marketing

Getting Started in Social Media: Twitter for Business

After one of our clients recently set up a twitter account for her company and we connected, she sent me an email that read “OK, seriously – how did you manage to get 439 people to follow you?  I mean, I’m sure you’re an interesting guy, but 439?  The race is on!”

I had to admit that 400 wasn’t really that many compared to a lot of the people I follow, and we continued a conversation about how twitter and other social networks could fit into their marketing plan. In keeping with my new years resolution to blog more for clients than creatives, I thought this topic would make a good blog post – so here we go: how to use social media for your business (an introduction). More

Tips and Best Practices for HTML Emails in Outlook 2007, 2010.

While office_2010_outlook_startupMicrosoft has been making great improvements on the web standards front in IE, they’ve been seemingly rolling backwards with HTML support in Outlook. For the 2007 version they switched from the IE rendering engine to the Word engine (apparently for security reasons), which is completely crippled compared to IE. For anyone who does email marketing and designs and codes attractive HTML emails, this decision has no doubt had you shaking your fist and cursing Bill Gates’ mother.

We were all hoping that for the upcoming Outlook 2010 release Microsoft would go back to IE, but they have announced that they are sticking with Word. The pitchforks and torches are waving, but it looks like we’ll be dealing with the Word engine for emails for many years. Even if they switch to IE for 2012, we’ll have clients using 2007 and 2010 for years. So if you haven’t yet learned the ins and outs of designing emails for Outlook, now’s the time to learn!

Forget all your best practices for CSS – go back to 2001 coding practices for an idea of where your head should be.

Mural does a lot of HTML email work for some of our bread and butter clients, and we literally have thousands of campaigns in our archive dating back many years, so we have a lot of experience testing for lots of different clients and learning the various techniques needed for each. With Outlook 2007 we have our most challenging client, and in general if your email works well in Outlook it’s probably working well everywhere.

Limitations

The first thing you need to understand when designing and coding for Outlook is that the usual rules do not apply. Forget all your best practices for CSS – go back to 2001 coding practices for an idea of where your head should be. Note that some of these things might work in Outlook, but I advise against them because in my experience they do not work consistently, and it’s embarrassing to get an email back from your client asking why it broke when they sent it, so just trust me.

General “best practices” for Outlook 2007:

  • Forget about separating content from design with CSS. Build your emails with tables and spacer gifs. No divs. See example below…
  • No background images, only background colors. If you want to have HTML text over an image area, you’ll have to make the area behind it a solid color so you can slice it out of the layout.
  • You can use basic styles, but use them inline attached to each tag, not in the header. Don’t get fancy – a lot of what works in a browser will not work in Outlook.
  • Don’t use padding, only margins. Padding does not work properly.
  • Keep your code as simple as possible.
  • Optimize your email for ‘images off’ mode, which is likely to be default for your recipients. If you don’t define a height for images, they’ll collapse vertically, moving your text content up. Do specify width though.

Lets take a look at a sample email:

webmetrics-email

View the HTML version for code.

Lets take a look at the first paragraph of HTML text for an example of how the email should be coded for outlook.

webmetrics-zoom

<tr>
<td width=”20″>
<img src=”http://client.muralconsulting.com/neustar/7ways/spacer.gif” width=”20″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”" />
</td>
<td bgcolor=”#ffffff” width=”530″>
<p style=”font: 14px/20px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #002765; margin-bottom:10px;”>
<strong>Budgets are tight, yet your customers’ demands for high performance from your online service are growing.</strong> The good news is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make your web applications faster&hellip; if you know where to look!</p>
</td>
<td width=”20″>
<img src=”http://client.muralconsulting.com/neustar/7ways/spacer.gif” width=”20″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”" />
</td>
</tr>

Note that we’re using tables to define the layout, not css, and we’re reinforcing cells with spacer gifs. All the styling is attached inline to the individual <p> tag itself, and not as a global p. Also note that we’re controlling vertical space with margins, not padding.

While many web designers and coders frown on tools like Dreamweaver for not providing accurate design modes for advanced CSS, Dreamweaver is actually a really good tool for emails, and can display them quite accurately. It was originally designed for building websites before the semantic web was popular, so it does old-school well. It definitely helps when building tables, so don’t be afraid to use it.

Testing your emails

There are three ways to test your emails: Sending it to yourself on a lot of different computers and clients, using a testing service like Litmus, and the ‘send page as email’ trick (Windows/IE only). While I don’t really recommend the former for practical reasons, the latter two are essential.

If you’re  using windows and have Outlook on your machine, the quick and dirty way to test is to open your email in IE, and then go to File > Send > Page by email. This will open a new Outlook email and insert the code faithfully into it. Don’t trust the compose view though, send it to yourself, and then you can see how it will appear when it arrives.

If you’re a Mac user, that will not work for you, and you’ll probably want to use a browser testing service that includes email testing. We use Litmus, which lets you test emails in a dozen web and desktop clients to ensure that it works properly. It also lets you test things like the fold, and turning images on and off. It’s expensive, but if you do this a lot it’s worthwhile. HTML clients can have even more compatibility issues than their browser counterparts, and can require just as much testing.

Certainly this is not an exhaustive article about all the ins and outs of Outlook emails, but it should give you a good working foundation. Like anything on the web, you’re bound to find more quirks, but following the guidelines here should get you 90% there.

How to respond to bad press online

Following up on my earlier post about customer service being the new marketing, I just came across a great example of how your business should respond to bad press online.

TTAC BlogFor some reason, an insensitive phone call with a Spanish speaking customer was recorded and uploaded to YouTube, to the embarrassment of Frank Myers Auto Maxx. It got picked up by a very popular blog, The Truth About Cars, giving it broad exposure. Immediately the comments started coming, all of them disparaging to the dealer.

Fortunately, the owner of the dealership was paying attention, and responded quickly in the comments of the blog:

frankmyersauto :
July 17th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

I am the owner of Frank Myers Auto Maxx and I appreciate the person that brought this sick and pathetic video to my attention. Yes, it was made at my dealership but I can assure you that this type of behavior is NOT tolerated when it is known about. It is unfortunate that the “good guys” in the industry are not spotlighted more and this is the type of news that makes the headlines. I have called and personally apologized to the customer for this fiasco, I have had it removed from Youtube, and the people involved are being dealt with according to our strict company policy. In addition, all employees will be attending a mandatory sensitivity class. Once again, I owe anyone that had to sit through this embarrasing video an apology from the bottom of my heart and “thank you” for bringing it to my attention.

Great response – note that the subsequent comments turned around completely, becoming sympathetic with a business owner who can’t control everything his employees do, and thanking him for addressing it properly. Liability turned into an asset – done.

Customer Service is the new Marketing

Customer Service is the new Marketing is a mantra at Mural, and something we emphasize with our clients. We always make sure that customer service is a core value of our clients marketing efforts, because we believe that it’s an essential skill set in our new internet driven economy. I was recently contacted by an old client I did some work for about 4 years ago that proves how true this is.

This company is a family owned, but multi-million dollar HVAC company in the North Texas area. It was started by the current owner’s father decades ago, and has always maintained that small, family owned, low tech quality that can be a very endearing trait. They have done a lot of things right in the history of the company that has helped them grow to such a large size. They are extremely picky in who they hire, and hold them to very high standards. There are random drug tests, weeks of training, no cursing, no smoking, and the work day ends when the job is done, and not before. If you’re going to have some strangers in your house all day, you can probably appreciate the standards they enforce. They’re a bit more expensive than the independent guys, but they’ve worked hard to establish a level of trust that’s hard to beat.

The Internet has become a huge megaphone for consumer feedback, and customers who feel slighted or cheated have a really loud voice.

That is, until the last year or so. They’ve serviced over 100,000 homes around DFW just in the last few years, mostly for happy satisfied customers who have trusted their business for years. But as you can imagine, at such scale, screw ups happen. A bad egg tech slips through and pushes unnecessary repairs on customers, people with no A/C in the Texas summer lose patience when it takes hours longer than expected to get a tech out, and sometimes they have been slow to respond to unsatisfied customers who need repeat service. These types of issues have probably been with them forever, and surely plague their competitors as well, but there’s been a shift in power over the last few years. The Internet has become a huge megaphone for consumer feedback, and customers who feel slighted or cheated have a really loud voice.

Customers for this company have started to speak up when things go wrong. Things really came to a head for them when a collection of complaints about the company’s policy of refusing to turn gas lines back on if they detect a crack and possible carbon monoxide leak in a furnace were published in a local paper, and loyal customers started calling to cancel their service. When they called me, they were interested in an agency that could help them with a public relations problem. So I started looking into it – a google search quickly turned up the infamous article, as well as a couple dozen other review sites littered with 1-star reviews from angry customers. Anyone searching for this company online would likely be turned off from them very quickly, and would probably be warning their neighbors. The reviews were scolding. It would not surprise me at all if google is costing this company millions a year in lost revenue.

It quickly occurred to me that the problem was not one that could be covered up with positive PR to compete with the negative press. That would just be a bandaid on a gunshot wound. What was needed was a swift and dramatic shift in the customer service policies of the company to make sure as few customers as possible ever got angry enough to bother writing a bad review.

I made several recommendations to the company to help remedy the situation. I consider these points of sound advice for just about any business today:

  1. The first step is always admitting you have a problem. Make the decision to change what you need to get the problem fixed.
  2. Be immediately responsive to any complaint, and give it priority over new business.
  3. Be proactive – ask customers if they’re satisfied, and if not, what else you can do for them.
  4. Online communication must be two-way. Don’t just shout out into crowds, and don’t leave your unhappy customers to do the same. Connect with them! Monitor the web for new reviews of your business, monitor social networks like twitter. Dedicate a CSR to ‘online customer service’ and empower them to remedy any complaint found online.
  5. Do it publicly – don’t try to counter-review yourself online anonymously, but post a neutral review with your Online CSR’s direct phone number and email so anyone about to write a review sees that there’s a recourse. Don’t avoid problems, embrace them, solve them publicly, and demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction.
  6. Get involved with online communities like GetSatisfaction.com. Encourage your customers to visit and post an honest review. You can’t avoid the conversation, so you might as well embrace it.
  7. Commit to the long haul. This isn’t a campaign you run for 3 months and then slack off. This is as important, if not increasingly more important than traditional advertising. Consumers are wary of advertisements, but trusting of honest communication. This needs to be a permanent establishment of the company.

The gears are turning over at the HVAC company, and new policies and strategies are now being drafted. If they play their cards right, in a year they could very well have completely turned the tide, and converted a liability into an asset. The brave new world we find ourselves in requires a new set of strategies for companies to effectively engage with customers online, and companies ignore it at their peril. Google can be your savior, or your executioner – it’s up to you.