To promote his wisdom, Andrew recently started an iTunes and Youtube channel with some amazing tips and ideas for small business owners. Here’s one below.

Enjoy.

Call or email us at kevin@digitalmarketing,co.nz to learn more about Andrew’s strategies and how they can be applied locally.

Tri-messaging is marketing messages that are created, integrated and unleashed for email, social and mobile channels to stimulate engagement.

The graph Lyris provided, reminded us again of how marketing has dramatically changed. Again how the consumer, not the marketer or advertiser is in control. Business are now just participants, not drivers of marketing. Seth Godin and other gurus forecast all this long ago,

However this paper showed what digital marketing is really about today. Finding the best touchpoints where our customers are. Certainly it is around email, social websites and mobile.

Mobile is the most interesting element, since is can bring everything together. Modern iPhone and smartphones can do it all – Collect and send emails, monitor, view, even update blogs, facebook pages and twitter accounts at will, on the go. 

The other neat, emerging mobile phone marketing tool is text messaging and the use of business-defined keywords. These can be easily established for any business, allowing customers to ‘opt in’ to company specials, coupons or events. It’s not broadcast marketing or spam either. These are customer-requested, auto-response text messages providing quick information, coupons, even weblinks through to a mobile-optimised ‘mobi’ website, in realtime.  (Read more)

“Laptops are for old people”

It’s only a matter of time before smart retailers, restaurant owners, advertisers and marketers realise the sales potential on interacting with their customers through these channels, focused around mobile email, texts and mobile web. Forget clunky MS Outlook or IE/Firefox on a PC – As my friends teenage son told me, who’d ditched his PC for an Apple iTouch, “Laptops and PCs are just for you old people”.

P.S. For more on mobile marketing, keywords and mobi websites visit my mobile marketing website at www.quicksave.co.nz

However if you’re selling, there may be a bigger elephant in the room. Is it just the message,  or the fact that we’ve made a connection? If you’re in sales and working with established clients, the message or offer may not be important. It’s the connection and fact we’ve taken the time is the key – Relationship selling concepts come to mind. We’ve spoken a lot on this blog about the emotional factors when selling. An article on what new strategies to employ with email marketing being the most recent. (Read more) 

It perhaps emphasises the need to remain human when selling. Less of the old ‘hard sell’. Local guru Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics had an interesting observation on all this in his weekly podcast. Take a listen…

Why Connection Is Way More Important

Be sure to signup to his newsletters. Better still, buy his book, Brain Audit – Why Customers Buy

Radio, TV, banner ads, pay-per-click (PPC), magazine ads, billboards… There are dozens if not hundreds of marketing channels you can use to get your sales message across. [Many marketers forget this]. We don’t expect you to use all of them all of the time – but you should know what your options are. Test different channels and different channel combinations, and roll out with what is most effective for you and your organization.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that if a specific channel does not meet the return on investment (ROI) goal for your overall multi-channel marketing campaign it should be disregarded.

Take a look at the chart below:

In this example, you are selling your product for $100. You had $85,000 to spend and your goal was to make $1.25 for every dollar you spent, or a return on investment of 125 percent.

You had tremendous success with your online efforts (endorsed e-mails, banner ads, and PPC campaigns). On your teleconference, your marketing efforts yielded a 90 percent ROI and lost $500. And on your direct-mail campaign, you produced only an 80 percent ROI, losing a whopping $10,000.

It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value.

Since two of your five channels lost a total of $10,500, are you going to cut them from your multi-channel campaign? Of course not. Those two channels brought in nearly 42 percent of your new customers. Customers you now have the opportunity to bond with and sell more products to. It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value. This means that the 400 new customers from your direct-mail campaign will most likely become your best customers. On top of all this, you’ve met your goal of 125 percent ROI on your overall campaign.

The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues. The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues.

Ed: This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health, secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

P.S.  For those wanting to learn more about cross-channel marketing, MaryEllen has an amazing book on the topic entitled Changing the Channel.  I read this over the Christmas break and it has to be one of the best, most objective and down-to-earth books on marketing I’ve found. Based on 20 years of real-world experience, not just theory. It’s a virtual case study on how a company achieved massive growth using direct response marketing, across multiple channels – Openly discussing what worked and what didn’t…

Every marketing student, entrepreneur and business owner should read this book

It covers must-know tricks on direct mail, email, search engines, telemarketing, social media, events, PR, print advertising, radio, TV and more. An easy-to-read book that puts it all into perspective – Something few marketing books or ‘experts’ do today, who all seem to have their own agendas and media biases.

This is the essential marketing handbook for any NZ business.

It can be purchased online from www.fishpond.co.nz

Here’s a short interview with MaryEllen

Much of this 1-hour interview was a reminder that marketing is failing us, seldom giving a good ROI. And based on Mark’s and many of his clients experiences, 95% of today’s ad agencies and marketers are image and brand-focused, still seeing ROI as relatively unimportant. (A recent UK survey seems to back this up) .

Click on the mp3 graphic below to listen to a 5 minute extract from the interview – Here Mark talks about a simple strategy that started the turnaround in sales for a large client in the finance sector. He then discusses a disturbing case with a smaller operation, that clearly demonstrates where many of us are failing.

Your Marketing Sucks. by Mark Stevens – Excerpt.

Marketing is not about spending money on such things as advertising, direct mail, and P.R. Those are just tools. Marketing is about growing your business–its revenues, profit, and valuation. If you saw someone open an office window and start tossing out handfuls of thousand-dollar bills, you would have every reason to think that he’s nuts. Yet that’s what happens in business day in and day out, as company after company wastes millions of dollars on spending camouflaged as marketing.

… Smart people do stupid things all the time when it comes to marketing. Since the art and science of marketing is not their core expertise, not surprisingly, their marketing is far less effective than they dream it will be. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into. Think of it this way. There is a Christmas-morning sense of excitement when you get your company’s new brochure with its pretty pictures or see yourself hawking homemade hickory furniture in a cable-TV ad. In the back of your mind, a little voice says, "We’re big-time. We’re on television. We have a beautiful brochure. We’re marketers. Wow!"

But hold it a minute. You know how they say, "Anyone can be a parent. Being a good parent is where the tricky part comes in." Well, a similar dynamic occurs with marketing. All you need to market your business is money. You don’t need an iota of creativity, smarts, experience, or savvy. No, all you need is a cheque book. And with that cheque book, you can buy ads up the kazoo, public relations that can make Donald Trump look like a recluse, brochures to fill warehouses, websites that would make Steven Spielberg envious.

…when the return on your investment isn’t there, there can be no arguing that your marketing sucks.

The problem is that if you are like most companies, all of that spending will result in a negative return on investment. Your marketing will cost you more profits than it brings in.  Why? Because in all likelihood, your marketing sucks.

…when the return on your investment isn’t there, there can be no arguing that your marketing sucks. This book tackles the problem head-on. It will help you

• Rid your company of spending camouflaged as marketing, and redirect your dollars to programs that deliver strong and measurable financial rewards. (If you get the Christmas glow too, that’s fine, but keep the ego-gratification stuff to yourself. We’re in pursuit of dollars here.)
• Stop overlooking simple but obvious ways of increasing sales and earnings. For example, you will be amazed to see how easy it is to sell additional products or services to existing clients. (We will be talking about that in detail later.)

To buy the book, click here

Persuasion architect guru Bryan Eisenburg of futurenow provides a nifty little online calculator which calculates your website or brochure effectiveness. (Click here). It looks at the we vs you words and determines how often you talk about yourself and how often you talk about the prospect.

Ref: It’s the Customer Stupid.

Making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely the key to profits

The international audit during 2008 of some 650 senior marketers revealed that making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely, was among the top strategies for realizing greater revenue and profitability from existing customers. Other leading strategies included addressing under-penetrated markets or new customer segments, as well as finding new ways to up-sell and cross-sell existing accounts.

The CMO study highlighted three key obstacles and deficiencies to overcome. This included:

• Lack of real-time data that captures across all customer touchpoints.
• Information not only being selectively gathered, but often inaccurate.
• Data restricted in its availability and use across the organization.

The core need for change  has been simmering for a while now. It started with that groundbreaking research by Romano and Broudy way back in 1999 who clearly established the benefits of  utilising client profiling and transactional data within marketing campaigns.

“It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers today are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” noted CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May.

Hospitality and Retail have the biggest growth opportunities

An earlier Retail Trends Report in 2005 came to surprisingly similar conclusions to the CMO one. It concluded that retailers that take a customer-driven approach to marketing will be able to withstand the competition for dwindling discretionary income, and still have a productive and profitable. The key to success for small retailers is to identify their best customers, find potential niches to cater to, get to know what motivates customers and then interact as individually as possible.

Retail Trends Report suggests that retailers creating personal experiences and communications are those most likely to come out ahead. Personalising the selling experience and marketing messages will help to level the playing field between small and larger retailers.

According to Gary Wright, of Wright Marketing who specialise in retail strategies, "Technology today puts personalised communications within the reach of every retailer, regardless of size. With new database and digital press technology, small retailers can affordably engage in one-on-one communications which has been proven to significantly increase a customer’s brand loyalty and lifetime value."

when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale

Wright encourages retailers to explore database programmes and digital production opportunities that will merge customer data with promotional materials in order to produce personalised and highly relevant materials at a fraction of traditional printing costs. His report indicates that when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale. When you add customer-specific information from a database to that correspondence, the potential increase jumps to 13 times.

Loyalty marketing guru Rafi Albo knows all this well. He’s shown us in his own retail sector numerous examples that gained a 15-35% response / voucher redemption rate. Winston Marsh also provided some handy tips for small retailers where he touched upon the benefits of using the internet and email in innovative ways. Now, in 2009, we can add in mobile TXT messaging and QR barcodes.

The opportunities here for all retailers, restaurants and the hospitality sectors are immense, but like any marketing strategy, expert planning and execution is the key to success.  Call us on 027 244 4884 to discuss how we can together devise a retail marketing plan to suit your industry or market sector.

If you want more information on the Routes to Revenue study go to  the CMO web site at http://www.cmocouncil.org/index.asp.

Kevin Trye

Considering that many of these campaigns are extremely costly, should we tolerate such blatant wastefulness in these tough times?

What to do?

For some background, below we’ve an excerpt from an insightful article by expert media consultant Harvey Hirsch reminding us on how we market today, what’s going horribly wrong and ideas on how to fix it.

“… This ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to marketing is so antiquated, so primitive, and generally so ineffective that when you add it up, it costs every company that employs it between $600 and $1,500 to generate a sales lead…

Americans [and NZer's] are assaulted over 4,000 times a day by media messages (that figure varies upward depending on who I consult with), and cutting through that clutter is all I am hired to do. And my first choice is always a 3-Dimensional, personalized and printed, full-color, emotionally charged, hand-assembled mailer, followed by a well-trained telemarketing person who sets up a live person-to-person 1:1 meeting. This is true multi-channel marketing…

Following these guidelines has allowed my clients to generate sales appointments for under $200 a piece. Not only have some of these programs generated over 50% response rates (we actually hit the 90% response rate recently), they have allowed our clients to trim non-productive marketing programs out of their budgets and actually plan for controlled growth, even in these economically uncertain times.

And here’s what I’ve learned.

The future of marketing is evolving into short run, personalized, well-targeted, “Coney Island” enhanced, B2B direct mail, versioned to go 3-deep into a prospective company with Information on Demand as an on-line back-up, handed off to a skilled telemarketing support team who’s only mission is to generate a face-to-face with a well-trained sales person. Using this system, not only can you baseline efficacy, you can actually predict expansion and growth.”

So, where to from here? A realisation that something has to change. Company owners and marketers need to investigate far better methodologies and strategies that make our messages more personalized and relevant to the recipient. To start demanding response rates that give a real return on investment, not just marketing for pure ‘branding’.

P.S. If your creative person or ad agency is struggling with these concepts (over 80% will initially oppose it), then send them along to one of our free seminars - Your business survival may depend upon it… Click here for details

It’s a tough time to be in advertising. Things don’t work like they used to. More media choices, more competition for the consumers gaze, time and attention. Just throwing more ‘out there’ doesn’t work like it did.

The Secret to Super-Effective Marketing with superb response rates is being able to migrate from this traditional mass market advertising model (i.e. ‘Spray and Hope’), to one that helps clients receive relevant, personalized one-to-one communication – Direct Mail pieces (paper or electronic) that are WANTED.

But adopting this new strategy brings many new challenges:

1. Most clients have not collected the right data, or any data, on their customers, and if they have it, they are reluctant to share it.
2. Companies that have successfully produced programs using new bells and whistles are not sharing their results for fear that their competition will learn how to catch up to them.
3. A majority of creative content providers (writers and designers at the agencies) are totally without any understanding of or how to write and design for variable, versioned pitches, let alone Web-print-to-Web programs, or database mining. (read this)
4. There is the commoditisation in the products offered by a majority of print providers, and how it affects content providers, like creative firms.

Although challenging, none of these issues are insurmountable. The blueprint for success, although not widely known, is there and well proven. And like all successful marketing or advertising campaigns, expert planning and execution is the key.

Today great success can come from building a connected community of followers, not just a brand – Finding products for your unique tribe of customers, instead of customers for your products.

sethgodin.mp3

Click on the audio mp3 icon to listen to Seth Godin

This is a short 5 min extract of an amazing gem-filled 50 minute interview with Seth by John Jantsch of DuctTapeMarketing where he introduces the concept of building a ‘Tribe’ to gain credibility and sales growth.

Source link

Bob Bly has been called "America’s Top Copywriter." He is author of The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Copy That Sells. In the podcast below, Bob shares more secrets on writing email and direct mail pieces that get amazing results.

Click on the audio graphic below. This is a 30 min interview.

Download

Interview HotSpots:

• What is direct response and direct mail?
• What’s the most effective format for direct mail?
• How to get response using direct mail.
• Writing effective copy for direct mail.
• What gets attention?

Other tips and trends we got from this podcast includes:

• In some markets, direct mail is on the rise again, whilst email marketing is falling
• Use more Postcard marketing, sending people online to PURLs
• Direct mail is super-effective for small business, selling locally.

What’s best, long or short copy?

Additional article extract, (June 09) by Bob Bly

The debate over long vs. short copy rages on, and a recent Copy Chasers column in BtoB magazine (6/8/09, p. 26) declares that — at least in B2B advertising — short copy is the winner. “In an age when 140-character messages seem to push the limits of the human attention span, it’s best to keep things as short and sweet as Twitter,” the column advises.

“Brevity is always welcome in B2B advertising, as decision-makers need to think fast. Advertisers that can concisely convey a message have a distinct advantage over those that force readers to slog through text.” On the surface, this seems sensible:

1. Businesspeople are busy, and don’t have a lot of time to read.
2. Therefore, they will respond better to short copy than to long copy.

And today, any product information they need is posted on the advertiser’s web site, the URL for which can be featured prominently in the ad. Yet in consumer advertising, there are still some advertisers who hit home runs with long-copy space ads. Two that come to mind are the Institute for Children’s Literature (”We’re looking for people to write children’s books”) and The Teaching Company (”The Great Courses”).

So … is BtoB right –and (at least for B2B) is long copy advertising dead at last?

Or can a long copy ad, in some cases, do a better selling job than Madison Avenue’s minimalist approach to body copy?

What say you?

Bobs blog link

It seems we’re all readable and somewhat predictable, especially once we’ve been profiled and diced up into a particular segment. The best marketers and copywriters know this and apply their secrets to get higher response rates to their ads or promotions, regardless of the media channel.

But it goes way beyond knowing the right words to put on paper, TV or in an email. It gets personal. We can literally be ‘read’ by our body language – Remember all the Allan Pease books, popular in the 70s?. Now it seems the lines on our face, expressions, voice inflection count too. There’s even a drama about it on TV3 called Lie to Me. All this knowledge comes in real handy for professional sales and marketing people.

One of the most interesting interviews I’ve found on the latest developments in this area was with John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, talking with the authors of Face Values. Click on the audio icon below to hear a short 4 min extract from that 30 min interview talking about the use of Mental Filters to boost marketing response rates.

The trick to all this I guess is how to have this type of information put into a CRM system as part of our marketing planning and management. But what’s an easy way to profile people then catalogue and use the data? Maybe we have to buy the book to find out.

Website Conversion Tricks

The World’s number one website conversion guru Bryan Eisenberg was also interviewed on this general topic, proving again that no matter what the media channel used (web, print), the same principles apply. Here’s his advice.

What a local expert on this? Check out Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics. who has his superb Training books, podcasts and CDs entitled Brain Audit

The biggest trend is making better use of email marketing, but in an expertly planned, super-coordinated manner. This means integration with other media channels as well as methods that better track and monitor what we’re doing. The biggest immediate benefit is undoubtedly the savings in postage. For many charities, this can be thousands saved per annum. There’s also postage savings possible by ensuring your database is optimised and certified for accuracy.

Enter Web 2.0

Better using of social media and viral marketing is the biggest trend and opportunity for charities. It’s a strategy often recommended by marketing guru Seth Godin who calls it the megaphone approach – Helping your best supporters promote your work.

Videos – When it comes to website strategies, mini videos should play a big part too, doing a better job of engaging people. Done well, it generates a strong emotional, giving response.

Today it’s relatively easy to do and when part of a our personalised direct mail, email and purl landing page campaign, it can be really effective in drawing in new supporters and donations.

I’ve pointed out previously that while you might spend days, even weeks, crafting a direct mail message, recipients will spend just seconds deciding whether it’s worth their attention.

Here’s a video from Pitney Bowes illustrating this simple idea.

Let me first say that I disagree with the comment that a plain envelope is “boring.” The fact is, a plain envelope, especially one that looks personal, is a great way to get people to actually open the envelope and look at what’s inside.

Most of the other comments are worthy of consideration. For example, you have to get the recipient name and address right. Nothing will kill a mailer faster than addressing it to the wrong person. You must clean your list before you mail. And please remember to make sure you’re sending just one mailer to a home address unless you intend otherwise. I’ve been seeing a lot of waste recently with the same mailing arriving for various spellings of my name and my wife’s name.

Above is an excerpt from the DirectCreative Blog

Note this particular vendor video also show us how much more advanced mailers are in the US market. More innovative personalisation plus a trans-promotional mailer (the credit card bill), that we don’t see down here.

Note that most of the items shown in this video would not comply with the local NZ Post layout guidelines, allowing you to obtain the discounted postal rate. Call  for details or if you want to try these more innovative ‘high response’ techniques in your next direct marketing campaign or billing mailout.

Kevin Trye, ph 0226301625

“If you can find bread, buy it!” My friend’s advice seemed almost comical as we sipped tea and enjoyed scones, strawberry jam, and cream on a fine spring day in 1990 in Bristol, England.

But he’d already been where I was headed: an earthquake relief effort in Leninakan (now Kumayry), Armenia. And he was right. Amidst the devastation, when I did manage to find a loaf of bread in a rundown store, I bought it without hesitation. It was the fourth shop I’d tried. It was the last loaf on the shelf, the bag was split, and some of the pieces had spilled out. But it was the only bread available, so I scooped up the pieces and paid for it.

Back home in England some months later, my first visit to the local supermarket to buy some staples was a bewildering experience. An entire aisle was crammed with bread, cakes, confections, and pastries, not to mention people squeezing and inspecting the packaging to check freshness, sell-by date, ingredients, and prices.

“Does anyone really need so many choices,” I thought, “when all you want is a loaf of bread?” And that brings us to the paradox of choice.

More Choice, Fewer Sales

You probably want to offer your customers as many choices as possible. But too many choices can be overwhelming, confusing, or just plain off-putting. And overwhelmed, confused, or off-put customers may spend their money elsewhere.

In an oft-cited study from Columbia University, a display of jams and preserves was set up at a gourmet food shop. On Day 1 of the test, the researchers displayed six flavors. On Day 2, they displayed 30. The display of 30 flavors attracted more attention than the smaller display. But – and here’s the shocker – shoppers were only one-tenth as likely to make a purchase when faced with the 30 choices.

The results of this study support other studies and examples I’ve come across in business and my personal life.

When faced with too many options, people become paralyzed by “analysis paralysis.”

Just recently, for instance, while shopping online for digital picture frames, the Philips website was so confusing it stopped me dead in my tracks. I shifted over to Kodak’s to find and buy what I was looking for. (That’s a $250 sale that Philips lost.)

Think back to the last time you went car shopping – wading glassy-eyed through model after model and feature after feature. A decision that could have been made in minutes probably took weeks.

And consider the plight of a first-timer perusing the Starbucks menu and trying to make a decision. (Milk, alone, comes four ways – regular, low-fat, no-fat, and soy.) I’m guessing most of them give up and say, “Er, um – just give me a plain coffee.”

Choice. Way too much choice.

Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less offers up more examples and demonstrates further how too much choice can be a bad thing.

Let’s say you have an online business. You want to give your site visitors enough information about what you’re selling to make it possible for them to make a decision, but you do not want to give them so much that their eyes “glaze over” and they leave without buying. So how much is enough?

Here are three suggestions that have worked well for my clients.

• Offer only one version of your product – which means you’re giving people two choices: Take it or leave it.

• Give them three options. That gives you three ways to target your prospects. More than that might be confusing.

• Offer only one product, but give your prospects an upsell or add-on option. (”Buying the pen? How about a nice leather-bound notebook for only $10 extra?”)

If you must offer multiple products or options, at least make it easy for your customers to comparison shop. The Honda website, for example, allows you to compare the features of their vehicles against those of other Honda models… and even against similar vehicles from other companies.

You could also allow your customers to narrow down the number of products displayed by having them select characteristics that are important to them (color, size, price, etc.). AT&T does an excellent job of this in the wireless-phones section of its website. When I selected PDA + International, my choices were reduced only to products that suited my needs.

More Important Than Choice

Regardless of how many options you offer people for what to buy, it is imperative to give them only one clear choice on how to take the next step and make the purchase.

Confusing or overwhelming a customer at this point will translate into fewer sales for your business.

Not sure how to present that step? My recommendation is to do a series of simple A/B split tests, where you match two possibilities against each other. Or you can use multivariate testing to see how different combinations of elements impact response. In a shopping cart checkout process, for example, this could include placement of text, images, buttons, security logos, padlocks, and confidence items like guarantees and company contact details. Over time, the multivariate test will indicate which combination of elements will likely give you the best conversion rate – the highest number of people performing the specific action you want them to take: buying your product.

It may sound strange… but offering your customers fewer choices can result in more sales. It is true that you must provide enough information for “fact-finder” types. But even fact finders, once they’ve made up their minds, want an unfettered decision and action process.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.