Come see The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing Live in Miami this Saturday

More info on Mashable’s Social Media Day Miami and the full schedule can be found here: http://miamisocialmedia.com/

A simple and basic social media marketing plan

This short presentation I did for one of my clients lays out the basics of how to drive engagement and action via social media channels for any company.  Want to get started in Social media marketing?  Start here…

A simple basic social media plan anyone can use…

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The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing – Presentation from #DMA2011

On October 5th I presented The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing to a packed house at the Direct Marketing Association Annual Conference and Exhibition.  Here is the deck from that presentation.  I have some video and pictures I will clean up and post next.  Feel free to pass this presentation on.

The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing DMA 2011

View more presentations from Gilbert Direct Marketing, Inc.

Social Media for Non-Profit and other Marketers presentation for the Florida Direct Marketing Association

On Thursday 8/18/2011, I spoke at the Florida Direct Marketing Association’s annual Non-Profit Summit.  The subject, “Social Media for fun and Profit”.  Here is a the presentation for your review

Fdma presentation social media non profit 8-18/-

View more presentations from Gilbert Direct Marketing, Inc.

How to Mess Up a Perfectly Good Customer Experience

As a marketer, you should be overly concerned about how your customers experience your brand, products and customer service. I evangelize how in the internet age it’s very easy for a company to wind up getting skewered via social media.

But all isn’t the same out there. I come across businesses daily who don’t have their proverbial act together. All could really learn some lessons on how customers must be king or else.

I love to go to the movies. The local theater I go to recently underwent a complete makeover, including new, wider reclining chairs; a bar with real food and alcoholic beverages; and more. This theater already had a really great loyalty program in place: it seemed for every couple of movies I went to, I wound up with a free ticket. Very cool!

Even more cool (guilty pleasure alert), it actually used real butter on its popcorn. Oh, and free refills. And it was never too crowded like the mega-giga-multiplex in town where you need a shuttle bus a la Disney to get from the parking lot to the theater.

Enter Frank Theatres a few short months ago and the mega-giga-multiplex doesn’t look so bad. It upped the price of a movie ticket by a few bucks, made it harder than winning the lottery to get a free ticket via its points-based loyalty program and in general tortured me as a customer by making the $6 popcorn nonrefillable. Now you have to buy the $7.50 size (maybe you city folks pay that for 30 cents of corn, oil and seasonings, but down south here that’s a big jump) in order to get refills. I’m pretty sure the $6 bag and the $7.50 bucket are about the same size, so why not just charge me $1.50 for a refill and stop with the subterfuge already.

I won’t even tell you about how customers are supposed to understand how to wait in one central line for the candy counter until the next person is called without any velvet ropes or a queue. Ridiculous! Is it one line or three lines? This is for sure going to turn into a fistfight one day soon because people try to form three lines only to be told they’re cutting the line.

The kicker: I took my family to the movies last weekend knowing I’d drop close to $100 for the latest 3-D flick (an additional $3 just to use the theater’s 3-D glasses), but I couldn’t even use a $100 bill. The girl at the ticket booth told me flatly, “We don’t take that, it’s our policy.”

So by now the moral of the story should be obvious — wait for the movie to come out on cable. Wait, that’s not it.

The moral is your customers have expectations. If you meet or beat those expectations, you’ll do well in business. If you don’t, there will likely be consequences — i.e., lost sales. Your customers are creatures of habit. They like their little creature comforts. If you take them away, they tend to get upset and take their business elsewhere.

So a note to Frank Theatres: This is the internet age. Get it together or deal with some very vocal customers who like what they like. If it’s going to take over another theater, keep the customs of that theater or risk losing business (or at least go with gradual change). It’s OK to add to a better user experience. Be careful that progress isn’t taking one step forward and two steps back.

How Integrating Social Media Into its Marketing Mix Brought The Fresh Diet Success

By Melissa Campanelli, from eMarketing and Commerce Magazine

Integrating social media into its marketing mix has helped drive revenue for The Fresh Diet, a gourmet diet delivery service established in 2005 that delivers freshly prepared meals and two snacks directly to its clients’ doors each day.

The Fresh Diet’s newly redesigned website makes it easy for visitors to engage in social media, which creates excitement for prospects coming to the site. “There are all kinds of chicklets on our homepage where we drive people to our social media sites and blog,” says Jim Gilbert , The Fresh Diet’s chief marketing officer and frequent eM+C contributor. “Then they can see what’s happening on our social media sites to get a sense of what their peers are saying about the company.”

What’s more, Gilbert says, “we know that once we have them on a social media site, we’re pretty good at drawing them out. We do a lot of contests and we have a lot of people who are very vocal. So we’re always doing fun and crazy contests there.”

A recent video contest The Fresh Diet launched on Facebook received 15 videos from customers that ranged from heartfelt to funny, Gilbert says. “One person who loves our cheesecake did a takeoff on ‘The Terminator,’ calling himself ‘The Cheesecakeator,’ and did a four-minute video on that.”

While social media creates excitement for The Fresh Diet, it also helps drive sales. “We know for a fact that every time we run a special on Facebook, people come out in droves and order,” Gilbert says.

Social media mix
To drive people to multiple channels, The Fresh Diet sometimes introduces a contest on Facebook designed to drive people to its blog. Or, it may use Twitter to promote its contests.

“Oftenimes, we use a combination of the three,” Gilbert says. “We drive people from the blog to Facebook, from Facebook to the blog, and Twitter to both places. We really believe that the more channels people are engaged in, the more likely they’ll be our better customers.”

The Fresh Diet also uses Facebook Ads, a tool that enables it to post display ads on targeted Facebook pages. In addition to Facebook Ads, The Fresh Diet has used paid celebrities (Lindsay Lohan, to name one) to tweet about its brand and drive people to its Facebook page. But that type of campaign can be expensive, Gilbert notes.

Groupon, the deal-of-the-day website, is also part of The Fresh Diet’s marketing mix. The Fresh Diet is able to strategically select the areas that it wants to promote in — e.g., new cities where it will be offering its delivery service — via Groupon.

The Fresh Diet is in the process of creating a social media app that will allow it to push its members’ meal choices to their Facebook or Twitter streams at the appropriate times, enabling its customers’ friends and followers to get an idea of what the customers are eating.

“It will be a clickable link, so if a customer’s Facebook friends click on it, they’ll see a beautiful, full-color, professionally photographed image of the meal,” Gilbert says. “Taking it a step further, when The Fresh Diet customer’s friends or followers click on that link, the customer would get points or a reward.”

Marketing beyond social media
But The Fresh Diet doesn’t only use social media for marketing. It also sends monthly direct mailers to prospects, for example.

“We work with a top-notch list broker, RMI Direct Marketing, and look for lists of people that have a certain amount of income, have proven that they’ve bought big and tall or plus-size items in the past, and are all direct mail responsive buyers,” Gilbert says.

The Fresh Diet has increased its direct mail circulation this year. “We started out mailing 50,00 to 100,000 pieces, but now we’re up to 500,000 at a clip,” Gilbert notes.

Email is also a big part of The Fresh Diet’s marketing mix. To help it acquire new customers, The Fresh Diet relies on two opt-in email lists: a referral list through Catalogs.com and a list of people who are highly targeted, such as those who have gone to a specific diet company’s website and registered.

As for frequency, The Fresh Diet sends out an e-newsletter to customers and prospects at least once a month, and supplements that with an email campaign regularly. “I’d say we’re touching our customers via email on average about twice a month,” Gilbert says.

The Fresh Diet is currently in the process of creating tell-a-friend and upsell-type emails to go out once people come onboard as clients, Gilbert adds.

All of this activity has helped The Fresh Diet get more visitors to its website, social media sites and blogs. In fact, every single metric that the company measures is increasing, according to Gilbert.

“Our direct mail response rates have been going up, as are our customer retention rates,” Gilbert says. “We noticed early on this year that when we do a direct mail campaign, in a matter of days after their initial order, people literally come back and buy more. Everything seems to be firing on all cylinders.”

A 3,500% increase in fans/likes, engagement and sales on Facebook? (a case study)

When I first started marketing via social media, I didn’t understand Facebook. A blog was the central focus of my social media programs. I’d create a blog post and push it out via Facebook and other social media channels. And that worked well at driving traffic to my blog. As for engagement with my readers, I got some comments back, even some people interacting with each other on occasion, but nothing earth-shattering.

Over on Facebook, I had a whole bunch of content, but no interaction and not many fans. I’ve seen a ton of Facebook fan pages like that.

But about a year ago, I found the key that unlocked the Facebook engagement factor. At that time I took over the fan page of one of my clients, The Fresh Diet (whom I wrote about  last week). When I began working on The Fresh Diet’s Facebook page, it had 96 fans. At first it was business at usual: Write a blog post and put it on Facebook; add The Fresh Diet’s Facebook link to emails; etc. The net result: In three months, The Fresh Diet had accumulated 300 fans.

Since January, The Fresh Diet has seen its Facebook fan base swell to over 3,500 fans. Here’s how we did it:

1. We asked questions — sometimes controversial ones — that drew fans out.
2. We held contests. At first these were held every few weeks, but now they’re going on almost all the time. And they’re simple: caption a picture, name a feature of The Fresh Diet’s business, etc.
3. We also held more elaborate contests. Recently, The Fresh Diet held a video testimonial contest and was blown away by the results.
4. I know you’ve heard this one many times by now, but The Fresh Diet spoke in a real voice. The voice of The Fresh Diet’s Facebook page is me — goofy, earnest, caring, sometimes a bit snarky and sarcastic, but always real. I call myself The Fresh Diet’s “fearless FB leader,” and they now call me by it, too.
5. To tie items three and four together, The Fresh Diet’s fearless FB leader is known for “overgiving” contest prizes. Goofing around one day, when it was just too tough to choose between two contest winners, I named four winners. Pretty soon, I coined the phrase “overgiving”; The Fresh Diet’s Facebook fans now wait in anticipation to see how much free food I give out.
6. Find and nurture your brand’s dominant influencers. Early on in my work with The Fresh Diet’s Facebook page, I noticed half a dozen people started to stand out. So I built a relationship with them, not as a strategy of course, but a real relationship. As brand ambassadors, these people have become the voice of The Fresh Diet’s Facebook page, too. And I find new ambassadors all the time!
7. Don’t be afraid to ask people to do things. Promote your page, run a contest, take over for a bit. When you build real relationships with real people, not just “fans” or “likes,” they’ll walk through fire for you (because they know you’ll do the same for them).
8. Go crazy. Last week, I asked an actress and singer to do a music video for us (we have lots of famous people on The Fresh Diet). She was totally honored and did a homemade video — even gave me a shout out in it. The Fresh Diet holds contests where people write songs about their favorite meals, or they have to rearrange the lyrics in a song or slogan to be about The Fresh Diet. Our fans love it.

In my next column, I’ll continue to detail some of the ways you can build engagement and sales on Facebook.

7 ways to make the Inc. Magazine 500 Fastest Growing Companies list in a down economy like my client did

I’m not really big on self-promotion or self-congratulations — especially here in my column. However, I’m quite pleased to “admit” that one of the companies I work for has made Inc. magazine’s fastest growing companies in America list.

So, what does it take to make the list? While it’s not Inc.’s criteria, I’ll tell you from my perspective what you and your company need to do to get there.

But before I do, let me tell you a bit about the company in question. The Fresh Diet was founded in 2005 in classic entrepreneurial style — in the kitchen of CEO Zalmi Duchman with Executive Chef Yosef Schwartz . The company creates gourmet meals that are healthy, portion controlled and delicious (Chef Yos is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef). The meals are prepared fresh and hand-delivered to clients’ homes every day.

For this luxury (or is it?), customers dish out about $35 a day (most order a month’s worth of Fresh Diet meals at a time — about $1,100).

So, how can your company follow in The Fresh Diet’s footsteps and makeInc.’s 500 list? Here are seven ways how:

Identify products that create fanatics and advocates. It’s easy to go into the meal delivery business and not deliver food daily, or by hand, or buy top-quality meats and produce. But why do that? The Fresh Diet constantly strives to exceed its customers’ expectations.

Build a persona around your business and your people. It’s not enough to just be a business these days. With social media and peer recommendations fully in play, companies must put a face to the nameless, faceless corporate entity. Use social media as a way to connect with your customers. But don’t do it as a strategy. Connect in an honest and personal way, in a real voice. For a good example of how The Fresh Diet accomplishes this, check out its Facebook page.

Take risks, but calculated ones. Develop a mentality of testing — everything from marketing channels to individual campaigns. But also calculate the risks. Test small and do your math up front; big results can potentially be found in tests of all sizes. Even companies that are struggling should test. By making testing part of your culture, the rewards will outweigh the risks.

Empower your employees to think and act independently. The days of micromanaging employees are over. Empowered employees are more productive employees. Find great talent, then let them do their thing. OK, so sometimes they won’t do what you thought they should do, but that will be offset by things you never would have thought of.

Use all of your channels. I’ve seen too many companies get stuck these days by a specific kind of thinking: online retailers who only market online; direct marketers who fear advertising online; etc. Don’t fall into that trap. The Fresh Diet survives quite nicely in the online and traditional worlds, where it’s tested and rolled out many successful programs.

Understand that messaging needs time to develop. Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither should your messaging. Going back to developing a culture of testing, your marketing message falls into a category that should be constantly tested. And even if you hit it big and have “control” messaging that works, always strive to make it better.

Handle customer service issues promptly, and look to resolve each issue in the customer’s favor. Know that an upset customer is a brand ambassador waiting to happen once their issue is resolved (which says much for the lack of customer centricity with other brands).

Are you automating your emails with trigger and drip campaigns? (an overview and 3 good tips)

Lately I’ve been working with clients on automating their marketing tasks, specifically their emails. The more I work in this channel, the more I realize how wide-open a frontier — with a huge upside — it is for cross-channel merchants.

Most medium- to high-end email service providers (ESPs) offer some sort of automated functionality. This gives marketers the opportunity to create “set-it-and-forget-it type” campaigns.

When you acquire a new prospect, for example, you can create a triggered drip campaign. A drip campaign involves a series of emails that are sent to prospects at pre-specified intervals, say once a week over a four-week period.  Each email is designed to either highlight a key company benefit (part of the unique selling proposition), or have a series of progressively stronger offers.

Most ESPs have application programming interfaces available to their clients. By having your IT folks set this up, your ESP can automatically communicate with your database. In simple terms, once a prospect becomes a customer, no more drip emails are sent to them as they move to a different bucket (customer) in your email database. And once prospects become customers, they’re promoted into a different automated email series.

You can set up campaigns for all of your customer statuses — prospects, single, multibuyers, past customers, gift purchasers, cancels and so on. The sky is the limit based on your creativity.

Furthermore, some ESPs have pretty good list management tools available for automated and/or one-off campaigns. For example, a client of mine chose Bronto’s solution, which allows it to store 100 different customer attributes. It can then create campaigns based on whatever criteria meets its needs from Bronto’s list selection module. Want to send an email to someone whose birthday is coming up? It’s simple: Whatever data you collect from customers and prospects can all be sliced and diced within a good ESP’s system.

Try the following three ideas for triggered email campaigns:

• customer satisfaction surveys X number of days after a purchase;
• tell-a-friend offers when customers becomes multibuyers; and
• customer reactivation emails. Instead of doing a query each time you want to send a reactivation message from your internal database and uploading a new list, just create it for X number of days/months/years and the message automatically goes out.

Of course, no new form of direct marketing should be done without testing. Test offers, creative and especially the timing of your messaging.

You’ve worked hard, now let email marketing automation help you drive revenue! Are you automating your marketing efforts? Tell us how it’s working by posting a comment below.

My prescription to heal the US Postal Service in 8 easy steps. (all direct marketers get behind this)

Looks like the USPS is back in the news again- it seems the five day work week issue has reared its ugly head.

The post office is claiming that declining revenue from reduced mail volume is the culprit.

Well Duh!

The USPS bit the hand that fed them way too many times with it’s rate increases.  They drive mailers out of the market, and they drove other mailers to look at alternative methods of customer acquisition and retention too.  Loosely translated, they helped many marketers shift their dollars to the internet to the point where I would hope that the folks from Google sent them a thank you letter.

I’m going to keep it short this week.  If John Potter and the post office want to get out of this mess, they need to take s few steps.  Now I’m not naive enough to assume that my prescriptions to heal the USPS are alone a cure, but hey, it’s a start

So here in simple form even a gov’t run bureaucracy can understand are some tips for the post office to help increase revenue.

1. Do everything in your power to seek out customers they lost and woo them back.
2. By wooing them back I mean, come up with ways for these lost customers to lower their postal costs to the point where they can mail profitably again.
3. I love the concept of mail sales and discounts. Keep that stuff up.
4. Don’t make the rules so hard and the criteria to get sale prices so restrictive that the average mailer doesn’t get to take advantage.
5. Create promotions for smaller companies.  There are two kinds, companies who stopped mailing when prices went up, and companies who don’t mail because they get sticker shock looking at postage and printing costs.
6. Get some postal ambassadors out to all of the local and regional direct marketing groups and clubs, plus internet/social media clubs and promote the heck out of small business discounts, first time mailer discounts, etc.
7. Have those same representatives of the USPS start teaching more companies how to do direct mail buy the book.  I know they do some of this now, but it’s not nearly enough.  Teach stuff like analysis – the 40/40/20 principle and how to do mail right.
8. Getting new mailers to test mail and smaller mailers back in the game will eventually create larger mailers!

Bottom line… USPS your image is damaged, and you need to rehab it.  Create products we can grow with using direct mail, promote the heck out of them on a national and grass roots level, and you will eventually get volume and revenue back.

Note from Jim.  Make a difference too.  Contact John Potter, the Postmaster General here and make your voice heard:

The Honorable John E. Potter Postmaster General

U.S. Postal Service

475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW

Washington, DC 20260-0010

E-mail: pmgceo@usps.gov