Online marketing solutions

Obviously if you are planning on launching an email-marketing campaign, you want to send emails to your customers and as many consumers as possible. Emails are a great way to advertise your products and services, while also building a relationship with you customers. But you shouldn’t force your customers into signing up for your emails.

Some businesses make their customers and potential customers signup and offer their email, before people can start browsing or buying their products. On one hand this can be a great way to keep track of your customers, while updating them about sales and new products. However, on the other hand you might lose some potential customers if you force them to signup to your service or give an email, just to browse or buy your products.

Just think of when you enter a store and you want to take a look around, you might even have something specific in mind that you want to buy. And as you walk in, a salesperson begins to pester you and repeatedly asks you if you need any help. All you wanted to do was be able to look around or buy something nice without being bothered. But now you’re annoyed and don’t want to spend time in the store and so you leave.

This is the same for people who simply want to browse a site. If they have to fill out a long form giving their information and email, they might just choose to leave the site and look somewhere else where they don’t need to give their information. Instead of forcing consumers to hand over their email addresses, try to entice them with some advertisements or special deals, maybe a 5% discount for all members (and of course to be a member, they need to join your mailing list).

You should also be careful of your wording when asking consumers for their emails. Don’t make them feel as if you are pressuring them or forcing them into anything. Tell them about the benefits of giving you their email, the updates, exciting news, special offers. Just don’t make it sound like you are going to send them spam or an email everyday.

Once considered a luxury, (hey I am dating myself), cell phones are now falling out of everyone’s pockets, including kids.  Having a cell phone is like having a watch; you can’t leave home without it.  How exciting it once was to receive a call outside the home!  You felt important, privileged, and singled out from the crowd.

In 2010, from Nextel to Blackberry to IPhone to Android, the transformation of that little cell phone, coupled with the latest state of the art technology, has overwhelmed and excited even us die hard techies.

Nope, it’s not just for texting and taking pictures anymore.  Cell phones are being used to help people in developing nations, bringing global awareness of their needs, raising their living standards, along with diagnosing their problems!

Mobility and literacy
“A variety of other applications for cell phones in remote areas are also being developed, including some aimed at improving coordination in areas where transportation both for people and goods is often unpredictable. One such system, called Transport Link, also developed in NextLab, is a way for people who rely on infrequent bus service to get timely updates on when the next bus will come through their area or to arrange informal transportation with others in the area who have private vehicles.”  Read Entire Article

Predictions for 2013
“Yet, personal mobile devices with Internet connectivity encompass a broad array of devices and with a wide range of functionality that continues to evolve and expand rapidly.  To put this in perspective, the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet is projected to reach 1 billion by 2013 based on research by IDC.  Say “mobile” to most marketers and they think cell phone, maybe SMS (define).”

Mobile E-Marketing Strategies
From an e-marketing perspective, this leads to increased complexity and expense. In order to integrate a mobile strategy to take advantage of this evolving market, here are some basic suggestions:

Conform your e-marketing campaigns for mobile surfers. Make sure your mobile campaign can be easily read on a mobile smartphone.  Most mobile shoppers are looking for high priority items, quickly scanning the surface in between meetings and travel.  They want to find what they need quickly.  As with any email marketing campaign, use brand name they will recognize, with a visible call to action.  Don’t forget to include your phone number, e-mail address, or Web site on the bottom.

Mobile Demographics

Before starting a mobile-oriented marketing program, gather your demographics.  Survey your customers and prospects, finding out which devices they use and what type of mobile content they’d like to receive from you.  Don’t forget to find out what your competitors are creating and sending.

Create a Mobile Website

“Think of where customers are when they access your information and include critical information like phone number, store hours, location and/or directions,” recommends Microsoft Mobile Solutions Specialist Steve Siegel.

Register and Index your Mobile Site on:

• Yahoo.mobi
• msn.mobi
• Google Mobile
• aol.mobi
• 4info.mobi

Based on Nielsen tracking, mobile search grew 102% in 2009.  Remember you can’t be found if you aren’t there.

Mobile Metrics
* Count the number of impressions from mobile Web sites.
* Track your mobile marketing advertising results.
*  Monitor social media stats related to mobile communications.

As the variety and power of mobile devices continue to grow, marketing strategies need to evolve as well.  Remember, whether or not you have a mobile strategy, your prospects and customers are already receiving your competitor’s marketing messages via these devices.  Don’t be left behind.  Your ROI is depending on it.

Whether for your own company or the one you work for, beginning your adventure in the social media world of digital communications is a good decision.

Social Media has become one of the most aggressive ways to promote your site or business, increasing back  links, resulting in additional website traffic.  For any business counting their costs, while weathering a bad economy, social media has become a lifesaving path.

Social media is all about conversation.  It is a very appealing way to create relationships online – giving a face and voice to small and large businesses.  This strategy can easily add to an email marketing campaign, whose name and brand begin to take on a more personal and widespread public recognition.

Beginning your SM Campaign Strategy – Before jumping in head first, you need to know what tools you will be using, as well as the information you want to share.  As with any email marketing campaign, research, time, and strategy must always come first.  Here are a few tips:

Preparation and Research

• Create an audience persona. What does your target audience look like?  As an email marketer, demographics is a survival word.  Get an image of your audience, age, gender, spending and surfing habits, what sites they visit, and how they use the Web.  This forms your foundation.

• Check out your competition. Find out what your competition is doing in the social media arena.  What are they talking about, what are they writing about.  See what kind of responses they are getting.

• Policy Guidelines. Make sure your company has a social media policy in place.  Guidelines are needed for any employee that engages online conversations representing your organization.

• The Designated Blogger. It is very important to designate a blogger.  Whether you hire a freelance blogger, or give someone in your organization this opportunity, this is a serious commitment.  Blogging needs to be consistent, live conversations need to be monitored.  Give this serious thought – you need the right person creating the right voice and conversations.

• Goals and Meetings. Have your plans and strategies clearly defined.  Make time for follow-up meetings on the outcome and results.  This is a learning process.  You can easily modify ideas and content along the way.

• Interesting and Relevant. Whatever message you put out there, cannot be taken back.  People are stressed, quickly skimming through titles and bits of conversations, as they surf.  Take the time to surf around at what your target audience is talking about on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  Do not let stress or urgency make your efforts sloppy.

Don’t forget to have fun. Social conversations should have some lightness about them.  We are not engaging in metrics or behavioral sciences.  Bring a bit of fun into this.   The very fact of the enormous proliferation of social media, proves that people want a more personal relationship and voice with those they do business with or buy from.

Here are some of the top SM sites in which to get started – Click Me!

As great as a value added email marketing campaign can be, planning its content, timing, and target is just as important to its success.  The proper approach to any email campaign should start with a well thought-out plan, which requires a little more time and effort then most e-marketers realize.  Here are some points that you need to cover when planning your email campaigns:

1.   Permission-based mailing list. Unless you have the recipient’s permission (op-in), you are trespassing and may be considered sending spam, which is against the CAN-SPAM Act.  Know the spam laws.  Stay out of trouble.

2.    Content is still king.  Your content should be relevant and directed at an intelligent audience.  Your message should be clear, sharing the essential facts in carefully thought out wording.  The structure of your message should be easy to parse.  Remember to give your message a personal voice.  You need to provide them with something that they desire.  Your content should hold their attention long enough for you to market yourself successfully.

3.    Grammatical errors. The amount of errors found within many emails can be quite surprising.  Misspelled words and poor grammar convey a lack of professionalism.  Rushing to get a campaign out, may cost you the loss of clients.  Take the time to read your email campaign over several times.  Have someone else read it as well.  Don’t let pressure cause you to be sloppy.

4.   Are your graphics in overdrive? Too many cooks spoil the soup; too many graphics spoil your message.  Your graphics should compliment not overshadow your text.  Keep your message simple and easy to parse.  Oversized graphics can cause a slow download, causing impatience in the recipient

5.    A clear and precise call to action. Don’t make your clients perform and jump through hoops.  If you want someone to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter or sign up for updates about your product or service, do not make it difficult for them.  Filling out endless online forms, clicking through multiple pages, is annoying.  Even if someone wants your product, you may push them over to your competitor.

6.    Your “from” and “subject” lines are crucial to your email campaign.   Why?  Because that is what your recipient will see in their in-box before opening your email.  If you are not recognized in the “from” line, recycle bin or spam here you come.  The “from” line should represent your company or newsletter name that they signed up with.

Subject lines should be catchy and short. Keeping your subject line down to 50 characters or less is the general rule.  If your subject line is too long or cut off, it may quickly end in the trash bin.  Shorter lines help optimize your open rates.  Remember, subject lines need to be relevant to the content.

7.    Do you have a landing page? Are you sending people to your homepage?  Not good.  A targeted direct email campaign needs an accompanying landing page.  Creating key pages that people land on when they click a link from your e-mail campaign is very important.  Make sure that page has all the relevant information pertaining to the product or service you are marketing.  Giving a prospect all the information needed, on that page, enables them to be able to make a quick response.

8.    What’s in it for them? Don’t focus on telling your readers how great your business is, and the fabulous products you sell.  All they want to know is how does this benefit them?  Focus on what they want and need.  It’s all about them, not you.

9.    Using Social Media. If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, you can let clients know to join and follow you, as you use that media to announce your specials and discounted pricing.  That makes you cool, and gets your name out there as well.

10.   The Three T’s – Test – Test – Test. Before you send out your campaign, do a sampling on a small number of people.  See what the response is.  How well was it received?  Better to delay a campaign, than to court a disaster.

There is still an important point to add.  Make sure that your e-campaign is targeted to the right audience.  An email campaign can only be effective when the right campaign, goes to the right people, with the right message.  Don’t let all your hard work go down the drain.  Make each campaign work for you.

Creating a professionally targeted campaign is not easy.  It takes planning, thought, and strategy.  Don’t let time pressure you.  Your campaign needs to be professional and relevant.  Do you have everything covered?

Behavioral marketing gives the e-marketer the ability to accurately segment and target your audience by present and past online behavior.  Utilizing this method when creating your email campaigns, can significantly change the way you plan and send your emails in the future.

“eMarketer projects that behaviorally targeted ad spending will reach $4.4 billion by the end of 2012.”

Behavioral targeting is predicated to become more widespread, resulting in better customer experiences, as they are targeted with more relevant information.

“Using behavioral targeting with email is not a new idea,” says Shar VanBoskirk, senior analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, MA. “It is something that good, smart marketers have been tuned into for several years: understanding that the activities within an email are good clues to the types of offers that would be useful to send in a subsequent message. In fact, email used BT even before other types of online advertising did.”

E-mail campaigns need to evolve.  Irrelevant email campaigns must change focus and deliver messages that their recipients want to see, hear, and read.  What does this mean?  Direct email marketing campaigns need to make use of behaviorally triggered e-mail in response to customer actions.  Content needs to be more personalized and much more dynamic.  E-newsletters need to have more valuable and interesting content, not becoming a replacement for an autoresponder type message.  All e-newsletter content needs planning and purpose.

Implementing Behavioral Marketing in our Email Targeted Campaigns:

Broadcast email:  According to Jupiter Research “when marketers actively target their email campaigns to specific behavioral and demographic characteristics, they can produce more than 18 times the profits that broadcast messages produce.  Think of the effect on your ROI?

Re-marketing: Marketers can easily track when an email is opened, what specific pages are explored, what links are clicked on, or any combination of actions and responses.  This important and recorded data can then used to create dynamic and strategic behaviorally targeted email.

Email Address Lists:
By collecting and utilizing specific and accurate information from your email address lists, you can send relevant offers and information based on a user’s preferences and prior purchases.  Instead of just depending upon your demographic data, you can now deliver unique offers and information that they want, according to their behavioral patterns.  This is differentiating the differences in specific actions that have happened, opposed to behavioral, demographical theory.

Actions are Key – Don’t Assume

Demographics are important but cannot be relied upon as the sole means to understanding your audience.  For instance, if you are selling perfume, and have targeted just women, within a certain age range, and location, you have automatically left out the all the men who buy perfume for their wives or girlfriends.  When the holidays come, men buy perfume, flowers, chocolate for various reasons and various people.  You can now see the implications and importance of targeting behavior and actions.

Up-selling to the Full Person

Combine past and present behavior.  Using the above approach let the actions speak louder than statistics.  Using past purchase behavior coupled with recent purchase activity, gives you a better and wider scope of understanding the entire person.  The more you know about the interests and overall purchases of anyone, the better chance you have of sending them a campaign that speaks directly to them.

Behavioral targeting is an ongoing process.  Remember, the more accurate the campaign, the better chance you have to convert browsers to clients.

Google has given us a brand new toy, Google Buzz.  Google Buzz is a brand new way to have conversations about things that interest you, while enabling you to share updates such as photos and videos with family and friends.  There is no installation.  You simply open up your Gmail account, and there it is.  At least, that was my experience.  No warning, just a cute little colorful icon waiting to be pushed.  Sharing information is faster than ever.   A possible new email marketing tool?

All responses will be sent by Buzz directly to your inbox – in actual real-time.  Buzz is also available on certain cellphones and smartphones, so you don’t have to be in front of your computer to create or read a Buzz.

Google Buzz  seems to be Google’s strongest and boldest attempt to get into and build a strong and popular social network.  They have taken and implemented the best of the most powerful social media programs like Twitter and other social services, combining the most popular elements together into one aggressive package.

Importing into Buzz
Do you use Flickr, Picasa, or Twitter?  Now you can automatically have those items imported into your stream.  Buzz will even recommend items you might like based on your friends’ preferences based on their activities.  Instead of building their own social network from the beginning, Buzz is now an integrated key part of their Gmail, with its own distinct icon tab underneath the inbox.

Even though thousands use Gmail, there are still plenty of people without Gmail accounts.  Will Buzz be enough to entice new users to sign up and start using an email service just because of Buzz?

A Bit more Complicated
Twitter is so simple.  If you have created a public account, anyone can see and follow your tweets if they have decided to follow you. It’s as simple as that.  With Buzz, it is not that simple because there are public and private buzzes.  Buzz will create plans for business and educational users.  So public buzzes may only be available within your particular organization or school.  You will have the option for a private buzz to designated individuals within your network.  Remaining flexible, it becomes a bit more complicated.

When users were asked why they are using Buzz, here are some of their reasons:
1.    Easy to use
2.    Simple interface
3.    No setup – Automatically embedded into Gmail.
4.    Users feel they get a wider and quicker global connection

How will G-mailers respond?  Will we buy into this quick sharing of information and brand new communication tool for social media?  Google believes we will.

If you would like to see a video introduction, along with a more detailed explanation of Google Buzz, please go to Google’s Official Blog about Google Buzz

YouTube is one of the most popular websites that exists today and it can be a great method for online marketing, no matter what business you’re in. Everyone on the web has had the experience of seeing a video from YouTube or seeing a video embedded onto another blog or Website. After launching the site in 2005, and being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion dollars in 2006, there seems to be no chance of stopping YouTube from being the leader for online video sharing.

YouTube is both amazing and unfortunate at the same time for the same reason. It’s amazing that anyone can post a video easily on the site. It’s unfortunate that really anyone can post a video. Every other person is reaching out for their 15 minutes of fame as we speak with their video blogs, talent shows, Star Wars routines, karaoke, and so much more. Nowadays news stations use clips from YouTube, people can watch clips from their favorite TV shows as well as theatrical trailers for new and upcoming movies, music videos…. Why bother staying tuned to listen to the President’s Inaugural Address when you can watch it later on YouTube in your spare time?

YouTube is as simple as…

Anyone with a video camera or web cam with a microphone can post content on YouTube.

To open an account, you must confirm that you’re 13 or older and create a username and password for the site. Once you are confirmed, you can begin uploading anything you want to show on video to the world, as long as it’s not copyrighted material (unless you own the copyright). If it is copyrighted, it will be removed, perhaps not the second you put it up, but probably very soon after. If just one person claims the material is copyrighted, it will immediately be removed. Each video can’t be longer than 10 minutes. You can have a succession of 10-minute videos if you want. After that you’re done and perhaps even on your way to getting your 15 minutes of fame. People can view your videos, you can view others, comment on them….

Learning with YouTube

YouTube is not just a place to show your favorite music videos, it’s a place where you can learn and teach others. Offer your expertise with tutorials on video. Learn how to draw like an architect, escape from handcuffs, pick a lock, moon walk like Michael Jackson, get really White Teeth. Pretty much anything you can think of someone has created a video about it and how to do it.

Marketing with YouTube

If anyone can use YouTube, why can’t you? Why can’t you market your business on YouTube or your school or University? The non-profit online Western Governors University established a contest amongst students. Students were given the opportunity to create a video about how a degree from WGU can enrich a person’s life. The contest promotes creativity amongst the students and it also advertises the university in a positive light.

At one point, Swiffer established a contest for people to make a video about how to break up with their mop. This was great exposure for Swiffer, people were entertained with the entries, and some lucky winner got $15,000.

So how can you use this if you’re a small business? Just make a video about your area of expertise or the products that you sell. See if others like it, comment on their videos, link your video to theirs, and already you’re getting viewers and comments. Now do it again and again and you increase your SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Now link your videos to your website and blog, which helps you increase traffic to your website, so you should have a blog in addition to a website. And there you have it; you have successfully used YouTube as a marketing tool.

Link Building is not cheap and can be pretty costly, particularly in competitive or popular markets. But there are ways to work around it, even if you are a small business with an even smaller budget, but are in need of expanding your online marketing.

It’s really all about exposure. Remember that saying, “all press is good press,” well it’s partially true. But it helps a lot more if the press is good.

Volunteer your areas of expertise

Within your company, you must have any area of expertise, some amazing service that you’re offering to your customers. So how can you market your skill to the world?

1)      Offer a service for free. Let the community know about your donation, by contacting community service groups and the local media.

2)      Contribute to a website. Write a weekly or monthly column in an area of your expertise.

3)      Don’t be scared to ask your loyal customers to link your business through their blogs, websites, or social media platforms. If they like you, they probably won’t be against expressing it on the Internet.

Let’s pretend you’re a veterinarian, but word of mouth is not really cutting it in terms of marketing. One way to help is by volunteering your services once a week to a local animal shelter.

Let the community know about your volunteering. This gets your name out there, your business out there, and people begin to trust you and your services. Maybe the local media will pick up on it or groups within the community will start publicizing your services. You’ll build up contacts. No matter what, you’ll be doing something good and you’ll get only good exposure from it. Basically this becomes your own marketing campaign.

Write for Blogs and Websites

Every time you read a magazine or newspapers, there are always columns out there, e.g. financial experts giving their expert opinion on the economy. You can become a guest writer for a blog or contributing columnist once a week. If you’re words are out there and the readers like your advice, chances are you can pick up some more clients right there and they’ll tell their friends.

Add Links

Find your business’s name online. There might be plenty of websites out there that mention your business, but they might not have links attached to the name. Email the host and try to get a link attached to your name.

Join Local, National, and International Business Groups

Become a member of various business groups that are related to your company’s interests. Link your website to their members’ directory. If they don’t have one, ask them if they can link your website on their site, wherever you are listed.

All of these ideas for marketing your small business take time and effort but it’s worth it. Most of these things are small and may be a bit tedious but they help. By having links attached to places where your name is mentioned is simple. By volunteering, you’ll feel good and you’ll get your name out there. By writing a column, people will begin to trust you as an expert in your field. Remember, it’s all about exposure.

If your business is ready to expand its products to the outer reaches of the globe, it might be time to research your potential expansion. Nowadays you can use search engines to investigate your options and see what’s popular using online marketing tools. If your search marketing tools haven’t come in handy yet, just wait and see because now is your chance to use them.

Find out which Services and Products will succeed in the Global Market

Do some research before you begin wasting money sending out shipments of your products. You need to figure out who wants your products?

Come up with a list of key words that are relevant to your products and services. Test them out in search and see how many results appear. Now you have to be careful with this if you are writing in English and you want to market your products in China or Italy or Israel. You won’t be helped if you translate your keywords, especially with an online translator. You will not get the correct results and the whole process will have been useless.

A keyword that is translated from English is never going to give you the right amount of results on a Search Engine and instead will most likely tell you that there isn’t a possible market where you’re looking. You could potentially lose an opportunity to expand your products to a new market if you trust results from translated keywords. The solution for this problem is using native-speaking professional search marketers who understand keywords and can use the right ones in their native language to conduct the necessary research.

The most beneficial part of this type of market research is that it’s incredibly fast. The not so great thing is that your competitors are probably doing the same thing at an incredibly fast speed as well.

Plan your Market Entrance

You must figure out how you’re going to distribute your products and services to the public. Will you go through agents, your own offices which you’ll have to set up, separate distributors, or simply online? Whether you decide to work exclusively online or with physical distributors or agents, your website will still be a great resource, but your market research will be different based on each method.

Make a list of Companies to test your products on

Just because every time you type your product into Search and there are more results in Australia instead of China, does not mean that there is actually more interest from Australia. It just means that China uses English less in their search. This means that there are plenty of markets out there they just use different key words.

If you use the keyword process correctly, then you can use it for coming up with possible countries that might be interested in your products, just as you did originally to choose which products to market globally. But your research isn’t done there.

You need to read a little bit about the country and learn about the prices for products in each country and if people will buy your product for an equal or greater price than you are already selling it for in your HQ country. You need to know if it’s worth opening your product up and if you’ll earn money in that country, as well as knowing how easy it is to take your money out of the country of interest.

Time to Experiment with a Test Market

After your initial research, it’s time to test out one of your potential markets. You don’t want to invest too much in case it doesn’t work out, so be careful with your initial investment.

Also it’s not necessary to completely rewrite your website for specific market but it helps to make it more user-friendly. A great way to test the waters is by using PPC (Pay-Per-Click). This is an efficient, cost-effective method to test out the market.

Branch out with SEM and Online PR

After you’ve finished testing the waters with Keywords and PPC, it’s time to step up the game. Use some more SEM methods to establish your business in the country of interested. Expand your PR online, localize your website for that country using a Native-speaker and see how well you succeed.

You’ve succeeded once, so do it again!

Go down the list of potential markets that you created and do the research for the next one and the one after that. Start with the keywords, check the results, use Native-Speakers, try PPC, increase your online PR, and the process continues.

We are living in a tech savvy existence.  Our day-to-day activities revolve and depend upon our ever-growing digital world.  This is a perfect setting for increasing our email campaigns.

From the very onset of the first email campaign, email marketing is and continues to be one of the most important tools for B2B and B2C email marketers in the arena today.  It is still the fastest and most cost effective strategy, sending out hundreds of messages to our lead databases in today’s global market.

The Internet is a main source of survival, not only for the seller, but for the consumer, as well.  Worldwide communication, for the most part, emanates from the Internet.  Our correspondence, conversations, and documentation seem to be headed towards a paperless society.  Every area of our life is affected.  The digital innovators of this age continue creating more tools and applications, with a focused dependency upon technology, not only for business, but for our pleasures and enjoyments, as well.

One Size Does Not Fit All

I am sure you have seen this famous tag (One Size Fits All) on many items of clothing.  Whether you are a size 4, 6, 8 or 12, they are telling you, one size fits all.  It denies our physical uniqueness, size, and preference in one’s appearance and choices.

This type of thinking may have crept into our email marketing campaigns.  Demographic studies show this just can’t be true.  Our target segments are constantly changing in age, marital status, preferences, physical locations, and professions.  Sending out generic mass emails is ineffective and may cause the loss of subscribers in the process.

I remember joining a cable company.  Spoke to and met the representative.  Long conversations and then we closed the sale.  Many times after that, I kept receiving mass  notifications under my door to buy their plan and get better deals.   They were generic advertisements absolutely nullifying my being a client and having met with and reached out to their client representative.  It really made me angry.

Generic Emails do not Differentiate between Clients and Prospects

•    Generic emails give a strong disconnect message to the recipient of any prior buying or contact history.  It is as if it never happened.  They are impersonal.
•    Generic emails discount the tracking history and stat results of prior campaigns.  You are shooting in the dark.
•    Generic emails fail to create value and interest, since they are not based on demographics or history.
•    Generic emails do not create, nurture or encourage a personal dialogue or feedback.
•    Generic emails show a lack of appreciation and value to your clients.
•    Generic emails make everyone a prospect, never acknowledging the client.
•    Generic emails create irrelevant messages which can lead to unsubscribers, spam, complaints or inactivity.

As smart marketers, we need to follow the formulas that work – sending the right message to the right subscriber at the right time.  Our clients are the reason we exist.  They need to feel special, and more importantly, acknowledged and appreciated.

This type of parsing can only come from demographics, stats, and history.  Without careful segmentation, you can push away good customers, who just might take their purchase potential with them somewhere else.

Remember: Prospects and clients need different email campaign strategies.  Generic email campaigns tend to make everyone a prospect, resulting in ineffective and irrelevant messages and unwanted results.