Depending upon how old you are, I wanted to ask – Have left the world a better place today than when you were just starting school?
As with a lot of things, this discussions has come out of a congenial discussion at the end of a business meeting. And before we all shout “yes it’s better / No, it’s worse”, I acknowledge that we are all connected to every possible piece of information, our TV’s are positively HUGE and the Unions aren’t on strike – oh, wait a minute, yes they are.
Really, I’m asking about your childrens, and grandchildrens lives. In comparison to yours.
I read an article this week, that noted that in America in the 1960’s an ‘average’ 2.2 family had one bread winner, one stay at home mum and the family still managed to buy a sensible sized family home, put food on the table, and still pay to put the two kids through college.
Can you do that today? Should you be able to?
Some numbers – I decided to avoid the Governments shopping backet with its various calculations. Boring. Instead I brought it right down to something we are all pretty familiar with – How much you earn in a year, how much did your car cost (on average) and how much did your house cost.
All fairly standard, average figures used. And the outcome . . . . . 50/50 split.
1969. Neil Armstrong had just landed on the moon and I was wearing shorts.
Income / House / Car
£1000 – £4,900 – £1,300
5x wage 1.3x wage
1995. The Spice Girls are just about to arrive.
£4,500 – £55,000 – £4,750
12x wage 1x wage
2023. We are all staring at our phones / tablets / laptops post BREXIT and Covid.
£29,000 – £258,000 – £18,500
9x wage 0.6x wage
House prices – things went really bad in the late 1990’s, when it seems no one could afford to get a mortgage, and they aren’t much better today.
Cars. Honestly, a much bigger drop than I expected, down to just over half of your annual wage.
So the key question – are we going to be ripped off by these hugely expensive electric cars?
Well, even allowing for the expensive Mercedes, Audi, Porsche and Tesla models, a sensible ‘family’ electric car is generally around £40,000. You can get cheaper and you can spend a lot more.
If we add that value to our stats –
2023 Electric cars : 1.3x annual wage.
So for cars at least, and definitely across the large family car brands, if not the Germans makes, the truth is : Your car cost you the same today as it did in the 1960’s.
Perhaps we should be reaping the cost saving and manufacturing benefits of 60 years technological advance? Perhaps we already are – you can plug it in over night, for a full charge at not a lot of money!
I’m off to order a brand new Volvo EX30 and a long extension cable immediately.
Just don’t ask how safe I think the location of the speedo is.
In sales and marketing terms its straight forward : Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic (or relevant) and Timely.
Nearly everyone I speak to, associated with sales, is familiar with the specific, achievable and realistic. They are the ones that easily trip off the tongue.
We want to sell more . . . cars . . . over the weekend of Friday 26th April – Monday 29th April. Achievable and realistic are sometimes rolled into one -, ‘damn right it’s possible, we have done it before!’
But measurable and timely are getting more difficult as we move further into a digital and GDPR world.
Generating sales or just enquiries
Once upon a time, we put a large advert in the local / regional paper. Probably with a list of cars we were selling on Wednesday, that unfortunately would be out of date by the time Friday came around. (But who cared, we would have other, similar cars by then)
If we were looking for a big push we would hold a Black and White event, a Man from the Factory event, Double Discount. The list could go on, but you get the idea. It needed to sound different to the customer and it needed to say ‘this weekend you will get the deal of a lifetime’.
If we were lucky, the manufacturer of our chosen brand would also be running a smooth and sophisticated advert on ITV or Channel 4. ‘Loosing a fortune is not important to the VW Golf driver.’
Today you have a head start if you are part of a large group, or have a really switched on marketing team. But not every retailer is the same size or has the same respources.
In the past, several boxes of pizza were ordered together with a few bottle of beer and everyone was roped into the showroom to make some early evening calls. Job done. We had people in the showroom and we sold some more cars.
As the salesman hated it – and therefore didn’t try hard to be really good at it – we asked outside companies to make the calls. They did it all the time, so there results were always going to be better.
They may have costed slightly more than the pizza and beer, but then if you sold one more car, it paid for the extra, and everyone was happy.
(Don’t ask about the focus group I was running in a ‘neutral ground’, two room, conference suite, to measure customers opinions. It had to be cancelled mid-session because the ‘sales team’ sat next door, watching the live video feed, decided to order pizza and drink and be loud and derisive after every negative comment)
Today we need to spend much more professional attention on Measurable and Timely if we want to make the most of our marketing.
Cold calling is now out of the window. If retailers are slightly twitchy, paranoid or have no confidence in how diligently the in-house database had been updated with ‘Do not contact’ notes. Even today, in 2024 I am still seeing client databases that don’t have the option to say ‘Don’t call / text / email this customer’.
Digital marketing rose in parallel with the internet. But now your message is one of a thousand that will bombard the customer this week. Making it difficult to stand out. Buying the back page of the paper anymore knowing that it will sit on a coffee table or side board for a few days attracting a number of subliminal glances is also unfeasible.
So sales teams hit everything. Checked Email lists, BLOG posts, Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.
But what is measurable and timely? Sales exec’s haven’t started to asked customers what brought them into the showroom – they say they do, but they still don’t!
You need to combine the two letters of the acronym and manage them together.
Most email marketing platforms, like our own eSend system, records how many emails were sent, when, who opened them, which ones bounced, etc.
But that’s not really giving you the whole picture. An Outlook user – If you don’t open the email, but read it in the preview window, like more than 50% of email users do, then it will never be flagged to the sending company that the email has been opened or read.
How many times have you seen some vague message in your in box, but entered the details straight into a browser to have a look? Again, no way of tracking that.
There is a lovely phrase in marketing called ‘Bounce rate’, not to be confused with bounced emails which means that ‘at that one moment in time’ your email couldn’t be delivered.
Marketing ‘Bounce Rate’ is the level of customers that visited your webpage, but didn’t go any further. Perhaps they were distracted, your page could have been one of many open on their browser for a couple of hours. In fact Google assumes they have already left if the page is still up after 30 minutes.
So what do you need. Is it really worth spending a tiny amount with someone to show you how to make it all measurable in a timely manner?
Absolutely. You would know :
How many people followed a link on your email, or your google ad’ and ended up on a specific information page you are promoting. The landing page.
When visitors looked, can be tracked down to the minute. And for how long.
Landing page for each message you are putting out there? One for the blog, the email and one or more for social media. It can split up all your enquiries.
Which offers ‘name’ is attractive enough, that users entered that into their Google search.
(Remember to add an information box on your main opening page – something like – ‘Latest Offers’ together with links to the most recent marketing campaigns. – You can track movement)
The more information you know the better. The initial idea, the offer, is only part of it. So is writing about it, texting, email marketing or calling. You need to know exactly who is seeing what you are creating and what they are responding to. If you want to know about marketing A/B testing. Give us a call.
For 30 years out telemarketing approach always broke down exactly what the customers through, and how that affected their buying decision. Google Analytics (#GA4) does the same thing online. But sometimes a retailer needs a little hand holding to set up something that is basically free (from Google) to make money for you.
Give Cymark a call. We can plan bespoke landing pages with your team and put in place Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics that will work for you. We will even do the reports so you can manage the effect.
‘My god, you made it to 29 years.’ This has happened a few times this week. Not quite as catchy as 25 years, or 30 years, but 29 years is a long time supporting one industry.
A great thank you must go to everyone who has worked for Cymark during that time. Lots of late nights and hard graft. You laid the foundations for today’s company.
In those decades, we have worked for numerous manufacturers and hundreds of individual retailers, providing successful and cost effective telemarketing and e-marketing for retail sales, local business and LCV sales and database building, aftersales service bookings and post service follow up.
The pandemic brought a lot of changes. Cymark streamlined its processes (we got rid of the big white binders so many of you remember). It’s all online and easily accessible. We still make on-site visits, we want to make sure we are doing it right for your retailer.
Successful industry marketing and comments are included within other blog pages. Make sure you subscribe.
Guy Winter
01423 501234
07711 978908
Have a look at the links across the top of the page for Retail / Service / Sales Conversion information.
We are often asked, “can you help us produce detailed statistics, like you do for all your calling campaigns, for our other marketing.”
eSend emails flying
We do produce complete marketing results for a number of clients, but you can do it yourself very easily.
Track your email campaigns like your web traffic.
A number of companies completely skip the FREE OPTION of tracking their email campaigns beyond the very basic.
Use Google Analytics to track your email campaigns exactly like you would a pay per click Online Ad.
Plus, if you do it all through Google Analytics (GA4) you can compare and combined the email results with the rest of your marketing – Interest from Facebook, Pinterest, Blog posts.
Tie it all together. It will make your life much easier and is a HUGE step forward from the ‘Sent / Delivered / Bounced / Opened’ responses that are pretty inaccurate. (Does your smartphone open your emails automatically, or do you read the bulk of the incoming email in Outlook without actually opening it?)
Sound like too much work?, Too complicated?, Have a look through the following steps and short video. You could have all this new information by the end of the afternoon.
Why Email Campaigns?
Recognised as the most cost-effective technique to grow your business. Email marketing builds your brand awareness and expands your customer base.
But you need to know which bit is generating you sales.
Simply put, because most of your ad’s are through Google – probably – and it is completely free.
You can see both which email generate interest. You can see which landing page they visited. Plus, being free, you can play with it without worrying about wasting money.
So what do I need?
To get this to work you are going to need the following:
A Google account. It can be a new Marketing account, rather than your own.
A Google Analytics account. This is where you will see all the statistics.
A Google Tag Manager account. This is the middle step, between your own website and the analysis.
Aware of URL/ATM codes. Really easy, this is the code you put in your email.
There are hundreds of very detailed Google help video’s online to walk you through these three items, but we can recommend starting with –
This instructor will walk through using all four steps above, it might take you 40 minutes. But it can save you hours if you are not familiar with Google Analytics.
I now have GA4 and the other bits. What happens now?
You are probably familiar with links within emails. These are the little blue buttons or phrases that you are encouraged to click, which then leaps you forward onto the senders website, normally to show you more information on the item you were interested in.
The leap to the website is the stage most users stop at. But there is so much more.
The URL/ATM code mentioned above lets you add a little bit of description to the blue link. All of which will take you to the same page on your website.
For example –
Link will go to. Harris Tweed Jacket Page.
Google Analytics will show – 317 users went to the Harris Tweed Jacket Page.
With URL/ATM Code –
Link will go to. Harris Tweed Jacket Page.
Google Analytics will show – 27 users went from your Newsletter email.
104 users went from your autumn offers email.
172 users went from your summer offers email.
14 users went from your ‘Not seen you recently’ email.
In fact, once you become used to Google Analytics you can track exactly which of those user types above ran through the whole website, put items if the sales cart (if used) and bought. Or completed a ‘more information’ form.
The links for the above products – all free and not connected to eSend in any way –
Once everything is hooked up above, you go into Google Analytics. Given the amount of data that Google fights through, there is often a delay of a few hours before data starts initially coming through.
We are the first to admit, that Google Analytics can look very daunting to start with. So we have put together some screens, with ‘Click this bit now’ arrows. (Google has a habit of upgrading GA4 all the time, the exact position on the screen may vary from those below, but you should be able to find the steps. Plus you will know what to type into the help screen should you get lost.
The opening Analytics page (demo account shown) shows the overall site traffic. Follow the arrows.
For a little more information, have a look at the eSend page on the Cymark website or visit the dedicated eSend website.
