6 imperatives for effective SME email marketing.

cold email 20140126-180535-pic-12290384

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

Barbed wire networking

barbed wire phone

Man has always found ways to communicate, Social media is not new, it is just the tools we are using today are upgrades of those we used yesterday.

Alex Bell patented the telephone in 1876, after many inventors had played with the physics of electro magnetism and its applications to voice transmission. By the 1890’s farmers were using the barbed wire fences that were strung the length and breadth of the US to communicate.  Phones in those days generated their own power by means of a crank and batteries, all you needed to do was hook up to wire, give the mail order telephonic device a crank, and bingo, a phone.

Downside was that someone had to be on the line at the other end waiting, and there was no direct dialling, so everyone was on at the same time, the ubiquitous party line, where privacy was a victim.

Sound familiar?

(Reliability was also an issue, everything from rain to the neighbours randy bull causing problems with the wire)

Point is, all this fancy new technology is no more than a new solution to an old problem: how to communicate effectively with those  to whom we have something to say, from the mundane and trivial to really life altering messages.

Small businesses need to remember this simple truth, as they are bombarded with “opportunities” to expand their reach via social media. The only useful contacts are those with whom you have something in common, and with whom you can collaborate to generate value for you both. Those sorts of “friends” are invaluable, and do not just “happen”, it takes time and effort to find them and build relationships individually. Just getting a “like” on facebook is as useful as Harold Holts flippers, particularly as the organic reach of facebook is now down around 5% as Facebook seek to financially leverage their membership base.

Fancy some barbed wire?

 

Native advertising or news fraud

lipstick on a pig

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?

Emotion is the path to your brain.

Olivier

Think of the average presentation you sit through.

If I can summarise: Boring, potentially useful information quickly forgotten.

Am I right?

Now think of  the best presentation you have ever sat through.

You remember not just the occasion, and the presenter, and probably those with you,  but also the information.

What is the difference between these two presentations?

Chances are the first was a wooden recitation of facts that were also on a powerpoint showing behind the speakers head, even worse, the speaker was reading the slides.

Chances are the best was a three dimensional “performance” by the speaker, there were moments of quiet, of passion, of visual conjuring from the verbal, of a simple point made that tied the whole thing together in a take-away message. The presence of props was limited to a very few photos, drawings or physical props that emphasised the point being made, the presentation was dominated by the physical presence of the person on stage.

The speaker brought emotion to the presentation, a physicality and personal engagement with the message being delivered far more than is possible with just the words.

Years ago before my first major public presentation, it was to an industry conference  with an expected attendance of about 1500, (the “Foodweek” conference about 1988)  I undertook a training session with a presentation coach. I do not remember much of that training, although it was well used on the day I was told, despite the almost terminal case of nerves, but I do remember the trainer saying again and again:

“it is not a presentation, it is a performance”.

That statement is as true today as it was then, perhaps more so because we are awash in messages, and increasingly those messages are visual, recognising we are a visual animal, so to be remembered, the bar is now set very high.

There are plenty of coaches out there, this session by Doug Stevenson is probably as good as it gets. My thanks to Mitch Joel for bringing it to my attention.

 

9 tips to crafting effective headlines

daves pen

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.

 

  1. Lists always work,” 6 ways to build a better backhand”
  2. “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”
  3. 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.
  4. “Free” is good, “Free e-book on how to build a forehand Federer would love”
  5. Evoke curiosity, then deliver in the body. “How many more sets would you win with a better backhand?’
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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
  9. 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.

 

 

 

6 Really simple steps to increase the effectiveness of your website.

don't shout

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:

  1. Count how often you talk about yourself, using pronouns like  “we”, “our”, “us”
  2. Count how often you talk about the problems your customer has, the ways that you are referencing their needs and challenges
  3. Compare the numbers, and in most cases  be amazed at how often you talk about yourself.
  4. Repeat for every page on your site,
  5. STOP talking about yourself!!
  6. Rewrite, and reap the benefits.

Pretty simple formula really, no different to those blokes I was envious of years ago.