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  • Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    I just received a living anachronism in my mailbox today – a local vendor card deck.

    This format used to be much more popular, and was often used for B-to-B lead generation 20-40 years ago. If you’re younger and aren’t familiar with these, they are a package of roughly 3″x5″ lightweight cards, printed front and back, packaged up in shrink wrap like a candy bar, with one card acting as the “host” or sponsor and carrying the address block. Each card is a two-sided ad for a different local business, often themed around a group of industries or services pitched to a specific target group. For instance, if I were a deck publisher, and I was creating a deck to send to a list of recently changed addresses, I would likely target new movers by including paid ad cards from a roofer, a cleaning service, a painting company, a landscaper, paving contractor, pool company, lawn service, gutter sales and cleaning, chimney sweeps and other services that people moving into a new home or a new neighborhood might need.

    This one appeared to be pitched not to new movers, but homeowners in general, as it is addressed to me or “Current Occupant” and contained cards from a fence contractor, a counter top company, a landscaper, a pool company, and several others surrounding home ownership and renovation.

    I picked out maybe three vendors that were relevant to my life and my needs, and pitched the rest. The Host card offered a packaged up bundle of prizes by combining offers from three of the vendors, including a restaurant, a pool builder and an interior design firm. The offer isn’t very explicit, but the slug line offers FREE dinner for two, and drives you to a website that will inevitably explain how these three go together to help me win a free dinner for two at the restaurant.

    This format has lost popularity over the years, but at one time was quite lucrative. I know of direct mail publishers who churned out an industry-specific B-to-B deck every quarter, and went on vacation for two months until the next one needed to be put together. Once the ads are sold on a long-term one- or two-year contract, it’s just assemble, print, package, mail. Pretty simple, but the list maintenance was pretty high, in order to keep response levels up and advertisers happy and coming back, and the level of detail to get a larger deck produced correctly is pretty high – it’s like printing a magazine with no editorial and no binding.

    With the advent of local look-up directories on the Internet, such decks as the one in my hand are anachronistic at best, but they must pull and make economic sense to the advertiser, or they wouldn’t exist. Kudos to the publisher for making the math work for them and for keeping this format alive.

    If you’ve seen something in your mailbox that was unexpected, let us know, we’d love to hear about it . . .

    Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    There was a time, not too long ago, where marketing pundits and other “experts” were saying that E-mail had run it’s course as a marketing media vehicle, that it was stale, that it’s open rate was too low, that the spam filters and firewalls had made it nearly impossible to get good results with e-mail marketing.

    Now those same pundits (of whom I was not one) are having to eat their words as major marketers are singing the praises of a well-crafted, simple e-mail to your hottest, most worked on lists. As usual, it’s the message, not the medium that counts, and a well-crafted effective anything will always beat the schlocky, hacky, abusive e-mail campaigns that desensitized audiences and killed response rates based on misuse and abuse of the medium and therefore the audience.

    As always, it comes down to personal approaches, real, workmanlike copy, free of typos, grammatical redundancy, slang and other silliness that kill credibility. E-mail is still mail, and it’s still sent to a single address, which means there’s a person on the other end. Simply write with that person in mind, on a one-to-one basis, and suddenly watch open rates soar, response rates double or triple, and sales shoot skyward.

    Never mind all the gimmicks, bells and whistles. I know of one marketer that sends out plain text stuff that nets him phenomenal response rates – not a photo to be seen, not even a logo, just good effective copy, real headlines that resonate with the audience – his secret? He writes to his Grandmother in his mind – if the offer is clear enough for her to understand, if the copy clean enough that she won’t cringe (Grandma was a Jr. High English teacher), if the intent clear enough and the benefits plain enough for her to like it, he’s got a winner. Yes, he primarily markets to an older audience – but these days unless you work for Disney, who doesn’t? Not a bad acid test – can your latest missive pass it?

    Keep it simple and keep it direct – speak to a specific person – if you personalize, be sure to get their name and gender correct, otherwise don’t bother. Nothing will kill response quicker than the feeling that you didn’t even care enough to send the right message – it’s like reading someone else’s mail, and it creeps people out.

    Keep the file small, keep the message simple – huge files still give viewers trouble, big images still get caught in spam filters and firewall screeners. The trend in design these days is to make the whole e-mail an image or series of images – and my browser is set to make me actually request these image files in order to view them – why make me work to see your information? It would have to be a heck of a headline to make me click three more times and wait for them to load, when I can simply hit “delete”.

    A well-researched list is still the key to success with E-mail. Most rented lists under perform, as e-mail addresses change more frequently than physical addresses. A self-selected list is best – based on a web login, or a previous response, or an inquiry, something you can verify and be sure is “opt-in” work very well – permission marketing is still king!

    Frequency is something you can debate all day, but suffice to say if you irritate your audience, your response will drop, and often less is more. I’d rather hear from you 4 times a year with relevant info than 8 or 12 times with fluff and nonsense. Save it for the good stuff, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to put together the mechanics of an e-mail, it might as well be a good one . . .

    Send me a copy of the worst e-mail you’ve received recently, and I’ll send it back to you with an analysis – FREE.

    If you found this useful and valuable, share it with your colleagues, and be sure and let me know by subscribing to this blog, above. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    Time Off Is Not A Benefit – It’s A Necessity!

    With the long holiday break just behind us, and if anything we’re all busier than before the break we took to help us relax, I stopped to ponder the value of doing nothing. Some of my best ideas have occurred when I was doing “nothing”. My mind was obviously active, but the body can be fairly inert and immobile, heart rate low, BP down, etc. What makes most people relax is the lack of stress, both good stress and bad stress. Bad stress is presented when there is a challenge presented for which there is no good solution. Good stress is what drives competition, performance, internal drive in search of praise or approval. Bad stress can do physical damage, good stress can drive new levels of achievement. Relaxation can be as simple as having nothing on the schedule for the next hour that is “required” of us.

    The conscious mind may be seemingly inert or inactive, but the subconscious portion is always churning, turning over the available data, mining the memory for connections, coincidences, angles and opportunities. Sometimes, driving the conscious thought pattern in a different direction can give the subconscious the room and resources to put more energy into solving the problem at hand. Not thinking about it can sometimes mean that you’re thinking harder about it, but in a different way, from a different direction.

    Creative endeavors can benefit from this type of approach as well, not just problem solving behavior. When presented with a new marketing challenge, sometimes it’s best to just absorb and the necessary data and see what shape it takes naturally, rather than force it. I’ve worked with several graphic designers and production creatives, who had a policy of not touching a piece of paper(in those days) or a computer mouse to start the project until three days after the project “began”, the initial assignments had been made and some of the preliminary research had yielded some initial results. This gave them time to let the information “percolate” for a few days, giving their subconscious mind time to study the challenge from a variety of angles. I’ve found the designers who employ this technique to almost universally bring something fresh, appropriate, useful and accurate to the table – often they hit a home run the first time out, rather than through evolution involving outside input.

    Doing nothing for some period gives us time to properly file the input presented during the day, assess it’s validity and value, maybe connect some of the pieces of data in a unique or different way. Many successful professionals swear by meditation for stress control and creative inspiration. Meditating forces you to stop everything else, calm yourself, clear your mind, focus on something amorphous or not relevant to the current challenge – precisely the same attributes as “doing nothing”. Maybe calling it meditation legitimizes doing nothing for workaholics? Whatever you call it, your mind needs time to rest, rejuvenate, recover from the daily assault of input from outside sources. Rest can be your sharpest tool for solving problems.

    Let’s take a few moments out this weekend, and take a few extra hours to “Do nothing”. You might find a few problems solved or that things look a bit more clear when you “come back”.

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  • Publish or Perish – By What Definition?

    Publish or Perish – By What Definition?

    In today’s social media-immersed, blogosphere saturated, media-driven, net savvy world, the nature of publishing has certainly changed. The very definition of publishing has changed as well – but is that a good thing?

    The Internet has provided the everyman a unique opportunity to broadcast their innermost thoughts to the world, no matter how inane or irrelevant, with no editing, correction or restraint. While this may seem freeing, in the end it has lead to a huge, nearly unnavigable mass of questionably valuable information.

    Now when researching a topic, you certainly have more information available and in a more convenient format – but is it valid, accurate, vetted and unbiased? Probably none of the above in most cases.

    This glut of information has given rise to some unique phenomenon as well – the speed with which urban legends develop and spread is breathtaking compared to just a decade ago. Viral information can be more damaging than real viruses, and travels faster, and with greater impact! Cyber-bullying is now an additional concern parent’s have to deal with, and the youth of today have diluted the accuracy, eloquence and power of their native English nearly to the point of unintelligability, in the interest of speed and convenience, holding true to an artificially-imposed brevity limit. Progress . . .?

    Internet publishing has some tremendous advantages, in speeding the exchange and sharing of scientific, philosophical, cultural, economic and ideological information. In the old days, when a book or magazine article was “published” in print, a whole host of scholarly, educated, experienced professionals read, fact-checked, edited, contributed to and proofed a work before it was released to the public. This may have slowed the release of information, but it gave the information a fighting chance to be at least passably accurate and honest.

    Today, most of those professionals have been rendered obsolete, and those skills are rolled up into a single individual – the author, right or wrong.

    What does all this have to do with marketing? Simply this: take care in assessing what you “put out there” to market your company, build your brand, promote your products – one false step not only travels faster than you can catch, but is permanent, residing in servers and living on hard drives around the world!

    Good luck all you nascent publishers out there!

    Be sure to pick up my published efforts, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – Amazon/CreateSpace can have it to you in a just a couple of days!

  • Think Twice Before You Hit Send

    Think Twice Before You Hit Send

    Everyone makes mistakes – I don’t care who you are in life, you’ve made a mistake or two along the way, it virtually unavoidable. In fact, making mistakes is often the hall mark of successful individuals – you learn more from making mistakes than from succeeding the first time out. The real trick is not only to learn from them, but also to avoid making them in future. Making the same mistake multiple times shows a lack of self-understanding, wondering why things go wrong as a result is the definition of insanity!

    One mistake I see many younger business associates make is to put something in writing and deliver it to a recipient before reading it and considering the impact on the recipient later. In the old days, if you had an unfortunate experience or got caught in some less than optimal circumstance, you could fire off a letter to the one who initiated this slight, real or imagined. This involved sitting down, composing the thought. Then you had to find a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp, and physically write the vehement tract in longhand, place it an envelope, seal it, stamp it, and post it. All this took time – time to consider, reconsider, and with that many steps, many chances to halt the process, and reduce or avoid the impending damage altogether. It took effort to vent on paper, and usually only the intended recipient got to see the result.

    Today, with the advent of e-mail, the opportunity for electronic lunacy looms large. Many people spend entire days tucked safely behind a computer terminal, reading, texting, tweeting, e-mailing, posting on social media sites – communicating to be sure, but communicating what? It’s now much easier to fire off a venomous missive at the drop of a hat, with no real editor involved, either internal or external. A few keystrokes, a few clicks of the mouse, and off it goes, wounding and excoriating all in it’s path. And, in true millennial fashion, once its out there, it stays there. It resides on at least two server drives, yours and theirs, as well as all the one’s in between, and can easily be forwarded, used as defacto evidence, either for the authorities or in an internal investigation. And, it carries with it an IP address that leads right back to you – no such thing as an anonymous e-mail hate letter.

    Even routine business correspondence sent to the wrong place or copied to the wrong address can cause trouble. A quick note to a co-worker about what a jerk the boss was in today’s meeting (a bad idea to begin with, never commit such things in writing, it will always be read by the wrong person eventually)can easily end up in the wrong hands with a simple click that’s a bit quick, thanks to automatic address lists, group e-mail, and a host of other technological corner-cutting to make our electronic lives even quicker and easier.

    To avoid all of this, there are three simple rules:

    1. Read all e-mail at least twice before sending, starting with the subject line, word by word, slowly and carefully.
    2. If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t write it in an e-mail, tweet, Facebook post or IM.
    3. Check all e-mail addresses carefully, and verify before hitting “send”

    Take a moment, think about what you’re writing, think about the impact it can have on other’s, and ask yourself what you would do and how you would feel if you received this message in your in-box. If there’s any way your message could be taken the wrong way, misconstrued, misinterpreted or taken the wrong way, edit, edit, edit. It’s free, it’s fast, and can save you hours of grief and tons of trouble later. 30 seconds of review now can save hours of explanation and hard feelings later, not a great bargain if you ignore it.

    Read before you hit send – the office life you save could be your own . . .!

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    Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”