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Category: Data

Want To Boost Profits? Never Mind Customer Satisfaction, Watch Your Rank

According to a study released by researchers at Fordham University and Ipsos Loyalty, customer satisfaction is not the best indicator of brand performance for consumer product or service companies. According to the study of 17,000 consumers over two years, the researchers developed a new measuring tool for brand effectiveness, dubbed the Wallet Allocation Rule, and skillful use of the principal can net companies millions of dollars, putting them ahead of their competitors and boosting recognition and loyalty along with customer engagement.

Apparently “satisfied” customers are not necessarily the most loyal or profitable. Wal-Mart found this out the hard way. After launching a major renovation initiative after reviewing massive amounts of customer feedback, it cleared aisles, deleted endcaps, removed pallets of products and such, and sure enough, customer satisfaction scores rose – and same-store sales revenue entered the longest decline in store history! Apparently customers were happy to shop at Wal-Mart, but did a larger proportion of their shopping elsewhere. Share of “wallet” dissipated.

So if happy customers aren’t loyal, and their happiness doesn’t lead to spending, what does? Ranking of priority does, based on a simple formula that illustrates a high correlation between brand ranking and share of wallet, in a very predictable fashion. This takes into account not only the rank, where the consumer places your brand on the priority list, first, second etc., but also how many brands that do the same thing exist in the landscape of their shopping experience.

There is an elegant formula for calculating your rank, and for calculating your share of wallet, which I won’t go into here. For details, see http://hbr.org/2011/10/customer-loyalty-isnt-enough-grow-your-share-of-wallet/ar/1 .

While the article states essentially that companies that boost their ranking will be more successful, what the formula doesn’t tell you is how to boost the ranking of your brand upward. Based on the way they conducted the study, and our own research on the way consumers feel about brands, I can make some educated guesses. Consumers have an emotional connection to the brands they engage with, no matter how infrequently they cross paths. Most people won’t admit to that connection or characterize it as emotional, but in interview research on brand awareness and delivery on the brand promise, consistently the brands with the highest emotional engagement, or most noticeable and consistent delivery on the promise would be the most popular, regardless of the nature of that emotion. Sometimes getting people riled up about something cements that brand sufficiently in consumer’s minds to rank highly, due to the high level of emotional engagement, even though the emotion might appear negative.

The other factor at work here has more to do with awareness and visibility. The higher the frequency of engagement with a given brand, at least in brands that elicit a high emotional response, the higher the rank will be. Recency plays a part here, too, although not as big a part as you might think. If you’ve engaged with a brand more recently than others, that brand’s ranking will tend to be higher, but only by a small percentage, and any negative aspect to the engagement will erode the recency effect almost immediately. That paradigm puts a lot of the responsibility for boosting brand ranking squarely in the Marketing Department. Marketing has long been the home of the brand steward, but this study gives some teeth to their feeling that “the more we spend the more we make”. Big, vibrant, effective marketing campaigns that put product in consumer’s hands more frequently and regularly, as long as the experience is living up to the promise, will move more units by boosting ranking, taking money away from your competitors and spiking share of wallet.

While consumer product or service sales is not a zero-sum game, you can grab market share from your competitors, and if you grab share of wallet, revenue and profits rise noticeably. Those extra sales had to come from somewhere, unless you’re the only product in the category. Moral of the story is that you don’t have to be the fastest guy in the jungle, you just have to be faster than the guy next to you, to avoid being eaten.

July 21, 2014
Tradeshow Promotion Requires Strong Planning

Recently we’ve been approached by several tradeshow organizers to review, upgrade, or revamp their marketing efforts, for a variety of reasons. With all the visibility and power perceived by marketers who use social media, often tradeshows get put on a back burner. Often there are misconceptions about the cost, value and ROI of exhibiting in a tradeshow, and those impressions are what the organizer is fighting when they try to attract new exhibitors, or build attendance. There are other aspects of working tradeshows into your marketing plan that are misunderstood or poorly perceived that present challenges to the organizers.

We’ve been working with exhibitors, and organizers, to eradicate some of these misconceptions, and to maximize the value of the tradeshow marketing channel as a viable means of penetrating a new market, launching a new product, or raising awareness of a new application to a new vertical.

When we work with organizers, its often to open up the shows to include new markets, to add new exhibitors and expand the show, or shift it’s focus. This involves building a strong marketing platform, and a focused sales effort, working in tandem, to approach new exhibitors with a fresh angle or a new spin to show them the value of the show to their sales efforts. Creating a solid prospectus that tells the story accurately and gives the exhibitor a feeling of confidence that the organizer speaks their language, that he understands their market, and that they are competent to make their experience a good, profitable one, is one of the first steps. As always, there’s a lot of research involved in creating that element, to gather data on the buying audience, demographics of the attendees, the market as a whole. Once that trust is established, then it’s a matter of making contact with the correct individual to work through their issues, concerns and needs to prove to them that the organizer will be with them every step of the way.

When we work with exhibitors, it’s usually to help the exhibiting company break into a new vertical market and to make an impact, to raise awareness of their firm within the industry at large. In those cases, its a matter of getting the attention of the audience, and even of the other exhibitors, be they partners or competitors. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of buying a sizable piece of real estate and designing a flashy display. We’ve worked with some companies where it was appropriate to do exactly the opposite – purchase the minimum size space, install a low-key display, but participate heavily in other parts of the overall marketing opportunity, like sponsorships of events, banners in the halls, kiosks, hospitality suites, press conferences and publication ads in directories, maps and schedules. These kinds of activities require lower levels of human resources, help present a unified and ubiquitous-appearing presence, while not spending on expensive floor space and having to furnish it with a large staff and display.

No matter who we’re working with, it all starts with research and planning to maximize the opportunity presented by the show. Solid planning and a knowledge of the audience can make even a marginal show a resounding success, generating revenue, growth and partnership opportunities, and helping markets expand and driving commerce. If you work in the tradeshow space, let me know what challenges you’re facing – we’d love to hear from you.

July 15, 2014
New Trends Not Always The Most Valuable

As a marketing consultant, I tend to observe things critically, find parallels and patterns in everything, to try and make sense of what I see and experience, so I can apply those learnings to client problems. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes, not so much.

This morning, my young son Alex, was playing in the livingroom. At 4, he sort of wanders around the room, and when his eye catches something bright and shiny or something he remembers from yesterday’s play session that was fun, he makes a bee-line for the new toy, dropping whatever he’s got in his hand already. Even though the “old” toy was perfectly captivating just 10 seconds ago, suddenly it’s yesterday’s news and he drops it like its hot in favor of the “new” one.

It dawned on me that some of my clients had exhibited this same behavior regarding their marketing and outreach activities. They were rolling along, sending out e-mail, sending out letters, engaging members or customers with their website, growing steadily, when someone pipes up in a meeting “Hey, why aren’t we on Twitter?” or “Why don’t we have a Facebook page?”

Before you know it, the whole marketing and IT department is discussing profiles, and launching pages and starting accounts and firewalls and policies and a whole host of related and relevant topics, and before long, these items are in place and being used, to what end no one knows. With all this discussion going on, and activity stemming from that discussion, often there is little or no thought given to integrating this new activity into the existing marketing plan, to setting goals and metrics for those new programs to measure their effectiveness at meeting those goals. Without those elements in place, and really solid and well-researched answer to the questions “Why are we doing this, and how is it going to help us achieve our goals, and how will we know it’s working?”, going forward blindly is a recipe for at least needless unproductive activity, at worst brand damage and reputational damage for the company or organization.

Non-profit organizations often have a history of behaving that way, although small to mid-size commercial businesses have been known to do this as well. They look a lot like my son, tossing aside what’s in place, even though it may be working, for the shiny, new, trendy, activity, regardless of it’s efficacy or effectiveness.

The moral of the story is that while some of the new media channels and applications may look exciting and may be experiencing a groundswell of growth and popularity, it doesn’t mean that they are the correct or appropriate types of outreach activity through which to achieve your particular goals. You can spot this type of behavior easily. Simply ask them, “What do you use your Facebook page for?” or “What do you get out of your Twitter account?” It’s not even a matter of cost/benefit analysis, it’s more about aligning the mission of the organization with the tools and public outreach mechanisms you use to achieve the set goals. Twitter can be a nice, real-time market monitor for short term buzz and brand recognition, even customer service monitoring or PR effectiveness, but that’s more about listening than posting. Facebook can be a good way to build community around a product or service, but it has to be used carefully and with some constraints in place to maintain control of the voice and the brand. It may not be appropriate for it to be used to help drive sales or leads.

If you are contemplating using new media tools, treat them and think about them much as you would any other service purchase – assess the needs, THEN go find the best tool for the job. Don’t go looking to add tools when you don’t know what the job is. Even Handy Manny knows to use only the right tool for the right job!

If you found this valuable and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” –

June 27, 2014
Integration and Personalization Keys to Success

Every marketer is trained from the beginning of their career to attempt to get the most value from their marketing dollars – everyone knows that they’re scarce enough without wasting them! Usually that means running leaner, tightening expenses, negotiating fees, cutting costs, avoiding waste. These measures assume that there is nothing you aren’t doing to boost performance, increase awareness or response, extend reach or build frequency, expose the brand more widely or selectively. One of the most effective strategies we’ve seen pay off is media integration to drive support of the central message.

As it turns out, American audiences like a choice. Who knew . . .? But good direct marketers know that if you offer a prospect too many choices, they may make none at all. No joy there. But if you offer them a choice and they don’t know you’ve done it, everybody wins. That’s what media integration is all about, creating those choices in the background. And, as an added bonus, which choice the buyer makes tells you something about them, absolutely FREE!

Picture a barstool (don’t lie, we KNOW you’ve seen them). They have three or four legs and a seat, or platform. The level of effectiveness of that device degrades in direct proportion to the number of legs – start removing legs and the stool gets less stable to the point where it won’t stand alone, or even becomes dangerous. You can sit on a one-legged stool, but it’s not for the feint of heart! On the other hand, a five or six-legged stool can become unwieldy or unstable too – keeping all those legs the same length and flat is a challenge, or at best the extras are redundant and wasteful.

What do barstools have to do with marketing? An integrated campaign to build awareness or drive enrollment or response can have several types of media integrated, each adding to the stability, and the effectiveness of the campaign, each message supporting the other media and the offer platform, like the legs of the stool.

Say you were promoting a conference. You have a great list of prospective attendees, responsive, accepting of the brand, happy evangelists for your organization. You have good, extensive file info in each record, including phone number, mailing address, e-mail address, some transactional info and more. You’ve got a terrific speaker line-up, a highly relevant topic, a great location. Sounds like you’ve got a good shot at success, but here’s how to maximize the number of bodies in those seminar seats – tell the prospect about the conference in multiple ways using different media.

You could mail to them, and the mailing could include a PURL that leads to a personalized landing page that showed their participation with your organization in the past year (or what they missed, in the case of a newbie). You could also send them a personalized e-mail with a slightly different PURL link embedded in it, that drives them to another page that shows their best choice in hotels or dinner location. You could also launch a robo-call or volunteer phone bank call a few days before the conference, directing them to the registration site for a last minute discount on airfare from a consolidator/partner. The e-mail also has a phone number included for audio registration, the e-mail has a reply feature for questions, the phone call lists an e-mail address as well as the web registration site address, and the registration page has a phone number for inquiries. You’ve now come at the prospect from three different directions, sent essentially the same message (attend this great conference) but shown them different facets of the conference, shown the benefits in the outgoing vehicles, and given them a choice as to how to respond to you (mail, reply e-mail, web registration, return phone call). Plus, the way they choose to respond or register tells you what mode of communication is the most convenient or effective for them, information you can use to reach them more effectively next time – FREE!

Those three directions are the legs of the stool – each media supports the message platform, and feeds the other media: web, e-mail, voice, print mail. This sort of campaign might make it tougher to discern just exactly what is driving response, but as long as the response is strong and the meeting is full, the job is done, and most of these are trackable now so that dilemma isn’t as problematic as it once was.

You can drive response to one media or another, but giving the prospective attendee a choice as to how they want to respond increases your odds of a response almost exponentially. Personalizing each medium makes each more effective than the generic version, further strengthening the campaign. By adding to your integration scheme with low-cost supports, (e-mail, and volunteer phone calls) you’ve maximized your resources and gotten the most bang for your buck, in some cases doubling or tripling your effectiveness, without doubling the cost.

Check the campaigns you have running and see if they could benefit from an integrated approach. It may be a little more work, even if you re-purpose elements like graphics, copy, forms, e-mail templates etc. but the results are definitely worth it.

If you found this valuable, and would like more like this delivered to your inbox weekly, just subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

May 28, 2014
The Illusion of Control

I think we can agree that most top marketing professionals are what used to be called a “Type A” personality – high speed, high motivation, attention to detail, internally driven, goal oriented, strong need for control. Sound about right? If so, you’re likely in the right role if you’re a marketer, but are all of these traits actually helping you succeed? Sometimes less is more, and I think as a race, most of us labor under the misconception that we can control much more than we can in reality.

That control issue can lead to problems. We can plan for just about any scenario, we can be prepared for the worst outcome, we can remove or stabilize as many variables as possible, but there is always a large element of the unknown involved in our work. That’s not to say that we can give up responsibility for the outcome of any of it, but there is only so much we can control about the results of our efforts. We can’t go to people’s homes and force them to buy what we have to offer at gunpoint. We can only use history, research, or self-proclamation to divine the likelihood of each one buying a product, lump them all together, and put forth our best pitch based on common characteristics among the group.

We can test, but we can’t control. Test results, be it focus group, direct response test, concept survey, or other method, can only give us a snapshot of the most obvious feelings and actions of the given group at that moment. If you got the same group together again the following month, you might get different results to the same test, based on circumstances beyond our, and their, control. All you can really do is play to the odds, decrease your chances of missing as much as you’re able, and hope to catch potential buyers under favorable circumstances. That’s not control.

On a larger scale, our lives contain the illusion of control as well. Anyone who’s planned an outdoor wedding knows, you can’t control everything. You can have the best vendors, the most elegant choices, the best caterer and decorator and a force-of-nature coordinator, and none of that makes up for the fact that it could rain buckets that day. You can increase your odds by considering timing, location, and site protection, but those are not control, just contingency planning – it’s still raining, you just made it tolerable for the guests by ordering a tent.

That’s not to say that such events don’t have a cause somewhere that can be eliminated, deferred or altered – the Butterfly Effect is a theoretical conceptual diagram designed to show the rippling and far-reaching impact of actions in a closed system that highlights this – but at the end of the chain it is simply a set of unalterable circumstances.

Lack of control can cause us to make errors – lack of recognition of loss of control can lead to disaster. Take a direct marketing test grid. We can’t control those buyers, but we can test that group of uncontrollable people’s preferences as a group, and control for wide differences within the group. When we read the test results, there may be a set of data that appears inconsistent with what we know in history, with what we feel, with what we “think” we know. That data may be discounted as an anomaly, an aberration, some irrelevant variable that isn’t affecting the overall program. But what if that piece of data, when expanded upon and tested further by itself, is critical to a strong response – that the audience needs that portion of the mailing needs to be there as a catalyst to response, and by ignoring it, we negatively affect response to a great degree going forward? Our own sense of control has effectively overwhelmed the data in front of us and reduced our effectiveness and our impact on profits with that mailing mistake.

We can’t control everything, but we can control how we react to things. If your first reaction when faced with an uncontrolled situation is to hide or ignore it, or worse, try to control the uncontrollable, failure is a likely outcome. As marketers we would be better served by our flexibility, our ability to “roll with it” in our reaction to the situation, to make the best of what might be a less than desirable outcome. Plan for the worst, hope for the best, be ready for anything.

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May 25, 2014
Personalization Boosts Response, But Can Be Overdone

We’ve seen studies, a few released very recently, that suggest that personalization of direct marketing materials, including print and e-mail, boosts response significantly – in some cases as much as 3-400% of the blind “A” side of the test. But there was an interesting study among them that perhaps showed the risky downside to this type of approach. Apparently, personalization CAN be overdone. But you’d be surprised how far you have to go . . .

The study we read told of a DM control package that had been declining from fatigue after nearly 6 months of heavy mailing. The commissioners of the test decided to test personalization, but in a new way. They personalized the letter in multiple places, and progressively added incidents of personalization as the letter progressed, per segment of the test. Segment One was mailed to a random list select of the house list, and contained a personalized greeting. Segment Two was mailed to a similar random list pull but the letter had a greeting and another incident further into the body of the letter that was personalized. Segment Three was mailed to a similar list and contained three incidents of personalization, and so on. All data was composed of elements contained in the address block of a five-line address containing job title and company name.

When the results were read and analyzed, the staff was astonished to see response rates continue to rise through segment 14! In a two-page marketing letter there were fourteen instances of personalization before the results started to flag. The package didn’t drop back below profitability until Segment 22! Clearly, people like reading about themselves, and as a result, feel you know them and are safe to buy from! The rise of the rate was roughly linear from one incident to 14, and tailed off sharply from 14 to 22 and dropped off less sharply after that. Seems it takes a lot to overdo personalization, at least as used in this study.

I get the feeling that most mail package probably wouldn’t get to 14 before dropping off, based on how much imagination is usually put behind this portion of the marketing effort. Just dropping the name in the copy 14 is not going to do it! To test this, simply read the letter out loud to yourself.

Have you ever been engaged with a retail sales person who had only gotten partially through their “Training” but got to the part where they were told to use the customer’s name whenever possible to help “connect” with the customer on a personal level? The overuse of your name in the conversation in unnatural places becomes annoying, then grating, then off-putting to the point where you want to stop the interaction and walk away.

With that experience in mind, read your letter out loud and see at what point your tolerance for the use of your name and other info seems to peak. Now, subtract one incidence, and that’s likely the sweet spot for that particular letter or package. Now you have a baseline, and can test above and below that number and see how accurate your initial read was.

Keep in mind, too that there is a gold mine of information in that address block, if you’re willing to make a few leaps. If you have accurate salutation and prefix information, you likely know marital status, gender, and to some extent, age. Ms. Brittany Jacobs isn’t likely to be 75, or married, or likely to buy orthopedic shoe inserts or support hose. You get some of this at least in a reinforcing capacity, from your list segmentation selections. And you can use all parts of the address block beyond the address.

There are data overlays that can be appended based on zip code that can give you a read on income, age, and other data down to the block level. Combine that with the job title info, and you have a pretty good picture of your prospect. Use street names, city and state info, job title, whatever you can to build a box of credibility around your offer. Now you just have to find a creative way to work those elements into the conversation so that they appear to be accurate but are really vague. If you’re having trouble with this, try imagining you’re setting up a fortune teller booth at a carnival – they use this same technique to read cues from you to weave a story that sounds believable. It’s like they KNOW you!

This may seem deceptive, or underhanded, sneaky, etc. but ethically all you’re doing is making some educated guesses, and feeding the information you have that is freely available back to the audience on a specific basis – nothing sneaky about that! Let your creativity run wild, build a conversation with as much credible personalization as you can – you’ll find it gets harder once you get above 7-8 incidents. And now that you know that the average person’s tolerance level is higher than that, go for it!

Test personalization on your next package, and see how much it boosts your response – in today’s digital world, there’s no reason not to . . .

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

May 5, 2014
Engagement Means Understanding

We’ve been working with several B2B clients recently on outreach programs to help them find and engage new customers, and one of the tactics we’ve had success with is the use of dimensional mail. The main reason is that while overall mail volume is down in the last two years, the amount of mail reaching top executives is up slightly, as gatekeepers have been removed through attrition or layoffs as company’s pare staff, and we were finding that we needed to break through the clutter in the C-suite to get noticed and to actually engage these busy executives with our message.

While the list is still king, the package is gaining in importance. We’re not talking about a simple A-B test between red and blue carrier envelopes, we mean a full blown package – a box of some type – that contains illustrative media, video, audio, print collateral or other physical, three dimensional object that requires time and thought to understand. It takes a few moments to open, to pick through the parts, to see the story unfold as you peel away layers and get to the meat, the point, the main message. Once you get there, it’s got to make sense to the recipient, to be relevant, to be personal in a way that says “hey, these people know my business and are here to help me run it better!”

Personalization plays a large part in these packages. Good use of personalization has been shown to boost response significantly, and the combination of personalization and 3D engagement means your target spends a good deal of time with your message, enough to thoughtfully consider your offer and put it in the “investigate further” pile. Now, it’s time for the follow-up!

The dimensional package is a great way to bait the hook, it’s intriguing, interesting and gets people thinking about your message. It may not be enough to close the sale by itself, few DM packages are when there’s a service or high-ticket item in the mix. But by pushing personalized, strategically-timed follow-up messages through different media, your product is now what we call “Self-vetted” – it appears to come from a variety of directions, and sources, so that it appears to be very safe, legitimate and reasonable. Since top executives are generally a conservative bunch, financially and emotionally, this plays on their natural caution and lowers their defenses, usually enough to make them receptive to a phone call, which is the knock-out punch of the campaign.

So far this scheme is working for clients, and we have several variations in the works, tweaking timing, packaging, levels of personalization and frequency. The key to effective execution of these campaigns is the homework you do on the list of recipients – each of these packages represents a significant investment by direct mail standards, and you want to keep your waste level low and your responsive recipients ratio as high as possible. Better to send out 5 and have 2 hit with real sales, than to send out 20 and have that same 2 hit.

A good list, an intriguing, personalized package, heavy follow-up and a persuasive phone call may seem like a lot to go through to reach a handful of individuals – but if they’re the right individuals and the sale is worth thousands or tens of thousands or more, the discipline and forethought is certainly worth it.

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April 27, 2014
Sometimes the Question is More Important Than the Answer . . .

There are times in a marketer’s career when asking the right question spurs the next great idea that turns into a campaign that turns the corner on profitability and launches a whole new direction for the company or the product.

Having the curiosity and the courage to ask that question – although to you it might seem obvious, so obvious in fact that you’re sure someone else must have thought of it, analyzed the result and discarded it as unworkable – is what good marketers do. How many times have you been in a meeting and another employee asks a seemingly innocent question, and suddenly the room is on fire with ideas, and more importantly, positive feelings and agreement to trying the idea immediately. Have you kicked yourself for not asking the same thing? Why didn’t you – because you thought it was too obvious. It was obvious to you, because that’s the way you were trained to think – but most of the other people in the room were not trained that way, and that’s what makes you special!

Think it through quickly, end to end, and go ahead and bring up the obvious – you’ll be surprised at the reaction you’ll get. Curiosity and courage linked together will get you a long way in marketing. A famous marketer I know is fond of saying that there are no bad ideas, just those that don’t work under the current circumstances. His approach is to try almost anything that appears viable, and if 6 out of 10 of them fly, he’s a winner! Indeed the margin on a good idea is pretty high, so it doesn’t take much for a good idea to bring in far more than all the bad ones waste. Remember the old campaign,”Try it, you’ll like it”? Not a bad mantra in these tough times. Businesses are desperate for good paying customers, and ideas that will attract them are in short supply.

Step up, state your idea, and let the chips fall – you’ll likely be applauded and the chips fall your way – if not, at least you put something viable forward, and if it doesn’t work now, circumstances will forever change and it might work at some other time.

If you found this valuable or insightful and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog above. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 19, 2014
Converting Prospects to Members (or Customers)

One of the biggest challenges non-profits and other small to mid-size businesses face is converting leads to sales, or for non-profits, a common challenge is to convert prospects to members. There are many different ways to approach this issue but they usually have a few things in common.

If you have a good list of well-qualified prospects, compiled recently, with a high-deliverability quotient, and fresh information, you’re already halfway there. If not, but wish to start compiling one, there are several good ways to do that, including referrals from current members, industry indexes and directories, publication lists, and prospecting campaigns at tradeshows.

If you have e-mail addresses, this might be the least expensive place to start. If not, you’re left with mail or phone campaigns to reach out to prospective members. If you have a really solid profile of your members, based on research, and can categorize them accurately into industry segments, title profiles and other segmentation to make your communications more specific. One factor to consider when making your selection is based on that profile, how do your current members like to be communicated with? Are they tech savvy, do they stay at their desks all day and have constant access to e-mail or social media? Do they only read e-mail at home? Do they get their mail at the office or did they give you a home address? The method deserves almost as much consideration as the message, in these highly overloaded, busy times. It’s to easy to delete, discard or filter out messages delivered in inconvenient ways.

Once you’ve decided on the best medium, now you have to craft a message that resonates with this group or groups. Your research profile will be of great use here, as it tells you what they are likely to be concerned about, what issues hit home for them, what keeps them up at night. Once you’ve discovered that key issue, now you can formulate a message to deliver that shows how their membership will take care of that pesky problem, solve that challenge, meet that need and make joining a solid investment. Solve a problem, and you’ll get them to join up just for that – show them the unique value of your organization in solving that problem, they’ll stay members for years.

Now you just have to mate the message with the right medium at the right time and deliver it cleanly, accurately and in timely fashion. But before you hit that “send” button or pull the trigger on the mail drop, make sure your customer response, receipt, fulfillment and registration infrastructure is in place, and ready to accept the new influx of calls/e-mails/hits/members – there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving inquiries or orders and not being able to activate them or monetize them – it’s a woeful tale of opportunity lost. It’s not overly optimistic to expect good response to your offer after taking the time to craft it so thoroughly and specifically. The better your homework and more thorough your preparation, the more likely you are to generate significant response and you have to have the structure in place to accept them.

Find your best list, do your homework, know your prospect, find out what they need, show how your organization can solve their problems and make life easier, get them the message in a form they’re receptive to, and make sure you can accommodate all the requests quickly and efficiently. If you can pull those elements together, your chances of success soar, and so will your organization!

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April 15, 2014
E-Mail Effectiveness Boosted by Data Availability

How many e-mail messages do you get every day? How many do you really read? How many get discarded based on the sender alone? Note how the numbers indicate a trend?

I receive at least 100 on most days, 80+ get discarded based on who sent them, even if it’s something I’ve signed up to receive! I just don’t have time . . . The other 20 go to the preview screen for a quick glance, and the top 10 of those get read and responded to that day at some point. Here’s 5 tips for making it to that Top 10:

5) Make Sure Your Subject Line Has Some Relevance To Me. Aside from what the excellent spam filter dumps off, subject lines with words like NOW, FREE, TODAY float through here and the urgency is not as desperate as the author would like. Worse are the ones who feel that I need their software so badly and that it’s so present and ubiquitous in my mind space that you can open up with the inside jargon and terms you’ve coined in your dorm room right at the get-go, and I’ll know what you’re talking about – NOT RELEVANT.

4) DON’T Waste My Time. If your subject line is intriguing enough for me to open in preview, be sure you’ve got something to say that I can understand at a glance – if I have to go to five links to get the info I need, we’re both wasting time – you by writing e-mails that are more complicated than they need to be, you might just as well send me the series of links with no text – the result is the same: DELETE.

3) If You’ve Got a Good Headline, Don’t Bury it in the Image Art, Because I’ll Never See It. Thanks to the preview screen and firewall software, along with Microsoft’s inherent wisdom, anything with an image is held back until I purposely ask for it, to save me from intrusion and overuse of bandwidth. If you put your headline in the image, I see a blank white box – DELETE! Any hope you had of that long-worked-over and clever headline grabbing me are immediately gone.

2)If You Can’t Use the Data You Have Correctly and Clean Your List Completely, DON’T USE IT! I get mail addressed to one of the many websites I have currently live, about various things, but they assume that putting the web address in the subject line will peak my interest, but the subject or offer have nothing to do with the website they’re using to “get to me”. My favorite is the Chinese granite counter top purveyors sending me offers of cheap product, thinking I’m a contractor or granite wholesaler, based on the name. The did a search for the word Granite and scattergunned an e-mail out to the whole results list – the Doctor says: DELETE

1) If You Have My Name on Your List, Use it Correctly – Get Your Technology Act Together. I can’t tell you how many e-mails I get with the wrong gender, the use of both names in the wrong order “Dear Poulos, David” and other idiocy of technological laziness. Don’t let the ‘chines ruin your marketing program, proofread your list! Some simple data processing, at roughly $1 a name, all told, will avoid all this and make your list much more useful, to boot. Be a professional, spend a little money, and watch your response rates skyrocket! It’s my name, I’ve had it for decades, you don’t think I’m going to find it first and check that you’re legitimate by it’s use? DELETE!

Now you know what it takes to get past my barriers. Now it’s up to you to produce technologically savvy, legal and smart e-mail messages if you want to reach me effectively and make me a customer – Good Luck!

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March 26, 2014