We can not ignore the role that social networks have taken as a professional marketing tool.

Social networks allow organizations to work quickly and efficiently between them. These applications make easy the interaction between professionals who share subjects of common interest. You can use the advantages of traditional communication with the communication of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis…).

The key is the agility. Social networks allow more open relationships between the different business areas. So organizations should take advantage of these characteristics quickly to react changes in their environment.

This new reality is completely integrated into the market. Corporate communication should not ignore this model of interaction that promises a great future for business.

Do not forget this point when you offer your customers services with more added value. Think in the ability of collaboration that has been opened through social networks.

I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a fairly controversial post. However I think it is worth to write it. At least the essence of a blog is to be as transparent as possible. So here we go…

One of the things several prospective customers ask our sales team is: “What if one month we don’t need to send e-mail with your product? Will we still be charged the monthly fee?” People asking this, almost always refer to August or the holiday month of their choosing, where they are not going to send any e-mail at all.

We at Krasis offer two ways to purchase our hosted service: monthly fee or Pay-as-you-go.

In the first case (monthly fee) you know approximately how many e-mails your company is going to send each month, so you choose one e-mail interval (eg.: 5.000 mails/month) and pay a fixed fee that lets you send each month as many e-mails as the maximum indicated. Additionaly if you purchase a whole year (12 months) in advance you get one month for free (so you don’t have to worry about not sending anything on holidays). You can change the interval contracted at any time or even punctually for just one or two months for extra needs, and only get charged for the difference. Not used e-mail credit is not accumulated for the next month, so you must choose the right interval to fit your needs.

In the Pay-as-you-go model (available only for 10.000 e-mails/month or higher), you only pay for exactly the e-mail quantity you have sent the previous month. If you send, for example, 38.137 e-mails, you get charged exactly for this volume. However, as your company is not assuring us any predictable income, the cost per e-mail is slightly higher, but you have total freedom for sending any volume of e-mails you need each month. If one month you don’t send any e-mail you get charged nothing.

So, these options will fit almost any needs you may have regarding e-mail volume planning.

But one question remains implicit in this entire pricing model. One that many customers want to know: Why your price refers always to month?

Well the answer is quite obvious for the main part, although there are a few subtleties that I think it’s important to highlight.

Obviously our main cost items are always supported in a monthly basis: salaries, data center fees, bandwidth, supplies, electricity and many more. This is a common to the majority of services companies. And all of this must be reflected in some way in our incomes, so it’s quite obvious why the price structure of every provider of hosted software in the market is defined in this way.

The not-so-obvious issues regarding this monthly price model are the secondary services around e-mailing that some customers don’t take into account when they think “this month I’m not going to send e-mail”.

E-mailing is not only about sending e-mail in bulk. There are a lot of other things related that are very important too. For example all the statistics related to the mailings. Although one month you don’t send any single email, if you have sent a lot of them previously, that month the infrastructure still needs to be on-line and working in order to keep receiving all the reading and click stats, serving RSS and RSS stats, serving images and contents, and other related services. Aditionally, of course, although you don’t send e-mail, you can be preparing new campaigns or have questions about e-mail marketing that our support services will be answering too in that period.

So in these cases we still are working for our customers, even if they are paying nothing to us.

This doesn’t happen in other kind of services, although the thing is essentially the same.

A good example will be your fixed phone line monthly fee. Although one month you don’t make any single call you still get charged by the phone company. In fact it's correct as long as they are providing you with a service (the line and the possibility of receiving and making calls) although you don't use it. So almost everyone feels it’s fair to get charged for this. In hosted services like email, this should be true too, don't you think? :-)

Another day I’ll comment on the way the sending of a high volume of e-mails in a short period impact the cost model of a hosted solution in a quite technical way. I think everyone using this kind of services should know well.

There are a lot of options out there if you want to do e-mailing. You can pay for a hosted (pay for use or SaaS) service like MAILCast, or you can download and install one of the milliard desktop bulk mailing programs that exist. In this case you even have several available for free.

You must choose wisely.

Choosing between a hosted service and a desktop program is like choosing between connecting to the electric grid and having your own in-house power plant. Yes, sure, you can have your own generator and work with the energy it produces. You even will have more sense of having the control. 

But it's not true and you surely can have a lot of trouble too. What if the small power plant get damaged on weekend?, What about the complexities of plugging it to your home's grid so that you don't get any of your small appliances fried? You could spot a lot of these "gotchas" yourself...

The same is true for complex software like e-mailing applications.

First of all there is the infrastructure regarding to deliverability and speed. You cannot download an e-mailing program, install it in a "Next, Next, Next" way and expect that everything will work. It simply is not that simple (pun intended). You need to set up some DNS infrastructure so that the e-mails get correctly delivered. And, if you're going to send more than a few tens or hundreds of emails, you can't rely on using your usual external e-mail server (as several of these programs do) without having it blocked for hours. If you choose this kind of desktop product, count on having a lot of your e-mails rejected. Besides this, a lot of servers reject e-mails directly delivered from DSL connections, and the upload bandwidth you have in one of these is very low (128 or 256 Kbps if you're lucky) which leads to long delivering time spans.

Then there are the stats. You need a permanently connected computer with a static IP in order to collect stats for your e-mailing. And usually a huge database too. What if you suffer a blackout? You'll miss stats. What if you receive thousands of reading stat request in a few minutes? Repeat after me: "I will miss stats". And that's without taking in account that you probably must serve graphics too through the same connection.

A hosted service will take in account everything for you. As it's usually said "The cobbler should stick to his last". Emailing is the core of your business or it's to sell or to make campaigns for your customers? So, why are you trying to setup your own emailing infrastructure? When you need to go from London to Seattle on a business travel, do you charter your own plane? Even though you do this travel frequently?

And finally there are support and service... e-mail marketing is a fair technical discipline and you will need support, advice and a good service level.

There is a long list of issues like those in this post, but I've only reviewed the most apparent and important ones. And I don't even have touched the economic part of the decision and the amount one can save using a pay-per-use service, which would be interesting enough to deserve a whole post by itself.

Choosing a hosted service is the wiser of the options and the less risky too. Stick to your core activity and let the professionals handle the technical challenges, and keep your deliverability in shape.

The communication process becomes fundamental to comprehend our customers’ needs, so we must take this thought into account. In order to achieve an efficient relationship with them, we must consider our communication as a reciprocal information exchange, so we´ll find out the opinion and ideas of our interlocutors.

We communicate a message in very single contact with our clients. Our communication skills will help to our recipient to decide whether our message is positive or negative. Because of that, here are some advices helping you to empathize with your clients and gain the customers’ trust:

·         Show the client that you are listening

·         Try to obtain useful information from any message you get from them

·         Allude to some comment that you have received from the client, demonstrating that you have been listening and acting as a result.

In addition of bearing these aspects in mind, we must not forget the clarity of our message, and so avoid to misinterpretations, because them can make the effectiveness or our messages fail.

As we said before, the relationships between customers and companies are changing. More and more, Internet has became the code to develope commerce (B2B, B2C, C2C...). This is modifying the original concept of buying and selling.

If you want to survive in the new global market you need make changes to increase sales. You must win customers' trust in the new economic system.The best way to count on users' loyalty  is the permanent communication.

The on-line support makes possible a direct contact with customers. It is a help system that get in touch the user with Customer Service or Technical Service. A good on-line support site must solve the issues easily. It usually gives email notifications about issues' progress and let you search the interaction history you have.

Although on-line support accessibility is fundamental, response to customers is more important. If we promise a 24x7 service we have to keep it without exception, because they trust in us. It is hard win the loyalty of  our customers, so we have to use some tools, such as on-line support, to achieve it and keep it.

The current market is driven by a globalized environment. As a result, Customer Service has become one of the aspects that more value add to your products and your business, especially if we talk about online sales and the Internet environment.

In this sense, it is completely indispensable to establish an excellent service and  support available to reinforce the customers’ feeling of security and confidence in having someone ‘real’ on the other side to solve their queries, doubts and suggestions, for whoever likes to interact with the company.

The channels that allow this reliable link with customers are basically:

• Email
• F.A.Q´s (Frequent Asked Questions)
• Enough documentation in the website
• Contact telephone number
• Chat
• VoIP services
• Remote assistance service

We should not overlook any of these communication channels, mostly when the dialog is on real time (i.e. chat).  We must be ready at any time to listen what our customers have to say, and do so to give them a proximity feeling.