Sep 15, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Small business
Cold emails are usually no more welcome that a cold phone call. However, For small businesses, the emergence of email marketing has transformed the opportunities they have to communicate, but so many fail to do some pretty simple things before embarking on a campaigns, so screw it up, and often give it away as ineffective.
Email marketing has become subject of some very good automation software, integrated in highly sophisticated platforms like Salesforce, and the Adobe marketing cloud, but for SME’s without the financial and management resources to make the investments these require successful, there are still very good low cost packages, like Mailchimp, which at the basic level is free, Aweber, and others at about $30/month.
However, the key to success is not the software, it is how you use it, so some simple market tactics to use.
- Find a connection to the recipient. You have a much better chance of not just getting the email opened, but also read, if you can establish some meaningful connection with the recipient. A common former employer, people you know, interests you share, or some project type you may be working on. This takes some time and research, but the investment pays off. LinkedIn is a wonderful tool for uncovering these connections.
- Nail the email subject line. If you fail to do this, the email will not be opened and read. We are all too busy to open emails that do not immediately touch some chord. The challenges is to do this in a very few words that communicate the value the email will deliver, and why it was sent to you. The subject line is in effect the headline of your story, so make it compelling to the potential reader, or they just become at best, a passing browser.
- Keep the email short, simple, and with a clear call to action. The recipient must understand easily what the message is all about without having to interpret blocks of text. Remember that many of them will be opened on mobile devices, making the clarity even more important. At the end of reading it, which should be a very short time, there must be no doubt about what you want them to do with the information.
- Be respectful. If the recipient gives their time to read, and hopefully respond, that gift needs to be respected, and even if they do not immediately respond, following up too quickly, or too aggressively will rarely be appreciated. You are asking them for something, be respectful of their time and expertise, and the simple fact that it is you doing the asking, not them. Disrespect is about the quickest way to turn off somebody from responding I can think of short of being rude.
- Never be desperate. Desperation is not a pretty sight, and will sway most people away from responding. Desperate people have little to offer back to a time poor person with the power to say yea or nay to you.
- Never, never, never promise something you cannot deliver.
As a final catch all for email marketing success, it is essential that you have a list. This is one case where bigger is actually better, the more accurately segmented and targeted the better, and the greater the level of active “opt-in” by those on the list the better.
Like all marketing activities, the better you are at it, the more targeted to the message recipients interests, problems, and situation the activity, the better your results will be. See the email you are about to send as if it was you that had just received it, and be a harsh judge.
Sep 2, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Governance, retail
Last night Media Watch on the ABC did a piece on the “news report” done on one of the 6.30 current affairs programs on a commercial station. The “report” was a 15 minute advertising free expose on the sourcing of the fresh produce the retailer sells.
It was a prime example of so called “Native advertising”.
Native advertising is just a term dreamt up by marketers, aided and abetted by commercially desperate media owners to make excuses for polluting the so-called news with favorable commentary. In this case, the channel concerned had a share of the retailers very substantial advertising dollars way in excess of their audience market share, and the “report” was nothing less than a glowing tribute to the quality and freshness of the produce.
Smells like advertising to me.
The “news” already seems to have been so polluted by the populist lowest common denominator “cat up a tree” stories that seem to dominate alongside sensationalist claims about today’s brand of extremist, that why would a puff piece on how fresh a retailers produce is make a difference?
Simple answer, because it is nonsense.
The retailer concerned does do a good job, works hard to deliver produce as fresh as they can given the constraints of their mass market model, competitive pressures and profitability objectives, but to put as much lipstick on the pig as the report did is really going too far.
You can watch Media Watch’s (the segment starts at 8.45) commentary for a while on the ABC’s iView, but if you are still confused about the line between advertising and journalism, and the chance of our institutions and enterprises being held accountable by the media, have a look at this satirical video by John Oliver that presses the point.
We are pretty savvy consumers of media these days, question is, are we savvy enough?
Aug 25, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
David Ogilvy said many things that have gone into the marketing lexicon, one that is particularly relevant to the ways we are communicating today:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar”.
It is disturbing for me to sped several hours creating a blog post, and then to have just a few people read it, and I find that following the rules below, my readership increases markedly.
- Lists always work,” 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- “How to” headlines always work. “How to build a better backhand” If you can actually find a way to combine a “How to” with a “list”, well, off it goes. Like “How to leverage these 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- Highlight the benefit, a WIFM (what’s in it for me) headline. “Having a great backhand increases your chances in doubles”. Sometimes a bit of innuendo or double meaning goes a long way to making a headline better “linkbait” to the body of the article or email.
- “Free” is good, “Free e-book on how to build a forehand Federer would love”
- Evoke curiosity, then deliver in the body. “How many more sets would you win with a better backhand?’
- Draft several headlines, and give considerable thought to which is the best to use in the context of the audience, and what it is you are trying to convey.
- Length, SEO experts tell me that about 60-70 characters is the limit, as the search engines cut off the subject lines at about 70.
- Learn from what others are doing. About the best source of effective headline writing lessons is in the local newsagent, spend a bit of time browsing the magazine section, there are SEO killer headlines effectively selling stuff that nobody in their right mind should buy
- The final consideration is that while it is the headline that gets people in, it is the value you deliver through the information in the body of the message that keeps them there. There is just so much content out there, so many opportunities to spend your time, that the real value is in delivering sufficiently good information and ideas to induce people to read the whole post, then return, again and again. The headline is just the icing, it is the cake that people consume.
There are many formulas, that claim to make writing good headlines easy, just like those above. However, like most things that can be broken down into a formula, you end up with some degree of repetition, a “sameness” with others, it may work, and usually has to date, it may deliver the outcome, but it is still the outcome of the same formula your competitors are using. So be different, add some humanity to the message, nothing is as good as a bit of humanity to connect to your audience.
That is really hard.
Aug 20, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
The blokes I saw as a youngster who had outrageous success with the girls were not always the best looking, or the most interesting, or had the best cars (although all these assets did seem to help) they were the ones who were genuinely interested in whoever it was they happened to be talking to at that particular moment in time. They directed all their attention and empathy at their companion of the moment, casual or otherwise.
Why do we think we can be successful digitally with strategies that are second rate in the real world?
Websites are communication tools, they are a digital metaphor for the conversations you have at a party, in a pub, at the office, in private. Nothing more.
So, go to the home page of your site, (or your competitors) and look at it through the eyes of the person you are attempting to communicate with, and:
- Count how often you talk about yourself, using pronouns like “we”, “our”, “us”
- Count how often you talk about the problems your customer has, the ways that you are referencing their needs and challenges
- Compare the numbers, and in most cases be amazed at how often you talk about yourself.
- Repeat for every page on your site,
- STOP talking about yourself!!
- Rewrite, and reap the benefits.
Pretty simple formula really, no different to those blokes I was envious of years ago.
Aug 12, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
Marketing has changed very rapidly from the mass outbound marketing upon which all the marketing theory and practice until about 2000, to what is often called “inbound” marketing, or in other words, finding ways to attract customers to you.
There is now a fundamentally changed capability set required to be a successful marketing executive, and to manage a successful marketing function.
- Customers are the new focus, not because of any epiphany, but because we can now see them clearly. We need to be able create situations and experiences for them to be able to engage with the proposition we are delivering them.
- Marketing is leading the digital revolution, now. Marketing was late to the table abut the pace of development of marketing automation over the last 5 or 6 years has been astonishing, and marketers need to be data analysts and automation savvy.
- Outbound marketing requires content, but no longer can you just hire an ad agency to churn out a few ads. Now the whole marketing function, and ideally other functions in a business need to become producers of content, so that consumers have something to relate to, that tells a story. These materials become the backbone of our branding activity,
- Marketers need to become remarkably ambidextrous when thinking about channels of communication. Not only do we now have a few paid outbound channels, we have a huge array of owned and paid and earned media options and platforms, all have to be managed, in concert with each other, so you get a cumulative and synergistic effect.
- Marketing needs to engage consumers in their social spaces, and on their social platforms. No longer can we just bash messages through via paid media, the challenge of engaging has become far more difficult and the location has moved from the lounge room to wherever they are.
- Branding success has always had customer loyalty and retention as an end result of any activity. Now that has changed, and we are actively developing marketing techniques and tactics to target the loyalty and retention of consumers, and the huge difference is we can now see the impact of our activities.
- Marketing agility based on A/B testing has become a core competence. This combines the data capability wit the imagination of the marketing to dream up ideas, then test and constantly refine.
Marketing is becoming the core function of every enterprise. From a bit of an extra, sometimes even seen as an indulgence 20 years ago, it is rapidly becoming evident that marketing is the most important function of every business.
Competitive success now depends as much on the quality of the marketing effort to deliver customers as it does the product and service offering. However, it is still true that no matter how great the marketing, without the product, you will not get a second chance.
Aug 7, 2014 | Branding, Customers
I just had another of those really, really annoying phone calls from a call centre, and being a marketer, I cringed with shame and frustration.
After I answered, it took probably 5 seconds for the person on the other end to answer me (memo call centre managers: this is just crapppola!!)
He was probably a nice young man, just trying to make a living in difficult circumstances in, well, it was not Australia, so his first language was not English, it may not have been his second either, so it was challenging understanding him.
He had a script, yes, scripts are a necessary tool, but do not easily allow the flexibility to cope with anything other than an utterly “vanilla” conversation, and those would be as rare as a cat in a doghouse. He clearly was under instructions not to vary from the script, but to respond to anything other than my script predicted comments with “yes, thank you Mr Roberts” and then, back to the script without a pause.
At least he got the name right.
I could go on, but the point is, why would somebody trying to sell me something waste their money so comprehensively?
The possibility that this young man was going to actually engage me in any way with his product let alone extract any money from me, are about as good as my chances of playing Roger Federer in next years Wimbledon final.
Why would any marketer actually pay for this desecration of their brand?
Are they really that stupid?
Unfortunately, the answer must be yes, at least in some cases.
By the way, the product was Funeral insurance, a hard sell in the best circumstances, impossible if you treat the potential customer with contempt.
