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Category: Data

How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]…each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.[/pullquote]

Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More in-depth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi-page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include all current members on such a survey, to get a sizable enough number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each should have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant.[/pullquote]

Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

If you found this article valuable and informative, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

January 28, 2015
Is Your Branding Team Thinking Strategically?
Graham Robertson provides us with this week’s opus – brilliantly done, a really good grasp on strategic brand thinking. Gotta love Graham. If so, spread the love . . . graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

In our marketing careers, we start off in a doing-role and get completely swamped in execution. We think “if only I had a higher level job, I’d actually have time to think, rather than just do”. The problem for many of us, is not only do we get good at the doing, we get so good that we can’t get past it and we never end getting to the real strategic thinking. We just become a do-er at a higher level and drive everyone crazy beneath us.

When I talk to many of the senior Brand Leaders, at the VP and Director level, I hear 3 common things:
1. “I am too busy and I have no time for strategic thinking”
2. “My team lacks the experience so I have to jump in resolve issues myself”
3. “If I didn’t jump in, it just wouldn’t get done right”
Are you really Strategic?

Everyone out there claims to be a strategic thinker, but I would guess that really only half of us really are strategic.
- Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planning who can see connections. This is PLANNING!
- Non Strategic Thinkers see answers before questions. They get to answers quickly, and will get frustrated in the delays of thinking. They think doing something is better then doing nothing. They opt for action over thinking. They are impulsive and doers who see tasks. They are frustrated by strategic thinkers. This is EXECUTING!
As a senior Brand Leader, it is easy to get so wrapped up in the details of the execution that you’re making the non-strategic decisions on behalf of the team. You have just really become the “senior” Senior Brand Manager that really annoys your team. Instead of providing the team with a vision, challenging on strategy or teaching the team, you’re telling them to make the flash bigger and change the sell sheet to purple.

If you speak in a telling voice, you leave your team with one answer: YES. If you speak in an asking voice you leave your team with 3 answers: YES, NO or let me dig in a bit more and find out.

Instead of telling people what to do, why not challenge yourself to sit back slightly and ask the really tough challenging questions. You’ll know you’ve asked a really tough question when you don’t even know the answer. There’s nothing wrong with stumping the team, because you’re even stumping yourself in the process.

So What are the Tough Questions to Ask?

As your team might be at the beginning stage of digging in on analysis, here’s are 10 great questions to ask your team:
1. How do we make money? This focuses them on figuring out the pathway from the activities on the brand to the results in the market and the profitability on the balance sheets. The most beloved brands use the consumer connection to create a source of power that they can use on various areas of the market and then use that power to drive the brand’s profitability. Your team should be able to map this out and use it as a roadmap for the brand’s future. If you’re not focused on power and profit, then you’re not strategic.
2. What is it that makes us different? The best of brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or not around for very long. If you can’t answer this question, then how do you expect your consumer to be able to answer. You’re likely just a me-too brand and once that’s discovered, you’ll be on a downward spiral.
3. Why are we here? How did we get here? Where could we be? It’s great for getting to the vision, without writing the word “vision” up on the board and saying to everyone “ok go”. That gets you no-where. Pick a magical date of 5-10 years from now and say “if you got everything you wanted, what would the brand look like in 5 years?” Push them hard on the where to, because that’s when the brand starts to transform itself.
4. What’s holding us back from being where we want to be? Once you get the team focused on the vision of 5 to 10 years from now. This allows you to start attacking your brand, to find the inhibitors that you can try to unleash or course correct.
5. Which would be easier: getting our most loyal users to use more, moving up those who have already bought into the brand to start using regularly or getting a new user? This is pushing them towards a strategic choice, whether to focus on base users or new users–penetration or usage frequency. It also should start to force you to look at your brand funnel to see where you have strength and where you have gaps. Every brand should be utilizing a brand funnel. It’s almost negligent to not use one.
6. That’s like working out at the gym and not knowing your blood pressure or cholesterol scores. When you layer in What would make us more Money, you might start to see the ROI impact of the same decision.
7. What would our consumer say about our brand? This shifts the focus of the discussion from a myopic brand focus into thinking about the consumer first. Everything you do should be start and end with the consumer in mind. After all, if you figure out how to win over the consumer, you become more powerfully connected and can drive greater growth and profits through that power.
8. For Strategy, what choices are on the table that helps you gain a foothold into the market but also helps to drive the long-term win? A test for any great strategy is whether it has all 4 key elements. FOCUS: all your energy to a particular strategic point or purpose. Match up your brand assets to pressure points you can break through, maximizing your limited resources—either financial resources or effort. Pick a tight target market of those who can love you, and pick a unique position that you can stand behind and win. You want that EARLY WIN, to kick-start of some momentum. Early Wins are about slicing off parts of the business or population where you can build further. Find that connection with your consumer—moving them along the love curve. LEVERAGE everything to gain positional advantage or power that helps exert even greater pressure and gains the tipping point of the business that helps lead to something bigger. Your brand finds a way to turn the consumer connectivity into a source of power the brand can leverage.Seeing beyond the early win, there has to be a GATEWAY point, which is the entrance or a means of access to something even bigger. It could be getting to the masses, changing opinions or behaviours. Return on Investment or Effort, where you can translate all the power you’ve earned into profits and brand value.
9. For any choice related to brand positioning and go-to-market, whether it’s target market, main message, media choices or activities, force their hand by asking a few questions to ask: 1) which one gets us on our way to vision faster? 2) which one helps us grow faster 3) which one makes us more money? Always push your team to focus by making them use the word “or” instead of “and”. If you think you are a strategic decision maker, then whenever you choose both, you’ve failed. When you go into a casino, and put one chip on each of the 38 choices on the roulette wheel, it might be fun, but you’ll never win. By targeting everyone then you’re not making the choice, you’re just depleting your resources. And you run the risk that no consumer ever says “wow, that brand is really speaking to me.”
10. When seeing new creative execution of anything, ask “DO YOU LOVE IT?” and then watch their eyes. Do you think our costumer will love it? Is this connected to personal pride or are they just passing the buck filling in forms. Getting something to market, big or small takes a herculean effort to overcome obstacles. I want to know on day 1, will they fight for it? A great idea that falls on the vine is worth less than an OK idea executed with passion. If we don’t love the work we do, then how do we expect the consumer to love the brand? OK is the enemy of greatness.
11. Why do you want to spend this money? If you are about to spend millions of dollars, I want to hear the reason why you think it’s crucial, why it will pay back even greater than the resources we put forward. Understanding and aligning to one key objective allows everyone to focus on the outcome.
And finally, the most important question of all:

What do your instincts think we should do?

And then listen. You might be surprised by the good thinking on your team and you might be surprised that their answer is better than the one that is in your head.

This might be most obvious of questions, but how many times per week do you ask this? Imagine the responses you might get from that. Imagine how motivated your team would be. As a leader, I want you to start exhibiting more patience. You have to learn the art of questioning that sets up the listening. If you learn this skill you’ll start to realize that you can still control the direction of the brand through questions, even more than through direction. On the plus side, you’ll have a fully engaged, motivated team that’s ready to deliver.

As a Brand Leader at the executive level, you should walk into every meeting telling yourself “I know less about this than anyone in the room” and that puts you in the most powerful position to ask the right strategic questions and listen for the right strategic answers.

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand.   I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better.

If you found this valuable, there’s more information like this available in one neat volume of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – pick up your copy today!
January 9, 2015
Empowered Customers: A Direct Result of Technology Adoption?
This was so good I couldn’t resist re-posting it, courtesy of Sourcelink

Rich Brown, Oct 02, 2012

Enlightened marketers are now referencing the “Age of The Customer”, which is defined by consumers holding all the advantages as they have real-time information about pricing, product features and competitors. The “Age of The Customer” has promoted the everyday consumer to the role of an empowered customer where not only consumer shopping behavior has changed, but also the way we market to these consumers. Empowerment, as a direct result of technology adoption, has given a single individual, your customer, the power to choose how, when, and what they desire in terms of marketing.
- How – In which channels does the empowered customer choose to be reached? Email, Social Media, Telephone, Direct Mail, or all of the above?
- When – How often does the empowered customer choose to be reached specifically related to the cadence and frequency of marketing messages? One email per day vs. one per week or one SMS text message per day vs. one per week?
- What – What type of marketing content does the empowered customer choose to receive? Plain text vs. HTML emails, a printed catalog vs. a dynamic online catalog, printed coupons vs. electronic coupons vs. emailed coupons vs. location-based coupons?
While customers have always had choices, it’s never been a more powerful time for the average consumer. The Internet has been around for many years now and personal computers have long been a common household staple for most families. Avenues for customer empowerment have existed for decades since the first online bulletin boards and online chat started to take a grip on our modern computing society. What has specifically evolved us into to the “Age of The Customer” is hands down widespread technology adoption. Without the proliferation of both the Internet and advanced hand-held, always-connected, technology devices such as smartphones and tablets into the hands of nearly every consumer, there would never have been this massive shift of empowerment toward the consumer.

Today we take it for granted that we’re able to sit in front of a computer or better yet, pick up our latest and greatest smartphone or tablet and quickly do just about anything we need. All in the palm of our hands, the empowered consumer can search for a specific product, find retailers who carry that product, research those retailers and their reputation, conduct a price comparison, read product reviews from other consumers and ask specific questions about that product, and finally buy that product. Customers are no longer blinded by false or improper product claims and misleading marketing because they have a global community in which to converse. They can research and determine if a company is not only reputable but also if their product claims are true and if they do right by their customers in the event of a problem.

Additionally, as a direct result of technology adoption, a single consumer, with the power of a mobile device paired with the Internet and the long reach of various social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube or Google+ for example, now has the ability to create a collective opinion or voice, which rivals even the reach and voice of most commercial organizations and governments.

Customers are indeed empowered and learning to use this power to not only buy exactly what they want, but to force companies, who want their business, to become “customer obsessed” and create an engagement strategy to help build relevant, timely and valuable customer interactions. Continued technology adoption will continue to make the empowered customer the new ‘norm’ and drive marketers to find new and innovative ways of customer interaction.

If you found this insightful or helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog today! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”
December 17, 2014
Effective Research Critical To Assess Member Perceptions, Boost Enrollment

There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More indepth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include a large chunk of your current members on such a survey, to get a sufficient number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each could have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

Now that you have some baseline data, you can begin to formulate a strategy to address the needs your membership has expressed, and how to effectively market your approach to meeting those needs as a value statement that will resonate with members and prospects alike.

For more like this, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

December 10, 2014
E-Mail Drives Sales – Duh! HBR Tells The RIGHT Story of E-mail Marketing

Thought you’d find this of interest, so I reposted it in it’s entirety – sums up what I’ve been saying for several years!

by Arthur Middleton Hughes | 9:00 AM August 21, 2012

In a business world obsessed with gaining more customer intelligence, you would think that email marketing would get more respect. But just look at media spending. According to eMarketer, this year U.S. companies are spending about $64 billion per year on TV, $34 billion on print ads, and $39 billion on Internet advertising. And how much are they are spending on email? For that, we have Forrester data: only about $1.5 billion.

Of course, compared to other media, email messages are dirt cheap to send. With TV you are spending on ad agencies, creative studios, and cable channels. With print ads, you are helping to keep newspapers and magazines alive. Direct mail costs more than $600 per thousand pieces. With email, there are almost no costs at all. But its low cost only makes the argument stronger that email marketing is the most cost-effective advertising method available today.

Certainly email beats the competition from a measurability standpoint. With TV you do not know who is watching your ads. Ditto with print. Even with direct mail, you cannot be sure that your mail has been delivered, or that anyone reads it when it gets there. With email, you know within 24 hours exactly which messages have been opened, by whom, what links the openers clicked on, and what part of your message was working.

A properly structured email message provides this benefit to the marketer because it provides benefits to consumers. A TV, print, or direct mail ad is what it is. On email the ad is much more. Because of electronic links, those who open your emails can do their own research: they can explore and see any of the thousands of products that you sell. They can see the colors and sizes. They can, and they do, read ratings and reviews. They can put products in their shopping carts and buy them.

“Fine,” say the TV folks, “but shopping cart sales through emails are seldom more than 5% of total sales. Nothing to write home about.”

What these detractors seem to willfully ignore is that emails create impressions that lead to sales through other routes. Some of these routes can be tracked. The recipient can open it or delete it. If she opens it, she can click on it, perhaps buy something or print out a coupon and take it to a store. Finally, if she puts things in her cart but does not buy, you can send her an abandoned shopping cart email that usually yields 29% of lost sales.

But note that, in many cases, she also does things that are hard to track. She can get in her car and drive to a mall to buy the product. She can pick up her phone and order it. She may be prompted to do research on Google for better prices of similar products, or discuss the offer with her spouse or a friend, leading to a possible purchase later. These are all the behaviors that provide the rationale for TV or print advertising. My point is that emails prompt the same kinds of behaviors. Thus, there is an off-email multiplier. For every purchase in an email shopping cart, we can fairly assume that there are some number of other non-tracked profitable purchases that occur because of the arrival of the email — a number that quantifies all the non-tracked behaviors that email recipients engage in.

If you are going to make a case for investing more heavily in email marketing, you have to determine this off-email multiplier to account for all the sales your emails can be expected to generate. How can that be done? A retailer I’ve worked with which has 900 stores and is very active with email campaigns recently did a great study. It took a group of 105,000 customers in its loyalty club database, divided them into three groups of 35,000, and marketed to the three groups differently, as shown in the chart below (click to see a larger version). Thanks to the loyalty program, it was able to see all subsequent purchases by these customers.

Direct mail has a higher response rate than email. But note that direct mail costs about 100 times as much. Meanwhile, the data collected by the retailer allowed it to calculate its off-email multiplier (a simple matter of dividing the percentage of online sales by the percentage of in-store sales generated by email-only marketing). It is 3.76. In other words, for every email shopping cart sale, this retailer gets 3.76 other, typically non-tracked sales due to the email.

What might your off-email multiplier be? Zero is of course possible, but studies to date suggest that a number between two and three is typical.

Once you factor in your off-email multiplier, it’s a very safe bet that email will beat all your other marketing methods in terms of return on investment. As email marketing gains more respect, marketing intelligence will meet customer intelligence. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” to read more about e-mail Marketing effectiveness.

December 8, 2014
Does Social Media Marketing ACTUALLY Drive Customer Behavior and Convert to Revenue?
Social Media, social media, social media – there, I said it three times into the mirror, now I just have to wait and see what happens . . .

That seems to be the approach many companies are taking to this relatively new phenomenon. The head in the sand approach might have some advantages in the long run, if recent data on the effectiveness of social media in driving customer behavior is to be believed. It seems that despite all the hype, and press, and sturm-und-drang in the digital media, minting new ‘social media gurus’ by the flock, digital media and it’s permutations don’t drive near as much revenue or even shopping behavior individually than they do when used together. Integration seems to be the real strength behind conversation marketing’s mechanics, and when the reams of data generated are used properly ACROSS multiple platforms, it seems to at least have the ability to drive a solid promotional campaign and boost response levels.

That said, here are some interesting tidbits of data, excerpted from a recent Gartner Group study:
- 11% of polled consumers had read a company blog, and only 4% had commented on one.
- Twice that many, or 23% had viewed a company provided video.
- 45% said they planned to purchase based on a combination of brick and mortar, digital ads, and mobile marketing, but only 1% said they planned to do so based on mobile marketing alone.
- Only 26% of consumers said they had clicked on a Search Results page paid ad – irrespective of engine brand.
- Based on data from another similar study, only 6% said they had purchased based on a facebook ad
- 40% said they had registered for a promotion or contest based on an e-mail or social media ad
Clearly, consumers want something for nothing (hence the contest results), but don’t want to work at it (read the blog data, reading a whole blog takes effort)

Also just as clearly, mobile marketing has not reached the level of credibility, trust or penetration it’s purveyors would have you believe, and while it may be the next big thing, it ain’t there yet, not without massive support from other media to reinforce it’s message and bolster its credibility.

Video seems to have made substantial inroads, but anyone who recognizes the level of involvement the TV generation needs to engage will see a clear correlation between the aging of the boomer TV generation and the level of importance video has attained. Add in the near ubiquity and availability of high-speed broadband Internet access allowing for video transmission at better fidelity and faster speeds, and video’s effectiveness becomes less mysterious. The fact that consumers would rather watch a video and have their eyeballs babysat rather than read and understand and digest and analyze a company blog to get their information is less than mysterious as well, when the audience is considered.

The trick with all this is to take the data it generates, and use it to form better customer profiles that can be used to not only drive behavior, but to predict it as well. If you can create a digitally integrated campaign that uses the initial brush with consumers to link to a behavior and transaction based profile, you can then draw that consumer along a continuum toward a purchase after several touch points are hit. That’s how integration beefs up the ROI equation. The development of such campaigns requires broad and detailed knowledge of the target audience, so that it can be set up to account for the wide variety of behaviors possible by consumers. If you can narrow the range of preferences and behaviors, and drive consumers down a narrower funnel, the ROI can be quite lucrative.

According to Gartner, ‘Companies using in-bound and event-triggered marketing techniques to draw consumers will see a 600% higher response rate compared to traditional outbound push campaigns’. That sounds pretty fantastic. I wonder if that will continue to be the case as more firms start to embrace this practice and it becomes more common. Will this type of campaign reduce the level of trust and credibility across the board, making consumers distrustful? Interesting to ponder, but I think not. To paraphrase W.C. Fields, “no one ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public”.

If you found this insightful or controversial, and would like to read more like it, subscribe to this blog today! Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”
November 17, 2014
Keep Your Audience Close . . .

As a marketer, I have a certain level of curiosity about my client’s customers, and how to reach them effectively, how to reach their emotions, to shift their perceptions, to alter their behavior in a way that helps them make the decision to buy, to join, to attend, to engage in some way. That curiosity is at the heart of all of our engagements, and as a research-based marketing strategy purveyor, we get to indulge that curiosity on behalf of clients every day, and after some discussion realized that we were all grateful for that.

Knowing your audience thoroughly and as completely as you can is what makes for marketing success. It allows you to speak directly to them in your copy, it allows you to offer them products and services and opportunities that you KNOW they will appreciate and will feel entitled to obtain. Knowing what they like, when they are likely to like or need what you offer, knowing what stage of life they are currently inhabiting, and being able to predict how they will react to a given opportunity allows you to present thing you have to offer in a way that other retailers and marketers can’t touch. Good research will allow you to do that, no matter what you’re selling.

Many of our engagements involve outreach in the form of direct mail, which allows clients to reach a wide audience with customized offers or pricing or product choices created specifically for that individual or group of individuals, with remarkable success. Mail may seem antiquated in an era of high-speed social media, e-mail marketing, wireless mobile this and that, but really marketing is not about tools, its about connecting with the potential buyer in a way that influences them. It’s about influencing them to consider your products and services for purchase. Purchases make companies money, period. So really, all the online communities, all the digital social interaction, all the sharing of consumer information really doesn’t make anyone any money until someone actually buys something.

What it can do is help you know your audience better. All the data served up voluntarily on a daily basis can help you frame a profile of your audience that’s more true to life than what magazines they read or what type of car they drive, and certainly provide more recent information. The combination of social media data and transactional data from retailers can be an unbeatable combination for marketers hoping to know their audience better. The data is available, now you have to figure out how to actualize it, to monetize it, to turn data into dollars.

The more you know about that target segment and the individuals contained within it, the better you can offer them goods and services they will find appealing. If it’s appealing, they will find a reason to buy it. The simple formula goes: data > knowledge > strategic appeal > purchase > data . . . in a big circle. It’s a good formula to keep in mind, and it feeds into the whole idea of creating a community. What makes a community, in marketing parlance, is that you have a group of individuals who have a reason in common to repeatedly participate in a certain activity, be it buying, or discussing, or learning about or something involving what you have to offer. The “in common” part makes it efficient to reach them and binds them together. The “repeatedly” part is what connects you to the data acquisition formula, and what gives marketers the “in” to offer them things they find appealing over and over again.

The real moral of the story is that the better you know your audience, the better you can serve them and the better your marketing will be to them, which in turn adds to your ability to serve them. Go forth and gather data . . . you’ll be glad you indulged your curiosity!

If you found this information valuable, and would like to read more, be sure and pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”. . .

October 13, 2014
Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing in Electronic Clothing . . .

With some prodding from Eric Mohr (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebmdirectmarketingservicesllc )I gave some thought to the reputation of Direct Marketing in the digital age. I read and absorb hundreds of electronic messages every day in the marketing sphere, everything from blog posts to group discussion posts, to e-mails promoting upcoming webinars on marketing topics touting digital marketing techniques, ad nauseum . . .

What that gives me, besides a huge headache from message overload, is a good scan overview of what’s up in the marketing space, who’s promoting what and what techniques marketers and consultants are using to help their clients succeed (usually). After all that reading, there was something in the back of my mind that bothered and irritated me about most of the promotions and webinar topics – and it finally dawned on me that they looked eerily similar to the promotions and conference topics I was seeing two decades ago pertaining to direct marketing techniques!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that the new digital marketing sphere isn’t a straight rehash of direct marketing – there are many differences in delivery, technology and targeting operations. What bothered me is the approach that new marketers took, the tone if you will, of the communications, which tends toward the downward focused and toward a certain smug word choice that hit me as an experienced marketer from a bad direction. The underlying meta-text in many of these messages tends toward something like “Gee, you haven’t figured out how to use e-mail effectively? We’ve known about it for a long time, here’s what we ‘experienced’ digital marketers have learned in the last two years”.

Guess what, digital marketers, direct marketers who are experienced and have applied their experiences to the use of e-mail, video marketing, targeting and social media, have had it figured out for nearly half a century! There still needs to be a good headline(read: Subject line), the offer has to be compelling to drive response (read:traffic), you can still break up the copy sentence length to help improve readability (read: chunking), you still need to send the message to the ‘right’ people on the ‘right’ list (read: geo-tracking for local promotion, keywords and webtracking for global campaigns), and most importantly, you still have to have good data, and use it appropriately, to reach out to the audience, engage their attention, and prompt a response (read: drive click-thru).

Clearly, good DM skills, like copy writing, offer formulation, list selection and data mining still have a place in the success of digital marketing, regardless of what the new label for them is. So, why have the large consumer companies tended to gravitate toward the “new digital marketing” agencies to set up e-mail campaigns, social media programs and the like, if those skills reside in abundance at their usual DM agency? Because, like everyone else, hanging the “modern” or “digital” moniker on something makes it the new, shiny, spiffy cutting-edge ‘thing’, that everybody feels is the magic bullet that will solve their marketing problems. What the digital folks have going for them is the carefully crafted perception that digital marketing is “cheaper” or even “free” compared to all that paper, printing, postage, nixies, BRE accounts, etc., and in some respects that’s true. But I don’t know anyone who selects a major agency or marketing firm based on whether they use the cheapest methods. They select them based on creativity, skills, and innovation of approach, passion and inspired thinking. So how did the less experienced (by their own admission and by historical fact) agencies end up capturing this business that the old, experienced guys are perfectly well suited to capture?

Two reasons, I think.

1) The old guys failed to adapt, like saber-toothed cats. When digital was developing, these more experienced marketers often doubled down on their traditional skills, beefed up their relationships with traditional clients and grew them, rather than branch out and create digital divisions or think tanks to investigate and develop talent and expertise in those areas.

2) The younger guys were deeply steeped in computer skills and culture, and saw the opportunities computers represented based on a comfort with the new paradigm in a very hands-on way. It’s a short step from sending e-mail instead of printing and mailing business letters to bulk e-mail and social media promotion, when you already spend a majority of time behind a terminal out of knowledge and curiosity. If a computer is your greatest tool in life, everything starts to look like a good digital adaptation.

The downside is, much like the shift in the publishing world from printed books and magazines (done by professionals) to desktop publishing in the late 80s early 90s – having the tools doesn’t impart the underlying skills and abilities to make the final product effective. Many a butt-ugly company newsletter was produced by unskilled administrative help, involving many unusual fonts, bad design, poor use of things like bold and italics, bad rules and underlining, and a host of ills that the pros learned to avoid in their formal training. But they could do it cheaper, get it out in ‘good enough’ form and move on to something else.

Same is true here – the digital guys understand the delivery mechanisms and constraints being used today much better, avoiding spam filters, enhanced delivery, subject lines that conform and pass through firewalls, embedded imagery and the like – but that doesn’t make them copywriters, or graphic designers, or impart understanding of consumer purchasing behavior or emotional engagement – ever talked to a computer geek at a party – not the height of emotional involvement in the conversation, was it?

We’ve got the tools on the digital side that traditional direct marketing could only dream of even ten years ago – the ability to track audiences down to the individual level based on behavior, not just transactional history – a huge boon to experienced marketers! Now if we can just get the two camps together, to use those tools effectively based on years of tried and true techniques of engagement, not just delivery, marketing can rise to the level of a pure science and really drive revenue and loyalty like never before – something to put on your Christmas list for this year, gang . . .

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September 5, 2014
Get Top Results When You Crank Up the “Direct” in Your Direct Mail

By its very nature, direct mail promotions are designed to be one-to-one communication vehicles. As marketers, we are all aware of this in the back of our minds, but in practice, sometimes the “direct” portion drops off the map, and we end up producing unplaced promotional brand ads in an envelope. If you want o see the best returns possible from your direct mail program, make sure the “Direct” angle gets full attention.

There are several ways to rev up the “you” in your programs. The most effective one starts with the concept of the mailing itself. As you envision the final mailing, conceptualize your offer, the list, the copy platform, the thematic graphics and other elements, get a good fix on your target audience for this particular mailing.

The “It” Person

Now take this to the next level, and picture in your mind a specific individual who fits the descriptors and parameters of your typical customer in your target market. Ask some key questions about your mailing with regard to this person: 1) Would this mailing appeal to this person? 2) Is the offer suitable for them and their needs? 3) Would this copy and these graphics attract their attention and resonate with them in an emotional way? 4) Is there enough reason for them to respond, to pay, to write a check and send it in?

If the answer to any of those questions is no for that mythical person in your head, then adjust, correct, edit and revamp until the answer is yes to all of them.

Copy is King

Many of these personal elements start with the copy. Often, the offer is what it is, and either can only be changed minimally to match the audience or is inviolate based on the time and resources available. If you’re in that box, then the solution is to start with the copy.

The word “You” is extremely powerful – indeed, you can’t write a true direct mail piece without it. If your copy speaks directly to that person in your mind, you are by fiat having that one-to-one conversation, and must use “You” to address that person directly, in first person voice. In today’s highly digital climate, the use of a person’s name in the copy is almost passé, but you would be surprised how little it actually gets used, aside from personalized laser letters. For postcards, fixed multi-page packages, and other formats, digital technology allows for the use of the recipient’s name and other information in repeated appropriate fashion, to juice up your message and really push the audience’s emotional buttons. This will drive your point home almost as powerfully as the word FREE in the offer, and will draw in the reader and involve them in your description and your message.

Good copy for direct mail should tell a story. Listing benefits, describing features has its place, but the meat of the piece is a message directly specifically at the reader like there is no one else around, and it’s just the two of you having a short conversation. The story should be illustrative, persuasive, cohesive, and have a point. No matter how long it is, (and there are endless debates about copy length – see Hershel Gordon Lewis for details on both sides) you should make a point, explain why your point is the best, make your point again, and get out after asking for the order.

Let the Data Be Your Guide

To be able to write persuasive, effective copy, to concoct an effective working offer, you have to really know the audience. You can get to know the audience, but to do that, some research is in order. Carefully select your list to be as homogeneous as possible, to select as many similarities as you can to define the audience as finely as you can. That list if selects is the basis for your research. In order to get to know those people (and a market never bought anything, people buy products), you have to have an actual conversation with a few of them, to pick up the subtleties, the similarities and the things that really push their buttons emotionally that get them going, that get them excited.

To help visualize the audience better, pretend to have a conversation with someone representative of the target group, and ask yourself these questions:

1) How does this person speak, what word choices do they make?

2) How do they synthesize the information you are presenting? Do they parrot it back to you verbatim, or do they absorb, summarize and paraphrase your concepts?

3) Do they pick up and use any jargon you use related to the product?

4) Does the product seem to be something they need, or just want?

5) Do they seem to understand the product you are offering or are they just being polite?

These ideas should give you plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down your current work and start from scratch, to really personalize your direct mail and make them truly “Direct” to the audience. Apply these techniques to your last project, recreate it with the new approach, and A/B test it against your control – you will be surprised at the results.

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September 2, 2014
Is A Graduate Degree Keeping You From Getting Hired At A Start-up?

I came across this article, Why Start-ups Shouldn’t Hire People With Graduate Degrees by Penelope Trunk on bNet, and thought it was particularly appropriate for our Entrepreneurship Practice – having lectured at both undergraduate and graduate level and worked with a variety of students, I feel this rings true. Having worked with start-ups and started seven businesses in the last 30 years, I can relate to the pool of talent that comes out of b-schools over the last three decades – they need more resources, more management time and more seasoning than undergrads with 2 years of work experience ever did. They whined more and produced less than their less educated counterparts, too.

See if you agree after reading Ms. Trunk’s words of wisdom . . .

It’s likely that if a person attended graduate school, he will have a hard time translating his strengths into strong workplace performance — especially at start-ups.

Most people who went to grad school did it to prolong adolescent needs for grade-based approval. (Note: This analysis comes from writers at the Chronicle for Higher Education.) This is because the grad school model is generally outdated for today’s workforce, and high performers see this before they enroll. But people who are scared of trying to hold their own in the workforce see grad school as a way around the inevitable difficulties of finding a job one enjoys.

Here are three reasons why it’s a decent bet to stay away from candidates with graduate degrees when you need to hire at your start-up:

1. Humanities are for people who are afraid of adult life.

My experience with graduate school was for English. I tried it when I couldn’t figure out what job I was qualified to do.

The answer, in fact, was that I was not qualified to do any job before grad school — but I was not qualified to do any job after grad school either. So I left early, without the degree, when I realized graduate school is stupid.

It’s not just the field of English that is a dead end. One would have had a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a job as any type of humanities professor. Humanities PhD programs suck up time and energy with little return.

Most people who go to grad school for humanities defend their decision by saying they love their topic. But look, if you love your topic, you can do it after work. Just open a book and read it on your own.

2. Business school is for people who lack ideas and initiative.

The big question you should ask when business school graduates tell you they want to work for your start-up is: Why did these people just dump $100,000 into a business degree instead of dumping it into their own company?

If they really wanted to work at a start-up, why didn’t they launch one? Clearly, money was not the barrier, because they had $100,000 to burn. So it’s something else.

I think they don’t start companies because they do not have any ideas. Or, in the case where a person actually does have ideas, he doesn’t believe in himself enough to give his own ideas a shot.

So why should you believe in this person?

Take a look at how many smart people write about how business school is not a good path to entrepreneurship. The only reason we are even talking about business school in relation to entrepreneurship is that so many people want to be entrepreneurs that business schools had to launch entrepreneurship programs to attract those people.

During my days as a journalist, I interviewed Saras Sarasvathy, from Dartmouth’s business school. She explained to me the research about the traits of a successful entrepreneur. And believe me, none of those traits requires a degree from business school.

3. Law school is for people who lack creativity and will likely fail in the workplace.

Yes, this is a generalization. But there is pretty good evidence to back up this generalization.

For starters, most lawyers hate being lawyers. There are five, big myths about being a lawyer, but the main problem boils down to this: To get in to law school, you have to be great at school (reading and regurgitating back to the professors what they want to hear) and you have to be great at test-taking (the LSAT still rules admissions).

So law school selects for people who are rule followers and like to be told what to do.

But to be a successful lawyer, you have to be great at marketing and client relations. Otherwise you won’t make any money because you won’t bring in any business.

People applying to law school ignore this problem. (And so do law schools, but that’s another story.) The reason law students ignore it is because they are so desperate to have a clear path to money based on the skills they have exhibited in school. The desperate need for a safe route makes people ignore the fact that law school is very, very high risk for an unhappy life.

4. People with multiple degrees will be a pain in the ass.

Why would anyone get two degrees? It’s like being a triple major. Anyone who is a triple major as an undergrad is likely to be awful to work with. A triple major is myopic in her knowledge, insecure with her own identity, and desperate to impress. There is no good reason to have a triple major in a world where it’s clear that an undergraduate education does not really teach you anything about your major anyway.

The same can be said about people with multiple graduate degrees. It’s just that as an undergrad, the triple major is trying to find an excuse not to have to socialize. A graduate student is trying to find an excuse not to have to embark on adult life. And that’s not the kind of person who’s going to add a lot of value to your company.

Which leads me to the best hire you can make: Someone who faces the difficulties of adult life head on and takes personal responsibility for building his own skills. Someone who makes time to develop social skills, test his own ideas, and take risks that are scary but necessary for growth.

Those people often look messy. Adult life is messy. But it’s better to hire someone who has waded through the mess of growing up than someone who has avoided it at all cost.

If you find this strikes a nerve, or if you think it’s spot on, and would like more, subscribe to this blog above – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

August 4, 2014