AP42's Brian Peck conducted a seminar on "Email Marketing: Getting It Just Right" at the Bishop Ranch B2B Seminar on July 17, 2012. We'll be posting a video of the event on our YouTube channel, but a number of attendees were interested in seeing Brian's slides, so we've posted them on SlideShare. If you're interested in a PDF copy, drop us a msg and we'll send one your way.
In direct mail marketing, it's all about the open. Well, that and the response, but you won't get to response unless the recipient opens the envelope on the way to the recycling bin. There are many ways to get people to open an envelope: in the magic balance of list, offer and creative, having a creative way of expressing a relevant offer to the recipient is usually the best bet. But in the Internet era, people are especially attuned both to relevance (good) and BS (bad). People form trust models in a 50 millisecond look at a web page, people form personal filtering strategies for telling legitimate email from spam. But you still see marketers abusing trust in direct mail.
Case in point, the "Expedited Envelope" I received in the mail yesterday. It's a pretty blatant play to get me to open the envelope through deception. So the sender has immediately insulted my intelligence before I even open the envelope. And I can guarantee you that when I do, and the disconnect between the "Extremely Urgent" message and the actual offer becomes clear, the sender has started our relationship with a clear basis of mistrust. Maybe they'll get the open, but at what cost?
Spammers survive because people open their emails, and if a tiny fraction of the millions sent end up in a sale, it's all worth their while. The Expedited Envelope and its ilk are all in the same spirit. They insult your intelligence before you open the envelope, they further insult you with the contents. But if they can bamboozle you into buying from they it's all worth it. (I get a lot of this kind of direct mail from political parties, by the way. Go figure).
Let's parse this one I got:
Expedited Envelope - Front of Envelope - click to enlarge
Back of the envelope:
EXPEDITED ENVELOPE
As though it were a brand of the Expedited Envelope Service.
Extremely Urgent
There's a promise for you. You be the judge.
Front of the envelope:
EXPEDITED ENVELOPE
I can tell it's expedited. It has a pre-sorted first class stamp on it! (Though that will soon lose its luster.)
Expedited Envelope
(There, it says it again! It must be true!)
• This Process Expedited Envelope and other important messages that are expedited and delivered according to their specific class of postage.
Huh? So expedited that they could not finish a sentence? And it isn't just an Expedited Envelope, it's a "Process Expedited Envelope". Does that cost extra?
• For Expedited Envelope services, there is no weight limit for envelopes containing business related letters other materials.
There is no weight limit because they're making it up.
• When using Expedited Envelope services 2nd day there are weight regulations and are subject to postal increase.
Huh? They expedited this one past the proofreader.
• Do not send cash, cash equivalent or jewelry.
Here's where they lost me. If they had sent cash, cash equivalent or jewelry, I might have opened the envelope! As a kid I always opened up the mail that had a penny glued inside.
PO BOX 25122 Santa Ana CA 92799-7490
Odd that the PO Box number and the 9-digit ZIP Code extension don't match up the way they're supposed to.
100% Recycled.
At this point, I doubt it. But it soon will be.
It is often effective to send a truly relevant and creative offer using real express methods such as UPS, Federal Express and the US Postal Service. It is a way of getting people's attention, and tracking delivery. But you start the relationship with a basis of authenticity and respect, and let the contents speak for themselves. Don't start your customer relationship on a basis of deceipt.
I'll hang on to this "Expedited Envelope" as a reminder, and hope I haven't missed out on any cash equivalents inside. But some things are better left unopened.
Sometimes I just have to walk out the door to find something to blog about, in this case it's this new sign at the front gate here at Bishop Ranch 11. Can you spot the difference between the real sign (left) and the artist's conception (right). If you said "less friction, higher response rate", you are correct.
Of course, we already like our landlord on Facebook, and I am hoping for that new iPad. But if I were walking by and saw this for the first time and had to go back upstairs and type in the URL, or take my phone out and type in the URL, there's that small amount of friction, a little hurdle that might lead me to say, "later."
With the small addition of the QR Code, you can send people directly to your Facebook page and get that "Like" with a lot fewer thumbstrokes. Try it out (click on the picture to enlarge if you need to.) And while you're there, you, too, can like Bishop Ranch Community and (maybe) win an iPad!
This is an example of starting with a problem (conversion rate) and offering the right tool to solve it (QR Code). A problem in search of a solution, as opposed to the other way around (which will be the subject of an entirely different post!)
MH6MJCPZB2XE
[Get a good start on social media marketing. Download AP42's free Social Media Workbook.]
Some media require short form copy, and it takes talented marketers to work within the limits. Bumper stickers, because of their size have challenged sloganeers since the 1930's. Billboards have more room, but try reading a paragraph or parse some complex syntax at 70 miles per hour. Our you could spread it out in a series of signs, but still keep it short.
New media challenges include the 140 characters of the promoted tweet of Twitter, or the 25 characters for the title, 70 characters for the ad text, and 35 characters for a display URL for Google ads.
One medium, however, blurs the lines between life-critical utility and marketing. The owner of this particular channel has a monopoly, and I think creative quality suffers. I'm talking about the dynamic messaging signs of your state's road department. Unless you have a magical sign like in L.A. Story, or you hack the sign on your own (not recommended), you're stuck with the creative output of the nannies at the road department.
"Steep Downgrade Reduce Speed When Wet." I like that. It's to the point:
The wikipedia article on variable messaging signs lists a number of uses for the signs for warning drivers of hazards, reporting relevant information and the like, but pays short shrift to the extra (and extra-cheesy) editorializing that's creeping into the signs:
You're seeing more and more messages like "Slow or move over for workers. It's the law." That last gratuitous jab is unnecessary. "Slow or move over for workers. Because I say so, that's why."
"Texting ticket $159+. Not worth it." I could accept a reminder of the fine or something like "Texting and driving and killing people - not worth it." I'm all against texting and driving and I'm all for a good high fine, but I don't think CalTrans should presume this conclusion for me. I wouldn't want to pay a $159 fine, but the guy texting his stock broker to buy or sell to lock in that $10,000 profit might appreciate CalTrans's reminder about what that tradeoff would be worth to him.
Don't get me started on "Click it or ticket." Do we really need a clever rhyme to remind us to buckle up? Even worse, does the highway department think we need a clever rhyme to do the right thing?
I'd rather keep the marketing and editorializing off of the highway signs, so we don't run our mental ad blockers on legitimate warnings. Let a stop sign be a stop sign, not:
"STOP. It's the law!"
or
"STOP. $281 fine. Not worth it!"
or
"STOP or face a cop!"
The "Not worth it" tagline is part of CalTrans's April awareness campaign against distracted driving, announced under the headline "Zombie" Drivers Endanger Other Motorists.
Hmmm, maybe the hackers have a solution after all.
It's been at least 6 years since I've been to the Addy Awards, conducted by the American Advertising Federation. It was held at SFMOMA, one of my favorite places to go in San Francisco. Back in the day, there used to be more attendees and a buzz that made you feel proud to be in the industry. But I guess the economy hasn't quite bounced back - or maybe everyone is just waiting for a tweet instead of attending in person.
It doesn't matter. Because what I CAN tell you is that there's a new breed of creatives out there – inspirational, passionate and so connected to the internet.
Congratulations to Bob Hoffman, Ad Person of the Year, and to Venables Bell & Partners for Best In Show for Intel's "The Chase."
My favorite part of the evening was the Student Work Awards. If these students are the baseline for what creative looks like today, I can't wait to see what they do once they get a job. Congratulations to all!
My colleague John Faville once offered, "A brief should be." I thought of that as I was reading WOW Branding's "Logo Savvy", where they suggest replacing the traditional creative brief in favor of ten evocative words. That is brief, and I think I'll give it a try. Hey, I'm a scientist at heart.
Until then, here's a question I suggest gets added to every creative brief template.
For existing products/services/brands/companies:
"What is the best example from your firsthand experience, from a customer you've actually talked to, that exemplifies the highest potential of your product or service in actual use."
For new products/services/brands/companies:
"Give me the best example from your firsthand experience, from a customer you've actually talked to, of their articulated need for which your product or service is the perfect solution."
Picking the ultimate example, either of how your product has actually been used, or of an expressed need that your new product is meant to solve is important. It places the high-water mark for success, at least in your known universe. (If the gods favor you, your product will be used in even more ways than you can currently imagine!). I don't want a typical example - there are plenty of those. I want the best.
And I don't want a theoretical or hypothetical example: "It's for the busy executive getting off a plane and grabbing breakfast in one hand with their iPhone in the other, and they've now run out of hands." No, tell me about a customer you talked to, who actually used your product (if you have one) or relayed a real experience that would lead her to your product or service (if you're developing or just rolling it out.)
This keeps it real. When I was directing a group of product marketers, I was always challenging them to move away from the abstract and get concrete. No talk of "the dealers' shelves" would last very long before we'd get in the car and go find a real dealer and real shelves. The same consideration should go into your brief. Not to design the whole campaign or product around n=1, but to know, for now, the apex of your current reality.
All too often I get around to something that has been in my "must-read" pile for far too long and ask myself why on earth I haven't read it before. Google's "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth - ZMOT" has been hanging around on my Kindle since last September, and when I read it last week, I kicked myself for not sailing through it earlier.
You can read it too, for free, in about an hour, and you really should. It's free because it is an extended white paper for search engine marketing the Google way, but it really is more than that. It speaks to the changing model of behavior among all purchasers that has led to Google's success, and by extension, anyone who factors that model into how they go to market.
The basic premise is builds on a traditional path to purchase, modeled as Stimulus + Shelf + Experience. Stimulus is where you are first aware of a product, through advertising or identification of your need. Shelf is where you first evaluate the product, sometimes by literally picking it off the shelf and examining it. Experience is where you have bought the product and evaluate it post purchase as fulfilling your needs and expectations. The shelf encounter has been referred to as the "first moment of truth", where your examination leads you to choose yes or now, purchase or not. The actual product experience is the "second moment of truth" where your use of the product leads you to judge whether it fulfilled its promise or not.
Google's Jim Lecinski posits a "zero moment of truth" that now influences most buying decisions. Before even hitting the shelf, people hit the Internet (Google, they hope) to apply a first filter to decide which path to take. Marketers who feel they can make their case at the "first moment of truth" may be left emptyhanded.
The book does a good job laying out the model for those who haven't figured it out already, and gives some good exercises and practical steps to apply to your own product or brand. Lecinski also highlights the shift from messaging to modeling as the holy grail of marketers. I still hear too many marketers base first principles around the messages they want to convey to the marketplace, ignoring the complexity of the connected consumer and the network of influence that is often impervious to top-down messaging efforts.
I love to see new models well articulated, even if they are thinly disguised promotions of the most successful player of the model, and this is a good source for any marketer who needs a refresher course on how things have changed, and how quickly they continue to change.
While ZMOT's primary contrast with older models of marketing is of great value, I noted a couple of contrasts with some recent ideas that are worth exploring.
There's a tension between highly effective search models and consumer-directed targeting on the one hand, and the rewards of serendipity on the other hand. Chapter 4 of ZMOT goes into the effect of rankings and ratings on peoples ZMOT choices. Yet people making more and more decisions based on ZMOT rankings, whether they're Yelp stars or Google's PageRank telling you what pages to see, will miss out on the discovery of the outliers, or products where the one good review out of 20 is from someone who has the same quirky taste as you. Salon explores this phenomenon in more detail in the article "How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring".
Though this runs counter to Google's hyperefficient market model, I think algorithms can factor serendipity in balance with relevance and user goals - (like the BananaSlug search engine's "long tail search" algorithm.)
Lecinski isn't just a pitchman for Google, he's also an enthusiast for change, innovation and progress. From ZMOT:
"How can marketers keep up? 'Say yes.' That's one of Lorraine Twohill's favorite sayings, and I love it. It's always easy to be cautious and say 'no.' But ideas come from everywhere now. Embrace that! Say yes as often as possible. Be nimble. Take risks, try new things, learn and be surprised."
This is in contrast with another philosophy I've embraced from another great little book that you can read too, in about an hour, and you really should. Derek Sivers's "Anything You Want" isn't free, but it's a fresh breeze on entrepreneurial success. In it, Sivers says,
"If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say 'no.'
When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than 'Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!' -- then say 'no.'
When you say 'no' to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say 'HELL YEAH!'
Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about it, say 'no.'
We're all busy. We've all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out."
Yes or no? Who is right? Maybe the answer is that Sivers's "HELL YEAH!" vs "no" is a ZMOT moment for us all.
One of my favorite quotes I use in presentations about social media is from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. It's a tweet he made, so it fits nicely on one slide: "Just reviewed a customer's social strategy. Solid work: Focused on business goals, organizational readiness --not a "Twitter strategy" He has it right; so often people want the shiny new thing without asking why, or asking a number of questions for that matter.
In my early web days a client said "We want Java on our home page." Not "We want certain functionality or user experience on our home page," but they wanted Java, specifically because it was novel. "Why?" we asked, which led us to a better solution. Or even worse "We want our logo done in VRML." OK, maybe that was my idea, so we can all be susceptible to answering questions nobody asked.
Yogi Berra had it right, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."
The other day we were brainstorming the opportunities to use QR codes to connect the dots between people seeing various sorts of media and an online experience. Of course, the QR code was the shiny object that caught our creative attention; and for a while they will continue to attract the curious visitors because of their novelty. And of course we always came back to the goals, the destination, the user experience. Why would someone scan the QR code, and what would they expect to find and do at the other end? It always comes back to the right questions.
This is why we published our AP42 Social Media Workbook in the form of six questions you should answer before setting off on your social media plans and programs. We start with Why? and move on to two forms of Who? (as in "Who are you?" and "Who are your customers?"), and on to the What? When? Where? and How? that give you insight into your business goals and organizational readiness that Jeremiah reminds you to keep focused on.
The AP42 Social Media Workbook is the first step. Following that, you'll develop a Playbook that is your bible that directs your activities - who is doing what, where, how, and on what timeline. The next step is to do it, measure it, refine it, and keep doing it all again. Check it out - head over to our website and download the AP42 Social Media Workbook for free, or, if you're so inclined, concentrate on this shiny new QR code:
\You may know that I sometimes use this space to offer gratuitous advice to marketing and advertising copywriters and editors. In that vein, here's another word of advice:
There are no "backslashes" in web addresses.
I still hear radio and TV voiceovers telling you to go to "foo dot com backslash bar" (or even worse, "Log on to foo dot com backslash bar"). No. It should be "foo dot com slash bar". (You don't really even need to say "foo dot com forwardslash bar" because in a URL, slashes only go one way - it's not like you get a choice.)
You think my internet service provider would know the difference, but no, the OnDemand VO says to go to "comcast dot com backslash help" and "comcast dot com backslash guaranty".
Many browsers will choke on this. Chrome will correct your backslash error, but Safari and Firefox will not. Not sure about Internet Explorer (though see if you can find the humor in this exchange). Try it yourself and let me know: http://comcast.com\help
Right. No wonder my internet service… never mind, I don't want it to go away altogether.
This is a slash: "/" This is a backslash: "\".
Those of you who know my lifelong operating system bias might expect me to blame Bill Gates for this (not the new philanthropic Bill Gates, but the old technobaron antagonist Bill Gates). DOS and Windows use the backslash character to separate directories, instead of the slash character used by Unix. (I always thought it was just to be different from Unix, but there actually was a reason). Because URLs use the slash to separate out what looks like a directory structure, and because the web was begun in the realm of Unix, you get slashes. Optimistic, positively forward slashes, not those regressive backhanded back slashes.
And why is "\" a backslash? Because it's leaning back in the line of text? But when I write it with a pen, that's the slash that I draw in a forward direction. And the forward slash… crap I'm starting to sound like Andy Rooney. On the other hand, he just retired, so there's probably an opening at 60 minutes. That's at cbscorporation dot com backslash careers.
San Francisco's two leading news/talk radio stations draw listeners in at drivetime with frequent traffic reports. They used to both be "on the 8's" - every ten minutes starting at 8 past the hour. Now one of them has snuck up by 3 minutes, and airs traffic "on the 5's".
Here are their slogans:
KGO 810: "First Traffic". Traffic reports every 10 minutes, beginning at 5 after the hour.
KCBS 740: "First for Traffic". Traffic reports every 10 minutes, beginning at 8 after the hour.
It's pretty clear to me who is "first". What do you think?
"First for Traffic" vs "First Traffic" reminds me of the continuing bone of contention between Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott in "The Office". Dwight contends that he's the "Assistant Regional Manager". Michael Scott corrects him every time: "Assistant to the Regional Manager".
There's also the solution in film and television credits where you have two co-stars, each who wants primacy. On the main credits, one name is in the lower left, therefore gets "first billing", the other is in the upper right, and gets "top billing".
Maybe we can get "first traffic" and "top traffic". You sort it out. Now you know what I think about while sitting in traffic.
