I received a spammed email from an email marketing company (it is a World Class Training & Consultancy, British Standards & High Quality) to get its customers. What will they teach their students? How to send British Standars & High Quality spammed emails?

I saw a lot of anti smoking ads but for me, this is the best.

If you want to make money online, make sure you have a retail website with free shipping to trigger your customers to buy.

Open Mind Resources has an infographic about Malaysia's Online Shopping Scene. Malaysians prefer to buy on websites and free shipping is No.1 reason to turn customers on. While No.1 reason turn customers off is unable to touch items. The infographic below helps you to understand Malaysian shoppers.

Click the image to enlarge

Source: Open Mind Resources

After reading Bob Burg and John David Mann’s first book – The Go-Giver, I immediately started with their second book – Go-Givers Sell More.

Even though I have not finished reading it yet, but one thing that really changes my mind is "selling".  In the book, they mentions sell in Old English is sellan and it means “give”. I did my search on Google and confirm it with Wiktionary.

From day one I studied sales and marketing in university, my lecturer taught me selling means making money from your customers by understanding our products, services and our customers. Until today, I believe 95% of the people will tell us the same thing. In fact, we are wrong.

We don’t make sales but we receive sales. To receive sales, we need to give value to our customers. Our jobs are to focus on one thing and one thing only: providing value to customers. The sales process is not about you, and it’s not about your products or services. It’s about your customers.

Bob and John don’t advise us to work for free but instead of asking “how can I close sales?” as the first question, we should ask “how can I add value?” It is temporarily suspension of self-interest. I would recommend getting their book – Go-Givers Sell More.

A lot of people try to predict what will happen to the future when comes to year end. They predict what will happen to the marketing world (SEO, SEO, Social Media Marketing, etc). But, I give you two things only that you need to master in order to secure your marketing future – Data and Relationship.

Why Data and Relationship?

In marketing world, first thing we need to do is understand customers’ mindset and behavior. If we don’t understand them, we do not know how to develop marketing plans to build relationship with them (regardless you do online marketing or offline marketing, business networking, etc).

Data
Imagine you have one million customer database, you need the right software to analyze the data to generate useful marketing statistics or information to understand your customers so that you can do highly targeted marketing activities.

Big Data is definitely the future. Each of us is a data generator now. We blog and post on social networking sites, we actually generate data. The question is we still do not know how to use those data (especially for Small and Medium Enterprises). With no signs of slowing, the data keep growing. If you need to know how much data we generate in a minute, please refer to the infographic below. With the right software, we can manage the data to help in making business and marketing decision.

Relationship
Data informs you that what consumers’ mindset and behavior are, but it is our job how to communicate and develop the right relationship with consumers. Regardless online or offline marketing, business networking, designing brochures, posters, etc., it is all about how to communicate to build relationship with consumers. While a lot of blogs focus on how to use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social networking sites, but what we should focus on is high EQ and how to communicate. As long as you can communicate well to develop closed relationship with most people, you can succeed in marketing world. One book you need to read to communicate well is Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People.

As long as you understand and able to master Data and Relationship, I believe you have no problem in doing marketing. All the best to you in 2013.

If you need any help in social media marketing, kindly call us at 017-24 30 307. :)