How to get everything wrong in a pitch

 

Some of the work I do for clients extends to drafting Letters of Introduction (LOI) for them to use as a cold email or introduction on LinkedIn. The general principles behind crafting such letters is to keep them brief (like five sentences long), focused on the interests of the receiving party, and not to attempt to sell on the spot.

Rarely do people get all the above right. Instead of starting with LOIs to ease into gauging interests, they tend to move directly into pitches, and many of those are the opposite of intriguing.

I recently put up a post on LinkedIn about red flags in cold pitches. Someone seems to have mistaken that as an invitation. Today I saw an Inmail that ticks most of the boxes for how not to message me.

This message came from someone who describes himself as a content writer and ghostwriter hitting up someone who also offers exactly those services for potential work. Here's the screenshot:

Shooting yourself in the foot from the opening

The person claiming writing expertise already gets everything he could get wrong in just the opening with "Hello Mr. Ariella Phd."

I have 3 strong objections plus one more nitpicky one.

1. Why assume Mr.?

2. Why not use my last name that is listed before the the PhD?

3. Why show that you don't know what a PhD means by treating it as a last name and not using it to come up with a gender-neutral title of Dr.?

4. In direct address, you really should have a comma between the Hello and the name. I know very few people bother with that for emailed messages, but a professional writer should still know that.

Using cliches and vague terms

It doesn't really get better after that. After the "Good Day!" greeting, the writer goes on to say, "I'm asking for a few seconds of your valuable time to offer my content writing expertise in your endeavor to keep the industry thriving."

1. You can't literally mean just a few seconds of my time, as that wouldn't suffice for your pitch.

2. What do you think is my "endeavor," and which industry do you have in mind with the definite article?

Not showing an understanding of the recipient's perspective

The next sentence is: "It will be my pleasure to get the chance for a progressive discussion with you."

Of course it will be your pleasure. You're the one reaching out to me to try to pitch your services, so you assume it will be beneficial -- "progressive" not the right word in this context -- for you. But that's hardly a point to convince me to hear you.

Needless to say, I didn't respond.

Related:

Another pitch that goes wrong

Define good

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Credit where tech credit is due

 

By Ariella Brown

Credit for keeping the service in automated service 

When was the last time you were delighted by an automated process from your credit card?

Tech innovation doesn't always deliver a better customer experience, as we saw in Customers and brands are not on the same page about tech. A lot of automations that companies implement  tend to frustrate customers as they're designed for cost-cutting rather than service. 

Customers are discouraged from even attempting to speak to people at companies that  either offer only "live" chat or email for contact or who put customers through endless rounds of menus and wait times that can extend to an hour. But when a company does get it right with an automated response that saves the customer time while delivering just the outcome hoped for, the company deserves credit for doing it right.

Such is the case for Bank of America. This week I discovered that I retained a large credit on the card. That was due to my having put in the payment for the statement balance twice. I first put it on July 3 and didn't see it applied, so I put it in again on July 5. When an email let me know that my balance was a negative number, I inferred that both payments went through. 

Not wanting to keep that balance until I'd spend it down, I wanted to request a refund check. When calling in and putting in the number, the system identified the credit balance and offered the option to get a refund. This was then confirmed with an email.

That was wonderfully easy and fast.There was no additional time spent on going over the account, the mailing address, or any of the other things one has to review when calling an online seller like Amazon about an issue on a delivery. 

 When the automations are set up to offer what people really want, then they do save everyone time and aggravation. We need more of this and less of the kind of tech that is used only for the seller's immediate benefit and not for the customers.

In truth, what benefits customers benefits the business because happy customers are the ones you retain and who add the most lifetime value (LTV).

Related:
Visualizing the customer journey
Keeping it Rrreal

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Don't just aim for different

By Ariella Brown

Learn to distinguish differentiation from merely different

Don't wallpaper the ceiling.

What do I mean?

When you revise your site content, don't just make changes to make it different. Make changes to make it better.

You improve the title, sentence structure, coherence, consistency, and make sure to hit all those SEO best practices. You can also find better images to catch the eye that are optimized for web view and identified with alt text for both ADA compliance and search engine reads.

But you don't need to change the general order of things if what was there makes sense. In other words, you don't have to make a point of putting wallpaper on the ceiling while painting the walls just to switch around the way you had it before.

That's not to say your can never put wallpaper on the ceiling, but it's a design choice that has to have more of a reason behind it than change. The key thing to remember is what you're trying to do: make the content more appealing to the reader. 

Some of that entails making changes but they shouldn't be made just to arrive at a different result. They should all be made with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey would say, and that end is not just being different but better.

Related: 

Visualizing the customer journey

What makes content marketing effective
What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing

What 7-Eleven got wrong

 

By Ariella Brown

Today is 7/11 in the US. That used to be "Free Slurpee" day. But that has turned into "Pay with your privacy forever instead of shelling out a buck for the Slurpee" Day.

That's the disastrous result of 7-Eleven attempting to take a page out of the B2B playbook. It turned what had been a simple way to capitalize on a date that matched the store name with an offer that made people happy.

People could simply come in for a free small Slurpee. While they were there, they may have bought something else. Even if they didn't, the frozen treat was actually a very cheap way to build positive feelings for the brand for the cost of just pennies per person per year.

But that's not good enough for someone with a B2B mindset who wants to track everything and be assured that nothing is given away without getting something of value in return. Enter the demand to put in your cell phone number and granting the convenience store permission to bombard you with messages and offers in perpetuity before you walk out with your "free" treat. #brand

If you think about it rationally, it's really not worth it to give a brand so much for something that sells for just a buck. Most brands that try to get you to opt into emails or messaging offer at least a percentage off discount that can amount to $20.

I pointed this out to my daughter. But lured by the siren call of "free" (see Dan Ariely's analysis of this in his books and articles), she insisted, "It's worth it." So I made the trip over, waiting in line to pay by relinquishing the right to privacy, and then punched in her phone number.

After all, the Slurpee was for her, and it really is way too sweet for my taste.

Related:


When doing business with humans
Major Marketing Missteps

Visualizing the customer journey

By Ariella Brown

It amazes me how many marketers still cling to the image of a linear funnel for the customer journey. Do you know of anyone whose path to purchase just proceeded smoothly from awareness to consideration to conversion. Real life just isn't like that.

A much more apt visualization of the customer journey is a Rube Goldberg machine designed to propel a single marble (representing your targeted customer) to a designated endpoint, which in the case of businesses would represent the conversion of purchase. A Rube Goldberg machine is not typically designed for a direct, linear path. 

Aiming to visualize your customer journeys? Are you picturing funnels? Forget about it! Funnels are wholly inadequate to represent a journey that is far from linear without a lot of recursive steps along the way.

A much more apt visualization of the customer journey is a Rube Goldberg machine designed to propel a single marble (representing your targeted customer) to a designated endpoint. In this case, that's , the conversion to purchase.

 A Rube Goldberg machine is not typically designed for a direct, linear path.In fact,  the setup for such machines lead the marble on a merry dance in which it moves in multiple directions as it comes into contact with different objects that push, pull, spin, and redirect it. 

Set it up 

In the same way, a customer's journey may begin with a single push.  But it can only continue if the framework to keep up the momentum is planned and put into place by someone who understands where an email is needed, where a case study would drive one forward, and also when to give the marble some time to just roll a bit until it hits your next lever. 

You don't just build the frames on the fly once the journey begins, which would be tantamount to leaving everything in the hands of your sales rep. Instead, you plan them out ahead of time, so the sales rep is only one of the levers in the whole machine.

See the video below for one such example, and keep your eye on the blue marble.

The same channel has multiple variations of a blue marble's journey from start to endpoint with different touchpoints pushing it along. That's also a great reminder that not every customer should be directed on the same path. Some will be ready sooner and some only later. You need to have several different maps available to suit your different customers. So think segmentation if not fully tailored personalization.

You won't always succeed

One final lesson to derive from Rube Goldberg machines as customer journeys is the fact that a lot of careful planning and setup can go into it without arriving at the desired result of a marble landing in the cup. This happens with the best-laid plans for purchase journeys, as well. 

Various things can come up in life that alter the path you were counting on. All builders of Rube Goldberg machines encounter setbacks and failures along the way when things don't go according to plan. You have to be prepared to accept that possibility and work through it. 

For example, your prospect's business might have taken a major hit that makes it necessary for him to put off the purchase. That's a setback, but it can be merely a temporary one if you take note of the situation and get a sense of when your customer will be ready to resume the journey.

Related

What to expect from a content marketing

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint 

What makes content marketing effective

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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.

Related:

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

Most Memorable Brand Slogans

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

CRO is Like Basketball

What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing

 

by Ariella Brown

There is a kind of disconnect is very common in all kinds of businesses in which the sellers fail to see things from the customer's eyes and project their own tastes and values on others. It doesn't occur to them that other people have their own calculus and that features and benefits they go on and on about may not matter to them at all.


In chapter 23 of The Little Prince, we get the perfect illustration of the misalignment between the value proposition of a product and what the customer actually wants in the interaction between the prince and a merchant he meets on his travels:
.

"This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.

"'Why are you selling those?' asked the little prince.

"'Because they save a tremendous amount of time,' said the merchant. "'Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.'"

"'And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?'"

"'Anything you like..."

"'As for me,' said the little prince to himself, 'if had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.'"

This is highly relevant in an age in which marketers have convinced businesses that they have to espouse causes to push on their customers. M.T. Fletcher debunked this effectively in a June 2023 AdAge article entitled Why Brands need to stop 'purpose' pandering:

Politics and purpose are not the same, rarely mix well, and yet marketers continue to wade into social issues they are unable to navigate. Some seem wholly dismissive of their own band DNA, which might explain why today's advertising seems so disposable.

 

We said this more than a year ago after a major study by the Brunswick Group demonstrated that most CEOs felt their brand needed to take a stand on social issues, while less than third of consumers wanted to see politics in marketing --roughly the opposite of what every agency was telling its clients at that time. Just because some major brands got away with it, and in a few cases hit all the right notes, doe not mean my toothpaste has any credibility in telling me which cause to support or when to feel outraged or guilty. It's stressful enough being told I have to floss everyday.

Read more examples here.

Related:

Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke

A matter of degree

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