Telecom Book

1. Very little start-up capital is needed.

By emailing a sales letter to a several thousand people, you can test a new product or service. In case your test is successful, you can mail to a greater number of people in your target market. Be sure, your mailings will be successful. A test mailing is like conducting a poll of a list,  which is grounded on the principle that general public opinion is measured by asking several hundred people their opinion. Of course, the sample you are polling must be properly selected to yield a valid poll result. It is proved by direct mail  that human nature is rather constant, and may be compared to the laws of physics and gravity .  Generally speaking, direct mail is based on this universal truth. The laws of email marketing run that people will respond in a particular way to certain offers, incentives and arguments. Human beings have commonly the same concerns, dreams, aspirations, motivations, and fears. We all behave in rather predictable patterns.

2. Target your market as precisely as possible.

Direct email marketing differs greatly from the broadcasting. It can be names narrowcasting. If TV, radio, magazine and newspaper ads hit people in a geographic area with your message, direct mail is aimed at those most likely to buy your products. TV, radio, magazine and newspaper ads hit everyone, even those who are unwilling or have absolutely no chance of  buying your product. With direct mail you can strike your potential buyers with an accurate precision.

3. You can immediately return your investment.

If you do direct mailing properly, you can return your money almost immediately. With direct mailings you can even make a profit.  Let’s say your return is about 70 cents for every dollar you have spent on the mass-market email campaign, you get a profit, which is practically impossible with  TV, radio, magazine or newspaper ad campaign.

4. Direct mailing is measurable.
It is a proven fact that direct mail marketing is entirely measurable. It’s very hard to value or to measure the effectiveness of TV, magazine, radio, or newspaper ads. The only thing we can do with these advertising methods is only to guess how well the campaign is doing. Each mailing shows you the exact amount of your investment return, since the orders come back in response to your mailing. The Internet proved to be a very interesting  response marketing media, and the results can be measurable. But Internet marketing can be very tricky, mainly because people may use  different email addresses and also because of anti-spamming technologies and laws.

5. There is no need of facing rejection.
One of the great advantages of direct email marketing is that you’re never have to face the rejection. You are only dealing with those customers who say accept your offer. Direct mail works under condition if only one person out of 200 says “yes” to you and sends you a reply. Imagine that you are going door-to-door and are making offers of sales pitches. Do you realise how it is emotionally draining to receive rejections, let’s say for every 90 out of 100 . It makes you feel discouraged, depressed and psychologically hurt.

Economies of scale are the factors that cause the average cost of producing something to fall as the volume of its output increases. Hence it might cost $3,000 to produce 100 copies of a magazine but only $4,000 to produce 1,000 copies. The average cost in this case has fallen from $30 to $4 a copy because the main elements of cost in producing a magazine are loaded at the front end of the production process. Economies of scale were the main drivers of corporate gigantism in the 20th century. They were fundamental to Henry Ford’s revolutionary assembly line and they are the spur to many mergers and acquisitions today.

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Cross-selling is an idea that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s. The Economist described it as “the synergistic notion that buyers of one of a firm’s services would become customers for another”. Cross-selling involves selling an additional product and service on top of the one that a customer has already agreed to buy or has bought.

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The concept of differentiation originated in economics and has been taken over by marketing departments. At its heart lies the ability of sim- ilar products to be differentiated by real or imaginary means, thus enabling them to be sold at a higher price and profit.

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I’m not a very experienced blogger, you know… I have been blogging for about a year or more. I definitely prefer blogs to traditional web sites, since blogs are not only more dynamic but also establish tight relationship with the readers as being more personal.
I’ve tried to work with Textpattern and Blogger, but in the end I decided to stick to Wordpress, as I find it most convenient to all of them. The reason why my preference falls on WordPress is that you can find a great deal of themes on the Web. The majority of them are absolutely free of charge.

iPod video converter is easy in usage software  to convert iPod video from the most popular and comprehensive formats. The fastest iPod video converter on the market, it allows to convert the most popular formats with just few clicks.

Another great thing about WordPress is the flexibility of WordPress as a platform. If your site is powered like Wordpress, it should not obligatorily look like a blog. I’ve seen tons of web sites powered by Wordpress. All of them look awesome. Wordpress can be even used as a content management system. Blogs are a bit simpler for people to use.
Blogs possess a great number of benefits and are highly competitive with the majority of expensive content management systems: archiving, categorization, and publishing is maintained automatically. There’s an option to set permissions on creating and editing content.

Weak dollar puts travelers under a serious disadvantage. Now traveling to
Europe becomes more expensive than ever, and for many of US citizens not affordable. As an experienced traveler I would like to share some very useful advice for those who are going to visit Europe this year.

1. Traveling Period
Choose your traveling period as accurately as possible. I strongly recommend you to travel during low season. It will give you an opportunity to save about 50 % of your budget. There is a simple explanation – during the high seasons the prices are usually considerably higher. Another forcible advantage – no more crowds of tourists thronging at the museums. Try to avoid traveling during big holydays, such as Christmas, New Year, and Easter.
2. Choice of the hotel
Staying in a hotel outside of city center or historical places will save you up to 50 per cent. You can conveniently put up at a hotel in the suburbs. Believe me, it’s a great alternative. Just compare – booking a room in a four-star hotel in the centre of a capital will cost you twice as much as booking a room in the suburbs –let’s say 15 minutes ride to the historical centre. Or imagine, a room in a seedy hotel in the centre is equal in expenses to a room in five-star hotel in the suburbs.
3. Choose hotels with half board (H/B) or full board (F/B) and access to the Internet
Half board means that only breakfast and lunch or dinner is included. If you book a room with full board, you get three meals a day. Note, that full board usually doesn’t come with alcohol included. If the Internet access is included, you won’t have to search an unknown city for Internet to communicate with your friends. Make sure that it is included in the price.
4. Use ATM machines
You will save money, if you’ll get your cash from an ATM machine. Usually, exchange offices charge high commissions.
5. Try to avoid using taxis
You can use instead public transportation. The overwhelming majority of European cities have well-developed system of public transportation.
6. Self-catering apartments
You can even stay in a self catering accommodation instead of renting room in a hotel. It will save you hundreds of dollars, not only on accommodation but also on restaurant expenses.

Franchising is a way for firms to increase their turnover without increasing their assets. One of the best known franchises is the McDonald’s chain of hamburger restaurants. Approximately  80% of McDonald’s restaurant businesses around the world are owned and operated by franchisees. However, almost every type of business has been franchised at some time or other, from Big Apple Bagels to DreamMaker Baths & Kitchens. Franchising involves two parties, the franchiser and the franchisee.

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A company’s culture is the set of priorities that it gives to different things. Sometimes these priorities are made explicit: in a company’s formal mission statement, for example, or in the structure of the organisation and the power given to different departments and functions. Sometimes they are implicit: what the Financial Times once called “the large number of unspoken assumptions and beliefs which managers in the organisation share about ‘the way we do things around here’”.

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Although the family firm itself cannot fairly be described as a management idea, it does embody a number of distinctive features around which has been spun a specific theory about corporate behaviour. Family firms have become big business. They have their own magazine, Family Business, their own specialist community of consultants and their own academic institutions – for example, the Loyola University Chicago Family Business Centre.

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The term e-commerce embraces all the ways of transacting business via electronic data: for example, the Minitel system in France, videotext systems, and direct selling by phone. But it is most closely identified with commerce transacted over the Internet, and it is the Internet that put e-commerce at the head of the corporate strategic agenda for the first years of the 21st century.

E-commerce is merely an elision of electronic commerce, but it embodies a revolutionary idea: that electronic commerce is qualitatively different from ordinary time-worn commerce, that (in the jargon) there is a paradigm shift in the way that business is conducted in the world of e-commerce. Doing business via the Internet is not only much quicker and much cheaper than other methods, it is also thought to overturn old rules about time, space and price. There is the much-vaunted death of distance: a customer 10,000 miles away becomes as accessible as one around the corner.  Furthermore, economies of scale, economic laws that were assumed for centuries to be immutable, become less relevant.

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