Dear Valued Customer

In some messaging campaigns, it is appropriate to use this addressing moniker when a customer's name is not know. Many small and large sized businesses are afflicted by incomplete customer profiles. While using "Dear Valued Customer" as a salutation within a bulk email is indirect and lacks the connectivity marketers strive for with their customers, it still has value when used appropriately. Consider these two bulk email examples where the customer's name is not known. One used "Valued Customer" in the subject line of the email. In the other example, no data validation was used prior to the send. If the salutation or subject line is the first impression a customer sees in their digital inbox, the email could be less personalized if those details aren't known. Frankly, both of these emails are unappealing, impersonal, and simply not the kind of email that conjures up warm, fuzzy feelings about their respective firms.

Review: Knowing Your Value

I've been on this binge with the public library and checked out a lot of books on topics that I thought I'd never get around to reading. I just finished Mika Brzezinski's Knowing Your Value, 

5 things learned from reading this book:

• Leadership is gender-neutral.
• When negotiating a salary or raise, do your research and know what you're worth.
• Don't get emotional (Men don't. Why should you?).
• Don't work twice as hard as men. It's apparently from the 235 years of income disparity between men and women that this work ethic and strategy has never worked to propel women to the top 1%. (I made that one up. Not in the book.)
• Women hold other women to much tougher standards than men in the workplace.

Intuit's Love a Local Business Promo

If you didn't already know how to promote your business using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Intuit incentively recruits newcomers by offering a $25,000 small business grant each month.

How it works:

A business owner nominates their business (based on company name and location) through Intuit's sign-up page (if the company name doesn't appear, e.g., if you're not registered with your city with an active business license or lack a D&B DUNS number, you can still nominate your business by filling in the appropriate information where prompted. Manual nominations will not show up on the locations map, but do count as valid votes).

If you are concerned about spam and privacy when posting your contact information; say, you have a home-based business. Sign up with Google Voice using your existing mobile or landline telephone number and get an Internet number assigned to it. That way you can collect legitimate business inquiries via Google Voice voicemail. Get a PO Box from your local post office, or a 3rd party mailbox service. If you happen to pair the PO Box with your home address, it will really confuse data processors for direct (junk) mail. But, make sure that Intuit is able to contact you, regardless. Banks and clearing houses use the POB method for marketing campaign targeting, you could too.

Local fans of the business can vote for you. Each vote counts as a raffle ticket. If you look at the previous months' results, Mid-Michigan Kennels won with only 1341 votes. 

Deadline for submitting nominations/votes: September 30, 2011

Facebook Places Enables Random Edits

This could be bad news for any company who wants to keep their online reputation clean and typo-free. It's interesting to note that Facebook doesn't have any means in place so that a company's site admin can monitor or reject recommended changes by random strangers. A competitor could log into Facebook and modify your Facebook Place page for the worse and no one would be the wiser, except you. Site settings have been like this for more than a year. But then, Facebook isn't interested in fixing petty details.

This is not to be confused with a Facebook company profile page, which appears to still be secure.