Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 22 - Otis Regrets... or not

Boredom banished at DMA 2014

The Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference is happening this week in San Diego, and I’ll shortly get on a plane to join my colleagues. I will be on a panel Tuesday morning October 28, called “Creative Slamdown: How world-class creatives successfully sell strange, obscure, boring or even the most mundane products” put together by estimable designer and freelance creative director Carol Worthington Levy. Panelists Kathy Lemmon and Michelle LaPointe and I will vie to present the most interesting case history of a dry, difficult or tedious assignment which was executed in an interesting and hopefully effective (since this is a direct marketing conference, after all) way.

My centerpiece is a print ad for Rovi’s advertising in the guide (the ads the appear on your TV channel guide while you are looking for a show to watch) aimed at media buyers. Come see how we turned a straightforward and complex pitch/explanation into something memorable, or at least unexpected.

The session is at 11 am, just before the “Hall of Fame” luncheon which is traditionally a barn burner, so this is a great way to get all fired up and ready to go.

Persado is not going to put copywriters out of business. (Whew.)

Persado Try It Page — *Persado “Try It” page; click the image to try it for yourself*

A recent article on artificial intelligence in the Wall Street Journal had me trembling with fear. It described a technology called Persado which writes emails and landing pages for multivariate testing, stating each component of the message in an infinite number of ways which can be mixed-and-matched through AI to surface the result that gets the best response.

“A creative person is good but random,” according to Lawrence Whittle, head of sales at Persado. (Note that the reporter relies on the sales department, rather than talking to a technologist.) “We’ve taken the randomness out by building an ontology of language.” The article goes on to explain how Persado deconstructs each ad into five components including “emotion words”, product descriptors, the CTA, text position and images and then offers up every conceivable option. (Actually I guess it does not offer them up but simply inserts them into an automated test.)

I experimented with the “play with the technology” page today (after taking over a month to get up the courage to visit the site) and am greatly relieved. The static page is shown here; you can click through to the site and try it for yourself. The “free storage” subhead, button and the text in between will dance around as you mouse over them showing all the options Persado has come up with.

However, there’s one thing that’s obviously wrong with this example landing page that Persado doesn’t address, at least in the demo. Any cub copywriter can tell you the biggest problem with the ad, which is that the company’s logo is used as the headline and the true head, a benefit statement about free storage, becomes the subhead. The logo head is actually completely unnecessary since the logo is repeated in the screen shot of the smartphone. (To be fair, Persado lists “image” as one of the things it tests, but it’s not happening here. It would be embarrassing if they put up a demo which does not properly represent the product.)

What Persado is going to kill is not copywriters, but boredom. I’ll certainly experiment with headlines and different button text, and if there’s more than one way to express a key selling point I’ll give my client options. But I don’t have the patience, and you’re not going to pay me, for micro-experimenting with every word in the copy. Persado, be my guest.

Why Words Matter… in bank marketing

We work hard to make banking easy. — How about…”We work hard to make banking easy”?

A regional bank has invested in an image campaign, and the results are visible in the window of their local branch. Unfortunately, the copywriter has a tin ear. Let’s take a look at three sequential pieces of signage to see what I mean.

“We strive to make banking simple.” Making something simple is a benefit, but strive is a word that implies difficulty. It’s also a little bit above the average person’s everyday vocabulary. “We work hard to make banking easy” would have been better, especially because hard/easy balance each other in a way that strive/simple don’t.

We'll give your money a good home — “We’ll give your money a good home”?

“Feel good about your finances.” Another five dollar word. “Finances” is not a word in the average person’s vocabulary or, if it is, it’s not something you feel good about. “Feel good about your money” would be better but it doesn’t really tie back to the bank. (Neither does the original line, of course.) How about “We’ll give your money a good home”?

“The convenience you want, with the security you need”?

“The convenience you need with the expertise you trust.” The copywriter was running on empty when s/he got to this one. Convenience isn’t something you need. Want, crave but not need. Expertise is another of those high falutin’ words. What’s wrong with “experience”? Again, we have two concepts strung together so thought should be given to how they balance. Is it news that you can have expertise/experience AND convenience? Not really because they’re two unrelated benefits.

For that matter “need” and “trust” aren’t very well balanced either, are they? Let’s choose something you wouldn’t really expect to get with convenience, and use verbs of equal weight. “The convenience you want, with the security you need.” Because usually the more secure things are the, less convenient, right?

So there we are. Didn’t take that long, did it? But I have the feeling the copywriter’s not wholly at fault. I say that because of what’s written over the ATM entrance. “Vestibule”? How about “lobby”? The client probably got the big words because that’s what the client demanded. It reminds me of David Ogilvy’s maxim, “don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.”

Mumblecore Marketing

We Boomers have a bug up our rear for Millennials, much as the “Greatest Generation” probably felt about us back in the day. Wall Street Journal reported on how they don’t like to use the telephone (probably because it intrudes too much on their personal space), and there’s now an app that allows them to hire household help without the awkwardness of meeting face to face and giving instructions.

In short, Millennials are self absorbed. Just look at them: walking with their heads down, obsessed with their iPhones, as they board their Google buses with the dark windows that will swoop them up to earn big bucks at whatever it they do. Goddam kids…

I have noticed a consequence of this in what I’ll call Mumblecore Marketing: emails that are deliberately casual and slouching, as if it’s almost too much trouble to get around to selling you something. As a side benefit these emails seem like they were written by somebody you know, though you can’t remember exactly how you know them.

Nicole Marshall of DMNews—by definition a direct marketing best practitioner and careful tester—is a great mumblecore marketer as far as subject lines go. “Did you see this email” “Re: 2 weeks left” “Are you free at 1 PM ET?” and “Log in now!” are a few that made me look. The body content is fairly straightforward, but the casual subject lines get my attention which is what they’re supposed to do.

Peter Coates of insideout.com starts with the subject line “Following up” and begins,

Hi Otis,

I sent you an email the other day… if your inbox looks like mine, you may have missed it. Just wanted to let you know Inside Out is holding a Performance Coaching workshop at the Fremont Marriott Silicon Valley on March 11.

It’s designed to help more leaders coach more often, for more business impact. Would you or your colleagues like to attend the training? There are a couple of discounts available if you are in a position to evaluate for your company or if you would like to bring your colleagues with you.

I’m happy to set up a call. Let me know a few times this week when you are available for a conversation.

Warm regards,
Peter

This is a very hard sell situation—a paid seminar—but the casual tone is disarming. Mentioning a previous email I didn’t read—a classic direct response no-no—makes it fresh and personal. And referring to “a couple of discounts” without getting into the details of pricing raises curiosity rather than objections. Once I get this far, there’s more straightforward content (including the price) below his signature.

Mumblecore, as you no doubt know, has its roots in independent film, usually low budget and featuring actors who try to appear non professional in order to create a realistic, slice-of-life storyline (though often there isn’t a storyline) including Greta Gerwig taking off her clothes. The term was coined by a sound editor, who was probably frustrated that he could not always understand what the actors were saying.

In mumblecore movies and in mumblecore marketing, the illusion of authenticity is absolutely essential. Make one false step and you turn yourself into a laughingstock. Such was the case with this email, which arrived with the subject line: “Young entrepreneurs… disrupting the food industry – Fancy Food Show 2014”.

Otis-

My name is Blake & I’m the Founder at eatKeenwa. We’re a bunch of mid-to-late 20 year old entrepreneurs disrupting the status quo in the food industry and re-pioneering American manufacturing. We’re doing something different for once.

We make a stellar snack out of quinoa. It’s robust in flavor, full of functional benefits and packaged with commanding presence.

Please stop by our booth, #5126. I would love to share our story with you. It will leave you engaged and will resonate with your audience.

Please check us out at www.eatkeenwa.com.

Thanks & Be Well,

Blake Niemann

The casual tone is there, but it’s disrupted by jargon and hype: “resonate” “engaged” and “commanding presence” are meaningless and overused and instantly tip off the reader. Kudos, though, for inventing a new word, “re-pioneering”. That truly is “doing something different for once”.

I hear often from Peter and Nicole, suggesting their marketing works; Blake was a one-shot wonder. I have the feeling the mumblecore marketing for eatkeenwa was suggested by a consultant, probably an elderly wretch with tobacco-stained fingers, who then couldn’t resist adding a few time-tested zingers. Blake, if you’re reading, try writing your own copy next time. After all, you and your fellow rambunctious twentysomethings are the real deal.

Home Depot, where’s your ALT tags?

Home Depot without graphics — *(Click the thumbnails to see the emails in readable size.)*

Home Depot graphic loaded — *Aha! load the graphics, and see the special.*

Home Depot sends me an enticing daily email: one special item, on sale for one day only! But I have no idea what they’re offering because my email reader (Outlook for Mac 2011) does not load graphics without permission and Home Depot does not use ALT tags.

ALT tags are text that appear in the space reserved for graphics, when for some reason the graphics don’t load. In many email readers graphics are turned off by default, and the user has to make the decision to turn them on. It was only very recently that Gmail started loading graphics by default. And many security conscious companies still refuse to allow network users to open graphics.

Hootsuite no graphics — *Who is this email from?*

Forgetting to put in an ALT tag (or being clueless) can lead to some peculiar effects. Like the message that I got from Hootsuite that said I needed to give them permission to keep contacting me, but I didn’t know who they were because their name was in the graphic. And the cookbook publisher which invited me to a launch event, but the date and venue were in the graphic. If I don’t recognize the sender and nothing appeals to me in the text I can see, how likely am I to investigate further? (Emails like Home Depot’s, with no text at all, are the worst offenders.)

Belcour no graphixs — I‘m invited to an event, but where and when?

Belcour with graphics on — *Looks like a nice party! Sorry I missed it.*

In each of these cases it would have been a trivial task to code an ALT tag which conveys the day’s special, the sender’s identity and the venue. Even if the no-graphics group is 5% or 10% of your audience, why give those folks a reason to ignore your email?

“Hope you are well” email intro makes me sick

Here’s an email typical of many I receive these days. It’s to a business account, and it begins:

Otis,

I hope all is well. I’m not sure if you’re attending the Fancy Food Show in NYC on June 29th – the July 1st, but if you are I thought you would be interested in visiting the Crown Maple booth…

Why do so many marketers these days think it is appropriate, and maybe disarming, to inquire about the recipient’s health as a way to start a mass email? What’s it to them? What business is of theirs? If I’m well I’ll attend the event, unless I get run over on the way, and if I’m not I don’t need you reminding me of it.

Note the odd use of “the” above, before “July 1st”, which suggests the writer is not a native speaker. Could this have something to do with it? The French (this is for a maple syrup product, so I suspect un Habitant at work) have the equivalent phrase Comment ça va but that just means “how’s it going?” which I don’t find at all offensive.

I’m preparing a longer post on the general trend toward faux-casual business email but this stuck in my craw so I couldn’t wait to get it out. There. Now I feel better. Thanks for asking.

How to restore lost AAdvantage miles

The other day I wrote about my unfortunate discovery that both my AAdvantage mileage accounts had zeroed out due to inactivity. I also wrote to AAdvantage customer service and received an interesting response which I’ll share for web searchers who might be looking for this information.

First, I received this email:

Because qualifying activity extends the expiration date of all active
miles in the account, there may be an easy way of restoring your expired
miles. If you had an eligible mileage-earning transaction prior to May
26, 2014 (the date the miles expired from your account) and no older
than 12 months, then let’s get that transaction credited. When these
miles are credited to your account, your expired miles will
automatically be restored on the same day! For more information on how
miles are earned, please visit us at www.aa.com/earn. You can also
request missing mileage credit from the ‘Request Air Mileage Credit’ or
the ‘Request Non-Air Mileage Credit’ links from this page.

If you did not have any qualifying activity, we have a couple of paid
alternatives. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be pleased to
furnish details.

Hmm. Unless there’s some coded wink-wink message, the only way I’d restore my miles is if I had done some qualifying activity, it had not been recorded, and I’d failed to report it. Highly unlikely. So I inquired about the paid options and got this:

To get you involved again, we have designed a Re-engagement Challenge – a set of activities created to introduce you to the program and to restore all or part of your expired miles, based on your participation.

First, register for the Re-engagement Challenge with AAdvantage Customer Service and pay the $30 registration charge.

Once you’re registered, you have 6 months from your registration date to complete the requirements listed below:

1. Subscribe to the AAdvantage eSummary™ and AAdvantage Promotions email and remain opted-in to these two subscriptions for the duration of your Re-engagement Challenge
In conjunction with your registration, you are also subscribed to receive these email messages if you haven’t been receiving them already. These helpful subscriptions send you information on how you can earn more miles and provide a monthly summary of your activity and current mileage expiration date.

2. Complete the following mileage earning activity within six months of your registration to restore the desired amount of miles: (for under 50,000 points, which is my level)

Earn 5,000 partner base miles*
OR
Earn miles for 1 round trip flight**

In many markets, a round trip is available for a couple hundred dollars or less. So for a fairly small investment you could earn back as many as 50,000 miles, which are supposedly worth $900. Fair enough. American is also getting you back into the traces with the behavior they expect from an AAdvantage member.

In closing, you may recall I had two accounts–one which zeroed out a few days prior, and the other last October. I wrote customer service separately about each of them. The long-expired account received no response.

Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye!

AAdvantage unsubscribe screen — *AAdvantage finally asks me for my email prefs… as I’m about to unsubscribe.*

I just unsubscribed from both my AAdvantage email accounts, mine and my teenager’s. I was getting several emails a week and it was pointless to read them since AA does not serve my local airport. But, they’re about to as a result of the USAir merger so I’ve made a point of making an occasional qualifying purchase to keep our combined 50,000+ miles intact.

Or, so I thought. I actually read one of these emails this morning, and discovered the miles in both accounts had zeroed out. (AAdvantage does not bother with real-time reporting, so it showed 24,372 miles in my kid’s account while a couple lines below showing an expiration date a few days ago.) D’oh!

Why in the world, if American wants me as a customer, would they not send me a special announcement that the miles were about to expire and some information on how to preserve them?

AAdvantage Customer Service screen — *Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye.*

And why in the world would they continue to flood my inbox with emails when I hardly ever open any of them? A best practice followed by many marketers today is to warn customers they’ll stop receiving emails unless they take some action. But AAdvantage is the original mileage reward program and their policies have likely been around as long as people have been receiving emails. Which is probably also why I get so many emails from them; I can’t remember them ever asking me if I would like to specify preferences, until I unsubscribed today.

So, AAdvantage has done its job, which is to pry loose some miles fair and square. But American Airlines has lost a couple of potential customers who fly frequently and could have been on its ALB routes very soon. I fail to see how that’s a good thing.

P.S. Don’t know if they are still doing this as I am no longer an active member, but United’s Mileage Plus had a promotion they would send to people with expiring miles, asking if they wanted to convert the miles to various subscription offers. I’m sure they earned some nice revenue from this partnership at the same time they kept members up to date on their accounts. Another example why AAdvantage’s assumption of primogeniture–I’m right because I was here first–is actually obsolete and clueless.

Does your direct marketing need a Letter Doctor?

I started my direct marketing career in the 1980s, a quaint bygone era when there was no internet. One of my favorite resources was a perfect bound magazine called Direct Marketing and one of my favorite contributors to said magazine was Luther Brock, “The Letter Doctor”.

Brock would take a sort of self-help approach to copy critique. He would pick a common marketing problem, present a few paragraphs from a letter (possibly not a real one) that was not solving the problem so well, then make suggestions for improvement. It was a diagnostic approach: you know things are supposed to be a certain way, but they’re not; what’s wrong, and why? Of course he was promoting his own services as a freelance copywriter, but there was lots of good information to a fledging.

I expect Luther Brock is no longer among us. A 1958 graduate of a Denton, TX high school is listed on the internets as the owner of a business called The Letter Doctor, so this is probably Luther’s son. Another person, I assume unrelated, owns the domain lettterdoctor.com and markets from that website. The original Letter Doctor probably never saw any reason to claim the domain name; what was an internet domain anyway and who cared? (In the very early days of the World Wide Web, we looked up numerical domain identifiers, not names.)

I found myself invoking the spirit of the Letter Doctor today when a client asked me to take a look at some not-successful lead generation direct mail. There were some bullet points of features and benefits: did they really know those were the most powerful message to their audience? There was an informational offer: was it really the best appeal to the target reader, and was it stated appropriately? In short, this robust and experienced company needed a checkup, same as any of us.

Do you have a letter doctor–someone who’s willing to poke and probe and make recommendations based on how your marketing differs from expectations? If not, it might be worthwhile to seek one out.

When you want LESS response to your marketing, do this

The Freakonomics authors present an interesting theory in their new book, Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. Why is it that, in spite of all the publicity and ridicule visited on “Nigerian scam” emails in which someone you don’t know will visit you with huge sums in return for sharing your bank account routing information, those emails are still sent from alleged Nigerians? Wouldn’t they get a better response with a new scam sent from, maybe, Crimea?

The answer, according to Levitt and Dubner, is that the scammers WANT a lower response. Sending out mass emails is free, but manipulating the mark who responds is not. Therefore the scammers want to limit their responders to only the truly most gullible who believe that, regardless of past disappointments, there may still be a pony under that pile of poop.

This has application for your own marketing if you have a sales organization that must process the leads you generate through email, direct mail or search advertising. Offer a free tcotchke or entry into a drawing for an iPad and you’ll boost the response, but many of those alleged prospects are responding just for the freebie. Not only are they worthless as leads, they cost you money because they get in the way of opportunities to follow up other, better qualified responses.

There are several ways to get fewer but better qualified responses:

Offer a premium that is only of interest to someone who meets your definition of a qualified buyer. Everyone wants an iPad; only a few want a poster with functional diagrams of vector network analysis yet that offer was highly effective for one of my clients.
Make them do something to get the freebie. Ask them to provide complete and accurate contact information and answer a few questions about buying authority and plans. (If you’re giving away something, they will be motivated to fill in correct information to be sure you can reach them.) Make them fill out a survey. In effect, they’re working for the reward so it’s no longer “free”.
Or, don’t offer anything, other than a “complimentary consultation” which is a thinly disguised sales pitch. This is what your sales reps want you to do, because it will only produce very well qualified leads. You normally won’t do it because there will be a disappointing number of leads and your cost per lead will be extremely high. But sometimes this is the right way to go.

With an improving economy, lead quality becomes increasingly important. Try a few of these tactics in your next campaign.