The Real Gold Is In the ListWritten by Marty Foley
Are you a one shot, hit-and-run marketer, or do you appreciate that real gold in business is in list?Rather than focus on one-shot deals, savvy marketers realize value of a good list, and seek ways to expand and derive more value from theirs. What kind of lists am I talking about? On Internet, an opt-in list of customers, or others who've agreed to receive regular communications from you. Or it may be an offline list of postal mailing addresses, telephone, or fax numbers. The best list is a targeted one, comprised of those who are at least familiar with you; with whom you've already developed a relationship of trust. Ideally, it's made up of those who've already done business with you, or have at least expressed a sincere interest in similar types of goods you offer in past. It's NOT a list of randomly gathered (untargeted) contact information, whether email addresses to which unsolicited spam email is sent, or otherwise. Once you've developed a good, targeted list, you have a valuable asset. For example: * Valuable time, effort and expense are invested in gaining customers. Customer acquisition is one of largest marketing expenses. Many marketers toss this investment out window by selling one thing to a customer, one time, and forgetting about them forever. A good list, on other hand, lets you market your goods and services much less expensively. * Additional sales to previous customers are often easier to make and more profitable than initial sale. A relationship of trust has been built, provided that your customer is satisfied with his/her purchase and service received.
| | Characteristics of a Good Company ReportWritten by Rafael Van Dyke
With all wonderful tools that IT industry has brought to business world, you would think that level of written communication would increase. But documentation has become a lost art, especially when it comes to reporting to team members and leaders. Unless your company has an outlined process with strict reporting procedures, your productivity is probably not as high as it could be. Why? Everything falls under one of two reasons: Not knowing that you should have more reporting, or not knowing how to create a good report. Submitting good reports when will do a lot of great things for you and your team, including following: increasing awareness of tasks, making sure that important details are not missed, keeping your boss informed to avoid misconceptions & increase confidence, protecting you when there’s a discrepancy, and demonstrating your leadership (in other words – it makes you look good!) Whether you use a document or an e-mail message, a well organized and timely report to your team members or your boss will always be received with appreciated and will always communicate to others that you’re serious about doing your job. By using guidelines below, you’ll be on your way to improving your image and your productivity (even if you’re already doing company reports). When To Create a Report Reports are excellent for recapping a meeting or important conversation. Once details are agreed upon by all attending, it is much easier to move forward with confidence. If you’re attending a meeting where you’re expected to give a status of your activity, you should always have your update written to make it easy for you to give your report and for your audience to use as a reference during meeting and afterwards. Other appropriate moments for a good report are following: when delivering a project (or milestone), to summarize analyses or research findings, or to assign or hand over a task or project to someone else. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Notes There is nothing more frustrating than trying to remember an important point that you don’ have written down. The best way to make sure that your report has all of important details is to make sure that you have all of details available to you. Taking meticulous notes from start to finish (even if they don’t seem important at time) will ensure that you get your report right first time. It may seem like a lot of work in beginning, but as my mom always said, "A stitch in time saves nine." Make Your Heading Eye Catcher When your audience looks at your report, emotion that you want them to have in first 5 seconds is that your document is important and should be read. To accomplish this task: 1) The heading should always be first; 2) The heading text should be bold, not italicized and have largest font size of any other text in your document; 3) Is is preferred that heading be center-aligned, having it left-aligned is acceptable, but it should never be right-aligned; and 4) title heading should be simple, short (no more than 6 words), but clear.
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