MarketingSherpa Blog

Marketers spent more than $419 million on promotional magnets last year, according to the Promotional Products Association International.

If you’re a niche ecommerce site, I urge you to consider tossing a magnet with your URL and telephone number into all your fulfillment packaging.

Magnets cost very little per piece — as low as a few cents. Yet, the impact can be tremendous. Unless you’re a household name website, past customers probably forget your brand name and URL when they want to buy again (or tell a friend about you) a few months later.

Like many people, I won’t sign up for email from a site I order from only occasionally — even if I’m a very satisfied customer. I don’t want more email from a site I intend to visit only rarely.

So, when I need to reorder, I’ll surf a search engine, hoping to trip over you again. That’s bad news because PPC clicks can easily cost more than a magnet, and I’m as likely to find a competitor’s site as your site.

There’s one specialist ecommerce site I always go to directly. Durham’s Bee Farm routinely tosses a promotional magnet featuring their logo, URL and phone number into all of their fulfillment packages.

When I need to re-order from them, I just run to the kitchen, grab the magnet from the fridge and type in the URL. I’ve ordered from them at least six times in the past three years, which is five more times than I’ve ever remembered any other niche ecommerce site’s name or URL.

The other nice thing about using magnets as a promotional item is that they have a higher perceived value than their actual cost. In my family, we all feel guilty about throwing a “useful” item away. Which means we now have six Durham’s magnets lined up in a stripe running across the door of the fridge. No doubt we’ll have to start a second row soon.

Have you noticed? Some marketers and email publishers are testing shorter and shorter subject lines.

In the old days, we’d all try to fit in as many descriptive words as possible to increase the chances the inbox skimmer’s eye would land on a word that delighted it, and you’d grab the open. Not any more.

Now people’s inboxes are so cluttered with stuff that the teeny-tiny subject line can be best of all.

It’s about white space. When you’re skimming down a list of wordy subject lines, your eyes are trying to deal with a lot of visual clutter. Text, text, text, text.

Then, oooh! A bit of restful white space.

A one-, two- or three short-word subject line leaves space at the end. White space is eye candy in a crowded screen. Your eye dives in there automatically.

Which is why the various presidential candidates’ email campaigns have been relying, for the most part, on very short subject lines, indeed. A sampler (one subject line per line):

Special Request
The crowds
MyPA
Yes, they can

One of the reasons I started noticing this trend — aside from the fact that it’s glaring to the email-marketing-obsessed like me — is at Sherpa we routinely review our own subject line success rates. I’ll get a list of all emails sent for 3-6 months for one of our weekly newsletters (we publish nine on various marketing niches altogether.) Then, I’ll skim down the subject lines, looking at open and click rates. Clicks are more important, of course.

The point is to look for trends. Is anything working in particular? Is anything really not working anymore? What tweak should we test?

The biggest standout from my last in-house subject line review was that newsletter issues with just one-two word subject lines invariably got better open rates. Maybe it’s an element of the unusual. Or maybe it’s that white space. I don’t know. What I do know is that for now it works.

And, it’s something you should be testing, too.

Got data? Let us know.

The dollar is so low right now that people outside of America are viewing us as one vast discount store. We’re the Wal-Mart for the rest of the developed world. For example, hordes of European tourists are buying European antiques more cheaply in Manhattan than they can in Europe.

That’s great news for the US tourism industry as well as for US-based companies that offer ecommerce shipping overseas. It’s also great for B-to-B companies that can offer products and services globally.

Plus, with the Internet, marketing internationally is so much cheaper and easier than it ever was in history. Just don’t make two big mistakes:

-> Mistake #1. Relying on English

Communicating in the English-language alone is rude, arrogant and costs you responses. Just because many of your prospects may speak English as a second (or third) language, doesn’t mean they want to. Be polite. Translate.

Pamela Jacobs, IBM’s Manager of Developer Communications, has been testing English-language vs. native-language emails for countries ranging from Brazil to Russia for several years now.

In every single case, sending the email in the recipient’s native tongue increased clickthrough rates — often by double or even nearly triple. In Poland, for example, English-language emails got a 4.24% response rate, while Polish-language offers had a 17.43% response rate.

-> Mistake #2. Using an American Translation Firm

Actually, this mistake is really using one central translation form in any one country at all. Unless the people doing the translators are all native-speakers in the language they’re translating and they have enough education/understanding to convey your message properly (not a given), the translations will be enough “off” to hurt response.

Often you need to hire regionally as well — for example, Mexican Spanish and Spain’s Spanish may require separate translations just as US English and British English often do!

If you’re streaming audio on your site, podcast, video or ad, you’ll definitely need a regional native speaker. For example, French speakers from Paris wince when they hear a Montreal accent, as do Brazilians when they hear a citizen of Lisbon talking.

Lastly, no, don’t even consider using translation software. I don’t care how great the programmers say it is. It isn’t. Not for marketing copy.

Are you an internationally-experienced US marketer? I’ve asked MarketingSherpa’s research and reporting team to start work on a series of special reports focusing on ways US companies can market both to incoming foreign tourists and also to citizens and businesses in other countries.

If you would like to participate as a source and share advice and lessons learned with your fellow readers, please give us a ping!

If I had to vote for any of the three candidates based solely on their email marketing prowess, the winner would be … Hillary. (Yes, I was surprised.) Here’s why and what lessons we could all consider applying to our own email programs:

Opt-in splash pages:
Marketers of America, you should check out the three candidates’ splash pages for inspiration right away. I’ve hotlinked to screenshots of all three below for your easy reference. Very, very few non-political sites are aggressive enough in asking for email signup from fans and supporters. If you are hiding your email checkbox in a sidebar or checkout process, you’re losing invaluable names.

In these recessionary times, that’s appalling. More new opt-ins from your site this week equals more revenues this year. (I know; I’m issuing a memo about this to Sherpa’s own in-house marketing team immediately.) Although a splash page dedicated to nothing but email sign-up may be overkill for your brand, not to mention annoying visitors, you certainly can make email sign-up more prominent.

The presidential opt-in winner: Hillary. Her design is clean and cheerful; it includes a branding tagline and asks for your zip code and name, so that she could personalize future messages. Barack’s is a close second, although the warm-fuzzy family snapshot seems too close to old-fashioned political imagery for his brand’s comfort. What’s he going to do next — kiss a baby?

I don’t know what John McCain’s email team is thinking. His depressing black and grey splash page doesn’t have any tagline or brand message — just “McCain” plus a giant red Donate button. Um, that’s sort of like asking for a kiss before the date begins. Lower down, there’s an email sign-up, but only email is asked for. No name, no zip code. So, I guess he’s not planning to personalize messages in any way.

Welcomes:
Actually, I don’t know what John McCain is planning to do with my email because, as of yet, I have not received a single thing from his campaign. Yes, I checked my spam folder just in case — nada, not even an automated welcome message.

Neither Barack nor Hillary sent me an automated Welcome; but, they did send me other emails within 24 hours that worked just as well.

Visitor Query Replies:
In addition to opting in for email at their splash pages, I used all three candidates’ website forms to ask them about their stance on Kosovo’s declared independence. In each case, I identified myself as an American blogger who writes about Serbia (which, if you’ve read my past blogs, you know is true.)

Again, John McCain’s campaign did not deign to reply. However, both Barack and Hillary’s campaigns sent notes back within 24 hours. Kosovo is clearly not a big issue in the US (aside from my own household), so neither had an answer to my question. Instead, both sent a form letter that said they were too busy to reply to specific questions right now, but here were some handy links for other info and donations.

Lesson – When was the last time you tested your own site’s Contact Us forms with a query using an at-home email address to see how quickly anyone responded — or whether they answered at all? Sadly, John McCain’s MIA response is pretty normal. Also, have you added a checkbox or other query to your contact forms asking if the respondent blogs? This might help you grow your database of fan bloggers plus triage site queries, so that bloggers get faster response than less-possibly-influential people do.

Newsletters:
I’ve only gotten one news email from Barack in my two weeks of waiting on candidates. Sadly, from a design standpoint, it uses worst practices. The typeface is tiny and grey instead of black, plus the width of text is far wider than 60 characters per line. This means it’s hard to read for anyone who is under 14 or over 40 years old. I see this mistake in a lot of B-to-B newsletters. Check out your typeface — is it readable?

Special Offers:
I don’t know which is worse, getting absolutely nothing from John McCain or having my in-box pounded by Barack’s team. Come on, guys — I liked the idea behind your ‘Dinner with Barack’ invite the first time I got it, but no voter wants to be inundated with the same offer three times in four days! So, you changed out the creative; it’s still too much. Plus, again, please tell your designer that text lines wider than 60-65 characters are unreadable.

Hillary’s campaign definitely won this round with their one-time invitation “from” Chelsea to be her mom’s personal guest at the upcoming Elton John NYC concert. The sweeps idea is the same as Barack’s dinner — if you donate now, your name will be tossed into a hat, and a handful of lucky donors will win.

In this age of celebrity, more brands should be running similar email campaigns, offering personal meetings with stars to sweeps winners. (I think this could even work for B-to-B brands where you have an exec who’s a bit of a star in your niche market.) If you’re considering it, my favorite individual email creative is the video message in Barack’s fourth message. See the link to a sample below.

Samples & Links Related to this Blog:

Samples of emails received and splash pages from candidates:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/prescandidate/study.html

Candidate Landing Pages:
http://www.barackobama.com/
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/splash/
http://www.johnmccain.com/landing/?sid=gorganic

The “should all content be free?” bandwagon has come around again, this time kick started by a Wired magazine cover article based on a forthcoming book by editor Chris Anderson.

The timing is kinda weird. Back when this idea was initially red-hot, the economy was, too. That way, happily bedazzled advertisers would foot the bill for all that content. The last time the economy and ad revenues were tanking in 2001-2002, however, paid content was all the rage. Otherwise, much more of the Web would have gone out of business….

If you are wondering what the reality is beneath the hype, here’s what I’ve learned from Sherpa Case Studies and personal experience leading a partly free/partly paid content company all these years:

#1. Ad-based content nearly inevitably gets crappy.

Media companies have been fighting this battle for eons. Their primary customers are the advertisers. Advertisers frequently want some type of control over the content they sponsor and, even when advertisers don’t push for changes, media companies pro-actively water down content for fear of offending sponsors. (It’s middle-management syndrome; you never risk anything that might upset the CEO even when the CEO, if asked, might approve more radical things than you imagine.)

Big trade shows have a similar problem – exhibitors nearly always push for speaking gigs and, if booth sales exceed ticket revenues, show programmers cave in. Which is why you hear so many sales pitches from show podiums instead of useful content.

Although they’re not reacting directly to advertiser pressure, content sites supported by Google AdSense revenues now often change the way they write headlines and even the types of stories and content they post to get more search traffic and then clicks on more expensive keywords. They’re serving the ‘bots more than they serve their readers.

So, free or partly free content winds up being less valuable to the consumer. Luckily, this truth helps the little-known-but-booming, *multi-billion* dollar subscription industry. More than 1,000 Web sites, including the massive Ancestry.com, non-profit ConsumerReports.org and tiny but influential eRobertParker.com, make most or all of their revenues through quality content dedicated to serving their subscribers’ needs instead of advertisers’. (If you’d like to learn more about the subscription industry, see link below.)

#2. Remove Registration Barriers to “Free” Content Online

Countless marketers have told me: “Our prospects understand that giving their contact information is the price they should pay for free access to our wonderful content.” Yeah, well, not always.

Actually, more often, the marketer is paying a price for that registration barrier. You are paying 90% or more for your possible audience, viral pass-alongs, marketplace education, and brand growth in exchange for the contact information of 10% or less of the prospects who are interested in your content. Oh, and of those 10% who do hand over that “price” for your content, roughly 50% will cheat you in some way with a false name, phone number or email address.

You’re also paying for those “leads” with 100% off your possible search engine spider visits to that content (spiders don’t fill out registration forms) and any resulting SEO traffic the related search rankings could have given your content.

Example: Consultant and professional speaker David Meerman Scott offers a ‘New Rules of PR’ eBook as a direct PDF download at his site without requiring registration of any kind. As a result, the eBook has been downloaded more than 250,000 times, making it one of the most read business white papers in history. The ultimate impact on David’s business has been very cash-flow positive.

#3. If you’re offering free content as a promotional exercise, don’t just do it virtually

Easy come, easy go. People don’t take things they get for free as seriously as they take things they pay for; it’s more disposable content. People also don’t remember online content or PDF content (anything they’ve only seen on a PC screen, perhaps fleetingly, for very long.

To be remembered, your content has to re-engage the consumer multiple times and, preferably, engage more physical senses than virtual content can alone. Consider offering your free content users the chance to get a hard copy (printed copy of a catalog or white paper, or a DVD of a video) of your “free” content. You may be surprised at how many prospects leap at the chance and at how well they ultimately convert into becoming paid customers for your real product or services.

Plus, offering people a mailed copy gives you a much better excuse for soliciting name and address. If your prospect wants the electronic version only, then they can get it without registering. But if they want the convenience and value of a printed version, they will certainly fill out a form for you and maybe even pay a couple of bucks for shipping and handling.

#4. “New” Can Beat “Free”

Since the 1930s, advertising copywriters have known a rule: “Free” is one of the most powerful words in advertising. But the word “New” can often work better for you. Why? “New” is nearly as powerful a response generator and it has the added benefit of not attracting that freebie-seeking demographic who’ll never pay for anything. Tire kickers don’t do anyone’s business any good – only qualified prospects do.
The word “Exclusive” can sometimes work as well as “New” too. So, your options are not totally limited.

So, those are my lessons. Hope they help you. Please write in and let me know what your free content lessons are too. We’re all in this “revolution” together!

Useful Related Links to this Blog:

Wired Magazine Free Article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit – a MarketingSherpa closed-door event now in its 8th year, held every may in NYC for top executives at Subscription Web sites and software businesses. For agenda and dates:
http://www.sherpastore.com/SellingSubscriptions2008.html?1150

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of PR ebook download page
http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/products_ebooks.htm

I’ve been surfing through Sherpa Case Studies and interviews from the 2001-02 era. It was, we thought at the time, the Big Downturn. It was dark, stormy, scary. Several marketers lost their jobs.

Now, of course, we’re in a new recession sooner than expected (aren’t these things supposed to occur only every 15-20 years?)

So, what worked last time that we can use to beat the odds this time around?

My favorite tactic is opt-in checkbox barters (also known as co-registration barters). I’m pretty sure Peter Cobb, head of marketing over at eBags, invented this idea. If he didn’t, he was near to the first. Then, loads of other marketers, including USA Today and even us at MarketingSherpa, jumped on the bandwagon.

It was very simple but effective:

You run a free email opt-in promo at your site. Peter ran a sweeps promo to win a trip plus eBags luggage; other marketers have offered anything from newsletters to discount coupons to ebooks.

The promo entry form included a checkbox to opt in for email promos from eBags. Then, Peter partnered with other noncompetitive marketers who targeted his same marketplace of heavy travelers. It was a true partnership — nobody paid anybody anything. They just agreed to barter opt-in checkboxes.

Peter would add another checkbox under his own on his promo; the second checkbox would offer emails from his partner. Then, his partner would stick a “get emailed sales offers from eBags” checkbox on their own site’s email registration forms.

Sometimes, they would even borrow the sweeps promo from Peter and just run that on their site, collecting names for both brands. (It made things easy when the Web department was too backed up to create a new promo.)

The most important factor to make this type of barter work is to be ready on your end with a well-crafted “Welcome” email message to send to all the new names pronto – hopefully within seconds or minutes of their signup, even if it took place on a different site than your own. The quicker you can acknowledge and begin to interact with them, the more valuable that name will be for you.

Even if you don’t know any of the marketers at a possible partner personally, you’d be surprised how friendly and open many can be to these sorts of partnerships. I’ve called plenty of complete strangers in my time, saying “I’m the marketer from X Brand, and I was wondering if you’d ever possibly consider a marketing barter that could get us both more email names.”

Partnership cold calling is absolutely terrifying the first few times you do it, but quite easy after a while. Some people will turn you down, some will become your new best friends. LinkedIn and the MarketingSherpa Facebook Group are great places to begin looking for the right people to connect with.

The key is, no money changes hands. You are both trying to help each other with a co-promotion — it’s a win, win.

If you’ve done a marketing barter of any type that worked out well for you, let me know. I’m definitely going to be covering this topic more in future columns and would love to hotlink to you!

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. If you are a copywriter writing a dollars off offer, do not omit the cents.

Tacking on cents makes the savings seem bigger. Take a look:
(a) Save $100
(b) Save $100.00

Which would you go for?

Obviously, when you’re talking about what something will cost, generally you should do the reverse and omit the cents. (Unless the price is so low that the retailer in question needs those cents to turn a reasonable profit, in which case test it.)

Adding cents to savings may seem like nitpicking — but it’s those little nitpicky copy tweaks that can sometimes make the difference between an OK response rate and a great response rate.

Got any copywriting pet peeves of your own that you wish marketers would stop doing? Post them below and help me educate the world. 🙂

OK, so you’re working on a landing page, and you’ve got a lot of information to get across but you know people online just don’t read paragraph text. They skim, they scan, they skip around.

That’s why after a quick line or two of intro, you dive straight to bullet-point list.

But that only lasts 3-5 lines. And you can’t follow a bullet-point list with another bullet-point list. You have to go to paragraph format again, which won’t be read nearly as much. In fact, according to eyetracking tests, the way most people read paragraphs online is a bit like this (“word” means they read it; “blah” means it’s unnoticed.)

WORD WORD WORD word blah blah
WORD Word blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah word

How can you get more words read? Enter the ellipsis.

The art of getting a paragraph — or a long sentence — read is all about catching the eye. An ellipsis gives you five glorious letter-free spaces in the middle of the paragraph to grab the eye with. An example:

Acme’s widget helps you make more money … lower your costs … impress your boss … and keep your career going strong.

Can you see how using a series of ellipses is a bit like using a bullet point list?

You can make a series of points in a row and catch the eye for each of them. Depending on the situation, you can use this trick several times in one piece of copy. I’ve actually seen direct mail letters and long-copy landing pages where ellipses are scattered with a liberal hand throughout, keeping that eye entertained.

Got a copywriting tip of your own? Share it with Sherpa readers by posting a comment below…

For marketing-lead companies, a recession can be seen as a golden opportunity. Your competitors are slashing their budgets, pulling back on brand marketing in particular.

At the same time, ad costs are dropping. Media companies, used to the fat of good times, slash prices and extend special offers (i.e., get three ezine ads tossed free in with every 12x drive-time radio spot) to keep their bookings stable.

It’s the perfect time to build market share at lower cost. When the economy comes out of its funk, your bigger slice of the market pie grows more profitable daily.

If your CEO doesn’t see a recession as an advertising-buying bonanza, try explaining it to him or her with a stock market metaphor. To succeed on Wall Street, you buy as much of blue-chip stocks as you can when their prices are unusually low. Then, when prices invariably rise again someday, you’re suddenly wealthy.

2008 could be your brand’s year to “buy low” for future wealth. How can you know if this will work for you? Four qualifiers:

– If you work for a public company — or one that’s focused solely on revenues for this particular quarter, future thinking be damned — then this strategy is not for you.

– If your lead generation or direct sales are driven heavily by search PPC advertising, expanding your other brand marketing in a recession can help raise PPC results by up to 40%. People recognize your brand, so they are more likely to click on your ad and more likely to convert. Your branding investment pays off both now and in the future.

– If you are in a highly competitive field, jostling with dozens or even hundreds of competitors, a recession can be a golden opportunity to rise to the top of the pack. Prospects can probably only remember and consider three to five brands in your niche. If you advertise heavily now when it’s getting cheaper every day, you may wind up being one of those three to five brands who automatically make everyone’s shortlist for years to come.

– If you are a new brand or start-up, a recession can provide unusually fertile marketing ground. While the major brands cut back on their ad presence to ride the storm out, you can make a bigger launch impression on the marketplace than you would in good times when too many brands are fighting for prospect’s attention. Have you ever wondered how so many brands, such as Apple’s iPod, Wikipedia, Sirius Satellite Radio and, yes, MarketingSherpa, could be successful when they launched during bad recessions or depressions?

Success, as with every marketing tactic, starts with initial measurements. You need to know three things about your brand … and be able to measure them on an ongoing basis to prove your worth to the CEO and management:

#1. Market share
What’s your slice of the pie? Where do you stand in relation to other brands in terms of accounts or sales within the market? What’s the total market size currently? How about the projected market size for three years? If your marketing efforts can win a percentage point of share, how much will that be worth to the bottom line?

You may want to break this out by market segment. Data is available from industry associations, industry analysts and researchers, and via surveys conducted by media. Start with a baseline measurement now and update quarterly if possible, annually at least.

#2. Brand perception
How well known is your brand name now? Do prospects recognize it? Do they think of it as being “The best”? Do your PPC ads do better with your brand name in the copy or URL or better with it removed?

Data is available via third party surveys — talk to your marketing partners (perhaps other brands who target the same segments for complimentary products) to see if they’ll run a survey for you if you run a survey for them. Media and research firms will also run surveys if you ask (and pay.) Consider measuring every quarter or six months, depending on how heavy your branding investment is and how much your management team need to see “pay off” via results data.

#3. Media costs
In a recession, media rate cards may not change much officially, but there’s often a lot more room for negotiation. Start your research by gathering the rate cards, or estimated costs, for all relevant media buys for your segments now including list rental, print ads, exhibit booths, radio, TV, white paper syndication, etc. Your goal is to establish a baseline.

Then as you negotiate media buys through the next year, report on real-life costs per impression versus official or old costs. This way you can show the management team that you are getting more for your money from the same marketing dollar.

In the end, even if your brand’s overall sales and/or profits are not growing as quickly as they used to, the marketing department can look like heroes because they are increasing market share and brand value — setting up the company to be a huge winner in better times to come — all while saving money.

You can be a recession rock star.

I’m not going to name brand names, but you guys should know who you are. You are Western brands being marketed overseas. And you ought to be auditing your media buys far more carefully.

In Nepal, a country where black hair is so universal as to make any other color seem freakish, I saw repeated shampoo commercials from Western brands prominently featuring blondes. After a few weeks there, even I was staring at the screen with the natives thinking, “Wow, that’s a weird hair color,” instead of, “What great shampoo that must be.”

Then, this month on my way back to the States for Sherpa’s Email Summit on Feb 24-26 in Miami, I stopped off in Croatia for a visit with my in-laws.

Croatia used to be part of the former Yugoslavia, and there is at least one black woman living here. I know this because I saw her on the evening news last night. She was being interviewed as an oddity — as in, “Wow, there’s an actual black person living here, and, golly, she even speaks pretty good Croatian!” As a result I had to endure a lot of ribbing about the lousy quality of my own Croatian speaking skills. …

But, what struck me the most was that on Croatian TV, I’ve routinely seen American-produced ads marketing cosmetics specifically for black women. Surely they’re not all targeting this lone consumer?

Thing is, there’s loads and loads of opportunity for Western products in the global market. I’ve spent much of the last year meeting members of the eager new middle classes in Asia and formerly communist Europe. They’ve just gotten credit cards; they’re buying their first new cars; they’re investing for the first time on local stock markets; and they like to show off their flashy cell phones with snazzy, new ringtones. B-to-B markets are also booming — especially for advice on how to run a business.

Business may be lousy at home, but if you market fast food (especially Mexican), fancy driving gloves and other show-off-able driving accessories, ASP-based business software or cheap, modern-styled furnishings for tiny condos, the Eastern European and Asian worlds could be your oyster.

Just stop blowing your budget on ill-targeted media buys.