I don’t want to lose Google Wave
Google Wave
We have a number of projects on the go that involve collaboration between different offices and about five people. We find that google wave is great for getting input and keeping track of changes to a document.
Last night it was announced we are going to lose google wave. Google is canceling the project! I’m more than a little disappointed and would like some suggestions on good programs to replace this one.
Colleagues provided me with a paper they wrote that focused on drafting good memos of understanding and letters of intent. I thought I’d share their insights:
In today’s increasingly cost conscious environment where every dollar must be justified, effecting robust contracts is even more critical. No longer are only contract specialists involved in the contract process, professionals of all disciplines have a vital role to play in the development of successful contracts and their ongoing administration.
Before developing a contract, the parties who intend to enter into a business partnership or negotiate a deal, should have in mind some benefit that they want to obtain from the collaboration as well as an idea of their respective responsibilities. The ideas of one party may not be similar to the other party’s. If these are written down and all parties clearly understand and agree, then there is a meeting of the minds and the agreement drafted by the lawyers based on the memo of understanding (MOU) or the letter of intent (LOI) will be effective.
Going to a lawyer for advice before negotiations and MOU may not be fruitful because the lawyer may put so much fear in the negotiator’s mind that they will lose the business sense and the trust to carry out negotiations. Also, it is easier for the lawyer to draft a legal document if there is prior meeting of minds between the two business leaders who want to partner and see benefits being generated by the synergy. The lawyer’s bill will be appreciably smaller if he starts from a clear MOU or LOI.
Good agreements make the work environment and interpersonal relationships so interesting and positive that everyone wants to get to work resulting in profit for both parties to the agreement. But writing them requires devotion of time and careful planning in order to meet one’s goals. It is also necessary to think creatively to generate new insights.
The objective of this paper is to review the process of producing a memo of understanding or a letter of intent.
An MOU or LOI is a document that outlines a commitment between two or more parties to work together towards a defined goal or outcome. They frequently detail the sharing of resources or services between the parties in a collaborative or non-competitive manner to achieve the defined objective or outcome. An MOU is not as strictly binding as a contract but instead outlines the intended relationship between the parties.
To help ensure a concise and effective MOU, begin by meeting with your potential partners and determine what your objectives are.
Clearly identify each of the parties and their contact information that are participating in the agreement.
Identify what resources are required to meet that objective, which of those resources can be provided by which party and how the various parties will work together (detail what each party will and will not do/contribute) as well as what the expected benefits to yourself and the other parties are.
Clearly outline the main purpose or objective of the agreement and define what specific outcomes are expected as a result of the collaboration. Establish any goals, milestones or measures of success or failure for the intended objective.
In the case of multiple objectives or desired outcomes or if there are phases or stages of the collaboration, clearly indicate by sections or headers the different phases or stages and state the expectations and resource requirements of each party separately to help ensure that each phase is easily identifiable along with its resources and requirements.
Detail what specific actions and/or resources each party will contribute to the collaboration and establish metrics to ensure they are being contributed.
It is also important to define how any money will be handled within the scope of the agreement; who will collect, disperse and how; who will be paid, how much, when and by whom.
Who will maintain accounts and generate periodical reports. Who should receive and analyze these reports.
If desired, a mechanism for review or revision of the agreement can be included to ensure the various parties have ways of revising it.
Establish a timeline as to when the agreement will go into effect and when it will end (can be based on a date or on an outcome). Also include any other termination terms if needed or can/should the agreement be extended automatically after a certain time period?
Once all these details have been outlined and agreed to by all parties, draft the agreement to include all the details from the meeting and circulate to all parties to review and if approved sign (be sure that the signatory has the authority to sign and bind themselves and/or their organization). Be sure to include any definition of terms as well as forms or schedules.
Authors:
Hira Ahuja is the President of EPIC Educational Program Innovations Center and can be reached at hahuja.epic-edu.com
Mike Fanjoy is the General Manager at EPIC Educational Program Innovations Center.
You can connect with him through Linked-In
Fund-raising for Cancer Research
Doing our part for the cure for cancer
Epic Marketing Solutions has been participating in CIBC’s Run for the Cure for three years. As part of our fund raising, we set a treadmill up on Quinpool Rd and ask for donations. Yesterday, we were noticed by the Metro-Halifax paper and they were good enough to give us a little exposure.
The Article reads:
Steven Elliott runs on a treadmill yesterday during his lunch hour outside the Epic Marketing Solutions office on Quinpool Road. Elliott and two other employees, Chris Doucette and Darren Bourn, will be running outside on the treadmill during their lunch hour every Monday through Thursday until October’s Run for the Cure to raise money for breast cancer research.
Email communications are still one of the fastest and least expensive methods to communicate with your customers, but there is work and planning that must go into the communications.
Emails are personal information so you have to keep track of when that person gave you their email address allowing you to send communications. Similarly, if a recipient tells you to stop sending email notifications, you have to. So maintain a removal file and make sure emails from this file do not get added back to the broadcast list.
To make it easier for your clients to reach you, it’s best to include all of your contact information in the communications.
It’s good to broadcast on a regular basis. You have to make sure that you have something to say to educate, entertain as well as sell your product/service. People will let you know if it’s too often by either telling you or not opening your emails.
The suggestions discussed above are important, however, the work in your list hygiene comes with the managing of bounces and blocked email addresses. Emails bounce back to you when they cannot be delivered. The failed deliveries can happen for a number of reasons. The email may not exist anymore, the person’s email folder could be full or their mail server may not be operating properly at the time the email was sent. Another reason an email may not be delivered is that the mail server that the person is on may identify your email a spam and refuse all email delivery from your email address or ip address.
If you continuously broadcast emails to address that do not exist or have you blocked, you may attract the attention of spam lists. Once you’re on a spam list, your email address will be picked up by a lot of spam protection software and then your delivery rates and open rates will plummet. To stay off the black lists, you have to remove the emails that constantly bounce from your broadcast list. The servers that have you blocked are a little more difficult to clean up. If the people are your clients, contact them and explain that you believe they’re blocking your communications. The client may be able to clear it up on their end by contacting their IT person, or by putting you on a “safe list”.
There are on-line services that can help you broadcast emails, companies that will maintain your databases for you as well as software packages that let you do it in house.
It’s important to know what you’re looking for so you can identify the service that meets your needs.
So in summary.
• Be upfront with your email recipients by giving them every way possible to contact you either to purchase or be removed from your list.
• If someone requests to be taken off your list, remove them and ensure they don’t get added back onto the list.
• Broadcast regularly, but only if you have something to say.
• Remove email addresses that are not receiving your emails.
• Address the clients that have your emails blocked.
Steven Elliott
By following these steps you will be able to better reach to your customers. You’ll also be able to utilize your customer data to see what each customer is worth to you, select them for new offers you have, decide who should receive which promotions and foster a relationship with your clients.
- Split up the names into first name field and a last name field. A middle initial is good too. This lets you search for the client a couple of ways. It also makes it easier to find and remove duplicate entries in the database
- Assign Industry codes for companies. For B2B products and services, targeting offers by industry can often make perfect sense.
- Allow for home address and work address information. This allows for the elimination of duplicates. It’s hard to find duplicates in a database when the person has different addresses.
- Provide a place for spousal information If you are offering a B2C service or product a database that allows for spousal information can eliminate confusion. For example, if one partner brings a car into a shop, and the partner other picks the car up, the database should be flexible enough to operate smoothly.
- Give a note field for sales people. You have to accommodate the users of the database. I’ve heard stories of sales people putting notes in title fields like “danger she likes to talk”. Down the road, this gets printed on a mailing piece and a customer is lost.
- Remove duplicates on a regular basis. It’s also a great idea to have a checking system so that when you enter a client into the database, you can make sure the person isn’t already in there.
- Get undelivered mail returned. Pay the 75 cents and get your return postage guaranteed so if the mail is undeliverable, it comes back to you. First class mail is returned automatically, but not bulk mailing unless you pay extra)
- Run the addresses through an address verification program. This just confirms the accuracy of the data entry.
- Utilize the change of address service provided by Canada Post. Your customers probably won’t contact you when they move. Keeping on top of this is essential.
- Standardize your phone numbers and cell phone numbers. ###-###-#### This is also a great way to eliminate duplicates. Especially if last names are misspelled in the database
- Keep track of the recency of the data. Put a date field in there so that you can see the last time the contact information was updated. This can be used to re-activate customers.
- Know everything that your customers have purchased from you. Have the tables in the database structured so that you can keep track of every transaction that the client had with you. This can range from what books they bought, to what services were provided.
Listening to your audience
We, as email marketers, receive lots of advice from experts in our field. I’ve learned over the years that you have to take the advice, decide what makes sense for your list and then test the change and measure the results.
It sounds like simple advice, but if you start asking questions about why certain procedures are being followed, sometimes the answer is “They said that’s the best way to do it.” Or “That’s the way we always do it.” We have to test, because every company and their audience are different. This makes for differing expectations from the email communications.
Background
Our client, Epic Educational Program Innovations Center, offers continuing education courses for engineers and other technical personnel. They send monthly emails promoting their seminars.
Initially, we broke the emails down based upon general types of seminars being offered and by geographic region. The seminars are technical training topics and are grouped by engineering discipline (civil, mechanical, environmental, electrical etc). My logic was that people would be interested in only the seminars that related to their own discipline. We tracked the open rates and click through rates so we could measure improvements. The trouble that we found was that if someone had mechanical codes and electrical codes they would only get one type of seminar and we had to create something like 20-25 emails a month because of different regions and the different general seminar topics.
I had the IT guys create a database program that selected specific seminars based upon an individual’s coding and their geographic region so that everyone received an email that was unique to their own interests and region. It was a pretty sweet program. We ran this database for a number of months and tracked the open rates.
Then, against my better judgement, we tried another test. We sent emails broken down by geographic region, with all of the seminars scheduled in that region listed. The seminars were organized by discipline and date and we featured a couple of seminars each month by giving them more real estate at the top of the email.
Open rates began to rise and click throughs were higher than ever.
Conclusion
That’s when I started to think about the data. We have people tell us what they are interested in, but we also infer their interests based upon their job and the industry they work in. Some people in management have broader interests because of the people reporting to them and we had to admit that there are inaccuracies in assuming what someone’s training interests are based upon the criteria we had.
The lesion learned is that I’m not as smart as I think I am and we have to listen to what our email recipients are telling us from the data we track. (We also have feed-back options, but not many people use them. )
This is the model we currently follow. We are constantly testing different frequencies, subject lines and days to send to find little lifts in the open rates
Steven
A new website
We have re-written and redesigned our website. I’m open to comments and criticisms so feel free to let me know what you think.
SE
Word of Mouth Advertising
I was reading a great blog entry on the Canadian Marketing Association Website about word of mouth advertising. The article professes that Facebook, Twitter, blogs and all the other forms of social media are tools that can enhance word of mouth, however they are not the be all and end all.
There is a good conversation beginning on this blog entry and I for one am following and learning.
Here’s the link:
The New Facebook Like Button
Last week, Facebook introduced a new feature called the “Like” button. Any website, outside of Facebook, can give you the option to “like” the page, such as an article or product. If you click the like button, your name and Facebook display photo will be placed onto that page and can be viewed by your Facebook friends if they also view that page. An item will also be placed in your friends’ newsfeed on Facebook.
This is good for business because it acts as a personal reference to the product being sold, or information being provided. It’s good for the site visitor because they can see which of their friends and or colleagues are benefiting from the website.
I think it’s a pretty cool option, which we set it up on a client’s web site – here’s what it can look like. We put the recommendations on the left side of the page (down on the left bottom of the picture)
Sample use of the Facebook like button
The downside, or upside, depending on how you want to view it, is that marketers can obtain the information about what kind of pages you like and can better target advertising towards you. At this time, you can choose to not share this information by going into the privacy settings within Facebook and editing the Instant Personalization option.
I’m a lucky guy!
Every once and a while I sit back and look at the people I’m working with here at Epic, and say to myself….Man! are they ever smart. They come up with creative solutions to problems that I didn’t even consider. Then they go about their daily jobs and take care to get them done efficiently and on time and do them so well I don’t even notice.
Sometimes I take being this lucky for granted.
