| Sam Young Newsletter |
Issue 167, June 2009
Hi guys,
Stats have set up a great little tool online called Infoshare which will help you with your Market Research - online.
For a quick tip on improving your click through rate on your e-newsletters, read Hooking Clients' Interest.
Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.
| Online Market Research |
With folk out there being more cautious about spending, it is now even more important to be effective in your marketing.
Understanding the demographics of your market will help you better target your marketing effort, so to undertake some effective marketing research on a shoestring, Statistics New Zealand, affectionately know as "Stats" has a lot of information online to help you determine your target market, your business needs and, logically, the resulting best use of your marketing dollar.
Stats newest tool for small business is called Infoshare, and, best of all, it's free.
Using Infoshare you can find out where New Zealanders live, about their work, their spending, how they like to live and their recreation habits.
The data in the Infoshare system is updated within five minutes of new data being officially released, on most working days; so you'll always have access to the most current, reliable information. It contains a range of data including economic information, demographic measures, data on the wholesale and the retail trades, and building consents (to name a few).
Infoshare is very easy to use by keyword searches. You can tailor the resulting information to suit your business through building customised data tables. Head off to http://www.stats.govt.nz/infoshare/database/SNZ/databaseSearch.asp to check out the search engine. I obtained the 2008 employment figures by region, by industry, in under a minute. Very, very easy to use, once you remember to use 'statistics' terminology!
To read more, go to http://www.stats.govt.nz/products-and-services/infoshare/default.htm. Not only is there a handy little "How To" pdf guide, but there is a calendar of data release dates, and a list of frequently asked questions.
| Hooking Clients' Interest |
Carrying on the marketing theme of this newsletter, I have a communications tip for you this time.
An Australian business - MacPhee's Pty Ltd - asked their marketing organisation why one e-newsletter they sent had a click-though rate of 17% of visitors to their webpage while another issue achieved a click-through rate of 25%?
After some research and some focus groups, apparently it all came down to the subject headings of each email. The first one simply said "MacPhee's Newsletter" whereas the more successful one had much more detail in the subject line (eg, "Decanting, Barossa Festival, Barossa Shiraz").
More people were willing to open the email if they were 'able to identify its contents'; which really comes down to giving the client a hook - a reason to read your communication that has meaning for them.
Thanks to CEO online for researching and publishing the MacPhee Case Study which contained this item, available to members at http://www.ceoonline.com/browse.aspx?ContentID=id28737
A very, very good tip indeed!
| Customise Word's 'Smart Cut & Paste' |
I am sure that you, like me, have tried to copy text into a Word document and had Word's 'Smart Cut and Paste' function fiddle with the formatting and turned it all to custard. More often than not, we don't want Word to adjust anything, but it best guesses the formatting when you paste text - often in a completely off the wall fashion.
The trouble is that 'Smart Cut and Paste' is enabled by default. While it works well for most people - most of the time - if we’re very specific with our editing, we might find it VERY annoying. If we do, we can disable it in Word 2003, as follows:
- Choose Options from the Tools menu.
- Click the Edit tab.
- Untick Smart Cut And Paste (in the Cut And Paste section).
However, by disabling it, we lose the good points as well as the bad.
But we can also customise it - in step 3, instead of unticking 'Smart Cut And Paste', we click the Settings button to display the options we can control. Then we tick the formatting settings we want to keep and untick those that we don't want. For instance, if we want to keep our paragraph settings, we untick the 'Adjust paragraph spacing on paste' option.
Easy as anything, eh :-)
| TLAs for SMEs |
Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:
- TANSTAAFL, There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Meaning that as much as we would like to get something for free, someone pays somewhere. Widely associated with Robert Heinlein (science fiction author) and used in his book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in 1966, both the acronym and the phrase have an unknown author and date to the 1930s or 40s; though often attributed to Henry Wallace, the US Vice President between 1941 and 1945. See http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/tanstaafl.html
Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.
| Tips, Short+Hot Keys |
Over the next few newsletters, we are going to look at all you can do with Alt, Shift, Ctrl and backspace:
- Windows "Undo the last action (NB: some actions, like Shutdown, cannot be undone)" Alt & Backspace
- Word "Undo the last action (NB: some actions, like Shutdown, cannot be undone)" Alt & Backspace
- Access "Undo the last action (NB: some actions, like Shutdown, cannot be undone)" Alt & Backspace
- Frontpage "Undo the last action (NB: some actions, like Shutdown, cannot be undone)" Alt & Backspace
- Outlook "Undo the last action (NB: some actions, like Shutdown, cannot be undone)" Alt & Backspace
- Word "Redo" Alt & Shift & Backspace
- Frontpage "Redo or repeat an action " Alt & Shift & Backspace
- Windows "Redo the previously undone action; works within a window" Alt & Shift & Backspace
| Hot Linx |
Any Terry Pratchett fans who are wanting to spread the good word & get someone new into reading the Discworld books can go to http://www.au.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/ and download a starter guide in their choice of formats. These are very good.
If you have completed your strategic plan and are now developing your own business/marketing plan, go to http://www.nzte.govt.nz/get-ready-to-export/Starting-a-business/Documents/Planning-for-success.pdf to download a pdf guide from NZTE to help you
To look at ways to save money on your ACC levies, head over to http://www.acc.co.nz/for-business/small-medium-and-large-business/how-to-pay-less/index.htm to see what options may suit you.
To get rid of duplicate entries in Excel 2007, there is a natty little video How To on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET9Y8sJRH0I, put together by Debbie Mayo-Smith
Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here
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