Email Marketing Campaigns share a lot similar with traditional mail order direct marketing.

The number 1 criteria for a high converting direct marketing campaign is list selection.

No matter how pretty your creative.  No matter how compelling your sales offer.  No matter how topical your message to the needs and concerns of your target market… the bottom line reality is…

If the list you are mailing to does not consist of precisely the right target audience, then your conversion rates will be low.

This requires customer profiling, data cleaning and suppression… the whole 9 yards.

With a highly targetted email list the rest is a matter of creative execution.

And having beat an advertising agency 610% on its control mailing piece for its largest client, I have 3 tips to share about creative execution.

Tip Number 1:  Don't think of it as 'creative', think of it as 'connecting'.

Your task is to create a 'market to message match'.  I.e.  A suitable message that matches the thoughts and needs of the target audience.  As such, it doesn't have to be colourful, pretty, curiosity building, loud, big, branded, or any other such thing.

What it needs to be is suitable to the target market.

My 610% win at the agency was done with plain text looking long-copy and only a single picture near the bottom of the email.   (See my copy on my Email Marketing page).

Tip Number 2: Test, Test, and Test some more.

In fact, every single mailing you send out should ideally be a split test.  Even just testing different subject lines to monitor differences in open rates is a truly excellent start to email marketing campaign testing.

Tip Number 3:  Sequencing.

Don't just mail once and expect a flood of sales.  In fact, often times the first few mailings to a list should not be a product offer of any kind at all.  First you need to build anticipation and high perceived value in your offering.  You also need to build credibility and trust… establish a relationship with the audience.  Even interact with the audience by doing surveys or inviting people to comment on a blog or just to reply to your email with their thoughts or questions.  Ferret out the top objections that your audience may have to your product offering.  Gather market intelligence and prospect insight as part of your early email marketing campaign sequence.

Once you have engaged your audience, identified objections, built credibility, and more… then you are ready for the launch sequence of your product.  Take away offers. Scarcity. Bonuses.

Email marketing campaigns are far more involved than cutesy pictures with short copy.  They are a replacement of a face to face sales interaction.  Respect your audiences intelligence and time.  Put your self in their place and ask what would I want to know about this product that would make we buy it.

I hope that helps your in-house team develop more winning email marketing campaigns.  Read more about Email Marketing on my main email marketing page.

Addition: Following from this post I have begun developing a more instructive Email Marketing Campaing page.

The sales funnel

prospects > lead > qualify > nurture > propose > close > service > repeat

The marketing function works on inquiry generation, lead qualification, and sales opportunity development… achieved through developing your Customer Centre (CC) with components such as:

1. Customer Contact Preferences
2. Grading Customers - identifying target segments
3. Creating a Customer Contact Plan - positioning, what criticial success factors need to be covered to capture your high worth target prospects?
4. Marketing and Sales Communication Plan - Message sequencing and inquiry capture devices to generate a new qualified prospect list (lead qualification) through your marketing communications

Successful implementation involves:

1. Involving the sales force - those on the front line probably know the prospect best
2. Determining objectives - cost per lead, quality vs quantitiy of leads, etc.
3. Developing the promotion strategy - read-map of steps required for accomplishing the objectives
4. Developing the creative strategy -
5. Developing the media strategy
6. Planning capacity and lead flow
7. Developing the follow-up strategy
8. Measuring results after the promotion has begun

Every marketing communication should have 3 focuses:

1. To provide value to the reader
2. To help bond them to the source (i.e. your client or company)
3. And thirdly, to sell.

Yes, selling comes third… and here's why:

Think about it, if your focus is to sell, then you may be too aggressive.

But by focussing on providing value and building a trusted relationship, you actually achieve the sale as and when the prospect is ready.

If every marketing communication is a sales pitch, but your prospect doesn’t yet hold your spokesperson with enough credibility and authority… or if the prospect is simply not ready to place their order just yet for whatever reason… then constant sales pitches will bore, pester, and turn them off.

By providing value and establishing a good relationship, your prospect will keep reading your marketing communications until they are at the right point in their purchase cycle to want and need your direct sales pitch.  At which point, of course… let ‘em have it.

The book 'Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy' defines customer equity as 'the total discounted lifestime value of all of an organizations customers'.

Three drivers of customer equityare identified:

• Value equity - perceptions of an organizations quality, price and convenience.  These perceptions are cognitive, objective, and rational
• Brand equity - Emotional, subjective and sometimes irrational perceptions of image, quality, prestige, or other emotional forms of desirability.
• Retention equity - Recent of purchase as positively effecting favorable brand loyalty

Customers must become an element of the organizations summary of key performance indicators:

Track profit goals for various customer segments, and clearly differentiate customer groups based on value.

• Most valuable customers (MVCs) - depending on how you define 'valuable'
• Most Growable Customers (MGCs) - Niche areas that have high growth potential
• Most Costly Customers (MCCs) - removed from further promotional activities

With my one hundred year background experience taken from studying the history of direct response advertising (mail order, direct mail, and print advertising)…my position on 'creative' advertising is this:

Combining an accurate well researched copy platform with the right mix of campaign execution, is far different from being ‘creative’.

This is vitally important to me as a direct marketer and copywriter.

‘Creative’ agencies often miss the potency and necessity of tying the product with the markets state of awareness (needs/wants) and their level of sophistication (how defined the offer is, how many times the prospect has been exposed to it, or similar offers from competitors).

You might be interested to know that David Ogilvy quoted Rosser Reeves as saying ‘creativity is the most dangerous word in advertising’.  Why? Because it is equally important for innovative marketing success as it is a cause for possible marketing failure.

Advertising and marketing must suitably match the buying process of the target market.

It is from that direct response copywriting perspective that allowed me the 610% response increase (1900% ROI) at an Ad Agency - after which the Marketing Director had me prepare copywriting training for her staff.

Read more about the distinction between 'creating' and 'connecting' in marketing.

Traditional positioning is done via 2 competing forces

1. Price
2. Uniqueness

Uniqueness relates to the degree of differentiation, which can be divided into 2 main areas:

• Merchandise
• Support

And produces the following possibilities:

• An offer differentiated by both merchandise and support can be classified as a system
• Undifferentiated by both merchandise and support then the offer is a commodity (common, like bread and milk)
• Differentiated by merchandise but not by support and the offer is a product
• Differentiated by support but not by merchandise and the offer is a service

This produces a declining scale of uniqueness: System > Product or Service > Commodity

And the customer is the final judge and jurer on this matter.

If your customer does not appreciate the way in which you are differentiated, if he or she does not see your offer as significantly, substantially unique from your competitors, then really you are not differentiated, and are simply offering a commodity.  Because the customer will see no special value in your offer over your competitors offer in terms of merchandise or support.

In which case you are probably to compete on price, unless you can find a genuine way to differentiate your offer in the minds of your prospect.  This is ‘brand/product positioning’.

Methods of Differentiation

There are 2 ways to differentiate merchandise:

1. By content (tangible attributes) or
2. By image (perceived attributes).

There are 2 ways to differentiate support:

1. By expertise (functional competence of the offer) or
2. By personalisation (flexibility in terms of customisation)

For a deeper approach to Positioning see the Strategic Busines Units page.

My Financial Services client had a customer list of 30,000 names for a back-end (selling to existing customers) promotion.

This particular promotion was loans for homeowners.  The average size loan was £10,000.

Up to that point they had been sending a similar email with no personalisation or compelling appeal that a good direct response copywriter revels in.  So I saw an opportunity for a big increase in ROI on this campaign.

Here's how it turned out…

• list 30k
• average order 10k
• expected response 0.05% = 15
• expected conversion of that 3% = 0 new customers
• Marketing costs = £2,000

They got a customer once every several months from that particular promotion.  Remember, these are people that had taken a substantial loan in the past few years already.

For our test with my long copy against the agencies creative we split the list.

15k names at 0.05% is 8 projected leads from their creative.

How much better could I do?

15k names on my long copy produced a response of 61 leads, which was a 0.4% response off the list.  The existing creative had a response of 10 leads (near enough their projected 8.

This meant a 610% increase in response (My 61 against there 10). That was huge for the client, who then wanted me to train their copywriters in some direct response copywriting principles (opens new window).

Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

And because of the personal nature, and genuine human appeal of my copy the client had 2 buyers, at approximately 10k each (a £20,000 return).

Marketing costs = £1,000  (half of the full cost of £2,000 given that we did a split test)

Return = £20,000

A huge ROMI of 1900%.

But this was still only the beginning as I saw it…

• I began work with the client on their loan information pack to increase actual conversion rates after the new lead generation.
• I also began to plan a follow-up series to the list of 15k that had received my email
• Plus another campaign to the 59 leads who responded to the first email but hadn't yet converted.
• And the email would also (ofcourse!) be sent to the other half of the list that hadn't yet received it.

Through integrated marketing, opportunities to increase ROI are endless.

You can read the copy I wrote for that initial split test on the Email Marketing page (link opens new window). Or read more about Tracking and Testing here.

I have added a lot of new information over the past few days (had some free time

Links in this post will open a new window so you won't lose this page whilst you browse the new additions.

First, there is a neat timeline of management concepts that I will flesh out over the coming months.

Preparation: Corporate Strategy

If you are working within a corporate environment, or want to know what the guys in the suits do, check out the page on Corporate Strategy.  It helps the Marketer and Copywriter understand the broader picture for each marketing campaign.

Development: Strategic Business Units

In essence, the SBU is a profit making area that focuses on a combination of product offer and market segment, requiring its own marketing plan, competitor analysis, and marketing campaign.  Read about Strategic Business Units.

Development: Acquisition and Retention

In the Development section we have new pages on  Front-End Acquisition and Back-End Retention.

Develoment: Copywriting

Visit the Copywriting page for an expanded description of what you need to cover in any and every marketing campaign you run.

Tracking: Metrics

Lastly, on the main Tracking page I have expanded the list of metrics to be gathered in marketing.

Enjoy the new additions.

Happy marketing.

There are four tests for the permission marketer that Godin lays out in his book. Think about these as part of your prospect insight research.

Test 1

Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite them to ‘raise their hands’ and start communicating?

Test 2

Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of potential clients who’ve given you permission to communicate with them?

Test 3

If consumers gave you permission to communicate with them, would you have something to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?

Test 4

Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people? Do you have a marketing funnel that encourages clients to invest at higher levels into your business services?

Jeanette McMurtry puts it so well:

Major mistakes in business marketing include:

Egocentric, Overreaching, Overbearing, Nebulous, Void of ownership, Out of site out of mind, Budget oriented, and Immeasurable.

About Egocentric marketing Jeanette says:

Out of either intimidation or inompetence, or both, marketers too often cater their marketing efforts to the business owner (sometimes themselves), CEO, board of directors, or other heads of their business environment.

And all too often the reigning business executives have little or no marketing in their resumes and no direct experience in serving the customer.  Yet marketers still build strategies and creative campaigns based on what will make management happy or, in other words, what will best prolong their job security and result in a better job evaluation.

When these are the influences that drive marketing plans (and in my observation, they often are), marketing has little chance of generating desired returns and thus fails.

Advertisements or any communications activities generated by the preceding motives, typcially result in what I call 'ego ads' or 'board of director ads'. They please a small audience for the short term (until the results come in) but fail to have an impact on the bottom line.

Copy for ego ads espouses the company misssion, making leaders feel proud and self-actualised, but fail miserably when it comes to appealing to consumers and their decision processes.

Brilliant!

A few so-called 'marketing managers' and compay Directors that I have worked with spring to mind…