Like other telemarketers, they let you know in no uncertain terms that you’re just a number to them.  They have a bank of operators and an auto-dialer that makes as many calls as they need to keep all their operators busy.  And if all their operators are busy and no one can answer your hello, so be it; they’ll get you on the next round.  Just consider each call to be a gentle reminder to put your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry.

There’s exactly one case where I’ve gotten a telemarketing call that I’ve appreciated.  The Acura dealership (or part of their ownership group) calls me every few months to remind me about getting an oil change and let me know what specials they have on that type of service.  What’s the difference between this and the San Francisco Chronicle?

My dealer lets me know what they’d be calling about and asked for my permission.  The value proposition was obvious: they call me around the time I need an oil change with a lower price than I would have gotten if I had to remember myself.

Permission marketing isn’t a new concept.  People have been asking whether they can follow-up on a phone conversation or a correspondence for as long as business has existed.

But this month also marks the tenth anniversary of Seth Godin’s book about Permission Marketing and he summarizes his book as follows, “Don’t be selfish. You’re not in charge. Make promises and keep them. It’s like dating. It’s an asset, it’s expensive and it’s worth it.”

I’m often (pleasantly) surprised at how big of a thank you I get when I follow-up with someone where we didn’t get the opportunity to work together after we first met.  I spend most of my time solving problems for other people so I take copious notes and try to remember something about that person and what I can solve for them.  Simply thinking about others at that level of detail and how you can help them grow their business, or make their lives easier, is often enough to get their permission to contact them again.

What some companies fail to remember is that unless you’re a monopoly or oligopoly provider, you can’t brute force your way to a customer.  That’s not completely true: you can use brute force, but you’ll need to throw money at the problem.

It’s an era where the traditional ad spend and marketing muscle are being augmented and sometimes replaced by more personal connections.  Major brands like Hyundai are basing campaigns today around the social networking referrals they get from Twitter, and even very small businesses like food trucks are creating their own online communities.

Other businesses also want to apply the concepts of permission marketing to building long-term business relationships through drip marketing, which we’ll cover in our next post.

“So how do you propose we grow our program?” he asked.  Brute force using mass media was out of the question given the budget constraints.  He wanted to leverage the channels they’d built through their blogs and email marketing.

“How is your program currently generating customer referrals?” I asked.  “No cost marketing, I like it and we do get more than a few referrals.”

Most companies get referrals from their existing customers and his was no different.  But he added, “I think there’s more we can do to get customers signing up their friends.  Most of what we do today isn’t formal, we have a great program and they tell their friends.”

The challenge with this approach was: because there’s no call-to-action, his company has left it to chance that the customer will come up with the idea of referring a friend.

“They might not know you’re looking for referrals, or they’re busy, or —” and I paused for a second.

“One of my friends has this knack for picking the worst restaurants.  One time, a place brought all of us a platter of rice that smelled and tasted like kerosene.  We sent back the rice three times before the owner came to our table, hands in the air, protesting that he didn’t smell or taste anything wrong.  We all looked at each other, settled on getting some flat bread instead, and we haven’t let my friend live it down to this day.”

“You’re obviously not saying our program is like kerosene rice…”

“Of course not, here’s the deal: we had to have been to at least a dozen good restaurants my friend’s recommended.  But after a funny story or two, he’s now got a reputation for referring us to bad restaurants.  For you, everyone knows they take a chance when they make a referral.”

“So step one is not making them look bad.”

“Right.  The next step is getting them to overcome both their inertia and the risk they take, no matter how small.”  So we went through a few of the most popular types of referral programs.

We talked about a typical affiliate referral system where a customer gets a reward or percentage for referring another person or business.  Usually this is done with a referral code embedded in a link, from a website, blog or email campaign.  That code identifies the referrer and lets your system know that a referral needs to be credited.

“The best practice here is to give both the referrer and the referral some sort of reward.  If you only reward the referrer, then it looks like that person is trying to make a sale.  If you only reward the referral, then the referrer doesn’t have a personal incentive to refer you.”  I’ve summarized the basics; there are more nuances from this word-of-mouth communication study.

The reward doesn’t always have to be monetary, though.  “You have a program where people can show how successful they’ve been using your methodology.  Many folks would be proud to share how successful they’ve been with others as part of a community, not just people they know but others who ask about your program.  It’s similar to what I’ve done for a number of software companies that want to reward people who extend their platforms.”

“The key is to lower the barriers to entry.  Make it easy.”

A referral program can spread like wildfire if the offer is strong and easy to communicate.   “So we can leverage what we’ve done on the blog and email marketing?”  It’s not difficult to automatically generate links from a blog, web publisher, or its landing pages that pass the referral code needed for this type of program.

And email marketing systems often give you the ability to embed a specific code for each person who receives your email; that code would be the referral link needed to credit both the referrer and referral.

The technology provides automation to make getting referrals easier and more scalable.  The same technology can be used to create stronger and more profitable relationships with the customers who will be providing you referrals, and influence your prospects to move from ‘maybe’ to ‘yes’.

“The price of postage is going up and it isn’t any cheaper to send my flyers out than it was ten years ago.  What gives with that?  Now I need to send out a more colorful, better quality flyer to get the same attention I got before.  And it’s costing me $1.46 a piece.”

Cost is one thing and I knew she had a Rolodex of over 1,000 strong, but if it was producing good ROI, it wouldn’t be an issue.  “Do you know how many folks are reading your newsletter?” I asked.

“Couldn’t tell you, I know they end up in a pile like this.”  One of the clever things she did was hide a couple random names from her subscription list in the flyer she sent.  If that person called in, they’d win a prize.  Even so, there’d be a few months back-to-back where she didn’t get a call from any of the names she dropped.

“What if you always knew which people were reading your newsletters?” I asked.  Her posture perked up a bit and I followed up, “And that buck-forty-six you spend per shot doesn’t end up in a landfill?”

Like most people, she knew about email marketing and the huge cost differential between sending one email and sending a newsletter.  She’d also heard about the ability to see which people had opened the email, track who clicked through, and send messages automatically.

“You can also choose different follow up messages too.”  We talked about how she wanted to reward people who read her messages and that she could send a better offer by email automatically to people who clicked on a message than ones who didn’t.  Or she could send a gentle reminder message to people who didn’t open her last newsletter email.

“Different offers?”

“Different offers, I have another customer who segments his list by product lines and sends an email to upsell his other products based not only on what they’ve bought in the past but how they’ve responded to other offers.  They use their email to send folks to their website with a special referral code.  That way they can keep their emails short enough to scan quickly, draw interested people to their landing pages for more information, and hone their landing pages to get a higher conversion ratio.”

She calculated the thousand or so greenbacks she’d save by going to greener marketing and how she’d get more tools for better personalizing her marketing towards her Rolodex.

“All this for not sending more flyers to the landfill?” she asked.  “This is just the beginning.  The next step is for you to turn your customers into your evangelists.”

We got to the page about their consulting services and I stopped for a moment to bring up a new browser window.  I asked him to describe what they did, while I opened up one of his competitors’ sites.  He read about what the competition said on their website and sighed, “Well, that’s exactly what we do too — I know we’re better but I’m not sure how we’d differentiate ourselves.”

In a way, that was true.  You could run down the checklist of all the services his company provided and it would look the same as his competition’s.  Which is one reason why their websites said basically the same things and had similar slogans.  If it weren’t for the images, you couldn’t tell them apart.

“Tell me about one of your happy customers.”  He talked about how he’d managed to save a company he was working with 20% on their labor costs because he installed an automated system to take care of something very manually intensive.  We talked some more and he had literally dozens of these types of stories that showed how his service was different than anyone else’s.

He then interjected himself and said “Well, I can’t put that on our website, we’d have to change everything every time we put one of those case studies up.”  I smiled a bit and fired up a demo of how to add content to a blog and how the navigation would adapt to fit whatever content his team added.

Then I showed him how his website can be your blog or it can be a part of your blog.  In fact, the main website can be built using the same software as your blog.  That way, he wouldn’t necessarily need a daily webmaster: the entire site is manageable by point-click-and-type.

“It’ll also make your web presence easier to find,” I said, showing him how search engines aggressively index content from blogs.  It wasn’t just search engines.  “You can also cross-promote your content automatically, on services like Twitter and LinkedIn.”

I often say that when websites are created, they’re born alone — where that proverbial tree that falls in the forest where no one hears it.  A blog is born connected to potential readers through ping services that notify dozens of websites around the world that you have new content, and through social media where your content can be integrated.

“My blog posts automatically show up on social networks like LinkedIn, where people get to know my credentials.  Then they visit my blog to get to know my company’s style and capabilities.”  He wasn’t a Twitter user so we didn’t go into this, but I’ll often cross-promote some of my articles there and get traffic and subscribers from folks doing Twitter searches.

“I’m not really into this social media stuff,” he said and then he paused.  He looked at the computer, took a sip of coffee and looked back up, “But I can use what we write for the blog in my newsletters, so we don’t have to do that work twice, right?”  I nodded and sensed he was thinking about the next step.

“And if I can email people the newsletter instead of mailing it them, I don’t need as much labor or stamps?”  Then I showed him how he could draw people back to his website and blog to provide more upsell opportunities for his sales force.

Blogs give businesses three distinct advantages.  First, your business will have a larger search engine presence.  It’s easier to find your business on Google with a blog than without one.  This will bring you more traffic that you can convert.

Second, your business will have a fast and convenient way of publishing ad-hoc information and syndicating it across the web.

If you know how to use Microsoft Word or equivalent, blogging will be second nature.  Then, when you have new announcements or product releases, you can write a blog post that’s about the length of a longish email and post it using your blog.

Your blog will then ping dozens of sites that will take your new content and notify hundreds of other sites, making it available to their readers.

Unlike websites, blogs are born connected to other websites. They have software built-in that talks to other sites and gives worldwide (or hyperlocal) exposure to your content.  With the right setup, your blog will even tell search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN when you’ve published new content.  That way, you’re more likely to be included and it’ll happen more quickly.

Third, blogging is the great equalizer.  A blog gives your business the opportunity to compete on equal footing with larger companies.  Instead of competing based on ad budget, you can build a reputation for expertise by describing parts of the business that only a true expert or insider would know.

As your content gets more popular and receives links from other sites, you’ll organically appear higher and more frequently on search engines.

In this age of skepticism demanding transparency, there are no more faceless corporations.  If you don’t put a face on your company, someone else will.  And what that face becomes won’t be up to you.

So no matter how large or small your company, your blog posts will help prospects and customers get to know you as a company and connect on a more interpersonal level than they would necessarily with the traditional “faceless” corporation.

Your blog doesn’t have to get a lot of comments to be successful, I’ve spoken with many businesses worry about negative comments.  When I ask whether they’d rather receive a negative comment on their blog so that they can respond, or a negative comment on a third-party site where that might not be an option, the answer was overwhelmingly one-sided.  You can turn it into a positive and there are even cases where other customers chime in about how the complaint itself isn’t merited.  Or exercise editorial control for egregious trolling.

Our next blog post talks about how blogs can be used with your current website and methods for building traffic to your web presence using traditional and social media.

But if the purpose of your website is to generate more business, then your most important metric is your conversion ratio.  The first step to getting your conversion ratio is to define your goal: what are you trying to get your visitors to do?

The visitors who succeed in doing so are called conversions.  And your conversion ratio is the percentage of your visitors who convert.  The reason why I used the word “succeed” above is because you might have visitors who wanted — and, in fact, tried their best — to convert, but didn’t or couldn’t.

There are the websites that literally dare you to buy something by requiring you to fill out a sign-up form before putting an item in your shopping cart.  There are the websites where the contact form is temporarily broken and there isn’t a phone number as backup.  I’ve even seen business websites without contact information.

Most sites have a more subtle issue: they don’t clearly communicate a mutually beneficial offer to their visitors.  This offer is the call-to-action, and it encourages visitors to convert.  Your call-to-action should be easy to measure and appropriate for a person surfing the web.  If your website isn’t generating as much business as you’d hoped, you may want to understand common reasons why some calls-to-action don’t work.

The easiest way to understand how your visitors see your call-to-action today is to work backwards.  Start from what you consider success, whether it’s filling out a contact form, making a purchase, entering a promotional code, etc.  Then map how a visitor might be instructed to get there and trace how a visitor might have seen those instructions.  Many site owners find it’s not as easy to convert as they’d envisioned.

Conversions don’t have to happen on the web.  Many times, you want to get a phone call.  The main issue with getting calls is that they aren’t as easily tracked as web conversions.  After all, most people put their main business phone number on their site.  How can you tell where your caller got your number?

As part of any good integrated marketing campaign, it’s a best practice to have a separate phone number for whatever initiatives you run.  The best part is that you can bypass the phone company altogether and get a forwarding phone number for a nominal cost.

It’s easy to see how the Internet has become more ingrained into business.  Over the next few articles, we’ll discuss integrated marketing techniques that combine the immediacy and measureability of the Internet with social and traditional media.  Our next blog post talks about how to create websites that already have communication mechanisms with Google and other websites built-in.

The most common example is web analytics, which is often managed by IT in mid-sized companies.  IT departments typically have a number of priorities that range from thankless basics like ensuring running email and network security to coordinating and executing the technical requirements of product and marketing initiatives.

Most companies track web metrics, but if yours doesn’t, you don’t necessarily need to purchase an expensive analytics package then have your IT department install it.  There are many hosted web analytics systems available, like Google Analytics, which are available for free — and have more reports than most marketers and executives have the time or patience to read.

Installation is simple and may not require IT.  It just needs several lines of JavaScript to be added to each page on your site, and this is usually very easy if your site is backed by a content publishing system.  And with these hosted web analytics systems, you don’t need special software or IT intervention to generate reports.

If your IT department manages your site, they might be picky about which system you use.  Should the system require software installation, it means they have to dedicate the resources to learning and maintaining it (i.e. they have to bless it).

With a hosted system, you might encounter resistance because the data is stored by a third-party or because it requires minor modification to the website.  But these generally aren’t showstoppers because of how important it is to measure the success of web initiatives.

It’s so important that in many organizations, web analytics reports are a subject unto themselves.  Creating these reports becomes its own job, with increasingly complex graphs and figures being presented.  It’s very easy to get bogged down in analysis paralysis either sorting through all the different reports, or spending time trying to choose between analytics packages that have one type of report over another.

The reality is that for most mid-sized companies not doing retail on the web, there’s not enough traffic or variation to provide all the data needed for an expensive analytics package to bring you measurable results.  What’s more important is knowing you need the right metrics, like conversion ratios and return on investment (ROI).

Web analytics will capture the information you need about your web visitors, but your site needs to be structured correctly and substantial enough to put the information in a relevant context.

In our next blog post, we’ll talk about how to create more successful websites by avoiding some common pitfalls and encouraging visitors towards the path you’d like them to take.

There are literally hundreds of statistics that you can gather and analyze.  But not all of them are a wise use of your resources.  We’ll look at the most popular metrics and show how they’ve evolved over the years to be a concise measurement of the success of your web presence.

Hits. In the 90’s, the most prominent measurement was hits but that was widely and quickly discredited because one person loading one web page will almost always generate more than one hit.  That one person visiting one web page create a hit for that page plus every image loaded on that page.

Page Views. When laypeople say hit in this day and age, they mean a page view.  Page views are a double-edged statistic.  One the one hand, more page views can mean a reader is interested in your site.  On the other, it could mean they’re lost and can’t find what they’re looking for.

It also begs the question, would you rather have a reader look at a hundred pages on your site and leave, or look at one page and become a customer?  For business sites, the answer is always the same.

Time on Site. The same goes for the time a person spends on your site.  Would you rather have a user spend 10 minutes on your site and leave, or 1 minute on your site and contact you?

Unique Visitors. Almost everyone says they want more visitors to their site, though, and estimating unique visitors is today’s most popular measurement of a site’s popularity and success.  And marketers can easily use this metric to measure the popularity of their campaigns.

This metric is useful to a point, but it doesn’t say anything about how well your web presence is bringing your company leads or customers.  After all, most unique visitors aren’t actionable: your sales force can’t contact them since you don’t know who they are.  Most, but not all of them.

Conversion Ratio. You actually do know who some of your unique visitors are.  They converted from being random unique visitors into your leads and customers.  These are people where your website worked, and knowing how many visitors it took to get one lead is the single most important metric for your web presence.

This is called the conversion ratio, and to get more business, you can either increase the number of visitors to your site, or you can increase percentage of people who convert.  The two require different techniques: one for increasing your traffic and another for optimizing your landing pages.

Return on Investment (ROI). The conversion ratio has a direct impact on when you see ROI for the campaign.  At the beginning of the online marketing campaign, you measure ROI by the amount of business you would need to generate in order to pay for the campaign.  Done correctly, a web presence never stops generating new leads or business.

The conversion rate comes into play when accelerating that ROI.  When you know your conversion rate, you can estimate how long it will take to achieve a full return and increase the resources you put into it to accelerate that return.

You can build a referral cycle using referral bonuses and email marketing, which will ramp up your growth as your customer base continues to grow.  As you get more customers, you build a greater referral base that can market for you.

These metrics are important because you can only improve what you can measure.  Getting these statistics isn’t always as easy as it seems because of both technological and human factors.  In our next blog post, we’ll show you ways to get these metrics and some of the traps to look out for.

Over a decade ago, I had the opportunity to talk with the world’s largest technology company at the time about their hard drive business.  One of the managers there talked about how they were a metrics-driven organization and how they measured productivity.  He went on to talk about how every one of their programmers was rated based on the amount of code they produced.

That code controls how and how well the hard drive works, and it’s stored in memory that’s purchased and built into the drive.  The more memory you need to buy, the more expensive your COGS.

Code is like writing.  You can write either “six words to convey an idea” or “a long missive that meanders around the point you’re trying to make until you’ve finally communicated the gist of what you’re trying to say”.

The second phrase is four times more expensive than the first, but gets you a higher rating.  Basically, their way of measuring how successful their programmers were caused their manufacturing costs to rise in the same way.

What happened to them?  In 2002, the company sold the division, suffering 1,500 layoffs and a $2 billion charge in the process, including those “related to productivity initiatives”.

So what are the right metrics to use for measuring the success of your integrated marketing campaigns?  That’s the subject of our next blog post.

It’s very much based on the concept of gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  In order for that to happen, your marketing messages must be consistently reinforced at every point where you interact with customers.

But integrated marketing goes beyond integrated marketing communications, which focuses on consistency of messaging across different mediums.

Instead, integrated marketing as a whole uses a number of different mediums to convert people into leads and provide data to support turning those leads into customers.

The campaigns center around a strong web presence — usually a website or a blog, sometimes a microsite — but may also include email, print, direct mail, television, radio and social media to support and publicize that web presence.

Integrated marketing also combines the data you get back about your customers from those mediums to give you a more complete picture of your market and the segments you’re targeting.  This information is used to identify how well the campaign is performing in those segments and can sometimes be detailed enough to help close individual deals.

With integrated marketing campaigns, your best data comes typically from web analytics and email response measurement: the reason is that the information is easily, reliably and automatically measured without using special phone numbers, printed promotional codes or coupons.

But it’s not always easy to get the right metrics and interpret them correctly.  In our next blog post, I’ll tell you a real-life story about how one company picked the wrong metric and encouraged its employees to make that division unprofitable.  Then I’ll share how other companies measure their integrated marketing success and use that information to grow their businesses.