The Wax Blog
14 Nov Why email marketing is just like the Hunger Games
Thank you to Campaigner for sending along these tips to improve your email marketing tactics!
Black Friday deals. Holiday sales. Travel promotions. New Years offers. This holiday season, all email marketers and online retailers are in a hunger games of their own: keeping their promotional emails alive – and out of the spam folder – will determine their ability to survive the email marketing games. Avoiding the dreaded delete button is a taxing battle, as 23 percent of consumers claim they get overwhelmed with holiday offers and just ignore them, while 31 percent look, but rarely take action and make a purchase, according to a recent Campaigner survey.
Similar to how Katniss Everdeen puts on a façade to entice her sponsors, email marketers need to adopt a mix of eye-catching graphics and personalized content to make a lasting impression. In the spirit of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay being released later this month, here are a few tips for email marketers to channel their inner Katniss and emerge from the arena as a victor. May the odds be ever in your favor!
1. Channel Your Inner Katniss with Fail-Safe Precautions: With her life on the line, Katniss never makes the same mistake twice. Taking fail-safe sending precautions prevents the same from occurring in your email marketing campaigns. You’ll be sure to ruin your chances with customers if you spam them with emails they can’t open. With more and more consumers reading email via smartphones or tables, be sure to implement responsive design (mobile) templates to make your content easy to read and interact with. Otherwise, similar to how the cannon blast signals a tributes demise, you’ll become a victim of the delete button and will leave the email marketing games early.
2. Your Email Marketing Mockingjay – Make an Impression:
10 Nov 5 Things Trump, PETA and other shocker brands can teach us about marketing
Years ago I was at a cocktail party that was also attended by Donald Trump. Don't ask me how I got invited, I think they mistook me for someone that was important. But regardless of how I got there, I was soon struck by several things about Trump in person. First, it does look like a dead animal is sitting on his head, but I'm pretty sure that's his own hair. (Although I suspect it's been planted.) Second, and most surprising, he's got amazing skin, nice shoulders and a nice ass. Not kidding. Lots of women were flirting with him at this party. I was too scared of Melania. But I digress. The thing that was the most surprising about Trump was that in person, he wasn't bombastic nor did he try to dominate the conversation. Although perhaps he was tired, or drunk when I saw him, I think off camera he's rarely as bombastic as he is on camera. What he's done is create a persona that works for him. It keeps him in the public eye (he claims he's never hired a publicist) and serves his purposes. I often say that Donald Trump is the PETA of personal brands. PETA also achieves its public relations goals through shock value. Remember when President Obama killed a fly, and PETA released a statement accusing him of executing an animal on air? A friend of mine was mocking the group, but I reminded him that probably every other person in the U.S was talking about PETA that day too. Do I think PETA cared about the fly? Of course not. They cared about impressions. I am not going to debate whether PETA is actually ethical , or whether Donald Trump is a narcissistic egomaniac. But I think there are some things we can learn from these two and other shocker brands in terms of marketing and public relations. Because they're both highly successful. And everyone knows their name. So here goes: 1. Shocker brands are consistent. Personally, I hate brands that make a statement and then backtrack because they get a bit of kerfuffle. If you're going to have a strong impact on the market, you have to have a strong voice. And for that reason you will piss some people off sometimes. (Believe me, I know.) Apologize, but don't let your brand voice waffle around in some kind of amiable, people-pleasing manner. Choose your brand message and voice carefully and stick to it. You don't have to have shock value, but it does need to be forceful in this cluttered mess of a media market. 2. Shocker brands often get a free pass. Consistency generates automatic forgiveness.
06 Nov Using countdowns as the catalyst to increase holiday sales
As a small business owner, it’s no doubt you’re looking for ways to maximize your sales over the impending holiday season. After all, it’s the time of year when people traditionally open their wallets a bit more freely and want to satisfy others’ wish lists and their own. So with all the opportunity for seasonal marketing campaigns and creative ways to use holiday cheer as fuel for sales, what’s the best approach?
While many methods may work, employing countdowns is one tactic that is tried and true. The premise behind counting down is that your consumer is faced with a limited amount of time to make a purchase. If they’re leaning toward making a buy already, the perceived (or real) time limit will cause them to delay no more. Here are three ways to effectively incorporate countdowns this holiday season for a spike in your sales.
Count Down the Number of Items Left
The principle of scarcity within advertising is really what makes countdowns so useful. People are more inclined to buy if they feel an item is universally desired or hard to come by or if they know their opportunities for getting it are limited. Zappos uses this technique by showing how many items are left in stock in the color and size requested. If someone was intent on buying a pair of boots, seeing that there is only one size nine pair in “camel” color left is sure to make her add the item to her cart in a hurry. She wouldn’t want to let that slip away. You can apply the same principle to your business. Even if you don’t handle transactions online or through an e-commerce platform, you can tip customers off to the fact that your merchandise isn’t going to stick around forever.Count Down to a Sale or Event
29 Oct You are not your best customer
[caption id="attachment_6058" align="alignright" width="300"]
Photo courtesy of MSNBC.com[/caption]
Last week I wrote about the importance of defining your best customer(s) and the influencers that send them your way. This is important when you're defining an overall campaign and determining their hangouts. ( sorry for the pun, Google) There is, however, an insidious problem with many business owners when it comes to marketing messages, audiences and customers. If nothing else, here's what I want you to remember. YOU ARE NOT YOUR BEST CUSTOMER.
Let me repeat that. YOU ARE NOT YOUR BEST CUSTOMER.
You may have been the best customer at one time, or knew one really well. Or perhaps you were an influencer. But the minute you decide to start your own business, or manage the business, you become biased. Here's a great example:
21 Oct Know Your Best Customer
This morning I gave a presentation at the venerable James J. Hill Center in downtown St. Paul. Beautiful place! The Center has created a new business program based on a similar, quite successful program in London. My talk was one of a series of free lectures open to the public.
I am passionate that businesses understand and know their customers really, really well. It's not enough to be personal with your customers. These days you have to get intimate in order to find them and keep them. I've embedded the slideshare below, but here are the main points I hope my audience walked away with this morning.
19 Oct 3 Ways to Use GIFs In Your Marketing Campaigns
Although Twitter introduced animated GIFs to their website earlier this year, most social media sites are not compatible with GIFs. Twitter has become GIF-friendly with the creation of GIFV, a looping video with a smaller file size and consequently a faster loading time, states Imgur. This change has made it possible for these movie-image hybrid files to be used in marketing on a variety of platforms.
Emails
Using GIFs in marketing emails is a great way to make your brand stand out. However, there are some points to keep in mind.15 Oct Why they didn’t name it Vision…the Cision Vocus deal
When I heard about the Vocus and Cision merger at the PRSA conference this week, all I could think was....oh shit. Both companies seem to be long on salespeople (my dinky little company has had 9 different Cision reps in the last 3 years) and short on customer support. And, I admit, I'm as guilty as the next person of having my intern sit in on webinars to earn a Starbucks coffee card from Vocus. Oh, and together they bought Visible, which apparently is a great company.
"...Coupling the company’s social intelligence SaaS platform and insights experts with Vocus and Cision’s powerful PR tools creates a comprehensive solution for tracking and analyzing earned, owned and paid media that elevates brands and drives business results." Or, as another release said "Cision is now better placed to provide quality solutions that will serve the PR and communications professional’s complete workflow."
Boy this takes me back. Those of us in IT services remember the 90's when flush with cash, we decided to go out and "merge with partners". (By the way, someone always buys someone. Mergers are just a way of making the smaller guy feel better about it.) The idea was that if you could sell the entire "lifecycle" you could own the customer. We can do it soup to nuts! And after quite a bit of partying and initial hoopla, the reality sets in. Wow, this doesn't work.
Here's why it doesn't work:
- First, it's the usually the biggest company with the worst brand that has the most money. And gets to keep the name. Therefore the better brands get sullied. The brilliant Katie Paine just wrote about this yesterday :
14 Oct How can social media benefit online casino sites?
With both online casinos and social media very much on the rise, there are a number of ways that social media sites can prove beneficial to online casino ones – as the casino companies are rapidly discovering. ...
13 Oct IMC – Fast and fearless at the PRSA International Conference
I'm always amazed at the ability of PR people to accomplish things in about a third of the time it would take the rest of us. But I think it's a necessity. News moves practically at the speed of light these days. Trying to stay ahead of that cycle (which is what public relations professionals have to do) takes a giant amount of energy, alacrity and mojo.
I was incredibly honored to be asked to speak at the PRSA International Conference yesterday. True to form, the staff asked me to present an overview of Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC. In an hour. I did a webinar version of this talk in August, and the general consensus after that session was they wanted less "what and why" and more "how to." Makes sense right? There's very little time to look at the pretty train and enjoy the comfortable seats. No my friends. The train has left the station and PR people are leaping on the roof, dashing into the cars and at times hanging onto the caboose with their fingertips. I love that energy!
I'm not entirely sure I delivered what they needed yesterday. Technology was not on my side and I probably tried to present way too much information. (Here it is on Slideshare if you're interested) It's hard to say. Here's what I'm really hoping they took away from all my mumbo jumbo: