Two marketers contacted me to say “thank you” yesterday. The first was Starbucks, who wanted to thank me for being their customer with a free mini-dessert celebrating their 40th anniversary, if I made a purchase between 2 and 5 this afternoon. Then, the folks at Time-Life Books sent a thank you to me just for being awesome and for motivating and moving them with my “passion”. The subject line said simply, “thank you”. Nothing being sold here.
If a real person was thanking me in person, I’d find the Time-Life message much more sincere. But this is marketing. I found myself thinking, “dude, if you like me so much where’s the offer?” And the Starbuck’s message, cleverly built around getting trial for a new product at a slow time of day, was much more appealing.
Starbucks thanks you.
Time Life thanks you.
That’s the reality: the only way for a marketer to say thank you, and be appreciated for the gesture, is to include a gift or offer of some kind. Maybe charities are an exception. One of my favorite outer envelope lines was on a WorldVision mailing asking for a mini-sponsorship for a Third World child. The teaser: “Gift enclosed. But not for you.”
The U.S. News and World Report marketers had a formula that was used for many years. Prospective subs would receive a double postcard offering some very attractive business premium (like a desk calculator, back in the day when they were special) as a bonus for a paid subscription. It must have worked because it was repeated so long. The benefit of requiring an upfront payment helps cash flow. But it ultimately does not foster a loyal subscriber base and both the pub and this advertising concept are pretty moribund these days.
The U.S. News example demonstrates both the appeal and the danger of using product giveaways to help you get customers. A certain number of people will always pop just for the gift… and the more attractive the gift, the more questionable the quality of these freeloaders to your business. What you’re hoping is that enough otherwise qualified folks who were on the fence say “sure, why not” because they like the premium and these folks also like what they see when they receive your publication, product or service. To make this work, the giveaways needs to be closely aligned with the interests of the person who matches your core prospect. Everybody would like to win an all-expenses paid trip to Disneyland, for example, so that is not a qualifying offer. Today’s popular iPad is much better. It’s trendy, techy and business focused… all of which match the profile of certain types of readers.
The next question is what you’re going to make people do to get the gift. U.S. News requiring payment is a good example since traditionally pubs have very poor pay up from their “free issue” promos. Keep in mind that in addition to the cost of the goods you’re going to have the expense and administrative headache of fulfilling them. Most marketers farm this job out to a fulfillment shop that will ship in anonymous boxes. This is expensive and misses an opportunity to do additional marketing inside the fulfillment package.
If asked by a client, I will always recommend a sweepstakes where one person, or a few people, win as opposed to a gift for everyone who responds. The greed appeal is still there but the cost is much lower since there are only a few units to buy. Companies worry about sweepstakes liability and if this is a serious issue for you, there are companies that will write the rules, choose the winner and indemnify you for a flat sum, most recently $25,000. If you’re on a shoestring budget, I would advise you to study a number of competitive sweepstakes in your market space, download the rules (which the marketers are legally required to publish) then create your own contest structure based on what others have done before (or pass the buck and have your lawyer do it).
A final consideration is that the giveaway should not overshadow the product or service you are selling. There are two ways this can happen. The giveway can become the most exciting and prominent thing about the promo, with sales playing second fiddle. This was the case with the notorious Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes. Magazine subscriptions were an afterthought and the subscribers gained this way were of such questionable quality that “sweeps sold” mailing lists often were rentable at a substantial discount.
More insidious is the situation when a premium is so unusual or complicated that substantial real estate is required to present it. This is the case with many brilliant ideas that clients come up with, for oddball items they happen to love or their kid has told them about. The ink required to describe these items is parasitically siphoning attention from your main selling proposition and can only hurt your results. As a rule of thumb, if it takes more than a few sentences to describe what it is and why you want it, then it isn’t a good premium.
Whenever I go to direct marketing trade shows I look up the booths of Konik and Co. and other sellers of premiums and “advertising specialties” (the latter being something that has your logo prominently printed on it, such as a baseball hat). I ask them what’s new and what is selling best and they always have a few idea starters for me. I also get lazy and look at what marketers of products similar to my clients’ are offering. Right now it’s iPads so might as well copy them. You can never get too many chances to be a winner, right?
Testimonials can be a key element in your marketing copy. They help attract new customers by showing that others have had a satisfactory ordering. They help bond existing customers by demonstrating that you’re a “real” organization with real consumer relationships. And, if you’re a new or little-known company, they show that you actually have customers.
In order to work well for you, the testimonials you use should have these characteristics:
They should be specific. I remember a Land’s End testimonial in which the customer says she’s been shopping “since way back when you sold sailing equipment”. Jackson & Perkins used a detailed anecdote about the customer who put his roses through a torture test in a Texas Panhandle winter. Specifics sell. These testimonials are believable, and make interesting reading in their own right…as opposed to generic one-liners or one-worders (“outstanding”, “excellent”) which seem contrived.
They should be realistic. Never correct your customers’ grammar or edit phrases to fit the King’s English. Write like they talk. (I do, however, correct spelling errors. No reason to let your helpful customers embarrass themselves.)
Resist the temptation to crop and consolidate. Leave in the rambling, off-the- subject asides; these provide the veracity you are seeking. Use ellipses sparingly and only when absolutely necessary (for example, because the quote isn’t understandable without this editing).
They should be relevant. A business-to-business client gave me a series of “testimonials” from dealers who said they were happy to be selling the product. This is not what the customer is looking for. Testimonials should be about the buying process (how easy it is, or how a problem was solved) or about their personal experience with their purchase.
They should be signed. Testimonials followed by initials and no address appear to be faked…even where they aren’t. Whenever possible, I include a full name and city in a testimonial from a consumer; name, title and company for a professional. If you must use initials to protect the customer’s privacy, include the city and state to retain believability.
THE RIGHT WAY TO GET TESTIMONIALS: Some categories, like gardening and other hobbies, seem to generate floods of unsolicited positive comments from customers who want you to know how well they’re doing with your merchandise. If this situation applies to you, you’re lucky. Much more likely, you’ll have to ask for testimonials.
Start with a customer service survey (something you should be doing anyway). Follow up with phone calls to promising responses. When you talk to them, have a mental list of topics you’d like to touch on and gently lead the conversation into these areas. Try to elicit case histories or other specific comments and examples. Before you hang up, ask if it’s okay to use the comments in your advertising. (Don’t push it if the answer is no.)
My next step is write up a transcript of my call notes, followed by a sanitized version in which I try to make the comments more coherent and cogent without editing out the customer’s personality. At the bottom I write:
[Company name] has my permission to use the above quotation in its advertising and promotional material [ ] as is [ ] with changes.
In the olden days I would send this self-contained authorization form to the interviewee, via fax or by mailing with a self-addressed stamped envelope. In almost every case, I received it back right away and with no changes. Today I’d be comfortable using email and using their reply as proof of consent. I’m not sure this would stand up in court, but if the customer objects to the use of their name you’re going to withdraw the testimonial anyway, right?
And speaking of legal issues: the above approval language was written without the help of a lawyer. Your legal department might want to add some “hold harmless” verbiage. Resist. The more mumbo-jumbo your customer has to sign his or her name to, the less likely you are to get an OK.
In closing, here are two ways not to get testimonials. Don’t invent them and then sign the name of a willing friend or co-worker. It’s smarter, and not much harder, to get the real thing (assuming your company has at least one satisfied customer, that is). Second, sometimes a well-meaning customer will offer to compose a testimonial for you. Never, never accept. The customer will write what they think you want to hear—and the result will be about as hokey as you can get, but you’ll feel obligated to use it to avoid hurting the customer’s feelings.
I recently ran across several articles I wrote for Catalog Marketer, a newsletter published by the late Maxwell Sroge. I’ll be sharing them in updated form over the next few weeks in the Copywriting 101 section.
I have been feeling very unproductive lately, looking for distractions and getting too few billable hours done in a day. Finally, today I tackled a project I had been putting off and finished it and afterward I felt like I’d dropped 10 pounds of mental fat. Though I didn’t realize it, I had been suffering from a chronic case of copywriter’s block.
Maybe it’s not as poetic as the creative seizings up of J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and other legendarily blocked writers. But copywriter’s block is a very real problem with freelancer hacks and scribes because if you aren’t writing, you aren’t getting paid.
I had a couple of real serious blockages early in my freelance career and will share what I learned from them. The cause of most of my episodes was that I hadn’t done enough preparation before sitting down to write. I was trying to think, and nothing was coming out. A far better strategy is to do so much prep work—in terms of research and rough, non-wordsmithed notes—that giving yourself permission to actually write the thing comes as a blessed relief.
Sometimes we stumble over something in the actual process of writing…. very often, the first paragraph in a letter or article. (And yes, editors will tell you your work can almost always be improved by simply removing that first warm-up paragraph after you write it.)
I still have a multi-page printout of my tortured attempts to write the first paragraph of a letter for a TPA—that’s a particular kind of consultant that handles a company’s health plan. What on earth could I have needed to say about TPA’ing that was so difficult? I can’t remember but I know I felt like a dog chewing on itself until I had the good sense to finally step away from it. I took a walk in the sun, then came back and worked on something completely different. The next day, the TPA letter was completed without incident.
This recent writer’s block had a new set of circumstances. It was for a good client, but I found it somehow very uninteresting, yet I knew I had to do it because of our relationship. The concept of “you must” is toxic to the independent and supposedly carefree freelancer, who has signed on to the concept that you can set your own schedule and work any 24 hours in the day that you like. But finally, writing it became more appealing than not writing it, and the deed was done. Now I’m going to celebrate by going to the library.
I’ve been writing a complex series of emails for a client. I finished one series, then had to modify them for a new audience. The right way to do this would be to save each of the emails with a different name, then do the versioning. But I was distracted so I saved the new email over the old one without changing the name. I did this twice. It then took me about two hours to go back and recreate the original emails and fix my boneheaded mistake.
This is a retainer client: we agree to a certain number of hours each month, and I account for how I spend my time. So do I include these hours in my billing? I say no. It would be different if I were billing at minimum wage in which case I’d expect to get paid just for showing up. But my client is paying for a certain level of professionalism, and this ain’t it.
Back in my suit days, I’d have to account for every hour of agency time. There was an “administrative” bucket where non-billable time would go but I better not use it too often. I’ve occasionally seen (not participated in) systems with no such catchall which means that inevitably every minute gets billed back to somebody.
If you’re hiring an agency or a freelancer by the hour, it’s fair to ask how they keep track of their time and if they have an accounting category where they put non-billable time. If they don’t, then you may end up paying for mistakes.
Groupon, which was featured in an earlier post and also in my social media presentation at the DMA in San Francisco, has recently spurned a $6 billion takeover offer from Google. Pretty cheeky…. considering that there’s nothing proprietary or patent-able about its business of delivering a daily coupon to your inbox with a big discount on a local business.
Indeed, Groupon is one of four coupon outfits I now hear from on a regular basis. BlackboardEats is doing something similar for San Francisco (except they don’t collect the money up front which is good for me but a poor profit model for them), Open Table has gotten into the act with discounts as well as reservations, and LocalSavings is giving Groupon a real run for its money here in the upstate NY area.
But Groupon’s emails are the ones I always open, and why? It’s the copywriting! Today, for example, in an offering for a Portuguese restaurant, the copywriter noticed it had small plates and delivered the following riff: “Small plates provide diners with a rare chance to act like a giant and yell “fee-fi-fo-fum!” at the waitstaff. Enjoy a make-believe growth spurt with today’s Groupon: for $20, you get $40 worth of Portuguese cuisine at Atasca in Cambridge.”
That’s the kind of extemporizing that used to get us yelled at by our bosses when we were cub copywriters… but as always it’s followed by solid research-based benefits including a description of menu items, a reference to its listing on a best-of directory, and a verbal capsule of the ambience: “The in-house atmosphere is warm and romantic, bedecked with Portuguese art and fresh flowers, ideal for a smooch-inducing date or a platonic rendezvous with a band of surly Casanovas.” You can’t make this stuff up, at least you can’t day in and day out. I spoke to one restaurateur who was a happy Groupon client and he said yes, someone from Groupon did indeed call and interview him at length.
I have one worry for Groupon though, and that is its inability to attract quality advertisers in the hinterlands. In San Francisco and Boston, the specials are from recognizable establishments where I’d want to eat anyway. But in Dallas and Albany (all part of my quixotic geographical rotation) we tend to get tanning salons, car washes and second-tier pizza joints, the same folks who show up in Val-Pak.
If Groupon is going to grow beyond $6 billion they’re going to have to find a way to sell creative marketing to the late adopters. If Groupon should happen to implode, at least there will be a lot of good copywriters available for hire in the Chicago area (where Groupon is based).
I am working on my first “long form” direct mail promo in quite a while. This one occupies an 8 ½ x 25 piece of paper, folding down to six 8 ½ x 11 sides. It’s a definite schlep writing this thing.
I have always used the “Michelangelo David” approach to such projects, creating a block of marble by putting everything that comes to mind into a Word document then gradually whacking away until a finished form emerges. Each day I attack the project anew and at the end I have a draft that is hopefully closer than the day before.
Yesterday was what might be thought of as my torso-carving day; I’m getting down to the point where I am not close to finished, but the final form is beginning to take shape. I worked very hard for maybe 8 hours.
Today I picked up the 11 page single spaced manuscript to review it. It was terrible. Significantly worse than the work I’d just criticized my kid for preparing for Mrs. Brooks’ third grade class. My heart sank.
But I read on, and it got better… as I should have expected. I had had a poor start the day before. My poor decision today was to review that bad introductory copy first. I should have started at a point further in the manuscript when I had a firmer footing, then doubled back to that beginning-of-the-day messiness when I kept hitting my thumb instead of the head of the chisel.
Don’t review your copy start-to-finish. Do anything but. If you are lucky enough to have a schedule that permits multiple rewrites, start your review in a different place each time. That’s my editing advice for copywriters.
I had a client who was concerned that the information she was collecting on a registration page was going to be a potential problem because people are registering to win a prize and if they do win a prize then a/they might not want to receive it at work (which is the address we’re asking for, this being a B2B mailing) or b/they might have given a fictitious address as some people do because they don’t want to get advertising contacts yet they have to put something in the fields.
This same client had a problem at a previous company, which was the cause for her concern. She was giving away iPod shuffles (then selling for $59) to qualified prospects in return for their time to sit through a demo and apparently many people did not get their shuffles. I say “apparently” because it could also have happened that someone lied in order to get an additional shuffle…. dishonest, but hard to prove. Anyway, once bitten she wants to be sure this time.
My response (before caving, of course) was that there are always going to be a few idiots and outliers in your audience who are not going to play by the rules no matter what you tell them. And you should not do anything that is going to make your offer more complex to the vast majority, such as adding additional information on the reg page to deal with this issue by requesting an alternate shipping address in case they win. (Everybody who has ever designed an online survey or reg form knows that each additional field or question causes a certain number of people to drop out.) Suppose they fill in the form with their preferred address but, being idiots, they write it down wrong. What do you do then?
Along the same lines, I had a client back in my “suit” days who wanted to know if it was a good idea to pay a 1.5% commission based on the value of all sales paid by check in return for this supplier’s guarantee to make good any bad checks. This one was easy to figure out. Do bad checks cost more than 1.5% of revenue from all checks? No. Then this apparent insurance service is a money-losing sinkhole. Plus, cheats are cheats. If a customer has it in their heart to trick you out of money, they’ll just find another way to do it.
Today’s moral is, the customer is not always right, not when they are idiots and outliers. Don’t screw up the rest of your promotion by making accommodations for a few wingnuts.
The annual Direct Marketing Association conference is a challenge for exhibitors. It’s a horizontal show, with many different categories of vendors represented from bankers to software to printers to agencies. And many of these have complex value propositions that are hard to convey with an elevator pitch.
Orange icing = cloud computing, get it?
In this environment, the booth shown here stands out. Everything is orange, and they’re giving away cupcakes with bright orange icing. The cupcakes attract traffic, and when the sales force follows up after the show they can say “we’re the people who had the orange cupcakes, remember?” All good.
The marketing tie-in is a little more tenuous. The booth staffer explained that “we’re the only software-as-a-service solution at the show for migrating legacy systems” for order entry, customer records and other mail order chores. That’s a bit complex to convey in an elevator pitch so the company—named “swyft” and pronounced “swift” I will guess—decided to just go for being remembered. Some people might go to their website, but in any case there are these orange cupcakes.
A bit of research was done, consisting of looking at the collateral. The cupcake tie-in becomes clearer, though the copywriter unfortunately cannot resist a treacly flow of plays on words: “Sweet! Ripping and replacing legacy systems is about as fun as a root canal. It can be a slow, painful process and leaves a bad taste in your mouth. That’s why we built the Swyft Interaction Hub to sit ever so sweetly right on top of your existing customer systems. It’s like the icing on your customer infrastructure cupcake.”
I have the feeling the booth people either weren’t fully briefed on this platform or didn’t feel comfortable mouthing it. I pressed the booth rep on the tie-in between the cupcakes and the product and she said “we’re cloud computing” and we agreed the puff of orange icing was indeed like a puffy cloud. OK.
I’m giving them best of show for the DMA by default but you see how this could have been even better. Think through that metaphor of cloud computing and maybe there’s a better way to express it…. maybe cotton candy which was being given away at the next booth (not as a gimmick, just free candy). Or here’s an idea, how about tying into the name “swyft/swift”? Any metaphors come to mind for that one?
