Chelmsford Business Networking
This was my first visit to Chelmsford 4N group – I’d had to cancel two weeks previoulsy as I couldn’t actually walk following a football injury – and I enjoyed it and had some very productive conversations.
The group meets at Chelmsford Golf club and is always booked well in advance – now I know why! A very vibrant meeting hosted by Chris ‘Mr Pink’ Ives who apparently carries a whip in his bag and as more ‘Ringmaster’ than ‘chair’ wouldn’t be afraid to use it!
Email Marketing
The foresight slot was by Philip Bryan from Sentori Email Marketing who provided some useful tips and some interesting facts about email marketing and spam. For example although it is actually against the law to send unsolicited marketing emails to consumers, it is not so with emails to businesses. Although, as Philip pointed out, it is not advisable to just go ahead and spam all businesses with marketing emails. There are better ways of doing it!
Philip suggested that sending a single email to a business introducing yourself and asking if they would like to receive more info about how you can help them is the way to go.
The fundamental understanding between the sender and the receiver is that the sender must provide some kind of added value to the receiver. In other words the person or business receiving the marketing emails must gain something from the interaction, regardless of whether they then go on to be a customer. In fact research suggests that the more value that is given in email series the greater the conversion rate, so it actually makes good business sense to make that extra effort.
One-to-One’s
I had one-to-one chats with Philip from Sentori, who showed me the backend of their reporting system, which is very comprehensive in terms of the data that users can access. Sentori is very reasonably priced at £12.50 for unlimited emails for lists of up to 1000 subscribers.
Next I chatted with Gary Williams from Internet Pipelines UK who provides his clients with ways of automating certain tasks. One example of this would be system program he created that allocates jobs and tasks to specific people in an organisation. The idea is to free up time to work on the tasks that really drive a business and not waste time on non-skilled admin work.
Finally I sat down with Tony Croft and had a fascinating conversation about Simply Fundraising which offers a points card which gets you free stuff AND gives to charity at the same time! Never feel guilty when you speed past the high street ‘chuggers’ with one of these!
Tony is looking for people who want distribute his cards as part of an affiliate program which will naturally provide incentives as well as giving you that warm, fuzzy feeling that you are helping people.
Finally
This was probably the biggest breakfast meeting I have been to – there were 40 people there and it was very lively. This meeting is always fully booked and it’s well worth checking out. If you’d like to go along as a guest the person to contact is the marketing assistant – Samantha Mawdsley who also doubles as a financial advisor.
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