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Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts

Friday, August 11, 2023

Another pitch that goes wrong

  

By Ariella Brown

This pitch arrived in my LinkedIn messages today: 

  • Hello Mam, I want to collaborate with you regarding articles publications on techopedia.com plz respond so we could discuss further.


It's amazing how many wrong notes a person can pack into such a short message.

1. What is this "Mam" doing here? I'm not clear on whether he was going a casual "Hey, man," vibe and mistyped the last letter or if he is misspelling Ma'am as in Madame. But why would he do that when he can address me properly by name?

2. Jumping right into what you want without establishing some basis to interest me in the endeavor. What value is supposed to be in this for me? Do you have industry insight to share? More likely, he's just hoping to get his company offerings described in a publication without paying for it.

3. While he may have found me from Techopedia, he did not bother to check that on profile I show it as ending a couple of months back when the publication was sold to a new owner. It's being taken in quite a different direction by a company that heavily pushes gaming and crypto and so is no longer the same type of publication that I contributed to.

4. What's up with this nonstandard "plz" in this context? You're not texting a buddy but trying to set up some kind of working relationship with someone new, so this is hardly the way to express yourself.

In a certain mood, I may have responded, but I decided to write about this instead. Any other writers get similar messages with the same pattern?

One bad turn deserves another

Later, the same day, I got this message (all misspelled words retained from the original):
  • Guest posting equries

    Hi! I saw the page of your blog techopedia.com and I saw that the page the page of your blog is beautiful and well decorated. I really enjoy your recent blog post. It is very effective and interesting. I want to share my thoughts on your blog. I totally understand that there would be some editorial fee involved and I'm ready to pay. I hope so you will like my suggestion and we will get benefited mutually side by side and this will help us both to rank our business. It's my pleasure that we work together I have bulk orders on your sites. Kinldy share your sites lists. Then we work mutually together. I hope u understand well. I'm waitning for your positive response Kind regards


A few weeks later, I got this doozy

I visited your YouTube channel and found that your channel videos are not SEO optimized and your videos have very low SEO scores. If you want me to grow your channel more and grow your business and your videos go viral, I will do on-page and off-page SEO optimization with your channel videos and work with actionable and performance tags of your videos and improve the SEO score of each of your videos to 95 plus score out of 100. As a result, your videos will go viral, every video will rank on YouTube, YouTube will get your videos first in search engines and people will find your videos very easily and your videos will come up in google-search. And I will promote your YouTube channel organically and manually. As a result, your channel will get more subscribers, likes, views and watch time day by day. As a proof I am giving you a sheet with before and after SEO results with links to some of my client's channel videos that are live on YouTube where you can see all the details.
Please check this:[redacted]
Please feel free to inbox me if you have any questions!

The reason it's such a doozy is that I don't have a YouTube channel, so the claim that he checked it automatically mark him an incompetent liar -- not someone I'd ever consider giving my business.
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Thursday, June 29, 2023

Speaking of gifts





by Ariella Brown

Subject line: Don’t Forget Your Gift by June 30!

When you read that in an email on June 29th, your assumption would be...?


That you'll get a gift with some offer that ends on June 30th. So you may click out of curiosity or out of a feeling of FOMO, two strong incentives to open an email. ( See 7 ways to grab customer attention in subject lines)


What would be your reaction, though, when you discover that the gift referred to is not for you but one that the sender is demanding you send by June 30th?


That's what the New-York Historical Society did for its email campaign as you can see from this screenshot of the email:

Would you be inclined to feel generous and hasten to make this arbitrary cutoff that the organization says is the end of its fiscal year?



Are you using the right KPIs for your campaign?


I have no doubt this subject line generated more than the usual number of opens. Perhaps whoever was tasked with this email campaign was told that's the primary KPI and so resorted to clickbait that turns into a bait-and-switch.

As Stephen Covey said, "Have the end in mind."

It's important to lose sight of the real end goal -- putting people in the frame of mind to want to donate to the organization.


Tricking them into clicking is not likely to do that.

False urgency


Neither is attempting to create a sense of urgency by declaring you're one day away from your fiscal year. If the donation comes in July. it's not going to make much of a difference.


The only end of year the donors care about is the calendar year if they are able to take a tax deduction for the donation. Remember, when you're asking something of someone else, you have to make it center around them and their needs -- not your own timeline.


If you want to use content marketing effectively, you should always be thinking about what is the likely reaction of your target audience to your communication. Failing to do so leads to major fiascos like the one currently experienced by Budweiser and other missteps described in Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke.


Don't lose the goodwill you've built up over years to a thoughtless marketing message, get a seasoned pro to craft the right message for your organization and your demographics. Learn more here and book a free consultation call.







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Monday, May 23, 2022

Typing Horses Promote Iceland

 

Screen capture from the video embedded below. 


The emails are about on par with what you'd get if your cat walked across your keyboard, but real emails are not the point. The stunt is an attention-getter for tourism for Iceland, and it does that quite effectively. See the Visit Iceland site with the suggestions of what you can see in that country when you "outhorse" your emailing to an Icelandic horse.

Monday, March 14, 2022

Colgate needs to brush up on its email communication

Uupload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Toothbrush_toothbrush.JPG/512px-Toothbrush_toothbrush.JPG

What Colgate got wrong

 It forgot that in marketing communication, less can be more more, and more is only welcome if the audience sees value in it.

Some time ago, I granted Colgate permission to email me in order to receive its promotions. What I had in mind by promotions was value for me, meaning special offers and/or coupons. But Colgate seemed to think it was just about constantly reminding me about Colgate products with no financial incentive attached.

Finally, today, I decided I had enough of the Colgate clutter that wasn't bringing any value to my inbox. I put in a request to stop the emails. 


What Colgate got right

The opt-out form offers a menu of reasons to select that the folks on the marketing team should note in planning future campaigns. Most opt-outs include the first three, but this one adds a fourth option that fit my motivation exactly:


That was nice to find exactly my reason without having to fill in other or pretend I had not opted in. 

Colgate email preference
What Colgate should do with that data is plan for more effective email communication in future. If you lure customers in with the promise of special savings for subscribers, you have to deliver on that. Otherwise, you're not keeping up your end of the bargain and will lose the customer's attention and trust.




Friday, March 11, 2022

From multi to omnichannel marketing

Online shopping
Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Not all marketing strategies deliver the same rates of returns. Omnichannel marketing outperforms single channel at the rate of 2.5x.

To get to that, it’s not enough to build an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site supported by marketing campaigns that reach out to them on various channels. All those components have to be integrated to work together through an omnichannel strategy.

The ROI of Omnichannel Marketing 


The returns of omnichannel marketing over single channel are quite impressive, according to the data offered on Clickz:


  • Engagement rate: 18.96% on omnichannel vs 5.4% on single-channel

  • Purchase frequency: 250% higher on omnichannel vs single-channel

  • Average order value: 13% more per order on omnichannel vs single-channel

  • Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs single-channel


One channel doesn't cut it

Most eCommerce businesses today do not rely on only one digital marketing channel. When competing for customer attention, you need to reach out to them in different ways in the hope that what they didn’t click on an email may still get a click on SMS or an ad served on social media.

 In a survey by HBR (Harvard Business Review), 73% of respondents said they use multiple channels during their shopping journey. That includes email, SMS, MMS, social media, as well as searches on the site.


The challenge for retailers is maintaining coherent and consistent communication that makes the most of the different ways of connecting.  A Facebook or Instagram ad may be what first grabs the customer’s attention, though they may need some follow up to convert to the level of putting together a shopping cart with an email or MMS  message that offers personalized recommendations.


So why do we call this omni and not just multichannel?


Multichannel marketing is simply messaging that a brand uses across various channels to try to increase its reach. In contrast, omnichannel marketing is not just about sending the messaging out across the different channels but linking up the data on feedback on each one back to the customer to personalize the experience through responsive adaption. 


Customer interests are not static but constantly changing as they respond to contextual triggers. Brands that utilize omnichannel use big data analytics to update customer data and adapt  each message that goes out accordingly. An omnichannel approach adapts to such shift to make marketing messages as relevant as possible.


Timely texts


Emails remain an important marketing tool for all businesses, especially eCommerce. However, widespread smartphone use makes texts a very effective way to get attention, as they work off a device many people keep at hand for most of their waking hours. 



Text messages the perfect medium for sending time-sensitive information. That includes:

  • Announcement of new product drops, especially if one of the benefits you offer SMS subscribers is early access to what’s new.

  • Promotions for  same-day  flash sales, particularly if they are set for certain times like noon to three. 

  • Notification that something they wanted to order is now back in stock or is now on sale.

  • An urgent notice that their selections in a cart they abandoned are in danger of selling out.

Channeling Success with Targeted Communication


Targeted messaging is much more effective than generic messaging. The basis of that communication is identifying customer segments, and it can get even more relevant with personalization with product offerings and promotions selected specifically for that customer’s interests.


No matter how responsive your customers are to emails or texts, it’s important to remember that a single channel does not fit all customers under all circumstances. You need to adapt to the needs and context of the moment to deliver the right message through the right medium.. 


For example, you could have a customer who has subscribed to both emails and texts. Even though sending an SMS is fast and easy, it's not an appropriate medium for longer messages. You also can use both channels for reminders say of an upcoming promotion or a price drop on something they have looked at but didn't end up adding to cart or that they added it to the cart but failed to complete the transaction.  


On that basis, you can get the right offer to the right person at the right time, and through the right channel.


Related:


Wednesday, March 9, 2022

When automated messages make your brand look stupid


Marketers love using emails and texts to be in contact with customers. It's so cheap and easy to get messages out that some abuse the channels and send out daily messages. Even worse, some send out multiple messages a day, which just crowd a customers' inbox and make them start tuning out those messages.

One of the biggest offenders on this front is the Gap family of brands. As the umbrella organization comprises not just Gap but also Banana Republic, as well as the "Factory" versions of both those brands, on top of Old Navy and Althea, it sends me a minimum of three and sometimes even five emails each and every day. So, yes, I tune most of them out now. 

But the one pictured above caught my eye. Can you guess why?

Are you motivated to make a purchase because a brand lets you know that you have free money to spend that amounts to just $0 in rewards? In other words, your purchasing power is unchanged from what you thought it was before.

 It's all too obvious that Old Navy is attempting to personalize the offer not just by using my name but by trying to tempt me to make a purchase that will be discounted by my rewards. As the algorithm is not programmed to discard that message for customers without a reward balance, we get a message that shows not all personalization necessarily fits your marketing message.

A bit later I got this email that made a similar mistake in a PR pitch. Notice how the personalization is worked in without regard for understanding how we address people in real life:

"Setting up your business remotely during Great Resignation

Inbox

KJ Helms via prnewswire.com 


to me

Hi Brown, Ariella​ Team,

 

I have a story I think Brown, Ariella​ would want to cover about a firm that can help businesses 

affected by “The Great Resignation,” which is continuing with 4.3 million resignations in 

December 2021 alone (1).




One other nitpick I have is that it refers to the Great Resignation continuing by citing the numbers from December 2021. As we are in March now, that is a non sequitur. Instead of presenting the sentence in this order  the text should have started with the December stat and then say that the trend continues in 2022, possibly with its own sentence set up this way: In December 2021 alone 4.3 million resigned from their jobs, and "The Great Resignation" trend is continuing in 2022, raising concerns for businesses that want to retain their employees.



 Related:  


MAJOR MARKETING MISSTEPS FROM ADIDAS, M&M'S AND COKE


TODAY'S TARGETED MARKETING IS POWERED BY DATA AND AUTOMATION

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

7 ways to grab customer attention in subject lines

                                                  Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
 

If you don't capture your audience's attention in the subject line, they'll just hit delete without even opening the email. So choose a subject line that offers them a compelling reason to click. Here are seven types of appeals that can be very effective.



1. Desire for value

Coupons are especially effective, seeing higher open, click and purchase rates than emails without. That’s why major retailers regularly refer to coupon codes offering specific percentages off. Standard retailers frequently offer savings that range from 5% to 20% off, though clothing retailers will typically offer an even wider range of 10% to 60%, depending on what point in the season they’re at. Subject lines that let people know how much they can save are effective in attracting attention and getting your customers to click through to purchase.

Understandably, though, that’s not suitable for all businesses and overusing them can make your communication seem overly salesy, even spammy. So don't rely too much on this approach unless you're the type of retailer that automatically factors 30-50% discounts into pricing like department stores and Gap brands do.


Even if you are not inclined to cut prices, you can appeal to value by describing to your products’ quality. So you don’t have to say “Our jeans cost less than theirs” but can say “You’ll wear our jeans twice as long as other ones; they’re that durable.” In more general terms, you can say that they don’t need to break their budget to look good, eat well, or have a good time.


2. FOMO
Fear of missing out. To achieve that, you have to work in a sense of urgency. Possible applications include emails from mutual funds warning you that the deadline for this year's IRA contribution is approaching or an eyeglass seller saying “This year’s flex spending account: use it or lose it.” It can also work in conjunction with the desire for value when promoting a particular bonus or sale offered for just that day, say “Order before midnight when your 25% off turns into pumpkin.”


3. Curiosity
 The thrill of discovery that we sometimes experience stems from the wish we have to find the answer to the questions we have. Channeling that can be a powerful motivator for someone to open your email. This can be combined with FOMO or the incentive to save money with a “mystery offer” or that only reveals how much the customer will save after clicking through to the site. It can also work with a “mystery gift.” Even without a monetary incentive, you can work off curiosity with something like “See our 5 best-selling pieces” or “How to wear the color of the season.”

4 Appeal to laziness
 People may not be proud of being lazy, but they do appreciate not having to exert themselves. Subject lines can target that when you refer to easy, one-click checkout, effortless outfit ideas, recipes that require just 4 ingredients, cleaning hacks, etc. that can even be used to market training for a particular skill like “Learn coding on your lunch breaks.” 

5. Appeal to vanity
We’re all vain about something, and that’s not necessarily limited to our looks. If you know what your customers are proud of, you can appeal to that in your subject. For example, women who pride themselves on looking young may respond to “Warning: once you use this, you may get carded at the liquor store.” Fashionistas may respond to something like “exclusive styles for those who know fashion.” For pet owners, you can have a message like “You can always spot the best loved pets by seeing our logo on their collars.” In more general terms, you can always refer to an offer to your “VIP customers” to give their vanity a boost.


6. Humor
 Even if you’re in a bad mood, seeing something funny can lighten it, even if it just coaxes a smile out of you, even more so if you laugh out loud. That’s the attraction of humor, and you can use it for email subject lines, drawing on the humor of breaking expectations. For example, an email seeking to market for Father’s Day shoppers can say, “Don’t get him another boring tie.” One aimed at graduates could say, “Remember how you complained about school? Prepare for something worse.”


7. Addressing pain points
 Drawing on what you know about your customer or contextual knowledge of what they would be experiencing or anticipating, you can use those in your subject lines. When marketers were sending out messages under lockdown, they had to consider what people would want under those circumstances to be comfortable and avoid boredom at home.


There are many seasonal opportunities to address pain points. For example, when a heatwave is in the forecast, your subject line can be “Keep your cool in these shorts.” or “All you need is air-conditioning and this ___” for drinks, warm weather clothes and accessories, or a summer line of beauty products. When cold weather hits, you can say, “Don’t go out in the cold; we deliver!”


Even when there is no particular occasion on the calendar, you can utilize empathy with a light touch by, say, emailing on a Monday with “Need a lift to carry you through the next 5 days? We have it here.” Or in situations in which weekend plans have to be shifted, “Weekend fun starts here.”

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