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E-mail marketing - A spammer in the works?
However successful we are as translators or interpreters, keeping our marketing activities on a gentle boil enables us to gradually refine our customer base as our careers develop and to prepare for the fact that we will occasionally "lose" a customer through no fault of our own. With the increasing coverage of the Internet, contacting prospective customers either individually by e-mail or with bulk mailings has become very much easier and cheaper. On the other hand, recent spam legislation has meant we need to take a few simple measures to ensure we stay on the right side of the law and our customers. Just as important for success, however, is the right tone of voice. Michael Benis takes a look at how to find and above all how to talk to prospective customers to ensure your business relationships get off to a flying start.
Catching clients in the internet
With most major companies and translation companies now on the Internet, there's no better place to get your marketing rolling than on the worldwide web. The Internet offers you two alternatives for finding customers. Firstly, you can do the work yourself, using a search engine to identify potential targets and then trawl through the web sites that come up. Chamber of Commerce web sites and online business directories are also useful starting points. The same obviously also goes for professional associations, such as the ITI or ATC.
The alternative is to pay someone else to do the work for you, buying a database or mailing list they have compiled for you. Most companies offering such services are out of the financial reach of freelance translators and interpreters, but luckily for us there is already a relatively cheap, downloadable mailing list and e-mail marketing package already available for those wishing to sell their services to translation companies around the world. Even better news, this mailing list, known as tranmail and reviewed in bulletin last year, is currently being sold at a reduced Christmas special offer price of £50 instead of £60.
What you get is a complete package, comprising a mailing list of over two thousand translation companies, a 28-page manual giving basic but helpful advice on how to write a good marketing e-mail and how to use the package, including a free utility named FletMail that allows you to send out a whole stream of personalised messages at a time. As such, tranmail is ideal for launching a mass-marketing campaign, which is unquestionably the most effective tactic for any language professional wanting to increase their volume of business swiftly either because they're just starting out or because work has suddenly dried up. Whether or not you decide to kick things off with a mass mailing, you can of course also use tranmail as a well-researched contact list for a targeted slow-burn campaign, which is the approach I'm recommending in this article - both for the quality of results and their duration over time.
Tranmail does have its weaknesses. The manner in which the e-mail addresses are collected is not foolproof and several of the addresses aren't actually translation companies at all, but online databases, some of which require you to pay a commission if you gain work as a result of your inclusion. Still, these addresses don't account for even 1% of the total and some of them could of course prove to be useful. Also, the nature of the translation industry and e-mail addresses in general meant that around 10% of the addresses in the version of the product I tested were no longer valid. To overcome this, the tranmail list is updated twice a year and whichever version you buy, you automatically get a free update to the next one. Bulletin hopes to report on the next version as soon as it comes out to confirm that all the addresses are current. We'll keep you up to date in bulletin board.
All in all, tranmail is a good package that is likely to repay your investment within a very short space of time if used wisely. It is also a good way of learning the ins and outs of marketing yourself by e-mail. Feedback from ITI members who bought the package following last year's review has invariably been favourable.
Spam glorious spam
I don't think anyone in the corned beef trade or even the Monty Python team in their wildest dreams could have imagined that spam would have been on everyone's lips and in their mailboxes in 2003. And yet here we are, being deluged with unwanted investment advice and messages with strange subject lines promising everything from instant muscles to instant degrees and more. The sheer volume of e-mail marketing and the exasperation it can cause in those receiving it (something with which most of us are likely to be more than familiar) should make us very cautious about how we ourselves use the medium.
The basic rules are: ensure your subject line can immediately be identified as relevant to your e-mail recipient's business. Get down to the facts as soon as possible. Don't blow your trumpet too much. Don't attach large files. If anything, simply include a link from which your CV or PDF business brochure, for example, can be downloaded.
Short and simple is the best policy. If a company you contact has a current need for your services they'll get in touch immediately. If not, you'll want to be able to contact them again in the future without making them feel pestered. But that's not all we need to bear in mind nowadays. There's also the new spam legislation.
Spam and the law
Following an awful lot of noise and headlines, spam legislation has finally started to become a reality. In the United States, the House of Representatives and Senate still need to pass the CAN-SPAM Act in identical form (although both have now passed versions of the act, they are not identical). After that it just needs to be signed by the President to become law. If the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 does become law, anyone sending unsolicited commercial e-mail messages will have to comply with the following simple requirements:
1) The messages will have to be labelled, although no standard labelling method is required. 2) The message will have to include opt-out instructions 3) The message will have to include the sender's physical address 4) Deceptive subject lines and headers will be against the law
European Union legislation, on the other hand, is not only more stringent but has already come into force and all member states are required to enact corresponding anti-spam laws before 31 October 2003. The EU directive (2002/58/EC of the European Parliament and Council of 12 July 2002) is more restrictive than the CAN-SPAM Act in that instead of insisting that recipients are provided with a mechanism for "opting out" of receiving marketing e-mails they have to actively "opt in", stating as follows:
"The use of automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines), facsimile machines (fax) or electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent."
Now you know why you've been receiving so many mysterious spam e-mails inviting you to take part in free competitions and so on that end up with you consenting to have your name in a database. Those little darlings become opt-in lists that allow the companies concerned - and their "business associates" who buy the lists - to send you their direct marketing e-mails.
A number of exceptions to this are allowed. In particular, companies will not need the prior consent of customers to whom they have sold goods and/or services in the past. Messages sent to these customers must, however, contain opt-out instructions enabling them to be excluded from future mailings if they so desire. The directive also makes it illegal for a sender to disguise their identity and requires them to ensure that any unsolicited commercial communication can be clearly and unambiguously identified as such as soon as it is received. In this respect, the EU legislation is very similar to the CAN-SPAM Act although, as far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no requirement to specify one's physical address.
All that seems nice and simple, but it's actually been designed for situations that are the reverse of those in which most translators and interpreters find themselves. The legislation explicitly protects only private individuals (physical persons) from unsolicited commercial e-mails sent by companies (legal persons). We, on the other hand, are physical persons sending unsolicited commercial e-mails to the e-mail addresses of legal persons. The directive allows individual countries discretion in how they implement the directive, but the situation of the UK law, which came into force on 11 December 2003, is unlikely to be anomalous and still allows individuals or companies to send unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to other companies. So everyone is, I'm afraid, going to continue receiving e-mails about vitamins and every conceivable type of supplement at their work e-mail addresses at least.
At first sight that makes the situation look encouraging for tranmail and our continued use of it until you discover that several of the companies in the tranmail database are not in fact registered companies but sole traders.
This doesn't mean you can't contact sole traders you've never done business with before. Most of their web sites will have e-mail contact addresses for aspirant suppliers or partners to contact them. If the website invites these sorts of contacts there is, as far as I am aware, no reason why you shouldn't comply and send a targeted individual message. But including them in a bulk mailing could be another matter if they haven't given their prior consent. The full text of the relevant article of the directive is shown alongside, so you can make your own mind up.
[Panel]
DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 12 July 2002
Article 13 Unsolicited communications
1. The use of automated calling systems without human intervention (automatic calling machines), facsimile machines (fax) or electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing may only be allowed in respect of subscribers who have given their prior consent.
2. Notwithstanding paragraph 1, where a natural or legal person obtains from its customers their electronic contact details for electronic mail, in the context of the sale of a product or a service, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, the same natural or legal person may use these electronic contact details for direct marketing of its own similar products or services provided that customers clearly and distinctly are given the opportunity to object, free of charge and in an easy manner, to such use of electronic contact details when they are collected and on the occasion of each message in case the customer has not initially refused such use.
3. Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that, free of charge, unsolicited communications for purposes of direct marketing, in cases other than those referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2, are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications, the choice between these options to be determined by national legislation.
4. In any event, the practice of sending electronic mail for purposes of direct marketing disguising or concealing the identity of the sender on whose behalf the communication is made, or without a valid address to which the recipient may send a request that such communications cease, shall be prohibited.
5. Paragraphs 1 and 3 shall apply to subscribers who are natural persons. Member States shall also ensure, in the framework of Community law and applicable national legislation, that the legitimate interests of subscribers other than natural persons with regard to unsolicited communications are sufficiently protected.
[End of panel]
The test procedure for this review of tranmail included e-mailing everyone on the list and providing opt-out instructions. Very few in fact opted out, but that of course doesn't mean that everybody else explicitly opted in. It would require a specialist lawyer's opinion to be entirely sure of tranmail's legal status for indiscriminate use generating bulk unsolicited e-mails within the EU. There shouldn't, however, be a problem anywhere else. The latest news is good news, though, in that future versions of tranmail are planned to be full opt-in lists. Once again, we'll keep you posted.
Summing up, then, to comply with the new legislation, make sure your messages are always clearly labelled and can be identified as direct marketing. Don't succumb to the counter-productive attention-grabbing tricks of using subject lines such as "In reply to your message", for example. In addition, identify yourself and preferably your physical address. Above all, provide opt-out instructions. The latter can be as simple as "If you'd rather not receive any more messages like this from me, please just reply to this e-mail putting the words "opt out" in the subject line and I'll remove you from my mailing list immediately".
Lastly, there's nothing to stop you from creating your own opt-in mailing lists by, for example, inviting visitors to your website to subscribe to a newsletter of your own creation. You could even offer special incentives to subscribe, such as a quarterly prize draw for one hour's free consultancy. It's unlikely that you'll end up with thousands of subscribers within a matter of weeks, but you could find that, when part of an integrated marketing plan, you nevertheless get a crucial trickle of new customers over the years.
But how do you go about successfully attracting new customers on the internet? As always the technical part is in many ways the easiest. So having dispensed with it, let's move on to the nitty gritty.
Worms on hooks
Successful marketing, whether by e-mail or any other method, is a bit like fishing: The more worms you have in the water, the greater your chance of landing a catch. But marketing is also a little like fishing when you own a freezer. You don't have to do it all at once. Depending on the results, you can gradually develop your customer base in the direction that suits your long-term business plans.
During some periods you may end up taking on more work than is comfortable. If this carries on for many months, you may decide to drop a particular customer, perhaps by increasing your rates. You may also find that increasing your rates doesn't lose you that customer, giving you a clearer idea of your value and how much you can charge. Had you not engaged in a little sustained marketing and picked up a couple of strong new customers that allowed you to "take the risk", you might never have known. Conversely, a sustained poor response might indicate you need to fine-tune or completely revise your approach.
In short, regular marketing can be an excellent component in an overall "business system" that allows you to assess your current market and any future directions in which you are taking your business, be it in terms of diversification, specialisation or gradually moving over from translation companies to direct clients (or vice versa). At the same time, it also helps "insulate" you against the possibility that you will occasionally lose a client through no fault of your own, such as your contact being promoted or moving to another company etc., and their replacement attempting to prove themselves in their new role by changing suppliers.
The big thing here, however, is that marketing ourselves can be extremely useful if we use it creatively. Instead of treating it as a fishing net to be dragged out in emergencies when we need a quick catch, we can also use it experimentally, testing demand for new services or new ways of delivering or charging for existing services. We have nothing to lose when marketing ourselves. But there's also much we stand to gain if we do it regularly and consistently, applying a little psychology and strategic thinking as we go. That's what we'll look at in the rest of this article, which doesn't just apply to e-mail marketing, since - as we'll see - any marketing has to form part of an integrated approach if it is to be truly successful.
What we want to say isn't necessarily what our customers want to hear
I've been in advertising for almost 20 years and worked with all sorts of companies, large and small, liaising with marketing directors of every type and kind. Surprisingly, the one simple rule that almost all of them seem to forget is that telling someone all about your business is not necessarily the most effective way of gaining their business. In the end, what every prospective customer wants to know is not the equipment, skills and experience we possess, but what we can offer them as a result. Above all, what we can offer them that's as close as possible to unique and will help them achieve their goals more effectively. This doesn't just apply to any written marketing messages we might send out, but how we speak to our customers as well. They'll be much more impressed by someone who wants to find out about their needs and how best to meet them, who demonstrates "client focus", than someone who comes blowing away madly on their own trumpet, however resonant the fanfare.
The same goes for client education. No one in business wants to work with a supplier who behaves as if they're taking them back to school. That's why Chris Durban's Onion Skin articles in bulletin are such excellent examples of what we should aim for. Her line of inquiry is invariably helpful, not critical, while her relaxed tone reminds us a solution is always within reach.
When we speak amongst ourselves, we can afford to be pedantic. Indeed, it's a good idea, since it saves us time. We don't have to beat about the bush, we can get straight down to the nitty-gritty of how the job should be done or could be done better. But although that sort of behaviour is great in some contexts, it certainly won't win us customers.
We are all well aware that there are some truly dreadful translations out there, translations that are so inaccurate they're dangerous rather than merely incomprehensible, or are so risible that they damage rather than enhance a company's image. Many of us believe that all we need to do in such circumstances is contact the company concerned and point out the error of their ways for them to immediately fall at our feet begging us to provide an elegant solution. Well, that certainly could happen, but I'm afraid it's pretty unlikely. There are a number of different reasons for this. We may, for example, get hold of the person who chose the current supplier, or who works with them on a regular basis and gets on with them just fine, thank you very much. Alternatively, they may find our assessment convincing but lack the confidence or authority to do anything about it. Even if we contact someone with the authority to change suppliers immediately, we must remember that they know nothing about us that would lead them to believe that, although we're capable of criticising someone else's work, we're actually capable of consistently doing anything better. And whoever we speak to, there's always the risk that we'll simply put the company on the defensive or, worse still, just offend them. What's more, once we've said our bit, we've burnt our bridges. If we don't get an immediate yes, there's nowhere else to go.
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First published in ITI Bulletin, 2003. |
