business strategy game tips
ALTI: Business Lessons - Marketing Advice - Entrepreneur Tips & Tricks for Small Business
Practical business advice, marketing tips and entrepreneurial lessons for small businesses in text and streaming audio (podcast).
- Creating Effective Marketing Plans (Part V); Unlimited Transcribed Emails + Audio Podcast
- AUDIO: How to Create an Effective Marketing Plan (Part IV) + Automate Your Typing
Marketing Plans [Part 4]
May/08/2006Hi,
Sorry this month's newsletter is running a little behind schedule, but, I've had to add a 5th part to our Marketing Plan series which is the primary reason for the hold-up.
Table of Contents:
-
(click here to listen to the audio ) or visit to download the MP3:
http://www.alticonsulting.com/podcast/06-05-07-Podcast-MktgPlan4.mp3(click here to read the full article) or visit:
http://www.alticonsulting.com/newslet-2006-05-07-mktplan4-web.htmHow to Create an Effective Marketing Plan (Part IV) + Automate Your Typing
Marketing Plans [Part 4]
May/08/2006Hi,
Sorry this month's newsletter is running a little behind schedule, but, I've had to add a 5th part to our Marketing Plan series which is the primary reason for the hold-up.
Table of Contents:
-
Save Time - Automate Your Typing: Here are a few tips and tricks that I use to spend less time typing.
-
Marketing Plans [Part 4]: Learn my secret to creating powerful, effective, quality, strategic marketing plans.
-
Staying In Touch: Learn how to never miss an issue - and what's coming up in future newsletters.
Save Time - Typing Automation Tricks:
On an average day, I personally respond to, type and send at least 20 e-mails - most of which require more than the 5 word cave-man response - go on, laugh, I know you've seen them.
If sending 20 e-mails a day sounds like a lot, then why do I constantly have so many more that need to go out than what I am sending? Have you ever felt like you just can't ever get to sending all the e-mails you know you should?
In fact, I am so obsessed with the amount of time I spend drafting responses to e-mails that I tracked the time I spent in one week. I was astonished when I learned that I spend better than 10 hours a week responding to e-mails.
Holy Cr*p! That's one whole long work day, just writing e-mails. In fact, there are at least 2 emails I send every day that require as much as 20 minutes each to compose: 40 minutes, just 2 e-mails... Something's got to give.
Here is how I've taken back nearly 4 hours of time and increased my outbound e-mail volume by 20% - and I am still a hunt-and-peck typist!
Stock e-mail responses - I started using this trick years ago. I spent some time drafting a really solid follow-up e-mail that I can send to all the people I meet through networking. I would personalize and customize the first and last paragraph. The key is that the content needs to be brief and succinct enough to be relevant.
As new situations would emerge, I'd create a new version, then, after sending, I'd always go into my sent folder, open the e-mail, choose "resend" from the "actions" menu, tweak it and then save 2 copies into my draft folder in Outlook.
The best part is that every time you use one of the stock responses, go over it quickly to be certain that it is accurate and up-to-date, thus, your stock responses should never become obsolete.
This is a great solution for churning out whole complete e-mails. But, what about repetitive blocks of text? Many of the e-mails I compose contain whole blocks of text from several paragraphs down to just a sentence that are somewhat repetitive. I've always tried to make good use of the copy & paste function, but sometimes finding the location of the needed text can be
-
-