FC Software Blog

Let me start this post off with a warning that I’m a developer not a sales or marketing person so I will have different views on this subject compared to people actually pushing products to end users/clients.

This aside though I want to talk a little about Social CRM and how I see it.  I’ve been reading a lot of articles recently mostly linked from twitter regarding Social CRM and how its the future of  CRM.  Now don’t get me wrong I’m all for developing CRM products into the future adding new features and aggregation abilities but the concept of a Social CRM just eludes me.

Everyone who’s harping on about Social CRM is saying its the future of customer interaction and that it’ll help you generate more leads by using social networks.  I see a small flaw in this that most companies especially the bigger ones in the food chain simply don’t use twitter, facebook, myspace whatever.  If they do use it they use it more like Dell does for example to spread the word of their products to the end consumer in a B2C role not a B2B.

Just how many companies out there really use Social Networking tools to keep in touch with their suppliers/clients etc.  I’m betting its probably less than 1%.

Now we’re a company that sells B2B and B2C we have our blog (you’re reading it) and we have our twitter feed.  Would we use our twitter as a marketing source? Quite possibly to announce new products or updates to existing products, after all its what Dell uses it for and they make a nice sum from it but is there any real benefit to using it as a primary focus for a CRM.

Personally I think not though I guess time will tell.  The issue that concerns me most of all at current though is that our clients and the people we’re speaking to are already complaining that the major CRM’s out there have too many features, are slow because of too many features and that they simply don’t use half the stuff in there already.  Adding in a social networking aspect to it all is adding yet more layers of fluff to a CRM and taking away from the real purpose of a good CRM system.  Thats to automate sales processes and help sales people work faster and more efficiently maximising their new sales and also reselling to existing customers.

The companies I can see benefiting from a Social CRM are companies the sell primarily B2C and sell off the shelf products books/dvd’s/computers etc.  At the end of the day could you imagine a company that sells bolts for engineering firms really benefiting from a Social CRM? or could you imagine stock brokers benefiting from it at all?

Personally I can’t see any real benefit to it for now and certainly not for the bulk of companies out there.  Perhaps over time though this’ll shift and hooking into social networks for 50%+ of your marketing may be the future.

Is it going to be the future of  customer interaction and feed back? again I can’t see any real benefit to it twitter limits you to 140 chars could you really have a conversation with a customer over needs and issues in that much space?  It makes more sense to me for companies that want customer interaction and discussions to setup forums where real discussions can take place.

Perhaps I’m just an old stick in the mud but to me the phrase “Social CRM” is just a marketing gimmic used by sales and marketing people to ride the buzz created by the social networks out there.  The jury in my head is still out on my final decision I guess time will tell and it could be I’ve got to play catch up and add social features to our CRM but I believe the time for that isn’t yet.

Ramblings by Dave [@] fcsoftware.co.uk

Over the past few years, research has continued to prove the benefits of e-mail marketing for business: low costs, high conversion rates and detailed tracking are all notable features. But e-mail marketing is becoming much more than just a tool for spammers and e-businesses. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy on the differences between spam and permission-based emails, and more and more of them are accepting permission-based e-mail marketing as a positive replacement for direct mail.

The best news is that the majority of people who receive permission-based e-mails open, on average, 78% of them.

Jupiter Research reports effective email marketing campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits of broadcast mailings. But crafting an effective business email is both an art and a science. Here is a list of factors, potential problems and effective solutions to keep in mind:

1. Spam! Spam! Spam! I don’t need any Viagra!

The average consumer receives more than 300 emails a week, 62% of which are spam. No wonder there’s such hostility towards the industry. But spam filters, bulk folders and “report spam” features are helping consumers become more at ease about the perils of spam. While 89% of users cited spam as a major concern in 2003, that number dropped to 85% in 2004, proportionally to an increase in the use of spam-fighting tools.

So as a permission-based business email marketer, what can you do? One tip is to remind your subscribers to add you to their “safe senders” list. The second, and most important, tactic is to make sure your email marketing service provider has a good relationship with ISPs. This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns go into your subscribers’ inboxes, not their junk mail folders. When choosing an email marketing software, make sure the company has strict anti-spam policies and complies with the guidelines of Can-Spam.

2. Images and formatting: Why do my emails look broken?

Broken email campaigns are an increasing concern among email marketers, especially since several companies and web-based email providers now block graphics as a measure to combat spam. In fact, according to ClickZ, 40% of email marketing messages delivered to inboxes are “broken.”

This was actually something that came up during Eliteweb.cc’s beta-testing phases, as we had a client in the Canadian Government whose recipients were mostly using highly secure email programs. The solution we came up has now become one of our key competitive advantages.

What Eliteweb.cc does is it publishes every single email marketing campaign sent to a secure location on the web (a location only original recipients of the email can access, thanks to encrypted technology that automatically authenticates the user). The technology also ensures you can track your users’ behaviors, even if they are reading your email campaign at the secure web location.

3. Personalization and relevant content: In a business e-mail, one size does not fit all.

In a recent study by DoubleClick, email users were 72% more likely to respond to a business e-mail if its content was based on the interests they had specified. That number points out the absolute importance of allowing users to choose their own interest groups and have control over which business e-mails they receive. The most popular interest categories, according to the study, are coupons and household goods.

But your coupon is no good unless the user opens the email. Users in the study said the most compelling reason for them to open a business email is the name in the “from” field. So it’s a good idea to make sure your company name is clearly stated there. Another major factor is the “subject” line. Users cite discount offers and interesting news as the most compelling subject lines, followed by new product announcements and free shipping offers.

4. Click-through and conversion: Show me the money!

So the user has opened your email and read the content. Great. But where’s the sale? There’s good news here. For one, consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases as a direct result of a business email campaign. One-third of users in the DoubleClick study had purchased something by clicking a link on an email. Another 42% clicked on an email link for more information, then purchased the product at a later time. Second, online couponing is booming: 73% of consumers have redeemed an online coupon for an online purchase, and 59% have redeemed an online coupon offline.

In terms of industries, the top performers are travel, hardware/software, electronics, apparel, food, home furnishings, gifts/flowers and sporting goods. All companies sending business emails in those categories said between 71% and 80% of recipients have purchased their products because of an email campaign.

There’s no need to fret if your company doesn’t fit in to one of those industries. The overall landscape for email marketing conversions is looking brighter every day. The average click-to-purchase rate has increased nearly 30% since 2004 and the average orders-per-email-delivered rate has increased more than 18% since last year.

5. Stats tracking: Who are my real consumers?

E-mail marketing is an increasingly popular tool in effective CRM, and it’s about time more businesses recognize that. First off, if your provider’s email services for business do not include detailed, real-time tracking, you’re getting a raw deal. Real-time tracking is now an industry standard, and it’s highly valuable, as it allows you to see the exact moment a user opens your campaign, clicks on your link and makes that purchase. Studying your users can help you improve your communications efforts, so each campaign performs better than the last (several email service providers also let you compare the performance of your campaigns).

But many marketers are still in the dark. According to a recent WebTrends research, only 5% of marketers are very confident in the measurement of their online marketing efforts, while 26% admit they’re “flying blind.” WebTrends says the low confidence comes from a lack of knowledge when it comes to measurement, which means there’s still a lot of work to be done.

In email marketing, a blind shot won’t take you very far. But if you aim properly by following these essential rules of play, you should soon be reaping the same major results as so many online and offline businesses.

Article by

Robert Burko

http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/tips-for-effective-email-marketing-83868.html

When implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) system, many business owners struggle to understand how standard definitions relate to their specific business processes. CRM software solutions (Salesforce.com, ACT, etc) typically use terms like lead, contact, account, opportunity, etc. which may or may not clearly apply to your business vocabulary. Usually it’s best to first understand how these terms are generally defined and then decide how (and if) to modify them to fit your specific business processes.

LEAD – anyone you think may be interested in your product or service. Leads are usually tracked by their status (e.g. open, contacted, unqualified, or qualified, etc.) and by their source (e.g. a referral, networking event, tradeshow, purchased lead source, web enquiry, etc.).

CONTACT – an individual (associated with an account) usually associated with a unique business opportunity. Contacts are usually tracked by their (duh) contact information (address, phone number, email, etc). Once leads are qualified and considered as potential prospects then are usually converted to a contact/account pair (and usually assigned to a salesperson).

ACCOUNT – generally an organization with whom you do business (could be a customer, vendor, partner, etc). Accounts are usually tracked by their industry (finance, manufacturing, etc.), their type (e.g. customer, competitor, partner, etc) and sometimes many other details like website, revenue, number of employees, etc. Multiple contacts usually exist within a single account (i.e. for different departments, projects, etc).

OPPORTUNITY – is a specific business potential associated with an account and contact. Opportunities are the source of sales forecasting and revenue tracking. Opportunities are usually tracked by their campaign source(direct mail, internet marketing, etc.), stage (e.g. needs assessment, proposal, closed won, closed lost, etc.), estimated revenue, probability and closing date.

Remember that the overall goal is usually for marketing to generate (and nurture) leads until an opportunity arises. They then they pass along these qualified leads to the sales team to close. The overall process is running smoothly when the sales funnel is filled with thousands of leads, which turn into hundreds of contacts, and finally into tens of opportunities that keep your crack sales team fully occupied!

Most of you will have seen the emails before.  If you’re a software development company most of the time its asking you to outsource your projects to them to cut your costs, if you’re a software purchaser it’ll be telling you how they can deliver your project on-time in budget and with brilliant code.

You guessed it I am of course talking about the broken English emails of the Indian code shop.

This is a typical email you’ll receive from them

It’s Jennifer,

Brief about our company:

We are a professional web development company based in India with a team of experienced web/internet programmers and designers. We have over 5 years experienced in this field with a number of high profile customers. Our skill set includes Microsoft technologies, asp, .NET, php, java, xml and major data bases. We have a good design team with extensive knowledge of macromedia products include photo shop, dream weaver, fireworks and flash. We have over a period of time developed than 200 websites and applications for various industries and sectors.

As a solution provider we develop custom web applications including e-commerce solutions and intranet applications. We have number of satisfied customers in the US and Europe. The majority of work is outsourced from these customers. Our company ethos is to deliver high quality solutions while being cost effective.

We believe that you can save up to 40-50% on your project cost per project by working with us in partnership.

With the services we offer we believe we can add value to your company and organization and would hope that you would be interested informing a working partnership with our offshore company.

We understand that this type of work may be new to you so why not try our services with a small job to start with. This will help you to understand our working methodology and ethos for high quality and cost effective pricing

If you would like more information about our company please visit www.BLAH.com

Here’s some of the links below:

*LINKS REMOVED

Upcoming sites

*LINKS REMOVED*
If you have any questions or queries please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,

Jennifer
Business Development Manager

Contact:-
E-mail :- jennifer@BLAH.com
Skype :- jennifer
Mobile :- 0123456789

No to most that will sound all well and good and you’ll be sat there thinking to yourself “why should I pay 3 grand for a UK supplier when I can go to India and have it done for £800″.

There’s nothing wrong with that thought of course that’s what these companies rely on you thinking.  One of our clients recently got taken in by a very professional looking Indian code shop promising to deliver his e-Commerce package for a fine £800 all within deadlines and fully functioning.

A month after his deadline had passed he finally realised that the project wasn’t going to be complete and asked FC Software to finish it off and prepare it for live for him.  He was emailed the code from the code shop and forwarded it straight onto me.

Now I’ve been aware of Indian code shops for ages and have heard horror stories but I’ve never actually seen any code generated by them.  I now wish I hadn’t.

I’ll skip the gory details (if you want them though feel free to contact me or post in the comments) and just give you a summary.

• Broken Code
• Missing Files
• 400k+ individual .php files with 1k lines of commented out code
• Unused DB tables
• Vulnerable to SQL Injection
• Unfinished pages

After 2 weeks of working on the site I’ve just about got the front end (customer side) up to scratch I haven’t even got 10% of the way through the admin panel yet.  There’s still some bits of the front end code which are almost like black magic as in they’re there but I can’t work out what they’re supposed to do or even where some of them are calling their variables from!

To top it all off the payment system setup was PayPal so you need some kind of PayPal return page after transaction complete this was missing all together and when asked for the file instead they sent us through images of their offices.

This was the icing on the cake and really opened my eyes as to exactly what the code shops are like.  I’ve attached the images below notice the damp on the walls, the newspaper on the windows, the precariously balanced air con unit, bundles of wires and of course how can you forget the office door sign!

In the end this project has cost our client not only the price for us to write him an e-Commerce package from scratch but also the £800 for the Indian code shop.

The morale of this story is simple. DON’T DO IT.  It seems like you’ll be able to save yourself and your company money but in the long run you end up costing yourself money and with a substandard solution.

Don’t outsource under the false pretense of saving yourself some time/money while UK firms sound more expensive we are more regulated to deliver a product fit for purpose and take more pride in our work.

If any of you have any further experience with Indian code shops please get in touch I’m quite interested now if its just my luck providing me with this experience or are they all as bad as this.

This small corner of the FC Software website is a place to allow the FC staff to post about their lives at FC Software.

What is it really like to work on an Email Marketing and Campaign tool that is capable of sending millions of emails a minute?

Just how much depends on you getting it right the first time when your product sits at the very heart of someone else’s business as our CRM products do?

All should become clear over time via the FC blog