Manhattan Marketing Maven

The 48 Hour Imperative

Every marketer makes offers. The difference between the successful marketers and the also-rans is follow-up. Fast, personal, on-point follow-up turns a random offer or a blind pitch into the beginnings of a meaningful relationship. More great campaigns have been killed by the lack of fast-acting follow-up than anything else. 

The most effective marketers build follow-up communications into the initial plan. 

Why? 

First, to break through the clutter. Prospects are busy, not paying close attention and not looking for a message from you. Distracted by others they are generally bombarded by messages that don’t matter to them. 

Second, to differentiate your brand. Prospects are so used to being ignored or treated with one-size-fits-all messages that when you actually listen and respond you instantly separate yourself from the pack. And if you listen and respond in ways that are personal, relevant and synchronize with what they told you or what they want -- you have a momentary shot at becoming their new best friend. 

Both forms of follow-up require a strategy and technology to implement. Map out the most likely responses to your offer and how you intend to respond to each one. Drawing a schematic forces you to think practically. Those squiggles on paper lay out the links between your marketing concepts and your infrastructure. The process forces you to factor in all the people, systems, channels and departments that will have to work in concert to effectively follow-up.

It helps if you can program “triggers” and automate much of the follow-up. Triggers should be linked to choices that prospects make. If they select a particular industry, they are offered White Paper #1. If they are actively in a buying cycle, they get different content and your inside sales team gets cued. The BANT criteria should shape how you trigger follow-up messages. So should elapsed time. 

48 hours is the outside limit for follow-up messaging. If a prospect took an action, you have to assume some level of conscious action. But in the same moment you must anticipate that the conscious action is at the low end of the urgency or value scale. Therefore unless you follow-up while your brand still lingers in short term memory caches, the prospect will forget that they had any interaction with you whatsoever. 

The offer-response-follow-up cycle has to be rhythmic. If they download the white paper, an automatic e-mail is sent out 48 hours later to assess readership, satisfaction and next steps. If they take the benchmarking survey, their results are automatically compiled and e-mailed at the end of that business day, a reminder or follow-up message is automatically sent 48 hours later and the compilation of survey results is automatically dispatched 30 days hence.

Treat each response like a nuclear isotope with 48 our half-life. Act quickly to follow-up and respond, probe or ask for preferences. We live in a world of nanoseconds. After 48 hours your precious prospect interaction lost and so is whatever cash or capital you spent to create the moment. 

 

 

Will Groupon Survive?

Groupon has demonstrated that group discounting can be successfully translated into digital and social memes at scale. To some extend Groupon, Living Social, which recently took in a big investment from Amazon, and its growing ranks of competitors are animating and digitizing the original analog version of group discounters – The Entertainment Book, which still offers offline word-of-mouth distribution of hyper-local deals and discounts.

With some 40 million subscribers, Groupon has set the pace in using the social graph to distribute deals. They will expand from strictly local to deals with national chains and franchises by the fall. Yet as Social Living, with 20 million subscribers advertises on TV and grows, they now face hard core competition from Facebook Deals with access to 500 million subscribers and from Google Offers with access to everyone online everywhere. The question is will access, scale and social potential beat a head start, a strong brand positioning and base of happy customers?

Consumers are flocking to these e-mail offers because it automatically comes to you, the offers are targeted and because most are relevant and easy to take advantage of. It’s unlikely that the channel, e-mail, every retailer’s workhorse medium, will make much of a competitive difference or that distribution via social network will yield higher or faster rates of enrollment. The game will turn on the real or perceived value of social sharing either for consumers or merchants.

At the moment, consumers get significant discounts, Groupon gets 50 percent of every sale and merchants get access to new customers, the potential for up-selling, cross selling and/or increment purchases plus the potential to turn promotionally-driven buyers into loyal customers. The jury is out on whether merchants really get these pay-offs and Groupon has a real renewal issue coupled with a Main Street perception that merchants using Groupon are desperate or in serious financial trouble.

 Groupon is reticent to share case studies and data to prove actual merchant benefits. Marketers trying to evaluate this channel rely mostly on anecdotal evidence even though it flies in the face of direct marketing orthodoxy which is that promotional buyers are always promotional buyers. They rarely convert from their value, bargain-hunting posture into valuable, loyal, high-margin buyers.

The new entrants claim that they will facilitate greater and easier social sharing which potentially will give group offers wider distribution and more virility with the added mojo of implied endorsements from your friends. I’m not sure how to measure or evaluate this since we don’t know how much social sharing happens now or what the impact of social sharing on sales is. If we don’t have a baseline or a rule of thumb, we can’t assess superiority claims.

Size, scale and general arrogance aren’t enough to convince me that Facebook and Google can do mass group discounting any better than the independents nor do I blindly believe that they can deliver better results to merchants, especially since they each have a track record of misses in the advertising sales and merchant services space.

Stay tuned. Things are about to get interesting.

Driving Clicks: Getting Your Button Right

The goal of the new website is engage customers and enter into an on-going conversation between the brand at their customers. The operational objective is to build a database by encouraging consumers to sign up. The offer, like so many, is so-so; information, news, tips and a plain vanilla e-newsletter. 

The big question is, what do we say to encourage opt-ins. How do we label the big red opt-in button for maximum action? 

You’d think that after all these years, there would be “best practices” that were tested again and again so that we could just plug-in tried and true verbiage and watch the forms fill themselves out. But no such luck. 

So I ran a one-question poll on LinkedIn (roughly the target demographic) to seek wisdom from our customer base. The question was “which button would prompt you to click?” 

The choices were :

• Learn More
• Join Now
• Sign Up
• Enroll Today
• Register

I pinged roughly 2000 people using my links and my Twitter, Facebook and e-mail contacts. Over the course of a week I got 87 responses. Not a very impressive 0.04 response rate for asking 1 question to people who actually know me! I hope I didn't annoy too many of them. 

Nonetheless the answers were intriguing, enlightening but only partially definitive. 

LEARN MORE was the clear winner. Fifty-five percent of all responders said this would prompt at click. Among VP and C level responders, three-quarters chose this one. Two-thirds of the older responders (35-54) liked this one and women liked this much more than men – exactly 14% more. 

I suspect this wins because it requires the least investment or commitment. The offer is the next step – find out what all this is. But my hunch is that while this button will draw the most clicks, it will NOT prompt the most registrations because the same lack of intention will be applied. Once they find out more, they won’t be all that interested and then they’ll abandon the site. 

JOIN NOW came in second drawing two-thirds of the 18-24 responses. It is the transparent, straightforward choice. You are committing to something, you know there is an implied quid pro quo and you are going for it.  I suspect that this button will yield the most actual opt-in registrations.

SIGN-UP ranked third. Four times more men picked this choice and 17% of all manager-level responders preferred it. It, too, is very straightforward and almost imperative. You know that if you give up your information somebody will send you some stuff. Even in a nanosecond, it requires a conscious decision to want in. 

ENROLL TODAY with 4 percent and REGISTER with 2 percent seems like the losers. Maybe they are a bit old fashioned in terms of connotation or perhaps they feel too formal or academic. Maybe they imply much too much intention and commitment. Either way neither clear word seems to have any motivational amperage. 

So what did I learn? Five not-too-surprising things …

1. Asking the customer always beats your best guess.
2. Women and men have significantly different responses.
3. Age and status impact response.
4. Low commitment yields potentially more clicks.
5. Now you can use this data to label your buttons.

Optimize E-Mail Nurturing

Marketing is a process of nurturing interested prospects from awareness and info gathering through preference to conversion. E-mail has become our tool of choice because it’s widely used and accepted, flexible, easy to change or update and it’s cheap. But assuming a prospect needs a series of messages or branded interactions between initial interest and sale, what’s the best way to engage, entertain and grow the relationship? 

There is a clear, if unacknowledged, difference between jamming messages down their throats and building a customer-friendly sequence of messages that keep you top of mind without turning off your prospects. 

New research by MarketingSherpa casts some light on the topic by documenting the mis-match between marketers’ perceptions and their prospect’s perspective. The key take-away is that the two are out of synch. Marketers love the tools they’ve bought and used time and time again like white papers, research studies and content considered “educational.” 

But many customers could care less about getting this stuff. This corresponds to my experience with many brands who have put carpet bombing e-mail programs in-place with little regard for frequency, segmentation or the content needs of prospective buyers. The marketing effort is rooted in and measured by showing outbound activity rather than on creating relationships, persuasion or sales. 

Buyers say they are looking for news and information to stay current, tools or data to help them compare and sort out prospective vendors and make decisions. It’s okay to send them an article, a link or a picture with a quick note. In fact, an FYI often builds more gratitude and interest than a full-fledge pitch message. Prospects actually want to get promotional materials so they can see what deals are available and gauge a vendor’s sensibility about price, service and extras. From the buyer’s perspective, less is more. The lighter touch and the lesser frequency are more persuasive, less intrusive and give the buyer a sense that he or she is respected and in-control of the relationship and the process. 

To optimize the nurturing and persuasive quality of your e-mail communication to prospective buyers, do these 3 things: 

Dissect the Decision-Process. Every product or service has a definable process flow. Understand how your customers buy and where the inflection or hesitation points are. Plan your e-mail nurturing to anticipate these points. Leverage timing, parse information or make specific offers to pro-actively drive the process forward. 

Isolate Key Variables. Every sale rests on a finite number of variables. Price and financing are always key considerations as are services, value-adds and the quality of the relationship. Use e-mail to influence the favorable perception of these critical variables. Factor in frequency of messaging, tone, manner and voice. Link the messages credibly to the individuals directly involved in closing the sale and ask for feedback. 

Optimize for E-mail Scanning. Since everyone scans e-mail, the big idea or the dominant offer ought to be set apart in bold type for emphasis. Bullets, lists, short sentences and white space help buyers get the point quickly. Don’t get prissy about branding. Logos and graphics are a secondary concern, they add little connective firepower and often impede efficient e-mail delivery.

Two New Important eCommerce Factors Revealed

On the cusp of the Shop.org meeting, with ten weeks to go until the annual “Black Friday-Cyber Monday” holiday sales kick-off, new research-driven insights into cross-channel shopping and shopping cart abandonment could impact recession-affected eCommerce sales.  

Lauren Freedman’s 5^th Annual Cross-Channel Shopping Study reveals a drop-off in in-store pick-up, which could potentially depress sales and disrespect a primo audience—multi-channel shoppers. By looking carefully at 40 websites and mystery-shopping 77 retail stores, Lauren and the E-Tailing Group discovered “many merchants are not taking advantage of opportunities to sell and service the cross-channel customer.” 

Multi-channel shoppers, according to IDC’s Global Retail Insight survey spend 15-30 percent more than single-channel shoppers and they do it more frequently. Those who shop multiple channels simultaneously spend 15-30 percent more than less hyper multi-channel shoppers. So if you ignore, disenfranchise or piss off these guys you are disconnecting a mighty purchase stream. 

Over the last year same day and in-store pick-up of merchandise purchased online has fallen off.  Availability of in-store pick-up fell from 54% of surveyed merchants in 2008 to just 39% this year. And the training, signage and dedicated effort to facilitate easy offline pick-ups have degraded as well. Only about ¼ of merchants have web access to shoppers should something be wrong or an instant validation be required. 

The ability to whiz through the store and collect your eCommerce goods has also fallen off significantly. In 2008 26% of merchants required no additional check out but this year only 4% offered this express “grab-and-go” option. As you might imagine customers madly buying from catalogs, using iPhones, shopping  at websites, clicking on e-mails or dialing 1-800 numbers want their stuff quickly. The key to multi-channel satisfaction is near-immediate gratification. 

Maybe this fall off in customer focus and service reflects the reaction of notoriously cheap retailers to the pressures of the recession. Or maybe they’ve just taken their eye off the ball. Either way, ignoring a critical sales driving segment doesn’t bode well for the immediate future. 

If under serving key customers doesn’t get your attention, maybe new purchasing patterns will. According to a new study by McAfee, 65 percent of all online shoppers sleep on their purchases. The Digital Window Shopping study, which tracked 163 million online purchases, found that 2 out of 3 online shoppers wait an average of 33 hours and 54 minutes before completing a purchase.

Evidently what we’ve been scoring as cart abandonment seems to be a recession-driven “mulling over period” that, according to McAfee, can be influenced by displaying trust marks or security policy. This is a ready-made case for deploying a robust persistent shopping cart and/or using triggered e-mail messages to nurture and close more sales. 

After ten years of robust holiday eCommerce we are still learning new tricks and understanding the nuances of online merchandising. These new data points remind us that retail is dynamic and that by measuring the use of technology we can consistently improve our customer support and sales performance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Direct Mail Redux: Return of the Personal Letter

Direct mail volume is down. Big traditional mailers are departing the scene. Costs are up. And a postal rate hike is imminent on May 11th. But highly targeted and personalized direct mail can be an effective break-thru media during this spiraling recession.

Here's why ...

1. We're inundated with opt-in and spam e-mail. There's no magic, no anticipation and few new tricks to surprise us and to prompt more, better opens. E-mail has become institutionalized and with broad scale acceptance and use come response rate plateaus.

2. Nobody gets personal mail any more.  Of the 199.4 billion pieces of mail that the post office delivers less than 3.8 percent is actual personal relevant human to human content. Mail is an underused channel to connect directly with people, even though our mailboxes are full of stuff. Deliver Magazine has a very cool graphic illustrating the breakdown of what ends up in your mailbox in its March issue.

The clear implication (at least to me) is that if you write somebody a personal letter -- one that looks, feels and smells like a personal letter not an ad in an envelope -- using personal, individualized information -- you have a shot a genuinely touching and communicating with a customer or prospect. It's a rare chance to capitalize on the unexpected.

3. Refined creative tactics exist. Direct mail creatives have tested and refined an array of techniques to optimize opens and response -- the twin moments of truth. We have a corpus of knowledge on the size, shape, texture, color, fonts, forms of address, key words, tone and which authorial voice to use in which circumstances to address which audiences. The trick is to blend this expertise with purchase history or behavioral data to create a compelling, relevant, personal, maybe even intimate form of communication. The technology to do this, and still make it look private, individual and personal, is widely available.

4. Mail enables small batch laser targeting. While the big volume mailers and carpet bombers are cutting back and scrambling to survive, according to the Winterberry Group, returning to the basic letter format gives marketers a perfect platform for targeting and testing. Even with a medium that costs 10 times more than e-mail, even small firms can afford to word process and mail  hundreds or thousands of carefully selected and targeted names. Whether the focus is acquisition, retention, loyalty or usage stimulation a personal letter can cost effectively move the needle.

5. There's a first mover advantage to be had. Because so many direct marketers are bombing customers and prospects with self-mailers, double-sided postcards, snap-packs, letter packages that scream "I'm an ad" on the envelope, coupons, flyers, catalogs,circulars, postcards, faux invitations, faux greeting cards, faux bills, faux official documents and all kinds of other printed SPAM, the personal letter won't work if everybody does it. The victory will go to the first mover who does it right because it will be so different and unexpected.

6. You can leverage remembered joy. As children we all were surprised and delighted by something special that came to us in the mail from someone special far away. The memory and the feelings of that moment are stored and carried around by millions of people. A well crafted personal letter taps the reservoir of good will and belief that these memories represent. Mail, more than pixels, carry embedded emotions. These impulses and sentiments can be directed your way.

Opting Out of Catalogs

Some percent of the 19 billion catalogs mailed arrive in mailboxes where they are unwelcome and unloved. A website called Catalog Choice offers an opt-out option by offering a method for consumers to alert catalogers to take them off the list.

The website offers a 1-2-3 register, select and notify sequence of free activities. It warns consumers that it might take 10 weeks or more to get off the lists and offers to provide follow-up advocacy for those not satisfied. The site also offers catalogers a free merchant account.

In an opt-in/opt-out world this sounds normal. The DMA is on red alert, according to BusinessWeek because such a move allegedly threatens the future of cataloging and direct marketing. More likely it threatens the Direct Marketing Association who purports to have its own "do not mail list" called the Mail Preference Service and wants to be simultaneously the industry advocate and watchdog.

Sounds like a tempest in a teapot is Kevin Hillstrom's conclusion. The veteran catalog data wonk argues that more opt outs means less wasted postage, fewer annoyed prospects and more satisfied customers. His impeccable logic is based on the understanding that printing and postage, though commodities, continue to increase in price and that people who get unwanted catalogs suck up scarce resources and never buy anyway. So the savvy green approach is to encourage anyone offering an opt-out mechanism.

I'm with Kevin. No downside to another opt-out mechanism. No apparent downside to potential conflict with DMA. No downside for merchants or the direct marketing industry to reducing unwanted mail.

Herschell Gordon Lewis Schlockmeister Turned Copymaster

Herschell Gordon Lewis, the self proclaimed direct marketing curmudgeon-at-large pushes my buttons. 

Also a former Pittsburgher with multiple careers, he is simultaneously the most entertaining and the most annoying person I regularly read. I guess I'm not alone since Direct Magazine published two pieces from him in the current October 2007 issue coinciding with the upcoming DMA meetings in Chicago.

The Fort Lauderdale-based Mr. Lewis, who has had a parallel career as a splatter/horror film director uses all three of his names as if to distinguish himself from some other Herschell Gordon Lewis -- either a Lex Luthor-like villain tormenting writers everywhere or a Talmudic scholar addicted to wontons -- has an unusual and uncanny take on the connection between people, words and ads.

Looking down at you sternly in his half-glasses over his interlaced praying hands in his publicity picture you know you are headed toward the Principal's office. Herschell is the ultimate questioner and skeptic. Consider his take on ads "created" by " an idiotic cousin of the that troglodytic character on the insurance commercials" that we can't figure out.

"Logic and salesmanship vanish from the 'creative mix' when self-absorbed cleverness supplants connection with potential responders." 

Dedicated to using words and images to connect with customers and and provoke action, Lewis argues that "success stems from being regarded as flourishing salespeople"  which, from his perch " is what we do. We sell or we deservedly perish."  In that context he offers a stream of guidance emphasizing clarity, the imperative tense, directing the consumer and using linguistic nuances and subtle language choices to reduce or overcome consumer's natural defenses and to connect with common experiences.

He understands that Americans have common idioms, common experiences and common ways to process information. What else would you expect from the man who virtually invented the splatter film, experimented with hybrid nudie-horror films and brought us "BloodFest2: All You Can Eat" in 2002? Underlying his stream of advice and course corrections is the idea that marketers must understand and use this commonality to connect with customers and prospects. It's always about the customer. It's never about the creative person. And they must do with wit, subtlety and deftness since our customers aren't as dumb as we think they are. It's no wonder he titled his latest book, Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings.

Part William Safire, part David Ogilvy, part high school English teacher and part MAD Magazine copywriter, Mr. Lewis, who has written 30 books including my favorite " Asinine Advertising,"  knows how we think, what we get (and don't get) and how to get us to click, call or to fill in the blanks. Its a good thing I don't have to pay royalties on every idea I've "borrowed" from him over the years.

Someday I'll meet him. Hopefully I won't say anything too stupid. Some other day, I'll be able to afford to hire him to consult on my copy. Till then I'll read him and let him push my buttons. 

 

   

List Buying Made Not-So-Easy

MarketingSherpa published a great little list buying guide on the same day that B2B reports a growing share for direct marketing. What neither tell you is that List Brokers   are down a quart on customer service, responsiveness and expertise especially if you're a smallish buyer.

Effective list buying isn't easy to start with. There are no uniform methods for list compilation, search or storage. Getting an apples-to-apples comparison is tough. Every broker (think: Walter Karl, DM2, infoUSA, Worldata and others) does every component task differently. Sending the same e-mail message to 3 or 4 lists requires repeating the same effort 3 or 4 times to do what ought to be a simple and transferable thing. But it hardly ever is.

Consolidation of corporate ownership has not led to consolidation of lists. It's not uncommon for you to have to deal with two brokers at the same company to buy postal and e-mail lists from the same source. And combining theses lists or adding additional filtering data to make your campaign smarter brings you into an entirely new arena of complexity and confusion.

Many of the people you'll deal with, unless you are a huge mailer with a dedicated rep, are clueless. They have no feel for the lists, even less intuition to help you target a campaign or evaluate choices and they are at the bottom rung in their organizational food chains so they will confound you with last minute issues, problems and details that often they don't even know about or can't explain.

And did I mention that they never call you back or take 36 hours to reply to e-mails?

Imagine being able to ignore or stall eager buyers with cash in hand without any consequence to your business? List brokering must be a a goldmine in this renaissance of direct marketing. But list buying is more challenging and difficult than it has to be.

Why White Papers?

White papers are to B2B lead generation what cleavage is to hookers -- the lure that prompts conversation and a closer look.

White papers purport to be neutral, educational material disseminated by vendors in the public interest. But everyone knows that white papers, named after official communiques among the British Empire set,  are either thinly disguised propaganda for a particular approach, viewpoint, formulation or product set or a paint-by-numbers rhetorical exercise authored by an academic with the loose commercial sensibility of the aforementioned hookers. And yet white papers seem to be the preferred tool for B2B lead generation campaigns. In fact TechTarget and CNET have built huge businesses delivering these documents to suspecting prospects. 

Jim Logan argues in his blog that white papers are inferior to case studies in the sales process and he's  right since most shoppers want to understand what their peers are thinking and what they actually did. Hard facts trump fluff every time. Though that doesn't seem to affect the constant demand to create faux content which is then swapped for basic contact information. What's amazing is that this game is played out millions of times everyday. It gets me wondering about how closely anyone is actually watching the lead generation game, how much wiggle room for inefficiency must be built into the process and how much of what passes for marketing campaigns is driven by tradition and/or inertia.

Consider the counterintuitive logic train.

1. Everyone knows white papers lack significant content. They have very little true information value.

2. They are solicited very early in the process usually by junior people, who have little say in defining specs or identifying vendors for RFIs.

3. Their real value to those offering them is to signal vendors that a prospect has begun to shop. I can't determine the real value to those collecting them.

4. White paper recipients do not turn into genuine leads in great numbers. They are great for filling a pipeline but wash out in great numbers quickly.

So why do B2B marketers keep doing this shadow marketing ballet day-after-day and year-after-year?

Because its understandable, easy, predicable, manageable,expected and it kind of works. Exactly the same reasons that the world's second oldest profession continues to flourish.