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Back to Resource CentreMalcolm Auld is a marketing author and trainer and runs his own agency. His books Direct Marketing Made Easy and E-mail Marketing Made Easy are available at www.malcolmaulddirect.com
The recent anti-spam laws and all the angst being created by unsolicited e-mail messages has brought sharply into focus two of my pet topics – the way many marketing departments are structured and the way marketers view their messages.
Marketers can be a strange lot sometimes, particularly with reference to advertising. We love to use jargon and tend to analyse ads in a way no customer would ever consider. Whole committees are needed to determine the correct shade of magenta in an image, or to decide how many seconds a product shot should appear in an ad. But customers rarely give an ad more than two seconds’ consideration when deciding whether to read, watch, listen to or click on it. The customer doesn’t look at a television commercial with any different emotions than a press ad, e-mail message or a mail pack, though the way they react to the message may be quite different.
It appears we live in a world far removed from these people who pay our salaries—the customers. For example, some of us believe there are two worlds of advertising—the above-the-line world and the below-the-line world. I’ve researched thousands of customers over the years and they have no idea what this mysterious line is that divides the advertising world. The only lines they care about are punch, clothes, bank and check-out lines.
To the customer, every communication for a product or service is all just part of the flim-flam of advertising. And the less personalised the message, the less relevance it has to them. Unfortunately though, many marketing and advertising people don’t think the same way as customers. They believe their “brand advertising” is more important than talking with customers. In fact their marketing departments are structured to reflect their ignorance of the customer..
Senior marketing people are responsible for the mass media brand advertising, while communicating personally with relevance to customers is often delegated. Messages delivered by e-mail, direct mail and telephone are often not the responsibility of senior management. If only they realised personal communication is the most powerful way to deliver “brand advertising”.
In many tests over the years we have proved this to be so. For a global financial services brand we segmented customers into three groups—those who received only television ads, those that received only direct mail and those that received both direct mail and television ads. The research findings revealed the customers most positive towards the brand were those who had responded to the mailing, followed by those who had received the mailing. Those who had just seen the television ad were the least influenced group.
“To the customer, every communication for a product or service is all just part of the flim-flam of advertising.”
Many marketers don’t take the time to understand how all media works. If they did they would realise that e-mail, direct mail and the telephone are some of the cheapest ways to do major damage to your brand when used incorrectly. At the same time, these media can be the most cost effective way to deliver your brand message.
The easiest thing to do in your marketing career is to create what is known as a “brand advertisement”. It’s not difficult and you get plenty of help from your advertising agency and media department to broadcast your message to the masses in the hope it will be seen. The hardest thing you’ll ever do is to communicate with relevance to your individual customers to generate a positive response—either emotional or physical. Yet who do you charge with the responsibility for talking with your customers?
My suggestion is you turn your marketing department upside down—let the juniors develop your brand advertisements as part of their training—you can keep an eye on them. But ensure the most senior marketers are responsible for talking directly with your customers. You’ll find it might just make a difference to your bottom line—which, of course, is the line we’re all interested in.
One of the problems created by the internet is that nearly every company now produces some type of e-mail newsletter. In other words, everyone’s a publisher. Sane, normal people with no publishing skills are now responsible for producing regular editions of news and information.
And they usually write the newsletters themselves – because they know how to write, not because they are copywriters – and because they haven’t budgeted for a copywriter. Interesting to note that the world’s best publishers don’t write articles for their publications, they hire professionals to do it – Rupert Murdoch for example.
“So if you are responsible for writing a newsletter, try to write from your customer’s point of view.”
And one of the problems associated with writing, if you are not an experienced copywriter, is the way you are trained to write. The first thing you learn to write is your name. And the people you write to are your parents. And the only thing you write about is yourself. And what do your parents do? They enthusiastically encourage you to do more of the same. And that’s the last time in your life anyone will give a toss about you writing to them about yourself.
But now you’re in charge of publishing a newsletter and you’re the editor, so you really go to town. You write from your own perspective using words like me, I, us, our, we – everything that is of interest to you and very little of what’s of interest to your readers. You rarely write in terms of your customer and what’s relevant to them. As the saying goes “easy writing is damn hard reading”.
So if you are responsible for writing a newsletter, try to write from your customer’s point of view. Write about things of relevance to your customer and your relationship with them. Here are some tips for producing newsletters.
If you are writing a text newsletter, keep sentence length to a maximum of 65 characters. Most e-mail clients have an automatic carriage return built-in at 65 characters, so if you write to a sentence length of 90 characters, your sentence will return at 65 characters and then again after 25 characters. This creates a very difficult-to-read paragraph as the line lengths vary. The eye prefers to read from a consistent line length, not varied – just like your newspapers are printed.
Use short sentences and keep paragraphs about two or three sentences in length. Just like in a traditional letter, use bold and italics or underline to highlight words or phrases.
Use simple graphic devices to separate articles, content and advertisements. Don’t allow advertisements to appear as content – they must be highlighted as separate messages.
Personalise your salutation and if possible personalise the content by using the readers’ name in the content. If you can’t personalise the recipient’s name in the “To” line of the header, then use their e-mail address. A person’s e-mail address will leap off the page to them, just like their name, birth date and phone number does.
“Use simple graphic devices to separate articles, content and advertisements”
Always explain the contents of the newsletter in the first screen, or above the fold, as it’s known in newspaper parlance. Your reader isn’t going to scroll to find out what’s in your newsletter, you must tell them as soon as they glance at the screen, so they can make a decision whether to read further or not.
Thanks to the problems of spam, many spam filters will block or redirect your newsletter to the trash bin when you use certain words or phrases in the subject line. For example, guarantee, win, winner, free, $$$$, happy and congratulations. You’ll only know by testing your subject lines.
While the P.S. is the most read part of a letter, it doesn’t work in the same way in e-mail newsletters. That’s because the reader knows who’s writing to them - it’s stated in the header of the message - so they don’t have to scroll to the end of the message to read a signature file and possibly a P.S.
In an HTML newsletter, use light shaded backgrounds and borders to separate content. You can even use a colour code as a navigation tool for regular content.
The navigation bar is the best place to generate subscribers to your newsletter as it is the most viewed part of your website.
In an HTML newsletter, use light shaded backgrounds and borders to separate content. You can even use a colour code as a navigation tool for regular content.
If you only provide a part of an article and link the reader to the rest of the content, make sure the link is to a landing page or micro-site. Don’t force the reader back to your homepage and hope they can find where to click to find the content. They won’t bother and you’ll only irritate them, or force them to unsubscribe.
Provide a clear unsubscribe process – you’ll always have churn within your subscribers, so make it easy for them to do so and act on the request promptly.
Invite your readers to submit content, by posting a question and publishing the answers, or by personal invitation to write an article. This saves you having to write the content yourself and gets your readers more involved.
Whatever you do, make sure you deliver what people have subscribed to. That is, if they have opted-in to a monthly newsletter, don’t send them a weekly special offer. If you’re wondering what to send, ask yourself these two questions:
Is it relevant to my relationship with the subscribers? And, will it enhance my brand experience with the subscriber?
If the answer to question 1 is ‘no’ then don’t bother with question 2. If the answer to question 1 is ‘yes’ but the answer to question 2 is ‘no’ then have second thoughts.
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