Yellow Dog Consulting

Sales & Marketing Consulting for solo-preneurs.

is your email address costing you?

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One of my clients has a couple of team members who STILL use an AOL email address. Others use Gmail but none were using an @company email when I was hired.

A few years ago at PSBJ I taught a workshop with a resume coach. One thing she said was that if you have an AOL email address on your resume, she’s probably going to stop reading your resume. SERIOUSLY. We judge people based on their email address. Don’t lie, you do it too. Sure you’re a better person than me, most people are. When your job hunting have a REAL email address. firstname.lastname@XYZ.com is ideal, or some combo of that-my personal email has my middle initial in it. If you work for a company, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using an @company email address.

As a company owner here’s WHY you need to have employees using a company email address:

1. They quit and take all your clients with their gmail account

2. They DIE and no one knows their email PW (it happens, you never know)

3. If I contact a company via their website and yourmom85@aol.com replies to me, I’m going to take my business to mom@company.com.

4. they die and no one knows who to contact to get access to their email account

You don’t think it’s costing you business, but you’d be surprised at how petty people are. It’s unprofessional, trust me.

My client is now transitioning to company email accounts, but it’s a much slower process than expected, and I have one person who’s refusing and bothered I’m asking them to look professional. It’s an uphill battle, so start off your company on the right foot.

What else?

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IMG_2458I love going to the meat market by my house, it’s a bunch of curmudgeonly old men, who don’t say “okay sounds good” they only ask “What Else?” And then I keep buying stuff because they’re big and scary! Okay, not really, BUT how often do you ask your clients- “what else”?

What am I forgetting to ask here? What else do we need to talk about today? What was on your agenda? What else are you thinking about (work related…)? What Else?

The next time you talk to a client or meet with a client, make sure to ask “what else?” you may be surprised by the answer!

Ask Yellow Dog: Customer Referrals

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Last week at a workshop I got a GREAT follow up email from someone asking:

How we can encourage and motivate current and past customers to recommend us to other potential customers?

GREAT question! I’m assuming you have a list of current and past customers (hopefully in email form) that you can reach out to. Here’s a few ideas:

1. Referral Campaign– Full Circle Farms does great referral campaigns, any time someone puts my name down when they setup their account, I get $10 off my next box of produce. They do bigger pushes throughout the year where if I refer someone my friend gets a discount AND I get a discount to get started. This could work to send an email to all your current/past customers and say you save 10% for anyone who puts your name in the referral field (which you’d have to add to your ordering page), OR give them a code (FRIEND or MEMORIALDAY), etc. Make sure there’s a limit to it- valid through Monday of Memorial Day or Fathers Day weekend only, etc.

2. Do you notice when you order something from Amazon that after you place your order it says “share with a friend” and you can tweet/FB/email your network and tell them what you just bought? Likewise, when I sign up for a contest sometimes there’s a landing page after I enter that says “share with friends” and asks for the email addresses of friends to send a note to.

3. Promo Cards– my husband bought really fancy Bose headphones and when they came, inside the case the headphones are in there were 5 business cards about the headphones. That way when he’s on a flight and someone asks him about his headphones he can just give them a card. BRILLIANT. Sure he might take out those cards and put his own business cards in there, but I know him well enough to know they’ll just stay right in that headphone case and he’s DREAMING of the day he can talk about his headphones. I’m okay with it as long as I don’t have to hear it! For you, throwing in 3 promo cards with each order, and maybe it has a 10% off code on it (or free shipping, etc.) would be an easy thing to do.