The Content Composer Org

In preparation for its Global Projects group, Mayer Brown Chicago has added two more attorneys to its team of talented legal practitioners. Hailing from Hunton and Williams, Robert H. Edwards joins the Mayer Brown group as a partner in the firm’s office in Washington DC. His new position leaves him responsible for handling Mayer Brown Chicago’s project finance and development. His job in the department requires him to focus more on policy issues and projects related to climate change, renewable energy, as well as the financing and development of “inside the fence” projects and independent power projects.

Robert H. Edwards is a graduate of Stanford Law School. He holds an MBA degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He finished his Harvard University BA in economics degree as a magna laude.

In addition to Edwards, Robert S. Goldberg will also join Mayer Brown Chicago as a partner in the firm’s Houston office. Hailing from Chadbourne and Parke, Goldberg’s new position expects him to offer advises to lenders, sponsors, investors, developers and other players involved in both international and domestic project finance and corporate concerns. Robert S. Goldberg is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Mayer Brown is a law firm par excellence.

Stop and think before you delete! If you don’t, you risk killing your brand and ultimately your business. In today’s marketplace, ignoring the e-mail inbox could shorten your business lifespan by killing your brand image.

Think about it: Would you intentionally ignore your clients and send messages saying you don’t care about them or their business? That is exactly what you do when you ignore e-mail or respond slowly or inaccurately.

Brand image is built from the inside out. Every communication that takes place between a company and a client, potential client, vender, consultant and even competitor results in a positive or a negative brand impression. And when those impressions are added together, they make up brand image.

As consultants, our brand images are our lifeblood. They must reflect near perfection, if we expect businesses to trust our expertise and to want our advice and recommendations. Furthermore, we need to ensure that our clients’ understand the dangers of messy e-mail communications, both inbound and outbound.

A recent survey of the retail industry tells the tale of what looks like an approaching trend in the business world.

Current numbers from this survey indicate that most businesses are in a lot of trouble when it comes to their “customer e-service.” Twenty-six percent of retailers surveyed failed to respond to e-mail inquiries from customers seeking to make a purchase.

In the same study, conducted by Benchmark Portal and sponsored by eGain Communications Corp., the cross-industry response rate (all verticals) of 41 percent shows that businesses in general have a pretty abysmal record. Forty-seven percent of retailers, for example, fail to respond to customer e-mails within 24 hours, against a cross-industry rate of only 61 percent.

Conducted in July 2005, this study also benchmarked the quality of company responses to client e-mail inquiries. Among companies that do respond to client or customer e-mails, 35 percent of retailers sent e-mails rated by Benchmark Portal as “good” at answering customers’ questions while the cross-industry rate is a sad 17 percent. Twenty-eight percent of retailers sent e-mails rated “fair,” compared to a cross-industry rate of 26 percent; and nine percent of retailers sent “poor” e-mails, compared to the cross-industry rate of 14 percent.

Another study provides even worse news for e-centric client and customers, and ultimately for overall business success. This one, reported by Internet Retail, shows that 51 percent of small- to mid-size companies and 41 percent of large businesses do not respond to customer or client e-mail at all. And of those who do respond, 70 percent of small- to mid-size companies and 61 percent of large businesses do not respond within 24 hours.

Since brand image depends on every single representative of a company, no matter their functional area, it doesn’t matter who inside a business deletes or responds badly to e-mail communications. Doing so creates a destructively negative impression to the person who sent the e-mail. Since every external and internal communication creates an impression that impacts the brand, those communications also impact marketing and sales results, and consequently the bottom line.

eMarketer’s Senior Analyst David Hallerman also recently surveyed the state of business e-mail marketing and reports that more than two trillion e-mail messages will be sent out this year and nearly 2.7 trillion by 2007. Businesses cannot afford to ignore those numbers, even if only a tiny percentage of these e-mails fall into the commercial category. Alienating even one client hurts brand image and eventually sales. Alienating hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of e-mailers over the life of a business can therefore be deadly.

Brand image is all about client perception. When businesses delete e-mails or respond poorly, the brand suffers. Before long, current and future sales take a direct hit on the negative side. Furthermore, responding badly to e-mail opens the door to competitors who treat every communication channel with the constant attention it needs. This includes e-mail.

Acknowledging that businesses are managed by busy people who may not understand the damage done by not responding or by badly responding to e-mail, business leaders must recognize before it is too late that such numbers point to a serious crises on the horizon for those who ignore the e-side of their businesses. In our pervasively online technological age, shoppers, customers, clients, vendors and competitors are choosing e-mail more and more as their preferred communications tool. Furthermore, study results suggest that businesses may miss up to two-thirds their potential audience by not adding e-mail to their marketing tool kit.

When businesses treat e-mailers badly, they risk such responses as anger, rejection, hurt, frustration and revenge. In addition, ignoring e-mailers generates harmful word of mouth. When done right, word of mouth grows businesses, increases sales and expands margins. When done badly, the opposite occurs, and a brand begins to die a slow and painful death.

As consultants we must take an active role in solving communications problems that my batter either our brand or our clients’ brands. Here are a few tips for turning e-mail into a business “growth tool” rather than a weapon for business suicide: 1. Respond accurately to all e-mails with 24 hours. 2. Embrace e-mail as a marketing tool. 3. Use SPAM filters, if necessary (but only if necessary), to block e-mails originating from Spammers, but do so cautiously. Blocking e-mails from legitimate clients and others will hurt your business in the long run. 4. For best results and greatest returns on investment, customize outgoing e-mail messages by employing some kind of consolidated client and prospect database that allows you to specifically identify client groups’ needs, wants and desires. 5. Communicate customized messages that meet the needs, wants and desires of those client groups.

When utilized correctly, businesses bask in results-oriented e-mail marketing and brand building. Home Depot, for example, has grown its client e-mail database from 500,000 to five million contacts in just the last two years. Each one of these five million e-mails represents solid future sales.

In conclusion, by embracing e-mail, a consulting firm can grow sales by melding ingredients gleaned from its client data points and managing them so as to:  Collect the right data  Craft the right message  From the right sender  Through the right channel  At the right times

First and foremost, customers and clients count. They measure your value and develop a perception around that value. By ignoring e-mail or practicing it poorly, opportunities for positive perceptions may be missed, dismissed or destroyed, shortening your business’s lifespan. Treating e-mail like the winning tool it can be, however, holds the potential of extending your business’s lifespan (and profits) indefinitely.

How many times have you been handed a business card and immeadetly got a negative impression on the person who handed you the card and the business they represent?

All too often, small business owners tend to skip investing in getting a decent business card designed by professional corporate identity designers. They either go for the ready made solutions that most online printers offer today or use templates that come with either MS Word, MS Publisher or some other application.

For a budget comparable to a good meal for two at a decent restaurant, a small business owner get a professional logo design and matching stationery design. A little more investment in a good printing company and you would have armed yourself with the most important tools that would help you win your battles on the market field.

Even though you are an honest and trust worthy business person, a cheap looking business card will definetly create a negative impression in the first 5 seconds of handing over the card to a potential customer. It is then an uphill battle to try and win over the customer by creating the right impression.

I am sure you spend a lot of money and effort into making yourself look decent and smart when going for a business meeting. But all that effort goes to waste if you are not backed by a professional image in the form of your company logo and business card.

Let the business card do the talking for you. A strong initial impression created by a professionally designed logo design on a business card would help you make the sale faster. The customer would make the sale themselves. Of course a professional image should be backed up by a professional service. I am not saying having a decent logo design and a professional business card would do all the work. I am just saying that it would add value to your business and enhance your image.

Jeff Marsh is a lead designer with Logo Design Works. He has more than 8 years of experience in helping small businesses create their brands.

For a Professional Stationery Design for your company contact Logo Design Works on 614 917 2177.

Naming your business is probably the second thing you’ll do when you start it,
right after you decide what sort of business it will be. It’s a decision that you’ll
have to live with every day so here’s something to think about before you print
up those business cards.

Names don’t matter. Really, there is no correlation between the success of a
business and it’s name. Only the first time or two that someone hears the
name of your company will the words have any meaning. After that, it becomes
a collection of sounds.

Maybe the first time you heard the name Nike you associated it with the
goddess of victory, and that’s only if you studied mythology. Now your first
association is with athletic wear. The same is true for Reebok and Adidas, and
you probably don’t even know what those names are in reference to in the first
place. The business becomes their meaning.

Your name doesn’t even have to describe what your business does. Take
Revlon as an example. Or Accenture. When I was thinking of names for Stesnet,
my website, I noticed that many of the most successful sites had nonsense
names, like Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon. Meanwhile, a company with a
descriptive name like Pets.com sank.

Your name can even be misleading. Take Duane-Reade, the ubiquitous New
York City drug store chain. The name comes from the fact that the first store
was founded on Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets in lower
Manhattan. They’re everywhere now, and only one is at the location that bears
the company name. Even more confusing, Bleeker Bob’s Records sole location
isn’t on Bleeker Street; it’s a block away on 3rd.

The only time names do matter is when they’re really bad. Henry Ford made
the right decision in naming his company after himself. If his last name had
been Czerniejewski, he would have had problems. Another example of a way to
go wrong is like when a Thai restaurant opened here in New York under the
name of Phuket. They changed it as soon as their customers explained to them
what was so funny. Also, avoid names that are too close to those of big
companies. Coco-Cola is probably going to get you letters from lawyers.

But, given the option, name your business something catchy and descriptive
anyway. Even if it doesn’t help, it can’t hurt. Look at Dunkin’ Donuts, or
NetFlix. Even a ho-hum descriptive name won’t hurt you, like British Petroleum,
or American Airlines.

Pick a name you like, and live with it for a week or two. Then get three opinions
from people you trust. If it passes those two tests, go with it. If later you
decide you don’t like it, you can always change it, like Philip Morris and the Bell
Atlantic Corporation did.

Fred Stesney
Stesnet Community Host
Stesnet is the only online community created exclusively for business owners.
http://www.stesnet.com