Questions to Ask a Bond Broker about a Bond

As you enter the world of bond investing, you’re likely to get phone calls from brokers pitching bonds they’re all sure you’ll want to invest in. But use some caution. Ask the questions in the following list — and get acceptable answers — before parting with your cash.

• Who is the bond issuer? Is it the U.S. Treasury? General Electric? Dade County, Florida? The Russian Federation? Moe’s Hardware Store? A bond is an IOU, and an IOU is only as good as the entity that owes U. In addition, different kinds of bonds have different characteristics, such as taxability, callability, and volatility.

  
  



• How is the bond rated? Especially among corporate bonds (more likely to default than municipal or agency bonds), you want to know whether the company issuing the bond is financially stable. Ratings are readily available through any brokerage house.

  
  



• What is the maturity date? Long-term bonds tend to pay higher rates of interest, but your money is tied for longer and the price of the bond, should you wish to sell it before maturity, tends to be more volatile.

  
  



• What is the yield-to-maturity? There are many ways of measuring a bond’s return. Yield-to-maturity is perhaps the most important measure. (Bond funds, which have no maturity, can be more difficult to compare.)

  
  



• Is the bond callable? Can the issuer of the bond hand you back your money at any time? All things being equal, a callable bond is not desirable, and you should get more interest in compensation for the call feature.

  
  



• What’s the worst-case yield? Suppose the bond does get called. What would be your yield on the bond at that point? When comparing callable bonds, this figure is very important.

  
  



• May I please have the CUSIP? The CUSIP (Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures) number allows you to go to a Web site, such as Investing in Bonds.com, to see what recent trades have been made on any particular bond. Doing so gives you a very good idea of what a fair price would be for the bond you're being offered.

  
  

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Determining How Many Marketing E-Mails to Send

Deciding how many e-mail marketing messages to send requires a fine balance: Send too many e-mail messages, and you overwhelm your audience with sheer numbers; Send too few, and you can overwhelm your audience with too much content in each one.

The total number of e-mail messages you send should match your consumer’s need for your information — not your need to send the information.

Estimating the total number of messages your audience expects usually depends on two factors:

• The number of times your audience engages in a buying cycle: If your prospects or customers purchase your products or services once per week, sending 52 e-mails per year is probably a good place to start with your frequency. If your prospects or customers take months or even years to make purchase decisions, you can base the number of e-mails you send on the number of times they’re likely to talk about their purchases with their peers.

  
  

  For example, if you sell once-in-a-lifetime vacations, you might create an affinity club for past vacationers and keep your customers talking about their experience by sending invitations to members-only social reunions four times per year.

  
  



• The amount of information your audience needs to make a purchase decision: Some purchase decisions are easy for consumers to make, but others require much more consideration. If your audience requires a lot of information to justify a decision, send a number of e-mails each focusing on a single factor so that you don’t overwhelm your audience with too much content in just a few e-mails. You can satisfy people who need all the information at once by providing a link to all your content hosted on a website.

  
  

Estimating how many e-mails you need to effectively deliver all your information may be as simple as dividing your information into equal parts or as complex as tracking interactions and delivering successively greater amounts of content as your audience becomes more engaged.

Although paying attention to the needs of your audience is always the best policy, sometimes your e-mail content dictates the appropriate number of messages to send. For example, the total number of e-mails you send might depend on

• The amount of change in your content: If your e-mails always have the same basic message, you don’t need to send as many as if your content were always fresh and new.

  
  



• The theme of your content: If your e-mail includes frequency in the theme, you can match the number of e-mails you send to that theme. For example, if your subscribers sign up for a daily weather update, you need to send 365 e-mails for the year, but delivering a quarterly financial report requires only 4 e-mails per year.

  
  

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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/determining-how-many-marketing-emails-to-send.navId-610165.html