Foreign Perspectives

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Although it might sound obvious, you need to ask people to do what you’d like them to do when you send out a marketing e-mail.

It might be obvious but many marketing e-mails are sent out without a clear “buy this” message and even more go out without giving the reader a clear means of actually buying the product. Many newsletters are sent out without containing links to specific products sold by the company sending it out yet it’s one of the easiest ways to pick up easy sales as you’re sending it out to people who’ve asked to be on your mailing list so they’re already interested in your products.

Don’t forget to vary your message too. For example, if you’re sending out a travel related newsletter, pick out upcoming vacations such as Easter and special interest periods like Valentine’s Day. Hallmark spend a LOT of money to produce cards that address every possible situation that you could imagine and you should approach your newsletter with the same originality (or just copy Hallmark!).

However, the most important thing is to ensure that there’s a very clear “buy this” message and a very easy way of a reader doing exactly that.

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We get a relatively low rate of turnover of the properties listed on our sites but one thing that always amazes me is that the seller never passes on the information about the advertising they’d done to the new owner.

In pretty much all cases that sale is a straight sale of the business so you’d think that the new owner would want to retain the existing customer base yet never once have we been contacted by a new owner wanting to revive the site through changing the contact details to their own, perhaps a new description, or whatever. In fact, in most cases that we follow up the very first thing that the new owners do is to change the name of the business and change all the contact details so they are pretty much guaranteed to lose all the existing customer base.

For the first time today we by chance caught one of the new owners via a general mailshot. Their first thought was to delete the advert rather than simply change the contact details even though the subscription has already been covered by the previous owner.

So, even if you are planning on changing how the business that you’ve just bought operates, do ask about the advertising and try to get a list of places that it’s advertised in. You may find that ongoing advertising has been paid for in advance so you may as well just change the contact details even if you don’t plan to renew it next time around.

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Usually when I go off on a short break there are a few new entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites but this time I returned to something of a bumper crop which took me most of the morning to catch up.

In theory, the process is quite automated but in reality there’s almost always a little work to be done to get the new entries online. Most of the time, it’s a matter of a few minutes but now and again you get someone that just puts “see website” and, of course, their website is rarely in a form that allows a straight copy and paste to get it online. In fact, this time it was worse as they’d their whole website typed in uppercase letters so I’d to retype it all and correct the grammar too for that matter.

That grammar problem is quite strange really. You’d think that people would put the effort into their site to get both the spelling and grammar reasonably correct but now and again you come across a site that you’d think had been written by a small child which surely can’t be an attractive proposition for a potential guest, can it?

Strangely, it’s usually the foreigners who are writing in their second or third language who get both the spelling and grammar correct and this morning was no different: the entry from Italy was perfect apart from one word which only needed to be changed to put a truly English-English spin on the phrase they’d used.

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