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Casual Articles - NCOA for Email - Is Your Email Address List Clean and Up-To-Date?
Too many small business people lose thousands of dollars in sales and profitable growth each and every month because of one simple mistake.They don’t ask the customer to buy!And it can hurt your sales and your small business growth if you’re a business owner, or it can impede your sales success if you’re a salesperson.So let me ask you this question.In your own experience as a customer, have you ever been served by a salesperson to the point where you’re saying to yourself, “okay I want to buy this now!”… And the salesperson either leaves you, keeps talking or just forgets to ask you to buy?It’s a little uncomfortable isn’t it?It happens all the time.Too many salespeople forget to ask the customer to buy. They may be scared of getting a ‘no’, scared of feeling ‘pushy’ or many other various reasons.Whatever the case, here are some tips on how you can ask for, and get, more sales and have the customer love you for it in the process.Read the buying signals from the customer. If they are interested in you and they have listened to you present your products or services, they’ll be waiting for you to lead them to purchase.The fact is this; if your customer is still talking to you at the end of your sales presentation they are ready to buy from you! You just need to lead them in what they need to do to buy from you.It’s natural. They’re talking to you because they have a ‘problem’ that they ne
It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person.
Your List Has Typos
No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:
1. User Caused
If you accept email addresses from your website, you p
In this installment on medical billing of electronic claims, using NSF 3.01 specifications, we're going to continue our review of the FB0 record, which is more line item detail, picking up with field number 8.FB0 field 8, positions 61 - 67, is the coinsurance amount. This is the amount of the claim that is covered by any additional insurance that the patient has. In the most common cases where you're billing Medicare, the secondary payer will be Medicaid and this amount will usually be the 20% that Medicare doesn't cover. Of course this isn't always the case.FB0 field 9, positions 68 - 82, is the ordering provider ID. I think we need to take a moment to clarify something that is probably confusing a lot of people. In this series of articles, we've seen many ID numbers for providers, including rendering, referring and now ordering. The difference between these three is very easy to explain.The rendering provider is the provider who actually performs the procedure or gives treatment to the patient. The referring provider is the one who referred the patient to the provider who actually performed the procedure. The ordering provider is the one who made the determination that the procedure needed to be done. In many cases, the ordering and rendering provider are the same but in some cases the rendering provider brings in a consultant for an expert opinion. This provider will sometimes make the call and thus becomes the ordering provider a
Shrewd marketers devote a great amount of attention to crafting their email messaging campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, fuss over the content, and carefully monitor the timing of delivery.
Once the perfect message has been created, it is just as important to focus on its successful delivery to the intended recipients. Unfortunately, it is likely that your current email address list has a number of significant problems.
Your List Has Inappropriate Addresses
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects you to everyone. The danger is that there are people out there you would rather not be connected to. Obviously, you want to keep these people, and their moments of malice, off your list. Some common situations include:
1. Bogus Addresses
Some of your visitors will never disclose their email address to you. If an entry is required, they will make something up. A frequent occurrence is some variation of "asdf@asdf.com", which happens when the user hits random keys.
2. Prank Addresses
An innocent person may be getting added to new lists daily, simply because they made enemies with the wrong person. Sometimes the abuse is a prank subscription from one friend to another; other times it targets a public figure (e.g. billg@microsoft.com).
3. Malicious Addresses
Another common type of abuse is when someone targets your company. Without you noticing, your email message is directed to someone who will make your life miserable. This might be an email address to report spam (e.g. Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time - when they switch jobs, move, switch Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances such as cable modems, as well as ISP pricing competition, mergers and failures continue to encourage this movement. In addition to their ISP-provided email address, users acquire additional email addresses from their jobs or schools, hundreds of free web-based email services (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% annually, and now exceed 100 million addresses. Email address changes are also fueled by the growth in unsolicited email, as users switch email accounts to escape "spam". Services such as AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which may be used and abandoned at will. As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day. Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly "dead" (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list. It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person. No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms: 1. User Caused If you accept email addresses from your website, you pr
Your List Has Old Addresses
Your List Has Typos
Recently I took my son Trent to purchase more school uniform items. He's a growing (very fast) 13 year old, and it was time for more clothing. When the school pants no longer drag on the ground and the hem barely reaches his ankles you know it is time.Anyhow we went to a school uniform shop nearby which we hadn't previously been to. Trent insisted we go there as they apparently stocked the longer sports shorts he wanted and the usual place we went to didn't have them.Well what an experience it was. Firstly the shop was in a time warp. They had probably been there for decades and nothing internally had changed. You didn't know who the staff were, in fact when we finally found them they looked like they had been dragged out of bed to come to work. The only exception was the older lady who seemed to be the boss. The girls who were in their early 20's looked scruffy and were very unhelpful. They stood around watching the older lady work and only did something when she asked them to. They had no initiative whatsoever and you had to (or should I say I had to) tell them what to do.The older lady later told me that the actual owner of the business, never listened to her suggestions to make improvements, in fact he hardly ever visited the store.Actually it was interesting watching her in action. In her position she could have taken charge and taught those girls how to deal with the customers and let them use their initiative. Even th
Some of your visitors will never disclose their email address to you. If an entry is required, they will make something up. A frequent occurrence is some variation of "asdf@asdf.com", which happens when the user hits random keys.
2. Prank Addresses
An innocent person may be getting added to new lists daily, simply because they made enemies with the wrong person. Sometimes the abuse is a prank subscription from one friend to another; other times it targets a public figure (e.g. billg@microsoft.com).
3. Malicious Addresses
Another common type of abuse is when someone targets your company. Without you noticing, your email message is directed to someone who will make your life miserable. This might be an email address to report spam (e.g. Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time - when they switch jobs, move, switch Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances such as cable modems, as well as ISP pricing competition, mergers and failures continue to encourage this movement. In addition to their ISP-provided email address, users acquire additional email addresses from their jobs or schools, hundreds of free web-based email services (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% annually, and now exceed 100 million addresses. Email address changes are also fueled by the growth in unsolicited email, as users switch email accounts to escape "spam". Services such as AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which may be used and abandoned at will. As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day. Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly "dead" (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list. It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person. No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms: 1. User Caused If you accept email addresses from your website, you p
Your List Has Old Addresses
Your List Has Typos
What does it means for us to be loyal to our customers? First of all it seems to be easier to take for granted customers loyalty to us and bemoan what we think is a lack of loyalty to us. Each repeat order from a customer can be a sign of their loyalty. Customers who change jobs and continue to use us are also signs of loyalty. Customers who use another vendor for a project because of price are not lacking loyalty; rather we have not provided enough value to justify our increased price. The point is this:It is not that there are customers out there who are loyal and lacking loyalty,
rather our company provides a certain level of value to each customer.
When that level of value is high, customers are loyal.
When we fail to exceed the level of value that customers can receive elsewhere,
we cannot be assured of their loyalty.
In other words, it is up to us to determine how loyal customers are!This leads us into questioning what is it that we can do to make customers more loyal? This should be an unsettling question, and one that we have all of the time. The minute we go on autopilot and assume that what we are doing is valuable to customers is when we begin to operate out of routine habit and fail to be a company that is truly interacting with our customer. What is valuable to the customer is not necessarily based on our unique understanding of their business. Therefore, continually winning the loyalty of customers, through providing
Your List Has Old Addresses
Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time - when they switch jobs, move, switch Internet service providers, or enter or graduate from school. Technical advances such as cable modems, as well as ISP pricing competition, mergers and failures continue to encourage this movement.
In addition to their ISP-provided email address, users acquire additional email addresses from their jobs or schools, hundreds of free web-based email services (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), and even pagers and cell phones. According to IDC, registrations for webmail accounts are growing at 91% annually, and now exceed 100 million addresses.
Email address changes are also fueled by the growth in unsolicited email, as users switch email accounts to escape "spam". Services such as AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which may be used and abandoned at will.
As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day.
Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly "dead" (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list.
It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person.
Your List Has Typos
No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:
1. User Caused
If you accept email addresses from your website, you p
In this article you will learn how you can increase your website and sales conversions, how you will benefit from it and how easy it is to learn. It is important to your Internet business, especially your profits, to increase your website conversions.There are some things that you can do to increase your website conversions. Whether you want to increase your sales, get more leads, or get seen by more people, increasing your website conversions is highly important.1. Analyzing Your Website Quality - You need to take a look at what content you have on your website, how your keywords and keyphrases are set up, advertisement copy, and home page set up.A. Your Website Content: Your website content should be dense in keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your Internet business, your products, your services, etc. These articles will help searchers find your website who are looking for information or products.B. Implementing Appropriate Keyword Dense Content: Your keyword density for your articles is important. They should be high enough to get into the top search engines, but not too high. A good keyword density is about 3 - 5%.C. Your Advertisement Quality: How are your website's ads working for you? If you want more from your advertisements, you should have a copywriter and graphics professional look over your ads. They will be able to help you increase the quality of your ads, and possibly get more people to click on them.ited email, as users switch email accounts to escape "spam". Services such as AOL allow users to create and manage separate screen names and associated email addresses, which may be used and abandoned at will.
As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day.
Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly "dead" (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list.
It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person.
Your List Has Typos
No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:
1. User Caused
If you accept email addresses from your website, you p
There is no easy and rapid solution to the challenges of the MLM and network marketing industry. Here is what I have learned to do to avoid some of the pitfallsAVOID PITFALLS Have a strong "why". If you do not have a deeply felt, personal, "gut level" reason for wanting to accomplish your goal, you will struggle. Do whatever it takes to get it. Your why is not: get out of debt, retire early, etc. Your why is that deep level emotional and spiritual reason why you want to accomplish your goal. Put your goals in writing. Make them SMART. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. I have annual, quarterly, monthly and weekly goals, that I put in writing in a three ring notebook. I share, actually, email my goals to my mentors. Goals, as Jim Rohn says, provide the roadmap fpr where you want to go. Learn to dream. I have a dream board and paste pictures of the house I want to live, car I want to drive, where I want to vacation. Treat your business like a business. That means you must learn how to and must always behave as a professional. It is not a hobby. Act like a business owner and people will treat you like one. Study, practice and teach business fundamentals. I have made it a daily practice to learn study and apply best practices in business networking, small business/home business accounting, taxes, prospecting, internet etiquette, approaching and so forth. Study, practice and teach personal development. Jim Rohn says the r
It is equally important to pay attention to a much harder statistic to track - what percentage of your database are old addresses that aren't bouncing? These are messages that are ending up in abandoned or throwaway Hotmail accounts, unread school accounts, ignored AOL screen names, etc. Messages sent to old addresses will remain unread no matter how much you tweak your text, change your subject line, etc. Or worse, the email account has been recycled, and you are actually reaching the wrong person.
Your List Has Typos
No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:
1. User Caused
If you accept email addresses from your website, you probably experience a 1-8% typo rate (or more!), depending on the stringency of your email address validation routines and the carelessness of your visitors. Typical mistakes include:
- joesmith@aol - missing the ".com"
- joesmith@aol.c - input box too small, user stopped typing
- joesmith@aol..com - double periods, sticky keyboard
- joe smith @ aol.com - extra spaces
- joesmith@aol.com" - invalid quotes
- joesmith@aol.cmo - transposition error
- joesmith@hotmial.com - likely misspelling of hotmail
2. Internal Entry
Many companies collect email addresses through phone centers, mailings, inquiry cards, etc. The data entry of these addresses is another common source for typos, as often the validation routines are much less stringent internally than on your website. In addition to the challenges of reading and interpreting handwriting, auditory misunderstandings can enter your database. One of our favorite typos, entered by a phone customer service agent, is "joesmith@yahoodotcom".
3. Data Manipulation & Corruption
Regardless of how careful your company may be to validate or double opt-in every email address, the list is still vulnerable to errors in ongoing database management. For example, on several occasions we have seen a forced truncation of records, which results in the last few characters of long email addresses being dropped. Other times, a well-meaning database manager will design a quick (but insufficiently targeted) query to clean up or correct a typo they have seen in the data. Unless the error is dramatic, faulty data manipulation or data corruption may remain unnoticed in a list for many months.
Your List Has Duplicates
Duplicate email addresses can result in disgruntled customers and database management challenges for your company. Obviously, it is unprofessional to email your customer multiple copies of the same message. Even though many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries by your customers, these very same people often become so irritated by receiving multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list altogether.
These "obvious" duplicates are easy to catch and most database managers can quickly do a scan of your list. Ironically, not all companies catch these duplicates, especially if they maintain several lists and forget to de-dupe between them.
The more difficult duplicates to detect are multiple unique email addresses owned and read by the same person. Imagine if your customer initially gave you their Hotmail address, and then later gave you their AOL email address. You need access to a sophisticated and comprehensive database of email addresses to discover these duplicates and to decide which is the customer's current preferred email address.
So Now What?
Now that you know your list has inappropriate addresses, old addresses, typos, and duplicates, what can you do? There are a number of solutions, including:
Improve your email address validation routines
Worth looking at, but is this really your area of expertise?
Switch to double opt-in
Has pros and cons; won't solve all your problems
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