I read an article by Dev Patnaik that talked about the success of innovation with empathy vs. innovation without it. I found the examples used (Microsoft’s XBox and Zune) to be unimpressive in getting the point across, but it reminded me of two old (2006 and 2007) posts of mine.

Patnaik writes that “empathy is the ability to see the world through the eyes of another person. Unless new products or services connect with the lives of real people, design or marketing can’t do much to make them succeed.”

I’m always behind on trendy terms such as empathy, so I looked at the same issue through the lens of assumptions.

Here are both posts…

Assumptions are bad

Assumptions. They’re bad for your health, wealth, business and all human interactions. I’ve previously written about how they influence the workplace, but I saw a story this morning that really tickled me as proof of how costly assumptions are to businesses and entire industries.

The article is about how the bike industry found a way to revitalize a falling market with bikes that automatically shift gears. Here’s what caught my eye, “Shimano spent several years figuring out why ridership has decreased, and realized people wanted to ride for fun…The company was shocked to realize its efforts at making newer, more high-performance bikes weren’t winning over new riders.”

“We come to find out these people not only don’t want high performance, they don’t even care about it.”

Notice the final words, “they don’t even care about it.”

The assumption that high performance was critical came from people in the industry—people most likely to be classed as avid cyclists and to whom performance was a key issue, and that assumption was generalized to the entire population.

It’s always that way. Every time someone finds that their belief/attitude/assumption isn’t held by everyone, or at least by the specific group they’re focused upon, they are amazed and even shocked.

How many times have you read an article, such as the one above, and your reaction was, “Well, duh!” That was my reaction to the amazement expressed when performance didn’t matter to the general public.

“Duh,” is my reaction to my own assumptions when they get in the way of my human interactions.

And “Duh,” is my very silent reaction to many of the assumption-based management quandaries I deal with every day—also the managers’ reaction, not silent, once they identify it.

Assumptions And Innovation

Following up on my previous post about how the assumption that performance was the most critical buying issue in cycling helped flatten an industry, comes yet another example of how assumptions lead astray.

The new generation of game consoles from Sony and Microsoft focused on the brilliant graphics demanded by game enthusiasts, but Nintendo is creaming its competitors by looking past graphics and focusing on fun. “Jesse Sutton, interim president and chief executive officer of Majesco, says Nintendo is targeting its hardware at the fastest growing audience in the games business — “casual” gamers who are more interested in fun, simple games rather than the deeply immersive titles that most hard-core gamers prefer.”

Hmm, sounds similar to the people who want to have fun riding bikes.

The car industry is learning the same thing. First, when Honda’s Element and Toyota’s Scion, designed as inexpensive first cars for teens and 20-somethings, got snapped up by their parents, who wanted inexpensive, fun transpiration, instead of performance and mind- and wallet-numbing electronics.

That challenge is being upped again by India’s Tata Motors, which plans to bring out a $2500 car in 2008. And this isn’t just about lower income, emerging markets. “To automakers’ astonishment, cheap cars are also proving to be just as popular in established markets as they are in the developing world…The new generation of cheap cars will be sturdy and reliable and will appeal to Western consumers who want to spend money on things other than transport… The shift to cut-rate wheels is jarring for an industry that has fixated for at least a decade on premium cars…”

The same awakenings have happened/are happening in consumer products, such as soup and cleaning products.

Other industries are climbing on the bandwagon. Even software companies are recognizing that most of their customers aren’t twenty-something programmers and that they don’t want to “work under the hood,” they just want to do whatever it is that they bought the program to do.

What these stories have in common are the assumptions that guided product development came from industry/product aficionados—hard-core devotees who designed products for people like themselves—and ignored the rest of us.

Finally, companies are figuring out just how large the so-called casual market is, how much money it has to spend, and that it’s a giant market anywhere you look for it.

For managers, the lesson is to avoid assumption-myopia by building a team with different backgrounds, varied experience from different industries, and a solid generational mix.

Do that and you’ll have a lot more innovation outside the box.

In times of economic chaos such as now, it’s a wise company not only listens to its current customers, but also broadens its focus to include the “casual” part of its market.

Image credit: flickr

Do you have emapthy for traders?

Image credit: flickr

Sounds just a little crass, doesn’t it? Corporate culture is a set of shared values that affect the behavior of the company. What’s that got to do with email marketing campaigns? But if your corporate culture drives the behavior of your employees, then marketing communications will be a reflection of your company culture.

Email Marketing Virtues

As an example, consider a set of “email marketing virtues.” These virtues dramatically improve the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. I’m not promoting these virtues as good behavior, merely effective behavior for email campaigns.

• Direct and Personal – Emails that come from a real person, as opposed to the “marketing department” or “customer service,” are much more effective in generating responses. On the recipient’s side the same is true. Email sent to an individual by name, “Dear David Persig,” will generate a better response than that same email sent to “Dear Director.”

• Honest – How often have you received an email promoting an e-book or a webinar claiming that “supplies are limited,” when, in fact, they are not. Once the email sender loses your trust, their company ends up in your mental spam bucket. Good email campaigns are honest not because it’s an honorable virtue, but because deception just doesn’t work as well.

• Patient and Persistent – Your customer does not think about your company every day. In fact, it may be a sign of trouble if your customer is thinking about you too much. You want to be a reliable, dependable supplier, always there when your customer does need you. In the same way, an email marketing campaign should be present in the in-box at the moment the prospect needs help. Patience and persistence in email marketing produce consistently higher results than erratic campaigns.

• Polite and Respectful – Do the email communications respect the prospect’s time? Are they short, direct, and clear? Timeworn marketing phrases such as “free,” “limited time,” “act now” and “while supplies last” demonstrate a lack of respect

Corporate Culture Drives Employee Actions

If the company culture demonstrates respect for individuals, then the marketing manager will reflect respect of customers and prospects in the email communications.

If the corporate culture truly values honesty and integrity, the marketing manager demonstrates that integrity in email communications to prospects.

If the corporate culture values long-term results over “quick hits,” then the marketing manager can take the time to build long-term relationships with prospects, patiently and persistently.

To discover your corporate culture just read your marketing communications.

If they sound like a late-night TV infomercial, don’t change the people, change the culture.

In the previous post our friend Jim Easterbrook, Director of Internet Security at Midwest Regional Bank, had just received his first marketing email from your company – Super Security, Inc.

Your first email passed Jim’s six intuitive spam tests, so he did not delete it immediately. Instead, he put it into his “To Read Later” folder. Congratulations to you and your marketing team.

Of course, Jim did not find time to read that email, so it got deleted a few weeks later when he cleaned out the folder. But it did its job. It created a little name recognition for Super Security, and made the initial introduction for a longer term relationship.

As VP of Marketing for Super Security, you continue your email marketing campaign, approximately one per month, for the next year.

Jim continues to file the next few emails in his “To Read Later” folder.  He likes the titles, he’s beginning to trust you and Super Security, and he has even opened one or two of them, but he has many urgent tasks and the services of Super Security are not critical at this point.

Then something happens to Jim and Midwest Regional. It could be a merger, a promotion for Jim, an internet attack on the company, or one of his vendors let him down. You may never know the trigger event, but suddenly Jim has a business need for internet security services.

Now he is alert and tuned to any information about internet security. When he gets your next email, he opens it and reads it thoroughly. The case study you reference in the email sounds interesting, so Jim clicks the link to read that study on your website.

Now Jim is ready for your team to engage with him, based on the relationship you have built through your email communications.

The chart below summarizes the email relationship building process.

As the chart shows, your sales team calls Jim only when he expresses interest by opening the email or clicking a link in the email. Jim’s interest level drives the intensity of the interchange. When an external event creates a business need, you will know by Jim’s actions.

These simple guidelines will lead you to effective email communications and easy sales when the time is right.

Always

• Be open and direct.
• Be patient and persistent.
• Respond to your prospect’s actions.

and opportunity will come to you.

If you are doing email marketing campaigns, you need to understand the inbox of your email recipients. If you can think like your recipient, and sit in his chair as he works his way through a huge stack of email, then you will succeed. In this post we will follow Jim Easterbrook, the Director of Internet Security at Midwest Regional Bank.

Some background: Midwest Regional Bank avoided the debt meltdown, did not take any loans from the Federal government, and had minimal exposure to consumer real estate loans. So now Midwest Regional Bank is growing rapidly, gaining new depositors who like its independence from Congress and gaining new business clients, too. Because businesses are fleeing banks that took Federal loans, Midwest Regional can choose the most creditworthy businesses as its new customers.

Jim has a big problem. He’s swamped with work and his inbox is swamped with emails. He cleaned it out Friday afternoon, only to see another 500 emails waiting for him on Monday morning.

Here’s what happens to them

• Jim’s spam filter automatically sorts about 350 emails into his spam folder. He plans to sort through the spam for any interesting emails, but somehow never has the time. Therefore, if the filter calls it spam, then Jim will never see it. (You can keep your email out of his spam folder, and we will talk more about this in a future post.)

• There are about 50 emails from coworkers, suppliers, or customers. Jim responds to these high-priority emails immediately, and then starts dealing with the remaining 100 emails, all lower priority from external sources. Your email probably falls into this bucket.

• Jim set up several rules in his Outlook (the company-selected email application) to help him manage the email. These automatic rules sort about 60 into various folders, such as community, professional and industry. These emails are typically newsletters, meeting notices, and professional correspondence that Jim handles in the evenings when he has time.

• Your email is one of the one of the remaining forty sitting unsorted and mostly unwanted in his inbox. Jim’s goal is to clean out these forty emails in five minutes, so your first email to him will get only about 5-10 seconds of his time.

First Email – Six Spam Tests

Jim uses a simple set of six external cues to evaluate an email before opening it.

Email title – Make it direct, specific, relevant, and plain. Jim intuitively recognizes certain words and phrases as spam. If he sees “free,” “limited time, “dear friend,” or other key phrases, he hits the spam button immediately. Your email should contain some information of value to Jim, and the title should reflect that content.

Recipient Email Address – Send business information to Jim’s business email. Jim has both personal and business email addresses. If your email went to jimeasterbrook0057@aol.com or any other ISP provider (comcast.net, msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.) he will delete it immediately. Take the time to find his business email address and send business emails there.

Sender Name – Make it personal. Your email should not come from the marketing department or the service team. Your email should come from a real, live person, preferably the CEO or an appropriate vice president in your organization.

Sender Email Address – Be transparent. The email address should always match the sender name; Jim unconsciously checks for this. If the sender is Fred Broomfield, then Jim expects to see  fbroomfield@ or fredb@ in the email prefix. Jim is looking for any reason to hit the delete button, so the email address must be obvious and transparent.

Email size and attachments – Small is beautiful, but attachments are ugly. As a sender, you are requesting time from the recipient. Jim always checks the email size, so keep it short, polite and respectful. He does not have time to read long emails and any attachment gets it deleted immediately.

Congratulations, your email passed all of Jim’s mental spam filter tests, so he did not delete it immediately. In fact, Jim moved the email into his “To Read Later” folder.  But don’t get too excited. That folder gets pretty full and Jim seldom has time to read the emails in it. Typically, he just empties the folder every week or so, without reading many of them.

Build a Relationship

The important thing is that with this first email you have started building a long-term relationship with Jim. Keep it up. Next week we will see how Jim handles the next few emails he receives from you.

Did you resolve to take the plunge into email marketing in 2009? If so, you need a good email list. Finding an email list is easy, but finding clean, qualified, effective email list is much more difficult. To ease the challenge, here are five questions that will help you build a more effective email list.

1. Is the list targeted to your prospects?

One of the first steps in a marketing campaign is to identify your prospects. Does this list specifically target your prospects? How do you know? For business-to-business (B2B) sales we identify target prospects at two levels – target accounts, or companies, and target contacts, people within each target account.

First identify the target accounts. For example, if you are selling transportation services then you want to target companies that handle physical goods. Use

• industry codes such as SIC or NAICS to identify target companies; and
• company sales to identify companies with the size that fits your services.

If you cannot get exact sales numbers for the company, you can usually find a sales estimate or a sales range. Even an employee count can help you estimate if the company is suitable for your services.

When your service is limited to a territory, use geography to narrow your target list. If you sell transportation services on the west coast of the US, then identify companies that ship in that transit lane.

Second, identify the target contacts within each account. Which people at an account use your services; approve purchases of your services? Use function and level to identify these contacts.

For your west coast transportation business, maybe the Manager or Director of West Coast Logistics uses your services and the General Manager or VP of Operations approves the initial contract. Depending on the size of your target, C-level executives (CEO, CFO, and COO) may not be involved with your contract unless it is especially large or mission critical. That means that the levels you want to target are Manager, Director, and VP. The functions you want to target are operations, logistics, shipping, transportation, and deployment. These people want to learn about your services.

Does the list contain your targets? Now that you can describe your targets specifically, you can tell your list provider exactly what you want – company sales, company industry, company location, employee level and employee function. Don’t assume or accept assurances, instead get a sample of the list. Do the companies and titles match your specifications? Do they match your targets?

2. Is the list current?

Job changes are accelerating. Senior level executives stay at a job less than three years, on average. With the recession driving significant layoffs and downsizing, many more emails will be obsolete in 2009.

• How does your list provider update its email lists?
• When was each email used last? Did it bounce?

The provider should have this information for you.

Use your list sample to test the emails. Send individual emails to a large test group, and track the responses yourself. Does your bounce rate correspond to the rate promised by the list provider?

3. Is the list complete?

For B2B sales, every email data record should contain this information.

If the sample from your list provider is missing any of these data elements ask why, but don’t hesitate to find a different list provider if the provider can’t supply the missing data.

Email Quality Counts. All email addresses are not the same. For business emails, you should demand a personal prefix and business domain. For instance, john.severinsen@ibmus.com is far better than severinsenfamily@yahoo.com for business communications.

Examine each email in detail. Is the email prefix personal, and does it match the person’s name? For our friend John Severinsen, the email prefix should be some variation of his name—j.severinsen, jseverinsen, severinj, etc. Look out for prefixes like sales@, info@, and nospam@. Not only will you get no response from these emails, but they may land you on a spam filter list.

Examine the email domain. Is it a business domain or an email provider? Do not send any business emails to email provider domains such as aol.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, gmail.com, pacbell.net, Comcast.net, or other email service providers. That is the fastest route to getting on an email black list.4.

Does “Opt-in” matter?

Yes, opt-in counts, but only in one situation—when the person opts-in to your email list. This “direct” opt-in is extremely valuable to you, and only to you.

Indirect opt-in, where the person opted-in to another list, say for the Modern Logistics magazine, that does not mean the person opted-in to receive email from you. Your list provider will show you the text in their email service agreement where their subscribers agreed to “accept occasional email communications from affiliates…” By buying that list you become a licensed affiliate, but the recipient just does not care. You have probably clicked your agreement to a few of these opt-in lists yourself. If the email is unwanted or not appropriate, it gets deleted at best or even reported as spam. Third party opt-in simply does not provide any value for you as a list purchaser.

5. Does size matter?

Does each recipient of your emails care how many other people received that email? Would your sales increase if you could email to one billion people in China? Good targeting and quality content are much more important than list size. Ideally you want to contact everyone within your target market and not a single person outside your target market. That’s the right size. When you focus your efforts on targeting and content quality, your market and your email list will grow naturally.

6. Test, Test, and Test Some More!

You are the only one who can determine the quality and effectiveness of the email lists you purchase. So test each list first, before you buy it. Ask for a sample of 50-100 records. If you already know key contacts at a few current accounts or target companies, ask your provider for samples from those companies.

Look closely at each email record. See if your contacts appear in the samples from companies you know.  Are any data fields blank? Any obvious errors in data format, such as 4-digit zip codes, misspelled cities or states? Any suspicious patterns in the data?

Examine the emails. Any bad email prefixes or email domains? Any illegal characters? Any bad email formats? Any email provider domains? Does the email prefix correspond to the person’s name?

Send some individual emails. Send personal, individual emails to the people. Track the results. Call them after sending the email. Does the telephone number ring? Is it the right person? Did they receive your email? After you test out 100 email data records this way, you will know the quality of the list. And you may even make a sale!

Contrary to promotional hype, successful email campaigns require significant effort to make them pay off. The key point to remember is that quality gives you more bang for your buck than quantity.

Best wishes for your email success in 2009,
Richard Barrett