices lend themselves to abusive handling of your mailing.  It also gives your message the unsavory perception of being spam.  You can avoid this by capping off discounts at a fixed rate such as 15% off for all parties involved.  Another incentive is offering something that is free and therefore poses no risk to potential customers.   Free 30 day trials or free versions of software that contain links to your product are both examples of things you can do to generate word of mouth.  As are the policies that you use.  A positive customer service experience is essential for positive word of mouth. A 60 day money back guarantee gives you good word of mouth because it lets people know that you are willing to let them try your product risk free.

What you need to do to generate positive word of mouth extends well beyond email marketing. You should make it easy for your customers to contact you by providing a phone number, address of a physical location, support area, and possibly even live chat.  How easy it is to contact you is something that people will talk about.  You should also offer ways for your customer to leave you feedback in public and private.  People listen to what their peers have to say.  Allowing people to leave comments on blog posts, documentation, and forums can give you a vehicle for generating word of mouth.  Ultimately, however, it comes down to how well you match appearance with reality.  Its one thing to have good policies but its another to follow through on them.  You will ultimately be judged on how responsive you are in handling the good policies that you put in place.

It’s not reasonable to expect that you will profit off of all or even most of your subscribers.   What you can expect is that a few of your subscribers will pick up for the majority of your list members.  We call them your best customers and you must value them as a precious commodity if you expect to make a living or turn a profit out of your line of work.  When you begin to lose any of your best customers you will know it because it will impact your bottom line.  The majority of your customers are good customers and this is equally true of your subscriber list.  However, you’re never going to be profitable relying on good customers alone.  You can expect to be marginally profitable off of good customers at best.  A hard truth you will have to live with in whatever you do is you will have bad customers no matter how right you run things.  If you have spent any considerable amount of time doing customer service the notion of a bad customer does not sit right.  But there have been times where you approach a situation using logic and reason.  You provide answers or explanations that are helpful or point in the right direction.  You spend considerable time and energy focusing your attention on a person and their concerns.  You give everything you have and no matter what you do you know it won’t matter.  That’s what’s meant by bad customer.

If you are running things the right way this number should only come down to a handful.   Still it only takes a few bad customer to demoralize your employees with excessive complaints or demands. If they are not dealt with properly they can hurt your business with negative word of mouth.  Also, they can be a drain on your resources and not allow you to focus on your best customers who you depend on to remain profitable. As someone looking to protect your bottom line,  especially in tough economic times,  you must always be on the look out for ways of turning good customers into best customers. At the same time you need to be cognizant of handling bad customers and looking for ways to turn these customers into good customers.

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule is often referred to as the Pareto principle after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.   He described the unequal distribution of wealth in his country as coming down to 20% of the people owning 80% of the wealth. Since then the 80/20 rule has been used as an organizing principle for understanding everything from time management, to running a business, engaging content in emails,  SEO, and of course managing your subscriber list.  This number is not set in stone but it can be used as a guiding principle for segmenting your list.

The exact breakdown of your numbers is going to be specific to your list and business.  What you are going to want to do is to find out which portion of your list accounts for most of your profits.  This is usually anywhere from 10% to 20%.  Find out which part of your list is marginally profitable or breaks even.  Should be between 60% or even as high as 70%.  Next identify which portion of your list you lose profits from.  This is the bottom end of your list which can be anywhere from 10% to 20%.   Now you’re going to want to find ways of moving some of those marginally profitable subscribers up your list so that they are more profitable and therefore best customers.  That way even if you lose a best customer your bottom line is not effected.  You are also going to need to decide what to do with the 10% or 20% that you’re losing profits from.  You’re going to want to find out if there is anything you can do to at least break even with them.

There are advocates for firing a bad customer and sending them off to a competitor.   How you deal with these customers depends on your business.   However, information spreads quicker than ever before.   How you conduct your business in circumstances that are difficult is noticed.  If you take the high road even in a circumstance where you know you are going to lose no matter what you may be surprised to find out you can gain the respect of even a bad customer.  Tell them you are sorry that things did not work out and that you wish them the best in their future endeavors.  Think of it as a breakup in any relationship.  Do not give them any reason to say anything bad about you.  Never burn any bridges.  Just like in relationship you never know but this person can come back in your life in a positive way.  Word of mouth spreads quickly. If nothing else the bad customer might be impressed with the way you conducted yourself and give you good word of mouth by telling people about that.

RFM Analysis

Although we never formally referred to it as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) we discussed this when we talked about targeting your best customers.   Doing a RFM Analysis is a great way to find out where your subscribers fall in line with the 80/20 principle.   It will also allow you to create a marketing strategy that is based on what kind of customers your subscribers are.   You can increase profitability by treating subscribers that make infrequent big item purchases differently from subscribers that make frequent small item purchases. Recency refers to how recently a customer made a purchase from you.   Frequency is how often they made purchases from you.  Monetary Value is how much a customer spends.  RFM Analysis gives you a way of quantifying your best customers based on their past purchasing behavior.

Lets show you how RFM Analysis works by opening up our own online music store.  We’ll assume that you worked out a licensing agreement with all the major record labels and each song costs only 99 cents and albums cost $9.99.  Because buying an individual song is only 99 cents we’ll count it as nothing until you get to 10 songs which is near the equivalent of an album.  We’ll use a 3 point system for the sake of simplicity.   3 points for customers that make the most recent purchase, 2 points for those that fall in the middle, 1 for those that have not made a recent purchase, etc.

Recency Score

1. Purchased at least 10 songs or an entire album more than a year ago.
2. Have not purchased within the quarter (3 months) but have within the last year.
3. Purchased within the quarter.

Frequency Score

1. Purchased 10 songs at 99 cents or an entire album with the last year.
2. Purchased at least 100 songes or 10 albums within the last year.
3. Purchased more than 10 albums within the last year.

Monetary Value

1. Average purchase amount is at least 10 songs an album at $9.90-$9.99
2. Average purchase amount is between 20 songs or a couple of albums at $19.80 – $19.98
3. Average purchase amount is greater than $19.80-$19.98.

Anyone scoring a 3 falls within the top 20% in regard to Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value.  Those that score of 2 are within the middle 60% while anyone scoring a 1 falls at the bottom 20%.  Anyone that scored a 3 on all categories is a best customer.  Those scoring a combination of numbers either fall in the middle 60% or the bottom 20%.  Pay attention to those scoring any variation of 3s and 2s as they are your low hanging fruit.  You should implement a marketing strategy that offers these customers an incentive for moving up to best customer.  RFM analysis is useful for identifying who your best customers are and for giving you an idea of what you need to do to turn good customers into best customers and bad customers into good customers.

Recently I came into the office to find that one of my two workstation monitors was getting no juice–it was completely blank. I’m pretty sure an automatic Windows update blew out the driver for my dual-monitor controller. After a restart, Windows told me it couldn’t find any driver for the video controller, and wasn’t able to find any compatible controllers online either. Tragedy.

It had been a very long time since I had done this job with only one monitor, and it was fairly amazing how difficult it was to go back to it. As you can see in my screenshot below, there are quite a few types of web software I need to have at close reach while I’m working, and there’s no way to deal with them all on a single monitor without constantly switching between windows to see what’s going on.

Which got me thinking: you guys aren’t doing all your work on just a single monitor, are you? The difference in productivity between a single and dual-monitor setup is definitely significant for anyone who is consistently working with a number of different tools. But I think there’s also a health issue here: I felt much more stressed out working that way. I felt cramped up and twitchy. By the time I left, I was a little burned out. And it was much tougher for me to unwind than is usual, even after a long day.

Working with computers all day can be much more stressful than a lot of folks would imagine. And it’s usually not an all-out assault of stress that you could point to as something that was definitely doing you harm. Rather, it’s a slow and steady trickle of stress that comes from paying attention to lots of little things for prolonged periods of time. Most of us are already only too aware that chronic stress can ruin your health, so you should take every possible precaution to ensure that your workday is as relaxed and pleasant as possible.

One of the very simplest things you can do to reduce your stress level is to reduce visual clutter. Allow yourself a little room to move around in, and you’ll find you feel less… imposed upon. This most definitely applies to what you see on your screen(s). I usually even go so far as to keep all of my windows just a little smaller than they could be so that I can see the space behind and between then more clearly. This establishes a sense of depth and expansiveness on your desktop, which not only gives you the visual impression of having more space for yourself, it also makes it easier to feel like each piece of work is a solid and graspable object, not a vast expanse of overwhelming workload.

So if you’re not already using at least two monitors, and organizing your workspace in such a way as to create a sense of natural simplicity and calm, then why not take a break from whatever you’re doing and get it set up right now? Not only will the increase in productivity easily earn back whatever time and money you spent on the setup, you’ll probably also notice an increased sense of well-being and improved overall health.

It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days like we do with our own web software, just to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of our Help Desk Software, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web software of their own!

There’s been a lot of intra-office chatter just lately about how to best enjoy music here in the office without:

1. Having to worry about it too much (most people prefer random play, or at least play controlled by someone else)
2. Stepping on anyone’s toes by distracting them from their work or forcing them to hear music they don’t like
3. Sounding like a frat-house when you call in to our help desk

The natural solution was for one person to step into the role of “office DJ” and just keep the music coming. As our web software company grows, though, the situation becomes more complicated. Our beautiful new sun-drenched office high atop Chicago’s Michigan Avenue has a very open floorplan, meaning that sound travels far and wide. Plus, bringing in new people means different tastes and styles of work.

The immediate solution has been to just have everybody listen to what they want through headphones. This generally works well, but tends to reduce social contact and also to violate worry #1 (above): making people think about what they’re going to listen to next. Some folks have even been calling for an audio router of some sort (does such a thing even exist?) which many pairs of headphones could be plugged into so we could all listen to whatever was playing.

Another idea has been to pipe in some form of music throughout the whole office. Of course, the problem with this is that the music is going to have to tend to be pretty bland in order to sound okay when overheard by customers and also not disgust or enrage the intra-office listening public.

My latest hare-brained scheme has been to set up a copy of Ampache on my local machine. I figure this will add back in a little bit of sociality into music-listening as we all see what other people are listening to and rate songs and whatnot, while still keeping the office quiet and letting everybody hear what they want. Looks like a pretty good system so far.

I’m interested to hear how others out there are handling their office music situations. Democratically? Autocratically? Technocratically? CD-by-CD rotation? (what if someone selected Slipknot or something? ugh.) In-cubicle decibel readings?

A common sales question we receive goes something like “How does your product compare with product X?”

And it is a fair question. Some may say it is an easy question. When asked we will reply that our company policy is to not do direct product comparisons. While this does surprise some users, it does not hurt our sales process in any substantial way. Rather than doing a direct product comparison we take the opportunity to give the benefits of our products and will help explain why our products are as popular and successful as they truly are.

A product comparison is a murky type of marketing and in some cases it is simply unethical and even illegal. A product comparison from a company (not a third party) allows the company to choose the features to be compared. And even more difficult is how particular features act and are at the risk of varied interpretation. I could distort any feature in our products to be just enough different to say a competitor doesn’t have it. But I won’t. Due to these facts product comparisons often contain a useless and rather cheesy sales message.

So the next time you see a product comparison take a second and ask yourself if it helps you or turns you away…

When presenting web software case studies I focus on how an application meets the needs of the client I am investigating. An application exists to fulfill the needs of a client while a case study gives measure to its success in reaching those needs. Solutions are designed with the acknowledgment that its intent is to accommodate the varying set of goals of a broad client base. Case studies make effective marketing material because they draw upon an application’s use in a real world context. Ideally, prospective clients identify with real world situations where the application is used to solve problems that are similar to the ones that they are facing.

Feature tours, screenshots, benefit pages, pre-sale knowledge base articles, and online demos are promotional materials that focus on how feature sets give our applications their dynamic functionality. A client is not interested in regurgitated marketing material when they are viewing case studies. They are interested in qualitative analysis, learning through observation, demonstrating how a solution meets the needs of an organization.

I recently added a few new listings, including ArielHost and VARhosting for ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software , to our case study collection. ArielHost found that our customer service software could be used to manage a diverse range of products and services and in the process they used fewer resources, provided quicker resolution to support needs, and kept their customers satisfied. VARHosting demonstrated how ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software allowed them to rise to increased consumer demands in the face of accelerated growth with professionalism and established protocol.

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