davidpoulos.com

Category: Design

  • 3 Ways NOT To Fall for a Clever Headline

    3 Ways NOT To Fall for a Clever Headline

    In a routine scan of my e-mail inbox, the discussion pages of my 40-some LinkedIn groups, various news sites and marketing sites, I counted over 100 headlines like the one above, promising everything from business lead generation to building up my profile, to keeping my windows from sticking, to where to go in Ocean City. All tempt the reader with a memorable number of simple solutions, neatly encapsulated in a short, easily digestible list, suggesting that if you compile enough lists about all the elements of your life, you’ll have all the answers and your life will run smoothly.

    Is this what content marketing practice has distilled itself down to, a clever headline offering quick easy solutions to life’s tough problems? I certainly hope not, because if your life is like mine and those of my colleagues here, it’s never that clean and neatly arranged – life is just plain messy!

    Marketing is a difficult, complex and widespread discipline, vastly misunderstood by the rank and file and by many of it’s practitioners. It takes YEARS of experience to master even the rudimentary elements in a coherent fashion, to be able to apply them in some fashion to a company or organization’s challenges, to identify and isolate the problem, and devise a strategy to combat it with well-thought-out tactics that do more good than harm, won’t break the budget and will return many times their cost. That’s a tall order for any single discipline, but marketing covers roughly 20 different disciplines within it, all of which can and should be considered when assessing and formulating a plan of action. If you can fit that in a list, I’d love to see it.

    Don’t get me wrong, lists of reminders can be very helpful and useful as a memory joggers of the various rough spots and pitfalls that can befall the forgetful. But I think the use (and overuse) of the catchy tip-laden headline is the lazy way to go. If our business attention span, our ability to learn new concepts, to absorb data and information, has sunk to the level where lists of tips guide your operative day, we are truly in a crisis. From the outreach side, they are a crutch for the lazy man, a cry for attention in the digital wilderness, where solid, impactful and dense information are traded away for quick thrills and easy clicks, screaming “Hey, look at my stuff, not that guy from the learned institute over there, I’m faster and easier.” They are the cliff -notes of a practice and a discipline that takes time and effort to learn, trial and error to master, and guts and determination and discipline to apply.

    Next time you see a list headline with 10 tips on anything, see if you can guess what at least five of them are before you open it. If you’re right, skip the list and it’s author and move on. I’m off to write the next entry, “10 Ways to Be Labeled an Old Curmudgeon Without Really Trying.”

  • Is Advertising Dead?

    Is Advertising Dead?

    Marketers, retailers and their agencies have been relying on advertising and it’s relatively high cost and low return to drive revenue for 75 years or more. Is the time of the ad behind us? Will banner ads and social media posts fill the void? Somehow, I think not . . .

    When we approach small businesses about increasing or even originating their marketing budget, their first thing they tend to think of is “Are we doing new ads, they didn’t work too well the last time” and the ears turn off and the eyes glaze over and the rest of the conversation is spent educating them on the value of other forms of marketing. Marketing and advertising have become so irretrievably intertwined in the minds of small business executives, that any conversation about one inevitably drives toward the other. While frustrating to our consultants, it tells us something about the perception that “only big companies can afford advertising,” which seems to pervade the landscape. With 500 cable TV channels, unending YouTube channels, and enough niche and general interest blogs and print publications to choose from, anyone can advertise. But can they afford to advertise in enough places enough times to break through the clutter and actually reach a select audience often enough and well enough to effect sales? That’s the real question.

    One element that will forever dog traditional advertising is accountability. No agency exec actually went into a meeting with a client and honestly said, “These ads that ran 60 times last week on all three networks and the Superstations, gave you directly a 5% uptick in product sales” – doesn’t happen, no matter how much they try. They talk around the results, talk about branding support, about number of impressions, audience reach and Q score of the spokesmen in the ad, but direct, 1-to-1 sales accountability ascribed to specific ads is the white Rhino of the advertising establishment – it’s been bandied about, but no validated sightings can be found in the literature.

    So with no direct accountability, why is something you can’t accurately measure, that costs a fortune, that can’t be tied back to the top or bottom lines, so hard to let go of? Perhaps because nothing else has come along that gives retail products the visibility, the bragging rights – “did you see our new spot on American Idol last night?” – and the complicit permission from the media outlets and media industries to charge based on demand, like a bushel of corn, driving both media and agency revenue ever skyward, that can replace TV ads. Social Media doesn’t do that, Search Engines don’t do that, E-mail campaigns don’t do that. Nobody ever turned to their neighbor at a barbeque and said “Hey, Bill, did you see that great e-mail from Purel yesterday?”

    Until something highly visible, ubiquitous to each household, device agnostic, easily monetized and publicly recognized comes along to replace it, advertising is here to stay. It’s utility may shift, it’s usage wax and wane with budgetary support and be temporarily dampened by the next shiny new thing that comes along, but I dont’ think it will disappear altogether any time soon, no matter what the digital pundits say . . .

  • Are These 12 Roadblocks Stopping Your Valuable Trade Show Leads?

    Are These 12 Roadblocks Stopping Your Valuable Trade Show Leads?

    Scott Llewellen of TPS Displays Express put this together, and I thought you’d all enjoy these tips – they’re right on the money!

    Most trade show exhibitors put the vast majority of their effort into creating their presence at a trade show – the trade show displays they build, the staffers they send and house, and for some, the promotions they do to create greater activity in their booth space.

    Unfortunately, too many waste these valiant efforts, because they fall down on managing their trade show leads.  That’s because there are more hidden roadblocks than they realize, obstacles to getting the full value from their leads.

    So let’s bring those roadblocks out into the light.  I believe the list below includes the 12 most common obstacles to effective lead management – how many of these are issues do you need to address?

    1. Incomplete lead management process
    2. No single person responsible for the entire process
    3. No consultation with sales about what information needs to be gathered at the show
    4. No training of trade show booth staffers about what makes a qualified lead, how to record lead quality
    5. Qualifying information from leads is not captured with a lead card or a lead retrieval system
    6. If complete information is captured, it is not conveyed to the appropriate sales person after the show
    7. Slow, incomplete, or non-existent lead fulfillment
    8. No computer system or customer relationship management software in place to facilitate lead management
    9. Lead fulfillment packages not chosen nor prepared in advance
    10. Lead fulfillment is generic and does not respond specifically to what individual attendees asked about while visiting your trade show exhibit.
    11. No one pre-assigned to data enter and fulfill the large quantity of leads
    12. No accountability for sales people to follow up on leads within a specific, short period of time after the show

    Any of these sound familiar?  Fixing this will take a team effort, including your sales, marketing, and information technology teams.  Get them all in a room and work to knock down these obstacles. For motivation, bring to the meeting a pile of your latest trade show leads, a spreadsheet of the costs of your show, and the highest level exec you can get that these people all report to.

    Then you can work to avoid all 12 of these obstacles and create a smoother lead management process that gives your company the full potential value of your trade show leads.

  • What Is The Worst Marketing Campaign Ever?

    What Is The Worst Marketing Campaign Ever?

    5/11/2012 | blur Group, Expertsourcing, Featured | Dorothy | No Comments

    We’re all guilty of the occasional bout of marketing Schadenfreude – but we’ve also probably had the odd campaign or two of our own when things didn’t go quite to plan. blur Experts talk about those well-known marketing moments when things don’t quite go to plan.

    David Poulos

    The worst marketing effort I can recall is a legendary story from quite a while ago, and was really a lack of research and local cultural awareness. When General Motors’ Chevrolet division launched a new mid-sized model called the Nova, after a superfast shooting star, hoping it would resonate with consumers seeking something fast and futuristic. The formulated print ads, mailers, TV commercials and worst of all, bill boards. The car sold very well in the US, but when they wanted to penetrate the Latin American market, no one in the marketing department did their homework. A quick rebadging would have saved the company many heartaches and a boatload of cash. They went ahead and launched the car as the Nova in Spanish speaking countries throughout Latin America, and after six weeks recognized that there might be a problem reflected in their dismal sales reports. It didn’t dawn on anyone at the company that NoVa in Spanish means “doesn’t go!”

    Huge billboards lining the roads in Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica and El Salvador promoting a car that doesn’t run! Finally someone pointed out their error, and they pulled the car and killed the campaign locally. It pays to do your homework.

    We had one fairly significant snafu, but it wasn’t a strategy error, it was a relatively simple technical glitch that cost an awful lot of money. We were launching a new financial publication, aimed at investors, and using a series of direct mail pieces, multi-piece packages mailed in the millions. As you might imagine, a large chunk of the addresses on the target list were linked to the financial industry, centered in Manhattan, NY. One of the largest buildings in New York City at the time was the World Trade Center, which leased office space to hundreds of financial firms, and was so large that there had to be an additional line of address added for a mail stop number, so that the building’s mailroom could deliver efficiently. Someone in the data processing department was tasked with printing off a set of labels for this list, which numbered over a million records. The technician had a tough time fitting the addresses using our standard font, labels and software due to the extra address line – so he took it upon himself to eliminate the third address line – the mail stop. In five days our lobby was filled with commercial laundry carts full of undelivered mail, nearly 50% undeliverable! The entire World Trade Center had denied the mailing as ‘inadequately addressed’ without the mail stop line, and the post office, having a standing order on the account to return ‘undeliverables’ for address correction, returned all the mail to us!  We made the technician open all 500,000 packages, salvage the guts, and re-run all the letters and new labels.

    The devil is in the details when executing marketing tactics, and it doesn’t take much to reduce your plans to rubble. The best marketers are detail people that stay on top of the small stuff to make the big stuff flourish!

    For hundreds of tips on how NOT to make marketing mistakes, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

     

  • Empowered Customers: A Direct Result of Technology Adoption?

    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”

     

  • E-Mail Drives Sales – Duh! HBR Tells The RIGHT Story of E-mail Marketing

    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.

  • Does Social Media Marketing ACTUALLY Drive Customer Behavior and Convert to Revenue?

    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” 

     

  • Integration Is Key To Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

    Integration Is Key To Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

    The phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is never more appropriate than as part of a discussion of integrated marketing campaigns. No matter how you slice it, by media type, by audience, by offer type or any other way, multiple approaches working together with common offers, common brand and common goal will be much more effective than any of those single efforts, and even more than all of them working independently. At the risk of using an overused term, there is “synergy” to be gained by driving all efforts under the same flag.

    Integration offers several key benefits, which as marketers we can scarcely afford to ignore.

    1. Cost-effectiveness. If a greater return (be it registrations, hits, impressions, memberships, sales, etc.) is gained by fewer outgoing exposures (mail pieces, ads, radio spots, e-mails, phone calls) because they work together and support each other, then the results have been obtained for less expense. More for less is the goal, and this hits it squarely.

    2. Breadth of Coverage. If point one is true (and we stipulate that it is) then the corollary is that for the same cost, you can reach out to even broader audience. This spreads the brand and the offer further, which can be beneficial to the next effort beyond this initial one, preconditioning the new audience to respond the next time they are touched.

    3. Brand Strength. Based on point two, if you are reaching more people with an integrated campaign, the pieces supporting each other, the brand impression is strengthened with each hit – overlap is more likely, and the impression is stronger with each hit as a result – there’s no disconnect between impressions depending upon the piece to which the audience is exposed.

     

    Some of the strength of campaign integration comes down to brand control. Harley Davidson has one of the strongest brands on earth, and its customers and fans are among the most loyal purchasers around. One reason for that effect is that the brand itself is so highly protected. All licensing is strictly enforced, and that HD moniker in all its various forms can ONLY appear on products that fit the brand profile. That kind of control creates a strong continuity. That brand on any product means that you can expect a certain level of quality, a certain outward attitude, a certain value and an appeal that competing products don’t have. An integrated campaign uses that same power of continuity and of meeting expectation as part of its effectiveness.

    Another big strength of integrating a campaign is to drive more response from the fringes of the target at no additional cost. If each segment of a campaign is independent, some slivers of the audience may slip through the resulting cracks in coverage between segments. If one medium fails to reach and motivate a member of the target population, if another does hit at a later time, the recognition level will be lower because the look, feel, fit, offer or appearance are not the same. No gain for that second piece. On the other hand if that first effort hits but fails to motivate, when the second, but integrated hit comes along, it has higher chance of being effective and motivating a usable response, because the recognition level is higher.

     

    It’s All About Levels

    Integration can be achieved on a number of levels. Ideally, a tight effective campaign should be tied together on all of them to maximize return on investment.

     

    Level 1 – Appearance

    All pieces in all mediums (except radio) should have a similar look and feel to them, including type face, imagery, color palette, theme, copy voice, and should offer the same product at the same terms, should share contact information (same phone number, e-mail address, website address etc.) for response, and include the same expression of the product and company logotype. First glance continuity will go along way toward boosting that recognition and beefing up response numbers.

     

    Level 2 – Functionality

    Each piece should not only function on its own to drive response, but cross-promotes to drive response from the other approaches as well. Fast food advertising is often good at this technique. You see the spot on television, which drives you to the website for more details, which drives you to the restaurant to use the coupon from the web, which is emailed after a registration process. These three media are functionally tied together in this campaign. The TV spot, the website, the e-mail and the point of purchase materials all have the same offer, the same appearance and you are engaged by all 4 to drive a purchase. The added bonus is that along the way you’re also exposed to a full range of other related products, thus priming the pump for an extended purchasing relationship.

     

    Level 3 – Emotionality

    This is the toughest to achieve, but if the campaign is truly integrated it becomes extremely effective. Emotionality describes the emotion, the feeling elicited by the campaign. Each piece, each media contact, each touch-point with the customer should elicit that same emotional response. And at its peak, not only should the same emotion be activated, but the customer should feel it at the same level of intensity as the initial contact.

    Say for example you receive a direct mail piece from a company selling fitness equipment. You’re interested in losing weight and getting fit. The next day you see a TV spot for the same piece of equipment with even more information and a fuller set of benefits, shown to you in living color, and you’re pumped up all over again. That afternoon on the radio driving to the grocery store you hear a radio spot for that equipment. When you get excited, and when you get to the organic foods aisle of the grocery, you see a dispenser with coupons for $10 off organic foods for owners of that equipment, just by sending in the coupon or going online and registering with your equipment’s serial number. You’ve gotten that same level of excitement in all five cases, and it’s driven you to seek out the equipment and make the change in your life, for purely emotional reasons – there are probably lots of different pieces of equipment that would provide the exercise you need, but that one got you excited in a repeated, intensive way at a very deep emotional level, and kept up that intensity throughout all the different media and offer sets. That’s a truly effective integrated campaign, and it provides maximum return for your marketing dollar.

    All three levels offer advantages over the traditional, less coordinated campaign. The higher a level of engagement you can achieve, the higher the level of effectiveness you’re going to experience. There is a direct correlation between the degree of integration you can achieve compared to response levels among the target audience.

    Level I offers significant gains over any single medium alone, and is the most cost effective, in terms of the number of different media used and the level of effort required compared to cost to execute.

    Level II requires a bit more in terms of resources, but can provide a strong boost in response, especially for existing programs that have some brand awareness among the target audience but that need some refreshing to re-engage the audience.

    Level III requires a very strong effort to coordinate all the various elements, to time them to launch together, and requires more media exposure initially to drive traffic toward the goal, but the ultimate response level can be incredibly high. Double-digit responses from the selected target are not unusual, and on higher-ticket offers that can represent significant revenue.

    Of course, all of this coordination and integration cannot happen without the

    technological infrastructure in place to support it. The databases involved in handing off the leads from one medium to another, the online backbone and processing software that allows prospects to see exactly what they are supposed to see when visiting the target site, to be able to take advantage of offers referred by other medium, to be able to print custom coupons with matching response codes and list numbers, and all the rest of the necessary back end that provides the intelligence for all the activity behind the scenes cannot be overlooked.

    Overall, integration is a valuable key to attaining pushdown marketing response levels that are unrivaled by singular media levels. The extra expense and effort at the outset provides significant payback in the long-term, and sets the stage to expand your efforts to new products, new approaches and the creation of an extremely loyal purchasing audience for a long time to come.

    If you found these insights valuable and helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog today! Don’t forget to pic up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Emoticons Do NOT Elicit Emotion From Prospects

    Emoticons Do NOT Elicit Emotion From Prospects

    I got several e-mails and text messages yesterday from other professionals and colleagues that contained one or more emoticons – you know, those little symbols of smiley faces or their derivatives made out of punctuation marks. These have become more popular with the advent of phone texting and Twitter, platforms of communication which limit the character count of a message. They are safe little familiar symbols that can be used in informal, personal communication to convey mood, or indicate that the preceding message isn’t serious. But one of the messages I received was acting in a different role, that of a selling communication piece, and I felt it was inappropriate to include this little symbol in this message. It reduced the seriousness of the document, as it was intended, but it also reduced the credibility of the sender, and diluted the sales message to the point that no serious prospect would consider buying services from this company – a net loss just for using a little symbol.

    That shows the power that written communication still has to hold, engage and persuade us in today’s high-speed communications environment. It also shows how much impact a few characters can have, be it negative or positive. Written communication is one of the elements that separates Man (big M) from other animals, and as such, I feel it’s owed a certain level of respect and that each of us should practice it’s usage and strive for the highest level of clarity and effectiveness in all of our written communication efforts, no matter how trivial or insignificant it’s intent. These little symbols work against that principal, and as such have no place in professional communications.

    Language is a very powerful tool, and written language has the additional advantages of thoughtfulness and permanence. You can take your time, craft effective phrases, get the word choice exactly correct to convey slight shades of meaning, and one you write it, either on paper or on a screen, you can review it again and again, in different contexts and under different circumstances, to help digest and grasp the intended meanings over time.

    Professionals, like the consultants here at Granite Partners, spend hours and hours honing their writing skills, crafting effective copy that evokes an emotional response from the reader, one that can persuade the reader to take action, either in advertising, or in direct mail, to make a purchase, to send back a coupon, to answer a survey, to buy an ad, and a host of other activities, without using one of these little symbols. We spend days devising questions to elicit a usable response in surveys, either to be spoken or read by the respondent, and don’t use any of those little symbols. We spend hours on the wording for a headline that elicits just the right emotional response, days on a piece of collateral material, fact checking, spell checking, organizing and editing to elicit just the correct reaction to the offer and call to action – without using any of those little symbols. So why are they even here?

    People use them as a short cut. They are lazy, or not properly motivated or sufficiently educated to use their own language properly, so the symbols make it easier to convey emotion with a limited vocabulary. It may seem curmudgeonly to professional readers,  but I feel that anyone who has graduated with a diploma from a public high school paid for by tax-payers in the country should be able to craft a sentence that is adequately robust so as to not need to add an emoticon at the end to convey meaning. Maybe a little test about a week before graduation for every senior, one that asks each one to write five paragraphs that will be sufficiently eloquent to persuade the principal that they should be allowed to graduate, without using the little symbols. I wonder what that would do to summer-school enrollment . . . ?

    More about the craft of language and other fascinating topics in your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • E-Mail Brilliance In Bite-Sized Chunks

    E-Mail Brilliance In Bite-Sized Chunks

    5 Elements of Effective E-mail Messaging

    1)      Carry the Brand – if you send an e-mail to a new or known constituency, no matter what’s in the body of the e-mail, if it doesn’t get opened it’s a waste of time, and if you don’t have your brand prominently displayed, your chances of an “open” are decreased by 70%. Security concerns are at such a level that if you don’t recognize the sender, it will NOT get opened. Make sure your “from” address is the one the recipient will recognize. If you’re sending through a third party e-mail service, which most will be for lists of any size, be sure they have created an outgoing box your audience will recognize.

    2)      Make the Subject Compelling – in the inbox or in preview, even on mobile devices, the subject may be the only thing your recipients will see. If you get it wrong, it’s irrelevant, looks promotional or like a scam or come-on, it won’t get opened. Give the receiver a reason to read further, make it relevant and within your brand characteristic list. Then it reflects accurately and well upon your effort.

    3)      Make it Personal – Modern e-mail technology allows for multiple personalization of e-mail messages – use it. Sending e-mail that looks like a static ad says to the recipient “you don’t know me”. You do know them a little so show that you not only know but have something you think they would find of value. Call them by their name, use their company name, pitch it to their gender, include a neighborhood fact – all this comes from just the address block on a mailing list! Make the technology work for you.

    4)      Get it Up Front – Structure the message like a press release – put the most relevant information in the first few sentences, front load the offer, use a coherent and attention getting headline and subhead. Pique the reader’s interest, get him to read further, and draw them in with relevancy. Most people, if they open your message at all, will only read the top 10% of the message before deleting. You only have a few seconds to get your point across, so make it short and sweet.

    5)      Make it Easy to Respond – One of e-mail’s main advantages are the links to web content you can include. Whether it’s to drive web traffic, drive donation, registration for events, make it a simple single click to get them the relevant information you wish to convey. Multiple links should be part of the body of the message, as well as at the bottom where the response mechanism is likely to land. Converted links are fine so that the message makes sense even when printed, and avoids long URL addresses that interrupt the flow of the message. Provide links in multiple formats, both full length and blind as part of the call to action, so that if it gets printed and passed along on paper, you can at least type the URL into the browser and reach the response page. Devise a specific landing page, so that the link takes them to the specific response you want, and they don’t get lost among multiple pages of your site.

     

    List Hygiene – Essential elements for high deliverability

    Keeping your e-mail list clean and functioning has many advantages, both reputational and economic.  There are many parallels between snail-mail mailing lists and electronic mailing lists. The ISPs function in the Post Office role, and they have their rules of conduct just like their paper corollary.

    Several rules will help you keep the list clean and effective, now and into the future.

    1)      Respect Your Recipients – when bouncebacks and requests to unsubscribe should be respected and acted upon immediately. All “Unsubscribes” should be scrubbed prior to the next mailing. Bouncebacks should be examined to determine the reason and a decision made whether to repeat them or drop them immediately. Remove any duplicates – they may not you’re your message once, they sure don’t need it twice.

    2)      Respect the System – ISPs are duty bound by their customers and enrollees to police their bandwidth and protect their customers. Repeatedly mailing to bad addresses will alert the ISPs and your mail may be considered SPAM. Set up feedback loops with the ISPs to have them alert you to requests to stop mail and other dead ends in your list. Take your bounceback that are bad links and use them as the seed of a suppression list for future mailings.

    3)      Check it on the way in and the way back – use data checkers in your data entry screens to keep out obvious errors and fat-finger mistakes – simple things like seeing the “!” in place of the “@” can raise your deliverability. Check the bouncebacks for simple errors and correct them immediately, especially errors in the domain name, which can be done with a find/replace algorithm.

    4)      Take out the obvious offenders –  remove all addresses that have the word “SPAM” in them, and distribution addresses – sales@domain.com or info@domain.org – those folks didn’t give you permission to reach their entire sales department, and will view your mail as spam and report it to the ISPs as such. SPAM addresses are likely traps added by the ISP and will land you in trouble quickly.

    5)      Routinely Revive your Opt-in – once you have permission via opt-in from a recipient to send something to them, don’t count on them remembering that they granted it. For regular e-mailers, those with periodicals and times messages, refresh your opt-in message and take the opportunity to show any value-adds that make it worth it to grant permission.

    If your lists are large, some mechanical assistance might be in order. LeadSpend recently introduced a new email validation service that correctly verifies over 97% of all email addresses. Check it out here http://www.leadspend.com/validation . Companies like FreshAddress and others can do some of the hygiene for you and keep your reputation clean with the ISPs.

    Mechanical Considerations

     

    1)      Make sure your HTML and other formats are readable by ALL formats of e-mail reader, including Outlook and others. If using a service they will likely ask for three versions of the e-mail, one for each of the two major formats and a plain text version.

    2)      Don’t count on an image to tell the story, use text as well. Some mail programs are programmed to strip out the images, or deny your message entry as a result of containing the image, so the recipient never sees them. Some very strict firewalls will deny any e-mail with any images in them at all.

    3)      Give your audience a chance to unsubscribe – always. If your content is relevant, they won’t take advantage of it, and if it’s not, you won’t waste money on sending to them in the future.

    4)      Provide a phone number – some people still aren’t comfortable spending via the web, but will gladly give out their credit card number over the phone, thinking its safer.

    5)      Make sure the links and phone numbers are current and functional – enough said.

    6)      Test color – some colors read strangely on different monitors and different graphics cards.

    7)      Keep fancy backgrounds and images sizes to a minimum and still maintain quality – if the e-mail is a huge file it might get filtered out of many firewalls based on size.

    8)      Make the headline tell the tale – some readers don’t get past the top three inches of the screen.

    9)      Format for mobile – most don’t do that yet, and you’ll gain an advantage over them if yours is readable on a Blackberry or iPhone.

    10)   Learn from your mistakes and READ your  metrics report from the ISPs and your service provider – there is a lot of valuable information that can be gleaned from open rates, dwell times and other stats, ready to be used when you design the next campaign for this same audience.

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