Blog Guidelines

Published at 12 August 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

The team at Edensilk has begun this Blog with the aim of establishing an active community of contributing Perth entrepreneurs.  So if you are the owner and/or operator of a small to medium ‘for profit’ enterprise based in Perth, Western Australia, then we invite you to participate.

In the interests of shielding us all from spam, we ask you to register with us in order to post comments.

As the moderator of this blog, I encourage constructive comments, which may include criticism; but not gossip or badmouthing.

It’s my belief that a blog needs to support freedom of expression, so I hope never to have to blacklist anyone, and certainly not anyone who is prepared to own their views; but I also reserve the right to protect the interests of the group in preference to any one person.

Any attempts to hijack this blog for personal purposes will be met with serious editing.

The guiding purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for Perth entrepreneurs to share the benefits of their combined experiences.  As only those who understand the principle of ‘giving before getting’ will ever bother to join with us in this endeavour, our purpose alone should serve to safeguard the quality of the content to be found here.

Regarding ‘competitors’?  There are many individuals and organisations purporting to assist the owners of SME’s in growing and managing their businesses.  At Edensilk we are not threatened by this.  In fact, nearly every one of our clients has prior experience with ’so called’ competitors.  Some good.  Some … not so good.

We actively encourage business owners to engage the help that truly helps; and so we actively encourage any consultants, coaches, trainers, etc from organisations other than Edensilk to contribute wholeheartedly, and we will gladly add them to our blogroll.

So if you’re a business owner in Perth, or a consultant/coach to business owners in Perth, we look forward to getting to know you.

Paul Curtis - founder and director of Edensilk Pty Ltd

Email Marketing

Published at 12 August 2007 in Marketing. 1 Comment

At Edensilk we’ve found eMarketing to be extremely valuable.  With over 1500 willing subscribers to our monthly ‘Business Growth News’ eNewsletter, every publication generates a raft of new enquiries.

Yet most of the business owners we speak to are reticent to employ this medium, or at best, unsure how; and doubtful that the return will justify the effort.  To be fair, they have good cause for caution.

Research by Quris Inc … ‘How Email Practices Can Win or Lose Long-term Business’ back as far as 2003 established conclusively that the dangers of email marketing done poorly are too high to ignore. Sending just one too many emails can have a real price: an additional sale on the upside; or a customer gone forever on the downside.

This opinion poll style of research revealed the following percentages of respondents who agreed with the following statements:

57% - made an online purchase in the last year directly as a result of permission email.
53% - can think of at least one company that does such a good job with email; emails have influenced the decision to do business with it.
40% - more likely to spend more money with a company that sends email that I regularly read, than a comparable company that doesn’t send me email.
80% - have stopped reading emails from some companies that I once signed up with because their emails are irrelevant.
45% - there is at least one company that I have stopped doing business with as a result of their poor email marketing practices.

The research discussed above also cites the ‘Top Reasons Email Subscribers Lose Interest’:

68% - their emails come too frequently
51% - no longer interested in that topic
35% - their emails were generally boring
34% - nothing of significant value in the emails

Those four statistics alone provide pretty clear pointers to good eMarketing practice.

If you and your business have had some positive experiences of email marketing, I hope you will share some of your wisdom here with others.

If your experiences have been more on the downside, and/or you’ve learned some valuable lessons about what not to do, you might also like to give others some of the benefit of your experiences.