Direct Marketing: Email & SMS Mailing

Good day.

It will be a question of Direct Marketing and in particular about my startup project Skyders.Direct. Everyone who is interested in this topic is welcome under cat.
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Any company is always sooner or later required to inform its customers about new products or changes about existing ones. Not all companies work or have advanced CRM systems (which have built-in communication tools) to communicate with customers. The main means of communication with customers that are at hand is: a sales person (sales person) who can get around and tell about company news, telephone, fax, mail, email and sms. About the last two means of communication and will be discussed in this article. It is clear that such means of communication as a sales person, telephone, fax and mail are quite expensive, and even with a small customer base of 1,000 people, it may take weeks to alert you of updates to the company and financially unprofitable. In situations where customers are from different countries, this case may generally be questionable due to different time zones, additional costs, and so on.

Imagine a store selling products (for habro readers, you should rather submit a store selling hardware / software). So, time goes by and the clientele has grown significantly. At first, the seller knew everyone by sight, but then buyers from other areas reached out to him. The time comes and he does not know his customers. To stay on the market in a tough world of competition, you need to know how to please your customers even more, how to achieve their loyalty and what to bet on for the future: is it worth expanding, increasing the range, and most importantly how to keep existing customers and how to attract new ones? For this you need to analyze the situation and here will help the methods of marketing. First of all, a base of major clients is created. How to do it? In many ways, in my opinion, one of the most effective ways is all kinds of lotteries. In your own store, you can install an advertising stand where you play (TV, computer, and so on). Participants only need to leave their details, for example, in special questionnaires in front of the cash register. Usually they always have a point where his consent is required that he agrees to receive marketing information.

Also, an effective database collection can be done, for example, by drawing a machine. The machine being played is installed, and all that is required is that it possibly become yours to enter your data into the questionnaire located nearby and throw it into the car itself through a slightly lowered glass. So, one way or another, the customer’s customer base has been received, they agree to receive mailings, and this is already a lot!

The next step is to find out how many interested buyers you have and what they want to see on the shelves of your store. You can send an email questionnaire and promise a reward. Or, for example, a special e-mail is made, in which the seller groups the products into categories. Categories are usually links for which the system collects statistics, how many people viewed the letter, how many people went to look at a particular product, how many times they returned, how many were unsubscribed, and so on. After analyzing the information received, you can safely use it to develop a future strategy!

The big difference is how such things are treated in the west and both in Russia and the CIS countries. In the West, it will be called "he makes a marketing ploy", and in Russia - "engaged in spamming."

My product has nothing to do with the latter and has very strict Terms & Conditions ( www.skyders.com/Home/files/Skyders.Direct_Terms_and_Conditions.pdf ) and Privacy Policy ( www.skyders.com/Home/files/Skyders_Privacy_Policy.pdf ) . The product has the following necessary functionality: downloading the customer database one by one or via CSV files; Email / SMS distribution on the customer database; also easy to create sheets. For example, to congratulate you on the new year, you can create a special sheet, fill in your friends or co-workers and send them greetings. The system can replace the names and surnames, if you register them with tags (of course it’s not good to congratulate friends with identical postcards, but you know, it happens that there is no time, and there are so many friends ...). Also, the product has the ability to use our or download their templates, on which you can create newsletters. Further, there is an account management system, which allows one company to have several accounts for different departments, one account for all of them, but that mailings and customer databases do not overlap. You can also upload files to the server, then use them in mailing lists, and have access to them at any time, and much more.

I immediately hear the objections of programmers: yes, in 10 minutes I will write such a program that we should run through the database and send letters. I AGREE! He himself wrote in 5 minutes when it was necessary. But here the whole thing is different. In the reports! The system allows you to have statistics on how many letters were opened (read), how many letters were bounced, for whatever reason (there was no space on the box or simply an incorrect address; if so, the system marks it as hard bounced and sets the status of the user - unsubscribed and then, he will no longer receive letters). Now it is not available on the site, but tests have been carried out and soon it will appear on the Skyders.Direct website: www.skyders.com/Home/Direct.aspx . To do this, we used a partially finished library from Chilkat Software (http://www.chilkatsoft.com/). In the future we want to rewrite it. So, if someone has some kind of experience in this field and wants to help, then please write me to the box (habrahabr [at] skyders.com). Well, the main thing is the statistics on the links who clicked where and how many times. All this can be downloaded to csv files and then do a targeted newsletter for those people who are interested in the product. You can also see those who unsubscribed. Having the contacts of these people you can always contact them and find out why they did it or vice versa, find out what their interest is. The project was decided to run in English. Although the interface has already incorporated multilingualism (in particular, the Russian language is implemented). But while it was temporarily decided to remove it and begin to develop in the UK. The company Skyders Ltd. is registered here. One of the reasons is that this product is clear here and the price policy in Europe is the most profitable. In Russia, unfortunately, this market is completely undeveloped. If you look at similar products offered on different continents, you can say that in USA direct marketing products are very advanced and are offered very cheaply despite the wide functionality. Russia - prices are comparable to the USA, there are few functions, brands are completely unwound and little trust in them. It happens that a company of this kind in Russia offers in addition, for example, an email recovery program that scans the site for emails for the collection of its database, which, in fact, is a spam method.

My product delivers if the customer confirms that he has the right to send the newsletter. Also, the email from which the mailing is being conducted is confirmed. The highest prices for such products are now in Europe. Our prices can be found here: www.skyders.com/home/Pricing.aspx . Now, taking into account discounts, I can say with confidence that we have some of their lowest prices, both in Europe and in America.

At the moment, 3 people are working full-time on Skyders.Direct and some freelance. Finally launched the project can be said from January. The first registrations have already appeared, customers are eyeing - this already pleases. There are a lot of ideas that we are going to implement on the basis of this engine. Such directions as Survey (questionnaires), SPAM rating (analyzer how likely it is that a letter of your mailing can get into spam), Google tracking for mailings, services for periodic mailing for companies, implementation of own API functions, editor of forms that companies can put on your website and the registered person will be right on their list, and much more.

Anyone interested, you can test it on www.skyders.com , and if you have questions or suggestions, please contact me: Andrei Koshelev, director of Skyders Ltd at AKoshelev [at] Skyders.com. If I can give you an additional quote if you don’t meet the 200 free emails that are given to everyone who registers ;-).

Good luck to all,
Andrew