HSBC

While we were in England we became customers of the bank, HSBC. They’re huge in the UK – from the moment you get into the airport you’re bombarded with their ads. They’re doing a campaign at the moment which has two photos, both shown twice. Across the two photos will be two opposite words, like ‘modern’ and ‘traditional.’ And then across the copies of the photos, the same words are shown but on the opposite photos. It’s a nifty ad idea, and works pretty well, though I’m not entirely sure what it tells me about HSBC.
Anyway, HSBC turned out to be an excellent bank, and overall we were well pleased with them. One of the best deals they offered while we were there was no interest on our credit card. In fact, if it was possible, I’d do a Credit Card Balance Transfer (as its called in bank parlance) from my other cards so I could take advantage of the no interest terms. Although it may not apply to transfers. Anyway, HSBC is good value, and their customer service is excellent. In every branch we went into we found well-trained staff who were only too willing to help.
My only complaint about them, perhaps, is that their branches are pretty thin on the ground in Europe, where I could have done with their help more than once, especially when my wallet was stolen.

Software you can get to grips with

I talked about AIMpromote’s customer relationship management a few days ago, which they provide by using their CRM software (CRM: customer relationship management – get it?). I also talked about turnkey marketing yesterday, and it seems to me that that’s what AIMpromote is all about: making the thing as simple as possible to set up, so that the customer isn’t spending days figuring out some new system, but can get to grips with it straight away. At least that’s what their site tells me, and who am I to gainsay them. (Yay, haven’t had a chance to use ‘gainsay’ in a good while.)
There’s nothing worse than a program that takes forever to get to grips with, as I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back. And doesn’t it bug you when a software specialist walks in the door of your business, loads up the software and then proceeds to go at a great pace through something he understands but you can’t get hold of for the life of you!
disclosure statement

Getting the right list

When I ran the bookshop, one of our biggest difficulties was building up the email newsletter list to a reasonable level, and maintaining it. People were always dropping in, shopping for a while, then getting bored with us and dropping out. Well, at least that’s what you had to assume, as some just stopped responding and vanished. On the other hand we made some good friends amongst these customers, even though we never met most of them.
Because we were a niche market, there was little point in buying a ready-made list of email customers, and in a way, chasing new customers had something of the hunt about it. However, businesses with different markets would no doubt benefit from buying or renting a list, and there are some phenomenally wide-ranging lists around. Martin Worldwide, for instance, possesses a database of over 290 million consumers and 14 million U.S. businesses. That makes our little list at the shop look rather paltry. Still, we made sales through it, and that was the aim!
Martin Worldwide act as a telemarketing lists broker, amongst other things, and offer turnkey marketing solutions. Okay, turnkey marketing isn’t a phrase I’m particularly familiar with, and I had to do a bit of hunting around to find out that it means – I think! – marketing that’s up and running and ready to go for the person wanting the job done. I guess it comes from the idea that you turn the key in your (new) home and voila! everything is ready waiting for you.

Looking after the customers

Enterprise-level features
Lead management
Website analytics

Maybe these three phrases leap out at you and you know exactly what they mean. I’m not sure that I do. They’re the kind of phrases where I think I know what’s being said, but have that niggling feeling that my mind is trying to glide over them because they’re not entirely clear to me.
I picked them out at random from a website that deals in customer relationship management. (There we go again: doesn’t that just somehow seem to be not quite the English you know and love?) This website, AIMpromote.com, has a page that shows all the ways in which it’s superior to two other sites. I checked out both these sites, and in fact, AIMpromote is definitely superior in being clearer in its use of English. That’s a plus, especially as they’re the ones I got these phrases from. (One of the other sites offered a ‘news’ item, which turned out to be a dull jargon-filled piece of stuff which my mind definitely refused to read.
But AIMpromote is also superior in its features, of which there are over fifty. The other two sites have lots of crosses where AIMpromote has nothing but ticks.

Read those phrases again, consecutively:
Enterprise-level features
Lead management [of]
Website analytics [into]
Customer relationship management.

There! That’s better, isn’t it? They just needed a bit of context.