Like many of you, the bane of my work day is the email inbox. The sheer volume of never ending emails is enough to overwhelm. On top of that there are the bolded, all caps subject lines yelling to be opened and read immediately.

The challenge is that email is one of the easiest investments in communicating to and growing your customer base. So why should you bother investing time in sending out emails if they are just going to go ignored? The bigger question is: Why are your emails being ignored and how do you get people to engage?

Yes, your weekly newsletter might be getting deleted from some inboxes during the afternoon slump. But did those emails address your customers’ needs? Probably not.

When investing in an email program there are a couple essential rules to follow. The first is clean and segment your database Take an evening, delegate to an assistant, hire a marketing professional. Whatever it takes, be sure to clean up your list. What you send out, no matter how engaging, won’t matter if the right people don’t see it.

Once you have the missing names or incorrect emails filtered out you should segment your list. There are several ways to segment a list. For most manufacturers segmentation by industry is the best option. You’ll also want to note if the contact is a customer, prospect or vendor. Now you can invest in building your relationship with the people on your list.

The Case Study

The best place to start is the case study. A case study should tell a story to the reader about your company that intrigues and showcases your product and process. When curating case study content, look at the information from your audiences’ viewpoint. A case study shouldn’t have a company centric focus. It should showcase something you did for a customer that may not be readily apparent to others.

This could be based on an innovative new product, or be a story about quality or customer service. If you choose to engage in a consistent email campaign be sure to mix it up a bit. If every case study is about a product, it will feel like you’re selling at your audience.

Case studies should addresses a challenge your customer faced and the solution you worked with them to find. Create a compelling story to showcase a different side of your company outside of products. The best stories are the ones that make the reader think “Wow, if they can do that for another customer then surely they can solve my challenge”.

Note: You don’t necessarily need to mention the name of the customer to get your message across, although it’s best if you’re able to.

When you create a compelling case study that customers can relate to, they will want to know more about your company. When you talk about something that you are passionate about, people listen. Make case studies work for you and showcase that passion.

Earlier this month, we told you about a scam email that two of our clients received in December that alleged they had misused photos on their websites. This is just one of many misleading emails or outright scams out there. We will continue to share the ones we come across, but we thought this was a good opportunity to tell you about a service that can help train your employees not to fall victim to scammers.

In the case of the photography scam, we were fortunate that neither client clicked on the link embedded in the email. Most companies count on their employees to know enough to keep their systems safe; however, employees usually are not trained on what to look out for. We recommend training your employees to protect your company from cyber-attacks through phishing scams.

Firewalls and anti-malware software are critical to fighting off cybercriminals and their malicious attacks on your servers, but many employees might not recognize a phishing email or know not to click on an embedded link. One click and you could become the victim of a malware attack. Education on the subject is a must.

Phishing Training will help you…

• Improve Awareness – If an employee doesn’t know how to distinguish between a legitimate email from a trusted source versus a phishing email, your system could be compromised.
• Avoid Unplanned Costs – Cyberattacks are expensive. The bad players may be able to access your financials or charge you to get your data back and, in some cases, leave you open to a lawsuit if they access customer information.
• Ensure Compliance – It’s simple. When hackers have access to your secure data, you risk violating the law in addition to risking civil penalties or a lawsuit.
• Protect Your Reputation – No one wants to be that company in the news with the major data breach.
• Create a Team – Educating your employees allows them to work as a team that can recognize a phishing attack and report it before hackers have a chance to take advantage of your network.

For more information on computer safety training, please contact us. We’ll connect you with a service provider who can assist you with your specific company needs.

In the last month, we’ve had two clients receive similar emails. Both mentioned images that were used illegally on their website. Since we purchased all images for them, we were sure it was a scam. Fortunately, both clients forwarded us the email without clicking on anything.

PLEASE be on the lookout for any email like the one below:

Hi,

This is Meleena and I am a qualified illustrator.

I was discouraged, putting it lightly, when I recognised my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner’s permission, you’d better know that you could be sued by the owner.

It’s unlawful to use stolen images and it’s so mean!

See this document with the links to my images you used at (website name) and my earlier publications to obtain the evidence of my ownership.

Download it now and check this out for yourself: (a link supposedly to a document listing the pages with the images in question)

If you don’t delete the images mentioned in the document above within the next few days, I’ll file a complaint on you to your hosting provider letting them know that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it is not enough, you may be pretty damn sure I am going to take legal action against you! And I won’t give you a prior notice again.s

There a are a few ways to immediately identify this as a scam:

1. Misspelled word – recognised instead of recognized (This technically isn’t a misspelling. That’s how the word is spelled by non-Americans—so it’s more an indication that it’s from another country.)
2. Request to download a file – never legit unless requested
3. Threatening language – used to scare recipient into action
4. No contact information – can’t confirm claim

This is just one of the many scams out there, but it’s rather prevalent these days. We thought we should send out a warning. Remember, NEVER download a file from an email you don’t recognize or remit any kind of payment to a person or company that you can’t confirm.

Web Savvy Marketers is proud to be a Series Sponsor of the Manufacturers Workforce Summit Series presented by Connecticut Manufacturers Resource Group.

The Manufacturers Workforce Summit Series is the state’s only workforce-building event focused solely on manufacturing. Due to the ongoing restrictions on in-person gatherings, event organizers have decided to take the Summit online in an inventive new format. Rather than a single day of workshops and networking, the second annual Summit will feature a series of six online presentations and panel discussions, to be held over the course of ten months beginning on Thursday, October 15.

Each session will be designed to give senior executives in the manufacturing industry the opportunity to learn from thought-leaders and resource providers who can offer solutions to some of the sector’s unique and pressing workforce challenges. Topics will include best practices from around the state, with presentations and panel discussions featuring manufacturers who have had success with recruiting and retaining a dedicated workforce in this highly competitive market. Serving as the program’s emcee will be Ron Angelo, President and CEO of the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT) and former Deputy Commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD).

The Summit Series has begun. The first event on October 15th was a success. Leesa Schipani moderated a discussion on the Second Chance Program with Peter Brunault and Angel Torres from Whitcraft and Warden Garcia from the Department of Corrections. Note: It’s not too late to sign up.

Register for the remainder of the series and you will be sent the complete video of the October event. 

Click here for more information and the dates/description of each upcoming webinar in the series.

A recent article in the CT Mirror calls on education not only to help us recover from the pessimism and economic downturn related to COVID-19, but to actually lead us to a better place than where we were before. I found that interesting, because it addresses education beyond what is taught in the classroom or measured on standardized tests. The article talks about broadening that scope to include something called Collective Impact, saying, “Collaborations such as ‘Cradle to Career’ have accelerated progress for children through collective impact. Collaboration between education and community development efforts are expanding education’s effect on communities. What other segment of organized society has such credentials?”

So how does this relate to manufacturing? Just as education has the best credentials to positively impact communities, manufacturers have the best credentials to help overcome the workforce challenge. We discussed the Collective Impact concept at last year’s Manufacturers Only Workforce Summit. It’s no longer enough to simply seek out and hire employees based on your individual needs as a manufacturer at a specific moment. If we keep doing that, manufacturers will just continue stealing the best employees from each other. Instead, we should be striving to improve the perception of manufacturing jobs throughout our communities. Before a company talks about why it’s great to work for them, they need to explain why it’s great to be in manufacturing overall.

The Manufacturers Workforce Summit Series  is being presented by CT Manufacturers Resource Group (a division of Web Savvy Marketers) and manufacturers who are committed to Collective Impact. They are willing to share their experiences and success stories to help their fellow manufacturers and boost the industry as a whole.

Last week, we addressed the need for a segmented database. Once you have that, it’s time to determine your message. Before you start writing blog posts or sending out e-newsletters, you need to decide on the “voice” of your messages. Is it going to be very professional or more casual? Will you be speaking in the first or third person? Will it differ depending on the audience? These are important things to consider before you even begin writing.

To make these decisions, you must first understand your brand. People often think that a “brand” is something that’s important for consumer products or big corporations like McDonald’s or Apple or any of those instantly recognizable logos that come to mind. But every business has a brand, whether they think they do or not. If you have customers, if you have people who are willing to give you money for something, you have a brand. A brand is like a promise. It’s everything that people know in their gut about your company—what they know they will get when they do business with you. It is what differentiates you from your competitors in the minds of the people you want to do business with.

So when you develop messages—LinkedIn posts, advertisements, press releases, email marketing, job postings (those are incredibly important right now)—keeping your brand foremost in your mind as you create them will help you to achieve consistency even though you are crafting the language to appeal to specific audiences.

One way you can flesh out your brand in your mind and use it to craft messages is by using the marketing tool called a SWOT analysis. You’ve probably done that at some point—and if you haven’t done it recently, we’d encourage you to do it especially as we enter a post-COVID 19 world, because so much about the marketplace has changed. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, the letters stand for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Your brand message should primarily emphasize your Strengths and Opportunities, and as much as possible, downplay your Weaknesses and Threats.

Quick example: Say your biggest strength—your differentiator, your uniqueness—is that you’ve been in business in your field longer than anyone else. You have massive experience. An Opportunity could be that you are incorporating new product lines so you can serve new customers. Perhaps a Threat is that other companies can afford to sell more cheaply than you. When you sit down to craft a message, you’ll want to keep in mind words like “respected,” “valuable,” “experienced”—because you want to attract the attention of people who value the same things you value (customers AND employees). You don’t want people who need products fast, cheap, and in bulk. That’s not you.

So get clear on your brand and what you have to offer, and WHO you want to attract. Then you can tailor your messages to your target audience while still maintaining some consistency.

Finally, a message needs to be about what matters to the person RECEIVING it, not the person sending it. If you are introducing a new product to the market, that’s a great thing to communicate. But the message needs to be about what problem it solves, and how it can make people’s work easier or their lives better. Get out of your own head. Your innovation and how smart you are for coming up with it—that’s not as important as how the product will be used.

This is especially important in the post COVID-19 market. People are helping people. Your products are helping people. I’d bet that everybody reading this has been creating something or doing something that is service-oriented over these last couple of months. That’s where the world is right now, and that’s the tone in the market. So keep that in mind. Why does what your are doing MATTER? If you talk about that, people are going to want to hear what you have to say. Next week, we’ll discuss What’s Worth Saying.