Even if you never place a cold call, you still have to reach people by phone. That customer who was so interested last month never called you back, and now you must call her. You call once, twice, three times, but you can’t get her in person. How can you manage to close a sale if all you ever get is voice mail?

A few years back we were marketing a specific type of packaged creative service through our dm consultancy. The service had wide ranging benefits for all industries. As a testing exercise we decided to hone in on one industry and see what happened.

Lets say that you have been given a budget of $10,000 (not including creative costs) to sell a new $800 product or service via direct mail to a relatively cold list. You know that once a new client comes on board they will usually spend another $2,000 with you over the next 2 years.

In any business endeavor, an owner may encounter multiple sweaty-palmed experiences. Customers may engage in multi-tiered assaults ranging from vehement criticism of a product or service, censure for (the lack of) customer assistance, objection to time lag for delivering said product or service and the airing of numerous other grievances.

If you are in business, you might want to consider using direct mail to find new customers or drum up more business from your existing ones. If using a print broker or a direct mail agency isn’t within your budget, you might opt to do the mailing yourself.

Reaching a prospect is no easy feat. One salesperson experienced a voice mail obstacle that was more daunting for him than most.

Here is the voice mail message: “If you are calling to sell me X, don’t hold your breath for a return call.”

As an operator of a home-based business website, I often get mail that reads something like this:

Question: I have been trying to find a way to transfer my existing OE email from this old P2$233Mhz to a nice fresh AthlonXP 2400+ I just finished building…and have met with little success and loads of reinstalls. (Cheat-mode reinstalls….Ghost is a very worthy toy

The great thing about the POP mail protocol is that it is a well-documented open standard, making writing a mail client to collect mail from a POP box a relatively painless process. Armed with basic knowledge of POP, or SMTP it is possible to write proxies which do a variety of useful things, such filter out spam or junk mail, or provide an e-mail answering machine service. Unfortunately, in trying to write a standalone client for Hotmail, the world’s most popular web-based mailing system, the fact that no POP gateway exists rapidly becomes a problem.

Part 1 of this article (www.isitebuild.com/organizedemail) discussed how to efficiently organize your email so you can spend more time on building a profitable business.

Answering your e-mail is a priority! Personal e-mail and e-mail marketing has become the favorite method of communication among the US and around the world.

Linda Richardson is the founder and president of Richardson, a premier provider of sales training and consulting to the Global 500. Linda is a thought leader in the sales training industry and is credited with the movement to consultative sales selling. Linda began her career in the sales training industry in 1979 as a manager sales training for a regional bank. She consults on enterprise sales solutions and sales force effectiveness in all areas of sales and management.

Over the past 35 years, I have been involved in the development and deployment of scores of business-to-business lead generation programs. Here are the 21 most significant truths I’ve learned.

One of the definitions of “involve” is “to bring into a situation from which escape is difficult.” That’s exactly what we want our direct mail packages to do. We want to hook the recipient to open the package, keep his/her attention, and show that the only means of escape is to place an order.

You can’t fake direct marketing expertise. Everything you do is quantifiable; every decision has an impact on short- and long-term profitability. If you’re seeking an expert’s opinion, get the benefit of Lee’s 35+ years of experience. He’s been on the client and agency sides and has run his own consulting practice for 10 years.

Connecting to the Internet

This article is a basic overview to get you started. There are other articles here that cover certain details in more depth. You may also want to read:

• Installing a Small Office Network

• Internet Mail
• OSR5 PPP Setup
• IPFILTER Firewalls
• DSL and Cable Modem Security
• VPN’s and other remote access
• E-Smith Server and Gateway

Sendmail can be a little scary. If the 1,000+ page O’Reilly reference doesn’t give you pause, the cryptic configuration files probably will. But actually, if you can put up with a little pain to get by the basics, Sendmail really isn’t all that difficult. It is complicated, but a few “rules of the road” will allow you to understand it.

The Mitel Networks SME Server (formerly E-Smith)is a friendly web server and e-mail gateway. The original E-Smith is now called Mitel SME Server V5. There is also a hardware/software bundle referred to as the Mitel 6000 Managed Application Server. Here we cover forwarding email to another mail account and mailing lists.

Read this Disclaimer

Many cell phones now have the ability to receive email. While that can be very useful, large messages are often a problem both because they are hard to read and because one large message may be split up into multiple messages at the phone.

Sometimes, though, it’s important that certain messages get to you even though they may be large. That’s the situation one of my Mitel (E-Smith) mail server customers had: mail sent to a certain account was very important to know about, but he didn’t want the entire message shipped to his cell phone. As it turns out, this was an easy problem to solve.

Disclaimer

First, The Consultant

Recently I was working with another “consultant”. I’ve deliberately put that in quotes because this person really lacked the skills to do the job he was doing, but for political reasons I had to refrain from pushing him out of the way and taking over. His lack of basic knowledge was frustrating, but I gritted my teeth and kept my comments friendly. It wasn’t easy.

Anyway, part of what he was doing was configuring a router. I had to hold my breath as he explained that he always left the default password unchanged because “it’s easy to remember”. After he left, and with the permission of the owner, I changed that. It’s just this funny idea I have that a router sitting on the Internet ought not to have a password that is known by a few million people and published on hundreds of websites. I’m funny like that.

There is no real way to know exactly how many times your newsletters are read. There is a neat little ‘trick’ you can use with HTML based newsletters and email so that you can know at least how many times it has been viewed. Compare the number of views the number of copies sent out and you will have a reasonably good idea of how well read your newsletter is. With HTML newsletters and email messages it is possible to tell if the message has been opened.