Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

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Critical insights lost through 'no-reply' emails

The so-called 'sin' to which McCormick refers is the 'no-reply' email address that is so often used for marketing e-mails, effectively meaning that consumers can't simply click their 'reply' button and give their feedback.

Clearly, many marketers feel that there are good reasons for this approach, with the most obvious being "I haven't got the time or manpower to answer all the potential replies". This may be true, but it also communicates to the customer a lack of both value and service.

"Some have referred to what we are observing in social media as a revolution. But for marketers, the revolution lies not in the tools, not in the speed, and not even in the ability of consumers to communicate with each other," says McCormick. "For marketers, the revolution is that the focus of marketing is changing from selling to serving. Good marketing is increasingly less about creating compelling messages and more about providing excellent customer service. There is an abundance of slick marketing messages, but what makes companies stand out from the clutter is an authentic commitment to incredible customer service."

So the 'no-reply' entry in the marketing message's header raises an immediate red flag for many consumers, who see such emails as a very one-sided dialogue, communicating that "this message is about us, and we don't have time to listen to you."

According to data from Forrester's 'Winning Email in a Down Economy' study, 29% of consumers want the ability to write back to marketers who send them e-mail messages. However, only 11% said they want to use e-mail more like they use social networks. In fact, this suggests that if marketers were listening via e-mail in the first place, consumers may not feel such a strong need to post brand complaints on Facebook and Twitter - which, if not spotted and addressed quickly by the brand, can often be embarassing or even damaging to the brand's image.

Interestingly, while many internet service providers are developing their own anti-spam measures to help keep customers' mailboxes clean and safe, a number of them are now checking to see whether their customers reply to senders of messages that could potentially be spam - and if the number of replies from customers reaches a particular threshold, it is assumed that the sender is not a spammer but a legitimate marketer.

In other words, ISPs are beginning to measure customer engagement with marketers, albeit on a very rudimentary level. But this trend means that providing a working address instead of a 'no-reply' address can actually help future marketing messages' deliverability with many of the world's ISPs and email service providers.

There will always be plenty of challenges associated with inviting a potential onslaught of incoming messages after sending out a large e-mail campaign (for example, customer service bandwidth might be negatively impacted), but marketers must develop the means of collecting insights from this kind of feedback, however daunting the task may initially seem, and circulating those insights to the entire company.

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)