Better response for marketing campaigns!

What marketing message did you send out this holiday season?

Was it product/offer-driven?

or was it a simple holiday message?

or did you build an application customers could use?

Don’t get me wrong, the messages above were chosen because they were well-designed and targeted (not all are personalized and they should be) but they all fulfil the different goals set out by each marketer.

Perhaps what would make marketing messages even better is building an application to go along with it. They could be as simple as a game (http://stockrider.trone.com/), a holiday snow globe or a viral application to send a simple greeting card (http://Greeting.L2soft.com).

This holiday, we chose to send a simple holiday greeting but with a link to an application that allows prospects to send a personalized email greeting to their friends, colleagues or loved ones.

Marketing applications that help you generate curiosity and interest while showcasing the abilities of your product will be the next big thing in marketing. They help you stand out from the clutter of marketing messages and if it is well designed and executed, your recipients will remember you for it.

For better campaign results: mix up your 2009 marketing messages with applications and you will build a better 1 to 1 relationship with your prospects.

Connect with me on Twitter http://twitter.com/RyanLou

Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa wrote about converting email with images turned off. Quoting a statistic that 59% of consumers and 90% of business email users view some or all of their email with images turned off. In the article she highlighted an example of an email she received from a HomeAway email newsletter (A vacation lodgings firm).

See what the newsletter looked like with images turned off. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/homeaway/1b.html

The good: Each image included “alt tags” and clickable links that allows for clicks to specific sections of the travel website.  The tags and clickable links provides users with options even when they have no idea how to view the images. Contrast this to the Borders Rewards email that is filled with some of the best email designs but are blank when images are turned off.

For designers, another solution with blocked images is to setup the email using tables instead of Div layouts. This allows you to display emails with blocked images while still maintaining designability.

See the screenshots below for an example of this.

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The biggest mistake marketers make with email campaigns is sending too much too often. “They’re cheap, so let’s blanket our prospects with our emails”. This might have worked before, but your prospects can easily protect themselves from this now.

Campaign success doesn’t only depend on email open rates, open rates won’t get you the sale. Instead you should be sending information only when you have something new to say, something big to announce, a good offer to make.

Move away from the mass marketing approach. Segment your prospects and customers into groups according to metrics like how much they like your product, (e.g. Apple fanatics get more product updates than the average ipod user) and how often they buy (borders customers that purchase once a week get offers more often).

Each business/ campaign will have an optimum campaign schedule that works. To get you started with yours, try sending out 2 emails between expected purchase dates, adjusted as the length of time increases. If your customers buy every week, send them 2 offers a week. If purchases are a yearly affair divide your campaigns into bi-monthly campaigns.

Make sure you vary your campaigns. Send them an email linked to a personal url, follow up with a direct mail piece then a call from your sales staff, send a letter thanking them for taking the time for the call, include a better offer in that letter… The methods of reaching your customers are endless, don’t abandon other channels because you think emails are cheaper. 

Remember your marketing campaign goal should always be to get better response that lead to a sale not keeping campaign costs down!

Sending yourself numerous proofs of an email campaign before it goes out is absolutely crucial. Here’s 8 mistakes (in order of how badly it can affect your response) to make sure you avoid in your email.

1. Links that are unclickable/ missing

2. Use of Spam words in the email subject/body

3. No company address/ way to opt-out (Non-compliance with CAN-SPAM)

4. Use of unmanned, “Do not reply” email addresses (Why bother to send an email that people cannot respond to?)

5. No campaign offer ( Why should they respond? )

6. Content in email and personal url does not match ( No one likes to be tricked!)

7. Incompatibility with Mozilla/ other browsers (depends on the disparity)

8. Spelling errors ( Note: Som take it more seriusly than oters!)

Have your own list? Feel free to comment.

1) Make your content and offer relevant

Make your content suitable for your customer segment. The experts in your industry will react better to a more technical message with specific features. Other buyers with less industry knowledge will likely react to a more benefit-rich message.

Take the following 2 sets of content for selling a new computer.

Advanced buyer:

Ryan, we know you are looking for a new computer and want specifications that lets you run games more effectively.

We have the newest game machine with the following features that will interest you.

Processor: Intel®  CoreTM  2 Extreme Processor X7900 (9.20GHz,4M L2 Cache,800MHz FSB)
Memory: 15GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 4DIMMs
Hard Drive: 10TB (2×64GB) Solid State Drive
Video Card: NVIDIA®SLI™Dual GeForce®8700MGT with 512MB GDDR3 Memory

When you buy today: I’ll even throw in a new extra-reactive mouse designed for gamers like yourself.

 ###

(By the way, if you knew computer specs, you’ll notice I exaggerated the details above)

Basic buyer:

Ryan, we know you are looking for a new computer. While I could go over the specifications of our new computer, I know you are more interested in reducing the time it takes to launch your programs. Our newest version significantly reduces the time it takes to load and run programs like microsoft office and outlook.

You’ll be pleased to know that it also comes with the latest version of these programs, they’re more stable which means your programs do not crash while you are working on them.

When you buy today, I’ll even throw in an extra 1 year subscription to Norton antivirus free!

###

2) Get them acquinted with you

Whether your email is read depends on the relevance of your “sender name” and “subject line”. A message from Dell is more likely to be opened than one from ‘Hotstuff’ for example.

What if you have a brand name that is not as famous at Dell?

Emails will be a good way to build up your reputation to a targeted list. Open rates may be lower in the beginning but as you send relevant information with useful content (e.g. 5 ways to speed up your pc, 10 tips for avoiding viruses, … ). Then you increase the chances each of your emails are opened.

While picking a good subject line is important, building a relationship with your prospects should be the ultimate goal.

3) Be clear how you want them to respond (Call to action).

Is the goal of your email to motivate a phone call, take them to a Personal URL, reply you at your email address, download a PDF file or sign up for an event?

If your recipients are not clear what they’re supposed to do, they click the cross on the top right corner and you lose a possible customer. Make sure you send yourself a proof of the email before you send it to your list. A convincing email with broken links will not get you any response!

The success of your campaign will depend mainly on how well you manage 3 things.

1) Your list
2) Your creative
3) Your offer

For most marketers, the list and creative would already have been taken care of: by their agency, list broker, previous investments with their CRM and the designers in the company. The offer is the one element that they’ll need to get spot on for a campaign to be successful.

And while the offer could sometimes be the difference between a 1-4% response and a 70% response. Marketers have to weigh the costs and benefits of getting either. While most would mark the campaign with 70% response as incredible, it may not always be the case.

Take the example of giving away cash, gift cards, a free oil change, a free nintendo Wii! People (excluding busy execs) generally will not say no to these. These are the campaigns that would generate great response and would be good for marketing campaigns where the main goal is to get brand awareness, promote a new product, build a wide diverse customer list or just waste money.

But if you are like most marketers feeling the pinch from a slowing US economy, then you’ll be looking at providing something of value only to those that are likely to buy from you. A whitepaper on how to profit in real estate, findings from an industry research, 50% off your product for 3 months, a personalized mad marketing poster.

These are the campaigns that would result in a 1-4% response rate, but the result of that is better leads to hand over to sales, a captive audience ready to buy and people that are more responsive to your message, no money wasted on leads that are both not likely to buy and who you won’t want to sell to.

Much of the focus on Software as as Service has been on differences in architecture, setup and implementation with other models like enterprise software or web 2.0. This post is not about these, instead it is about highlighting the “Service” aspect in a SaaS model.

For that I use an anecdote of Toys and batteries:

How often do we find in television commercials, print advertisements, etc. an outstanding advertisement about the newest robots (http://www.robosapienv2online.com/ ), Air Hogs that can battle each other (http://www.airhogs.com/) or even education toys like those by leapfrog (www.leapfrog.com), and at the end of the commercial/ advert, they say “batteries not included!”.

Surely, it makes sense to provide 1 set of batteries- a tiny fraction of the cost of the toy/item that goes a long way in increasing customer satisfaction!

Similarly, in Software as a Service, the key to success still lie in service quality. Sure, SaaS makes it cheaper than creating it in-house and more convenient than an enterprise solution, but the main benefit is the quality of service that it affords.

In a business environment that is increasingly competitive, it is still difficult to find a company that provides quality service and support for their customers. Yet this simple act goes a long way to keeping current customers happy, keeping businesses afloat and sales coming in.

Apply the same approach of including the “batteries” to your business in the following ways
- good customer support
- follow-up with your customers after the purchase
- trial offer/ discounts
- free bundled services/software
- could even be that Personalized Birthday Card you send to your clients
- doing things that surprise your customers.

At L2, we’re increasingly adopting this approach of “including the batteries” with lowered pricing for new customers to launch their first personalized marketing campaign with our software and improving our customer service and time to market with existing customers and their campaigns.

And with customer comments like these, it looks like we’re heading in the right direction.

“Your secret sauce is not just your code, it’s Joe and Alan and Lawrence (Operations and Lawrence is our CTO) ”

“I have some colleagues that chose another product besides Fuse and while they got alot of marketing and sales attention up front, the post-implementation support has been absent.  It’s not that way with you guys(L2)”

For more on improving customer service

See Joel on Software’s february post with 7 steps to remarkable customer service
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

And kevin Eikenberry’s post on how customer relationships can be recession busters
http://www.kevineikenberry.com/blogs/2008/04/customer-relationships-are-recession.asp