SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

Get out and LISTEN!

Innovation comes through listening to your customers. Richard Branson shares that if you get out and talk to your customers “there are lots of free and innovative ideas that will come from them.”

Similarly, BusinessWeek ran an article summarizing a panel titled The Business of Design featuring Jeanne Liedtka from the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. According to BusinessWeek,

“Supremely articulate, she outlined a three year study assessing managers who had been able to grow revenue in a slow market. She described these managers as ’smiling subversives’ who were able to quietly work around an organizational system in order to get stuff done. And she criticized corporate cultures that have made systems out of bad habits. Too often executives only want to hear about ‘big ideas’, she explained, which instantly commits an organization to making reckless bets that are unlikely to pay off. Instead, she said, executives ‘need to unlearn. The first thing a manager should do is leave the building and talk to a customer.’”

SubscribersRule! is the premise that your customers know best how to evolve your brand. Make a commitment to get out of the office this week and gather information from the trenches!

Subscribers Speak: “How would you like marketers to communicate with you?”

In July, we sent a group of 12 ExactTarget to the streets of cities around the midwest to ask them how they wanted marketers to communicate with them. Here’s a video showing some of what we heard:

Interested in more on this topic? Check out the Marketing Preferences Research Bundle featuring Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power, a commissioned study on marketers approach to mulitchannel marketing conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of ExactTarget, and the 2009 Channel Preferences Study, ExactTarget’s proprietary study on the communication preferences of subscribers.

Subscribers on the Street #4

You want to know what ticks subscribers off?  Selling their email addresses to third parties.  Bad, bad, bad.

You know what subject divides subscribers?  The use of text messaging for marketing messages.  Those with unlimited text plans like it.  Those who pay by the drink, don’t.  And both camps don’t like any SMS marketing without their permission.

To learn more, check out this week’s installment of SotS.

Subscribers on the Street #3

Back to the streets!  In this third installment of our “Subscribers on the Street” inteview series, we give you two questions for the price of one.

We first asked folks how frequently companies should send marketing messages via email.  We then followed-up and asked people to explain how their email inbox differed from their traditional, postal mailbox.  The responses are as varied as the subscribers we asked.   Enjoy!

Subscribers on the Street #2

For the second in our series of Subscribers on the Street interviews, we asked folks what their feelings were about the dreaded unsolicited commercial email, a.k.a. spam.  As you might imagine, few were shy about sharing their true feelings.

Tune back in next week as we’ll be asking people their preference as to email frequency and more.

Subscribers on the Street #1

So we hit the street and did something crazy–we asked real people their thoughts about a variety of topics email-related topics.  In this first installment, we asked what type of messages folks like to receive from companies via email.

Stay tuned next week as we get subscribers’ opinions about the dreaded s-word (spam!).