Wesley Day Advertising

ON ADVERTISING
September 2007 issue

TIPS FOR BETTER INTEGRATED MARKETING.
1. Share customer data across the organization.
   Vital marketing tactics often go unimplemented because organizational and technical hurdles keep customer intelligence in disparate silos. Simply having more data is not necessarily an ingredient for success.
2. Optimize customer data collection.
    Keep online registration forms short and sweet -- don’t ask for information that you’ll never use -- and use subsequent touchpoints, such as order takers in a call center, to gather additional data and verify existing information.
3. Coordinating your marketing efforts.
   Sending an e-mail in conjunction with a print mailing is one example that has boosted response for users.
4. Select a strong marketing partner.
   Wesley Day Advertising (for example) has the experience to oversee and integrate your marketing efforts for better results. And the integrity to tell you when you don’t need our services.
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COPYWRITING SECRET #4 OF 8:
THE GOLDEN THREAD.
   In a previous newsletter we discussed the architecture of effective advertising copy: picture, promise, proof, and push. To hone your copy even more, print your copy and, reading top to bottom, find and circle your big promise. It should be somewhere near the end of the first paragraph or at the beginning of the second.
    Now go to the end of your letter and, reading up, underline the places where you actually allude to, fulfill on, support, hint at, or mention anything connected to that benefit. Be strict.
Everything you've underlined – if you've done this right – is a key phrase that's going to help you sell your big idea. Professional copywriters call this “the golden thread.”
    Anything that's not underlined, you should consider cutting because it's most likely filler. The more focused your copy, the better it works. Watch for more secrets in upcoming issues. Read previous secrets at wesleyday.com.
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PUT ADS IN YOUR TRANSACTIONAL
E-MAILS.
   While 54 percent of e-mail recipients “very often or always read” service e-mails, MarketingSherpa’s research indicates that only 21 percent do so for promotional e-mails.
   Furthermore, their studies indicate that most customers no longer mind seeing ads in their transactional e-mails.
    And don’t bury your ad at the bottom. Sprint redesigned its transactional e-mails into a two-column format. The wider, left column had the basic transactional facts. The thinner promotional column had special offers for additional items related to whatever the customer had just bought.
    Results? Sales from these offers did better than many of the company’s 100 percent promotional broadcasts to the same list.
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BRANDING MYTH #4 OF 7:
DESIGN AND IMAGE AREN’T CRITICAL.
Go into any store and you'll find many great products. But because many of these great products have ignored their design and image, only a handful have become great brands.
    Minute Maid found that other orange juice companies were "borrowing" its signature black carton. What once was a point of distinction had now become generic.
    The answer? Revamp the Minute Maid packaging line.
    The outcome? Volume sales increased more than 24 percent, with convenience store sales exceeding 34 percent. When you're dealing with 28 million servings a day, even a mere 1 percent increase -- 280,000 more servings a day – is considerable.
    Watch for more myths in upcoming issues. Read previous tips at wesleyday.com.
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MAKE CUSTOMERS YOUR SECRET WEAPON. Transactional systems, including CRM, can tell you what happened, but don’t do a very good job of capturing why it happened or, more importantly, what will likely happen next.
   Here’s how to make your advertising and marketing customer driven.
1. Ask customers what they think.
   The problem is usually not a shortage of feedback – your receptionist, salespeople, accounting department, etc., get it every day – rather it’s capturing and utilizing this insight.
2. Understand what’s important.
   Go beyond asking customers to rate specific features; also ask them how much that feature matters to them.
3. Make it actionable.
    In addition to correcting individual problems, feed this information to your advertising people. You’ll be amazed at the results.
   Making customers your secret weapon gives you a competitive advantage in every aspect of your marketing efforts. In fact, there’s one simple question that can often determine if a business will fail or flourish: “Are you likely to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?”
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BUILD A BETTER WEB SITE.
1. Start at the end.
   Your home page should introduce everything in the site. So how can you decide what to put on it before you have decided what should be in your site?
2. Break up your information.
   Most users prefer clicking to scrolling.
3. Lead users to what they want.
   Offer choices – and not too many – that make sense to the user. Narrow the range at each step, so that they don’t have to read pages that do not interest them.
4. Keep the navigation simple.
   Not everyone knows your brand names. Use generic terms for top-level links.
5. Anticipate users' questions.
   A Web site should exist to answer users' questions. In the perfect Web site, as soon as a question arises in the user's mind there will be a link to the answer.
6. Make it look easy.
   Your text should not only be easy to read, but should look easy and inviting.
7. Put your best bits first.
   Be more like a journalist than an academic or novelist. Put your most important information at the top. Add detail going down.
8. Write with search engines in mind.
   Use words and phrases that users will likely enter into a search engine to find your site.
   Your links, which tend to attract the attention of search engines, should be informative rather than mechanical, e.g., avoid "click here."
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