Otis Regrets… or Not

Some years ago I was direct mail manager for a department store, and found myself in Jonesboro, Arkansas for a catalog press check. There were problems and I and the printer’s account rep spent several unanticipated days in this unfortunately dry (alcohol-wise) area of the South.  At one point, after a new disappointment, the rep pulled me aside and said, “I don’t like to say it, but this is what you might expect.”

What he meant to imply was that the project manager, who was African-American and in an unusually responsible position for a black man in the South at that time, was simply not up to the job. My reaction was not to agree with that observation but also not to disagree with it. I simply looked away, which wasn’t enough. Ever since then I have regretted my non-reaction.

This week I was involved in a complex real estate transaction involving a piece of property in the country and bats proved to be a problem—specifically a huge pile of bat guano in a barn which gives off toxic fumes. Hearing that we were getting estimates from bat remediation experts, the seller’s agent indicated that wasn’t an acceptable cost and “why don’t you just get a couple of Mexicans with shovels and garbage bags” to clean it up.

Everybody on our side of the transaction had the instant reaction that this was not an OK thing to say. Not only because of the statement, but also because of the attitude behind this and several other comments, we ended up abandoning the attempt to buy the property. Several people, from very different backgrounds and perspectives, felt the agent was not someone we could do business with.

Because this blog is about communication, a comment on the subtext behind the actual statements. In Jonesboro, it was “you and I as white Americans have the right to be indignant about being inconvenienced by this S.O.B.” This week it was “I want you to know I am an inflexible negotiator and am making a deliberately racist statement to show why you shouldn’t mess with me.” Since he knew he was offending, maybe this is progress of a sort?

I started to write this post because it seemed to me that Saturday, 7/12, was my slowest email day ever. I had some down time and checked email frequently, and there just wasn’t anything there. Makes sense… business folks are supposed to be taking summer time off now, and marketers follow the trend.

This brought to mind the evergreen discussion about “what is the best day to send marketing emails?” Ideally, you want your email to arrive when the prospect is in a mood to read it, is not overwhelmed by business and personal emails, and you are not competing with too many fellow marketers. That day used to be Tuesday… people have caught up with their work that piled up for Monday, but promotions for the weekend have not yet begun. But then MarketingSherpa did a survey (measuring the percentage of recipients who open their email) and the best day turned out to be MONDAY. Maybe because all the other marketers thought Monday was terrible and stayed away?

Also, who says that it is automatically a bad thing to be arrive when lots of other offers are in the consumer’s inbox ? In Econ 101 we learned the best place to open a liquor store is not in a community where there are no liquor stores for miles around, but across the street from another liquor store. The community defines the relevance of the offer, and the competition increases the consumer’s awareness of the shopping opportunity. Similarly, back in my days as a direct mail manager the most heavily rented lists were also the most successful… even though you knew your offer was going to be in the mail box with lots of others, you were reaching “mail order buyers” who welcomed lots of messages rather than opening their mail over the recycling bin.

Back to my experience yesterday, I counted up and there were 49 messages including junk email. Yes, that’s a bit slow compared to a normal business weekday like 6/25, a Wednesday, when I got 164 messages. But then I went back and looked at the count for 6/29, another Saturday, and I got just 20 emails. And 7/5, the day after the holiday, I got only 10 emails. So my perception is WAY off and clearly colored by the fact I was busy the previous two weekends, but looking for something to do on 7/12. If a marketer had hit me with the right offer, yesterday they could have sold me the Golden Gate Bridge.

As an old time direct marketer, I like promotions that a/tie in neatly to the core value proposition being advertised and b/have a clear call to action. So I was bemused earlier this year when I started receiving a free publication called “Deliver” from the marketing department at the United States Postal Service, obviously designed by an unsupervised creative cadre, filled with tips like use email, not the post office, to save money!

Then came a highly personalized mailer with an invitation to send away for a free t-shirt so I can advertise that I am an “environ-mail-ist” because of my commitment to “greener direct mail”. The ironic possibilities here are endless, so I immediately requested my t-shirt and it was at my door a couple of days later. I will add that everything was impeccably produced, down to my name in the appropriate places and a unique code to enter on the website.

So today I open the package and… they shipped the t-shirt in the wrong size! Yes funny, everything right except the product itself. But I really wanted to be able to wear that t-shirt! So I start going through the fulfillment package looking for contact information and there isn’t any. No person to call, no email, just a loose invitation to go online to delivermagazine.com to find more about greener marketing.

Which I do, and I choose the contact me tab, and I am able write a message to them but there are only smirking choices for “Why are you contacting Deliver” like “not sure” or “bored I guess”. I go ahead and state my problem and click “send” and we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of David Ogilvy’s observation that “Every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response. One glance at any campaign tells me whether this author has ever had that experience.” Indeed.

So a chef brought a great tasting chardonnay blend to a party, and I wanted to have more of it. Fortunately I’d saved the bottle (Novella Synergy 2007) and started checking with the usual Bay Area sources where a chef might buy his wine including Ferry Plaza Wines, K&L, Wine Warehouse and Jug Shop. No luck with any of these so I stopped by the eclectic and wonderful Bi-Rite Market on 18th St and spoke to Joshua the wine buyer who expressed interest because it is a Paso Robles wine (one we don’t see as often as others) and offered to see if he could get it.

The next day he called me at home and said he had telephoned the winery and learned that the entire vintage had been sold to… Trader Joe! Which of course is the Walmart of crunchy gourmet stores, threatening to put the independent Bi-Rites of the world out of business, so it was even more remarkable that he passed this info along. Of course I am going to go over to TJ and buy a case, but I am also going to make a far greater attempt to give Bi-Rite my business including their 10% off a case sale next month.

This is another example (the first was from Timbuk2) of a company giving extraordinary, old-fashioned personal service which is all the more distinctive, and consequently more valuable for both the customer and the vender, because others are dumbing down their service. Compare, for example, to this experience with Electronic Arts, when I found my 11 year old has discarded the paper with our CD key for an electronic game and asked EA if I could have a new one if I sent them the receipt and a photo of the original disks to prove we own them. They responded with an email that told me to go to a web page to read the response there, always a bad sign, where I found:

If you have not register the game and if the Registration code/Serial
Number/CD Key for the game has been lost or misplaced then you will need to
purchase another Registration code/Serial Number/CD Key from our warranty
department, please mail our Warranty department the following information:

-The [Proof of Purchase] page from the manual, or if that is not available
the game disk.
Note: If you send the game disk, please send it using a traceable method as
Electronic Arts is not responsible for products lost in transit.
-A letter explaining that you need a replacement serial number.
-A money order for $10.00 USD.
-Note: We do NOT accept cash, checks, or credit cards.

So EA is going to make me spend basically the original price of the game to get satisfaction, while Bi-Rite is sending me to a competitive store. The cost of the EA response was minimal, the cost of Bi-Rite’s probably $5 when you consider Joshua’s time and his phone calls. But in terms of future buying behavior from me that might result in profits to the vendor, Joshua’s approach makes far better sense. Bi-Rite is at 3639 18th St (parking difficult). If you need wine suggestions, call (415) 241-9760 and ask for Joshua.

Two of my agency clients have recently done extensive testing of personalized landing pages, in which a unique URL is assigned to each person on their mailing or email list and respondents click through to a web page that is just for them. The results have been very different.

Client #1 does primarily ecommerce sites, and their approach to personalizing the landing page was to offer products of specific interest to the customer based on purchase history. Client #2 does business-to-business leadgen. Their personalization was mainly about offering information that was versioned by industry.

Client #1 saw virtually no difference in response from their PURLs, while Client #2 saw a 20-30% increase in registrations. How come? I haven’t mentioned that Client #1 doesn’t make a big deal of the customization on the page, while Client #2 almost overdoes it with use of the name. (“Otis Maxwell, here’s your personalized offer!”) This suggests that, even in cynical and more sophisticated times, folks still love to see their name in print and to believe some care has been taken to respond to their unique needs.

Interestingly, the leader in personalized web marketing has backed off somewhat from its original approach, introduced maybe a decade ago. And we can be sure that Amazon.com does extensive testing. While at the beginning they’d say “based on your recent purchases we think you’d like… “ or some such now it’s always third person “people with your browsing history also viewed…” So maybe there’s a point where too much apparently intuitive knowledge seems creepy. And by allowing its plumbing to show, Amazon is letting folks know there’s no creepy surveillance going on.

Every writer has a story about the manuscript left in a taxi, or the memoir lost in a hard disk crash. Mine is a virtually complete ecommerce website where, instead of transitioning from the development site in Brazil to the live site in the US, the developers did the opposite and overwrote all my hard work with the existing site that was already there.

This is not a fun thing to discover in the wee hours and since the transition was still in progress, the first thing I did was grab as many pages as I could before they disappeared like Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”. Then I got lucky because it turned out they could restore most of it from a backup…. all but about 15% of the content which were the first pages I’d written at the start of the project. So, of course, those were in need of revision anyway.

In rewriting, I’ve been surprised by how much I “remember”, either because I’ve got good notes or because the content I wrote is still lodged in a recess of my brain. And this is a not atypical story. Robert Benchley had a vivid sleep experience where the details of a story were fleshed out and he scribbled furiously for hours and woke to find this note on his bedside pad: “write book”.

In my case I was seduced by a “front end tool” which allowed me to type in copy which was immediately reflected on real live web pages…how cool is that? But now I’m backing it all up to Notepad (actually not, since I use a Mac, but an equivalent) as I write. Klunky, but appropriate.

When I made a move from Southern California to a small town in Oregon, back in 1990, I wondered how many clients I would lose from my freelance copywriting business. I’d promised everybody I would assiduously stay in touch via phone and fax (no email then), and to show up in person whenever needed. Even so, I did lose business—including one regular client who said she couldn’t possibly work with anyone who wasn’t local, even though her office was an hour away from me and I saw her maybe twice a year.

We have come a long way since then. It’s commonplace to have people on several continents on a conference call, and to maintain a virtual identity via email and chat. So much so, I think we may take our connectedness for granted and not realize that clients and colleagues don’t find us accessible enough and so don’t have as much confidence in working with us as they should.

I’m specifically thinking of a guy I have worked with for several years in a technical capacity. He’s brilliant, but I always felt like I was second-tier in his book because he was unresponsive to emails and phone calls. I’d voicemail and email several times and get no reply at all, even in the middle of a project. That obviously made me uncomfortable about working with him.

So we had a talk in the middle of a current project. Turns out that a/email is his preferred method of communication, so if you leave a voicemail he’s likely to respond by email and b/he was having some terrible problems with his email provider and ingoing and outgoing messages were simply disappearing without a trace.

He’s now changed email providers and is suddenly very accessible, sending me reports and checking in several times a week. My confidence in working with him has gone up exponentially though the service provided has not changed. Virtual relationships need to be maintained the same as physical ones.

I love my Timbuk2 briefcase/messenger bag. It is nice that it is a San Francisco company with street cred that is good to its people. (A couple years ago, when they made more money than they expected, they distributed it to their piece goods workers… you don’t see that every day.) And I like even more that my orange bag is still intact after 2 years of heavy use. So, when I broke the buckle on the strap that holds it around your waist when you are riding a bike, I had to fix it.

I found the replacement piece on their website and ordered it. Got a cutesy email confirmation and then the piece arrived and it didn’t fit. That’s when the good stuff began. I replied to the cutesy email from customerservice@timbuk2.com and immediately got a reply from a real person, Ann H. She said, “I understand what you are talking about and I will look down in production for one for you.” Pretty impressive but what comes next was even better. She couldn’t find it and asked me to send a picture. The picture didn’t match so she wrote back, “Is it the cross strap or is it a waist belt? I can send you a whole new one if I know which one.”

And so she did. Turns out the buckle style had been changed (that’s why she couldn’t find it) but I just snapped off the old belt, put in the new one, and was good to go. And as Ann H said in a follow up email, “I am so happy to hear this. We do not want you to have an unhappy bag just sitting in the corner being neglected.”

Ann H may be one of a kind. But what’s reproducible and instructive about this is having my email go to a real live person, when I hit the reply button on my confirmation email. How many times have you done that and get a bounceback because the email address won’t accept incoming mail? What are they worried about? It’s logical that people would want to reply to an email from the company if they need further service, so why not let them do it… vs sending them to some kind of online form that may reduce the number of incoming inquiries, but also has an effect on overall customer satisfaction and future orders.

Contact lens wearers are a savvy lot. They know that once they’ve found the lens for the right eye, the other lens will inevitably fit the left eye. Thus there’s no reason to label the two sides of the contact lens case “L” and “R” as in the top example. You could call the second lid “not R”, or you could leave it blank… or you could use it for MARKETING, like the smart folks at Alcon in the lower example.

This example gets 100 points for incidental marketing, in which we use an available medium to communicate with consumers where otherwise an opportunity would be lost. Contact users see their contact lens cases every time they put in their lenses… what a great reason to remind them of the contact lens cleaner to buy next time. Unfortunately, this example gets 0 points for branding because the name of the brand actually isn’t Alcon. It’s “Opti-Free Express”. Oh well.

Early in my career I was direct marketing manager at a department store. The post office announced its first-ever presort discount (this tells you how long ago it was) but gave no instructions on how to prepare a mailing list to get the discount. An enterprising software company wrote an application to do the presort and they were willing to let me use it—for a finders fee of half the savings in postage.

I turned it down without a second thought, even though I could have still saved thousands of dollars. The prospect of looking like a sucker to my superiors far outweighed the financial gain. And of course the gain was to the company, while the looking foolish was on me personally.

I remembered this recently when a client wanted to do some email promotions. I did a bit of research and recommended several services that work with small lists. Then she came back to me with an objection that never would have occurred to me—what if somebody at the email service decides to steal their mailing list? Although highly unlikely, this was a big internal concern at the company and it stopped the email program in its tracks.

The concerns of middle managers are very different than those of higher up folks who have responsibility and maybe get a share of P&L. Managers are reviewed for being on time and on budget, with no unpleasant surprises. This is something to keep in mind in marketing, and also when dealing with them in person because often a direct marketing manager is your immediate client as a freelancer.

When writing a marketing letter to a middle manager, it’s a good idea to stress the absolute lack of negatives. Testimonials are priceless—your reader doesn’t want to be the first to take the plunge. Benefits like “make your job easier” and “stop users from complaining” are far more relevant than “help your company grow its revenue”.

And when you’re delivering your copy to the real-life middle manager, be on time!