The idea to think small did not only work for Volkswagen, in the famous 1959 advertising campaign by the Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency, cited by Advertising Age magazine as the best ad campaign of the twentieth century. Many people today are making a concerted effort to buy local and support small businesses. This new consciousness is behind the resurgence in family farming throughout much of the country. In a popular episode of the cult TV series Portlandia, a young couple played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein want to be assured that the chicken being served in a restaurant comes from a local farm.

Portlandia loves to poke fun at our modern cultural obsessions, but the desire to get to know the people with whom you do business is a growing trend. Most campgrounds are family-owned small businesses that are perfectly poised to capitalize upon this popular desire, and there is no better way to introduce yourself to new markets than to tell your personal story.

It’s Story Time

Sort of like “show and tell” back in kindergarten, telling your story is the best way to introduce yourself to people. Guess what? If they like what they hear or read, you may have set the foundation for a very long-term relationship. To get started, it would probably be a productive exercise to take the time to put your story down on paper. What is the history of your campground, and what is your story as its owner? Tell people why you bought your park, and what you are seeking to accomplish. Are you a new owner, or are you the fifth generation of Smiths to run Peaceful Acres? We are not talking about a business plan or formal mission statement. We are talking about personalizing what might otherwise be an anonymous business … just like those of your less personal competitors.

Here are a few tips for what might be included in your story, but above all else, make it personal and from the heart:

• Why did you decide to buy (or build) your park? We are not talking about how you intend to amass a fortune as part of a 5-year plan. What is it that you are trying to offer your guests or that differentiates your park?
• What did you do in life that took you to this point in time? Did you work in customer service or perhaps in a big company that downsized or moved its production offshore? What lessons did you learn, and how would you like to do things differently? Many people will directly identify with your prior experience.
• Talk about your family and what it means to you. Are there family values that are now part of your business ethics? Is your park the kind of place where you want your own children to grow?
• What are your long-term goals for your park? It is amazing how people will be willing to help you to attain your dreams and will want to be a part of seeing them materialize, but they need to know what those goals might be.
• What are you doing – personally – that makes your park different from many others? If your life includes some sort of Eureka moment or epiphany, tell the story.

Buy from a Big Box or Shop Locally?

As I pointed out early on in this essay, many people feel an overwhelming desire to shop locally. Even if your park is part of a national franchise, you should still be personalizing your imprint upon the national brand. People choose name brands because they feel that they can expect a degree of reliability and consistency, and you want to build upon those qualities with your personal imprint. Even McDonald’s regionalizes its menu. You probably want to do your best to “localize” the national brand.

Wal-Mart is a perfect example of what can happen when a business loses sight of its origins. The chain grew because it was Sam Walton’s personal story and retailing concept. When he died, his personal story died along with him. Today, people shop at Wal-Mart for one reason – and one reason only: price. Even the trucks that are ever-present on the highways tell the story: Always Low Prices. Without price, the world’s largest retailer would be out of business.

Word Association

Ask a few of your campers for the first word that comes to their mind when they hear the name of your campground. Ask first-time arrivals why they chose your park. If the answers are price, a color or a mascot, you may need to be putting greater effort into telling your story. If the answer is a word that conveys an emotion or a concept – anything from enjoyment to security to a friendly environment – you are probably on target. Use those same words in your marketing, recognizing that the qualities that are drawing guests to your park are the same qualities that will allow you to widen your markets.

Tell your story, and try to personalize every aspect of a coordinated marketing campaign. Add a personalized “About Us” page to your website, put your photo (or a family photo) in your advertising, and try to write in the first person. Speak directly to your customers, in a friendly manner, telling them what “we” can do for “you”. Your message will strike a resounding chord, and your readers will respond.

Several recent experiences have brought home the importance of telephone etiquette and its impact upon business. Particularly when a phone call might be the first point of contact with a business prospect, that first impression could create a lasting impression. With a little advance thought, you can help to ensure that the impression is positive. Let me share a few of my observations and suggestions.

Call Waiting

With call waiting, you are notified when a new call is coming in while you are on an existing call. The best advice I can offer about call waiting is not to use it. More than anything else, call waiting interrupts your existing conversation and gives the person on the other end the distinct impression that his or her call is unimportant. It gives you the choice of terminating the first call or rushing the first call to its conclusion. Either way, you are likely to put both callers at least briefly on hold. Who likes being put on hold? Nobody.

If you choose to ignore an incoming call when using call waiting, you are at minimum being distracted from the first call. If you do accept the call, the caller is given the impression that nobody is in your office, and that is not a good perception. You are far better off having a caller encounter an occasional busy signal. This, by definition, suggests that your office is busy, and that can be a good perception!

Answering the Call

Speaking of being put on hold, never answer a call using the words, “May I put you on hold?” More often than not, the person asking that question does not wait for a reply. This rude habit is notoriously abused by doctors’ offices, isn’t it? If you can’t handle the volume of incoming calls, it is time to add another person to answer your phones. If too many people are waiting in the checkout lines at a supermarket, smart management will call clerks up front to open new registers.

Last week, I had to place a series of calls to a prominent organization within the industry, and it was apparent that they were experiencing some phone problems. On one of my calls, the receptionist apparently could not hear my voice at her end. When this happens in my office, the policy is to presume that the caller on the other end can hear our voices, explaining that we cannot hear the caller’s voice before gently disconnecting. In my call last week, there was no such courtesy. The receptionist simply slammed the phone down onto its base, treating me like I was some sort of crank caller. Once again, was this a positive impression? No.

Never Say “No”

On another recent call, I asked the person at the other end if an exception could be made to a policy. The person at the other end was not authorized to make that decision, and simply said, “Nothing we can do about that.” Say what? If an employee, either on the phone or off the phone, is not authorized to make an exception to a policy or procedure, that employee should cheerfully pass the request along to a superior who can make the decision.

As a case in point (and a tip to my readers!), I have learned that every checkout clerk at Home Depot stores is given the discretion to authorize up to a 10% discount to a customer, upon request. I have made that request at each of my last four purchases, and I have been given that discount every time. Does that make me happy with Home Depot? Of course it does. ‘Yes’ is such a nice word.

Return Your Calls!

It utterly amazes me how often I will call people who really need to hear from me, repeatedly leave messages, only to have them not return my calls. As a case in point, my company had a long-time client who recently sold her campground and provided me with the name and phone number of the new owner. I called twice and left messages, as a simple courtesy and means of introduction. He never returned my calls.

About two weeks later, it came to my attention that the campground’s reservation requests were bouncing back to our server because the new owner had apparently terminated the Comcast e-mail account to which the requests were being e-mailed. I called and left two more messages with this specific information. My calls have still not been returned, and I am done making calls to someone who does not want to help himself. As of the time of this posting, there have been over 40 campers who have attempted to make reservations and who have been ignored, some looking for multiple sites or week long stays. Averaging two night stays at $35.00 per night, this translates into well over $2,750.00 in lost income.

If nothing else, my point in sharing these examples is to try to get people to understand that, in these days when everything is digital, the good old telephone is still a crucial tool when it comes to running your business smarter. Try seeing yourself as the caller at the other end of the line, and you are certain to benefit. Courtesy is profitable, and rudeness is costly.

E-Mail is often taken for granted these days, with the result being that many of us fail to realize its true potential. Everybody knows that e-mail is essentially free and immediate, as opposed to a letter which currently costs 49 cents to mail and may take days to deliver. E-mail always arrives at the right time because it is the recipient’s prerogative to determine when it will be opened or read. Unlike a phone call, the timing of which may be inopportune at the other end, the recipient alone determines when – and if – it is going to be read.

With a phone call, you know when you have reached the person you are calling, even though Caller ID may allow them to avoid your call, and – in extreme instances – call blocking may prevent a call from your number from even getting through. Then, of course, we have all experienced the unpleasantly rude experience of having somebody hang up on us.

With conventional mail, nobody discards an unopened birthday card, bank statement, or tax bill. These are immediately identified as either friendly or important communications. The decision whether or not to open a conventional piece of mail is typically made within 3-5 seconds. For e-mail to be opened with any reasonable frequency, it is necessary for it to convey that same type of urgency. The rates with which conventional e-mail is opened and read are difficult to measure, but it is safe to assume that they are remarkably low. The longer we have been online and the more e-mail that we receive, the more selective we become about what we will take the time to read. In my own instance, with excellent filters removing spam from the equation, I would estimate that I delete 90-95% of my incoming e-mail before it is read.

There are third-party services which will allow a degree of tracking of conventional e-mail messages. Some of these services are free, others paid, and they can tell you when somebody has opened your message, how long they spent reading the message, where they were located, whether or not they forwarded the message, and much more. These services generally work by embedding an invisible graphic file into your message, monitoring when that graphic has been downloaded. Unfortunately, if the recipient’s e-mail client or mobile device is not set to display graphics, that invisible graphic will not be downloaded and tracked. If you would like to look into this type of tracking, some of the services that you will find online include WhoReadMe, GetNotify, ContactMonkey, and BananaTag.

Conventional E-Mail Tips

Whether or not you use an e-mail tacking service, to increase your open and read rates, follow a few basic tips:

• Clearly identify yourself. In your e-mail settings, be sure that either your full personal name or business name is entered. I am amazed at how many e-mails I receive from senders named “office” or “info”. If you enter nothing in this setting, most e-mail clients will by default simply show your e-mail address. Having your recipients clearly recognize you will increase the likelihood of your e-mail getting read, and it will also tremendously help them to search for one of your messages to reference in the future.
• Write a subject line that asks to be opened. Ideally, it will start with your company name, both for name recognition and ease of sorting. Make it compelling and specific. I have an amazing number of e-mails in my inbox with the subject lines reading “hi”, “hello”, and “question”. Worse yet are the e-mails that are send with NO subject line whatsoever. Some people use special characters (also known as glyphs) to draw attention to their subject lined, converted to more graphical emoji on some devices. These might include symbols such as arrows ►, musical notes ♫, and hearts ♥ – not all of which are appropriate for most businesses. I believe that, in most instances, symbols such as these get an e-mail subject line noticed but have no impact whatsoever on read and open rates. In addition, they might flag a message as spam. Use a subject line that the recipient will identify as something of interest.
• Do not request read receipts. Except in specific instances, read receipts are perceived as an annoyance by recipients, and a recipient can choose whether or not to confirm receipt of your message. This last factor renders read receipts pretty pointless. I find that some people have their e-mail client configured to request a read receipt for every message sent. They are often the same people who send messages without a subject line!

When and Why to Use E-Mail Marketing

If you are thinking about sending a message to multiple recipients using an e-mail client’s ‘cc’ (carbon copy) or ‘bcc’ (blind carbon copy) features, do not do it! This practice is impersonal, can flag you as a spammer, and (using the ‘cc’ feature) discloses the e-mail addresses and violates the privacy of every recipient. To avoid these issues, use an e-mail marketing service such as Constant Contact, iContact, Vertical Response, MailChimp, or Campaigner. These services are all reasonably priced, have higher deliverability rates than conventional e-mail, and provide templates that make it easy for your messages to stand out. More importantly, they provide a wealth of tracking data which goes far beyond simply who has opened your e-mail.

When mailing using an e-mail marketing service, you know exactly which recipients open your e-mail, when they open it, what links they click, if they forward it, if they unsubscribe, if their address is undeliverable, and if anybody reports your e-mail as spam. Let’s say that you run a campground and your newsletter includes articles on seasonal site availabilities, a special event that you have scheduled, and a limited-time discount – each including a link for more information. By checking the click-thrus for any of these article links, you have identified key prospects that are likely to be more than receptive to a follow-up phone call … if they have not contacted your first!

The most ineffective e-mail is the one that is not read. Make your e-mail work smarter, and your business will truly benefit!