Category: Weekly Story

A marketing novice wondered whether a direct mail ad he received from a restaurant was any good. He described the ad in an online discussion board and waited for responses.

Dozens of people replied with all sorts of marketing advice.

Lots of them said they liked the ad.

Some asked to see the advertisement so they could analyze it more carefully.

Others said there was no way to know if the ad was good without assessing “a variety of factors.”

One wise person replied, “Is the restaurant busy?”

Pretty good question. The bottom line.

Sure, some businesses do well…

…despite bad advertising.

And some businesses do poorly…

…despite good advertising.

But more often than not, good marketing leads to a better, busier business.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

A few months ago, I went to a St. Louis Blues hockey game with my son.

He ordered a chicken sandwich from a concession stand run by a local restaurant.

The chicken was raw. When we returned the food to the stand and asked for a refund, the woman at the cash register apologized and gave us our money back.

But when she handed the sandwich back to the guy cooking the food and explained to him what happened, he glanced at the sandwich, shook his head, rolled his eyes and looked at Jacob and me as if we were criminals.

I’m not a lip-reader, but the guy seemed to say, “F-ing, B-S” (or something like that) as he flung the sandwich into the trash.

The next day, I sent a direct, but polite email to the restaurant. I noted that food prep errors happen, and I can forgive those.

But, I said, it didn’t feel great to have the cook act as if we were wrong for returning the raw chicken he dished out.

The reply from the restaurant: Nada. Zero. Crickets.

What a missed opportunity!

Someone at the restaurant could have replied. Someone could have apologized. Someone could have owned up to a mistake.

Had someone done that, I would have felt much better about the restaurant. I most likely would have overlooked this one-time hiccup. I probably would have gone back to that concession stand or the restaurant to give them another chance.

If they had gone the extra mile and, for example, offered me a gift card, told me how they followed-up with the concession stand cook, or something like that, I would have become a fan of the restaurant. I would have been telling people about their great customer service.

Instead, I’m telling you about their lousy customer service. It’s unlikely I’ll visit that concession stand or restaurant again.

When you own up to your mistakes, good things usually happen.

When you ignore customers who contact you with valid concerns, your business will suffer.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

Last month, a networking group that I help manage contacted 18 former members to learn why they quit.

Three of the 18 said they quit for no particular reason. They just let their commitment lag.

Prompted by the phone call, they committed to resubscribe.

Three out of 18. That’s 17 percent. That’s pretty good.

Many of the 18 offered great feedback about why they quit. Leaders will use that feedback to improve the group.

One of the 18 expressed some frustration. She said she left the group six months ago. She asked, “Why did it take you so long to call me?”

We’ll take that feedback to heart.

All of the above adds up to one simple lesson: When you reach out to former customers, good things happen.

Some of them may return. In most cases, it’s much less expensive to win business back from a lapsed customer than to capture, nurture and convert a new lead.

Your business will grow stronger. Former customers will give you great feedback. Some of it may be invalid. Usually some of it is right on target

You’ll diffuse bitterness and back-biting. Customers (current or former) don’t like to be taken for granted.

That former group member who asked, “Why did it take you so long to call me,” felt neglected.

When you reach out to customers — even those who have left — you show you care. Those former customers may not come back, but they’re far less likely to harbor (or share) negative feelings about you. That’s especially important in the social media age.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

In early January, when the St. Louis Blues were in the National Hockey League cellar with the fewest points of any team, Interim Head Coach Craig Berube tore the standings from the locker room wall.

Yesterday, hours before the Blues clinched the Western Conference championship and punched their ticket to the Stanley Cup Final, a reporter asked Berube why he removed those standings.

“Because it didn’t look very good at the time. Where we were at and to get where we had to get to, it’s a long process. To see that every day, it doesn’t change quick enough, and it’s just a negative effect.”

I like that…

…and not just because I’m a Blues fan.

There’s a lesson in that for all of us who work for a living, all of us who set goals and strive for something.

We all face long processes.

Maybe we’re planning and launching an email marketing program.

Maybe we’re redesigning a website.

Maybe we’re building a sales team and striving to grow revenue.

And maybe we’re stuck.

We begin at the foot of the mountain. Progress — positive change — doesn’t come quick enough. We stare up from the bottom and see the summit far in the distance. So far that it’s discouraging. As Coach Berube says, “It’s a negative effect.”

But if we stop staring at the summit…

…if we stop reminding ourselves how far we have to climb…

…if we just focus on one task at a time…

…we move forward, step-by-step…

…until the summit is within reach.

Athletes say it all the time: “We’re taking it just one game at a time.”

We dismiss such comments as meaningless cliches.

But I think “one game at a time” is a smart approach. 

After their coach ripped the standings off the wall, after he dared the team to quit focusing on the distance from the base to the summit, after he encouraged the team to worry just about the next step, the team began to climb.

And now they’re four wins away from the summit.

Remember that the next time you’re stuck in a long process.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

My friend who handles PR for a nonprofit had an annoying mystery to solve.

One of her email subscribers complained that she had opted-in but was not receiving emails. Then another complained. Then another.

As my friend dug into the problem, she discovered that several people on her list were marked as unsubscribed. But those people never clicked the “unsubscribe” link in emails they received.

What gives?

Turns out the unintentional unsubscribers had something in common: Their employers used Microsoft’s ATP Safe Links threat protection system to scan incoming emails and check for viruses, phishing and other dangers.

Depending on the settings, ATP will re-write and auto-click links to determine whether they are threats.

The Problem: ATP was auto-clicking the “unsubscribe” link in the bottom of commercial emails — including the ones sent by my friend.

ATP is not the only system that checks links this way. So “false” opt-outs was a real problem for my friend.

My friend solved the problem by switching email service providers.

She could not control whether subscribers had threat protection systems that auto-clicked the “unsubscribe” link. But she could control what happens when those systems click that link.

All reputable email service providers include an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of mailings they send. But providers have different ways of handling those links.

Some providers have “one-click unsubscribe.” When a subscriber clicks the link, they are instantly unsubscribed from the list.

If you use an email service provider with “one-click unsubscribe,” you will suffer false opt-outs because many subscribers have threat-protection systems that will automatically click that unsubscribe link.

Other providers have click-and-confirm unsubscribe. When a subscriber clicks the unsubscribe link, they jump to a page where they must click a button to finalize the opt-out.

If you use a provider with click-and-confirm, threat protection robots are far less likely to generate false opt-outs.

Not sure whether your email service uses one-click or click-to-confirm? Send yourself an email from the system and click the opt-out link.

Does it instantly confirm that you’re opted-out? If so, you have one-click unsubscribe and you probably have a false opt-out problem.

If, instead, you jump to a page where you have to click a button to confirm the opt-out, you’re good.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

In 1774, King Frederick II of Prussia was ruling over a land ravaged by famine.

He urged farmers to plant potatoes to end the famine.

But back then, potatoes were considered livestock feed in Eastern Europe, not suitable for human consumption.

So farmers defied the king and didn’t plant them…

…until King Frederick changed marketing tactics.

He declared the lowly tater a “royal vegetable.”

He placed guards around the royal potato field.

He banned the local population from eating the precious crop.

And then he secretly instructed his guards to look the other way.

As King Frederick expected, locals began to sneak into the royal potato field and “capture” some of the plants.

They secretly began growing their own potatoes.

An underground potato market developed.

Then gracious King Frederick bestowed on his subjects the privilege to plant potatoes.

Potato farming flourished.

Famine finished.

What can we modern-day marketers learn from this story?

The most important lesson: human beings base buying decisions on how a product or service makes them feel. That’s an emotional decision, not a rational one.

King Frederick didn’t improve the taste of potatoes. He didn’t make them more nutritious or increase their shelf-life. A tater is a tater.

But Frederick proclaimed that taters are fit for a king. In fact, he said they’re exclusively for the king.

So, one day all those Prussians felt like lowly livestock if they ate taters. The next day eating taters made them feel like Kings.

Human beings shop for status.

They also value scarcity.

When King Frederick asked farmers to plant potatoes, they thought they were making a sacrifice. Nothing special about potatoes.

But when Frederick planted his tater field and deployed soldiers to guard it, potatoes gained the aura of scarcity. Now potatoes were hard to get. People aspired to get them. People risked their lives to steal them. People thought it was a privilege when the King said you can plant them.

That’s smart.

Marketing fit for a king.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

I was at a concert last night and heard some lyrics that made me think:

“That’s a great marketing lesson.”

(I couldn’t help it. That’s where my mind goes).

Here are those lyrics from an old Kris Kristofferson song called “To Beat the Devil:”

If you waste your time a talking
To the people who don’t listen
To the things that you are saying
Who do you thinks gonna hear?

Here’s the lesson:

Know your target market and aim carefully to interact with it.

If you spray your content and pitches all over the place, without regard for whom you target…

…you’re pissin’ in the wind (Sorry for that image, but it makes the point).

You’re wasting your time and money a talking to people who won’t listen.

That’s all.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. We help businesses identify and connect with their target markets so people will listen to what you’re saying. If you want to discuss how to make it happen for your business, email me at tom@marketvolt.com. For no charge and no strings attached, we’ll discuss with you how you’re building email lists, generating new leads and generally finding and connecting with prospects.

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

This was embarrassing…

Several months ago, I pitched MarketVolt’s software and services to a prospect.

He replied by telling me he’s already a customer.

Stupid me.

I’d found an old email conversation in which he and I nearly closed a deal. Eager to try again, I wrote, “It’s been a few months since we discussed whether MarketVolt was a good fit for you…”

I didn’t realize that a few days earlier, the prospect called our office to say he was ready to buy. One of our salespeople handled the sale and recorded it in our customer relationship management software (CRM).

Our procedures are clear: Before contacting a prospect, check the CRM to review previous contacts. Had I done that, I would have known the sale was done.

I remembered my misstep this yesterday when a stranger contacted me on LinkedIn to pitch her company’s services. She introduced herself, told me a bit about her company and asked whether I would like to meet to “see if we might be a good fit.”

I told her I knew all about her company because she was the fifth person from that company in two years to contact me.

Oops.

Each time they contact me, I tell them I’m not interested. But the message seems not to register across the organization.

I’ve never had the same sales person contact me more than once. So I assume each one who gets rejected by me gets the message. But that person doesn’t share the rejection with the rest of the organization. So the next sales person in line finds my name and title somewhere and comes calling.

I was direct, but polite with the latest sales person.

I told her she’s wasting her time (and mine) by reaching out to someone who has (repeatedly) said “No” to their pitches.

I suggested that a good CRM might help them avoid frustration — for prospects and themselves.

She replied: “I apologize for that, and you are correct! It’s a frustration of ours as well. Our CRM isn’t the best and I know the company is currently looking into (options). I will send a note to the team here to let them know not to contact you.”

That’s what the sales rep before her said, too.

I’m really not sore about it. Just mildly annoyed.

Actually I’m glad for the wasted pitch this time because it let to this story and this lesson:

Put systems in place to keep track of your stuff. For sales, that means a CRM that can be shared across the company.
Establish clear working procedures to define who does what within the system.
Hold team members accountable for following the procedures.

I fumbled #3 when I pitched an existing customer.

The sales rep who contacted me blamed #1 for her misstep (“Our CRM isn’t the best.”). But I suspect the CRM is good enough. I say that because businesses often stumble not because they have inadequate tools. They stumble because they don’t establish or follow-through on system to use those tools effectively.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. Wondering how to improve your marketing content so it resonates with your audience and doesn’t fall flat? We can help you do that — without dirty tricks or garbage data. Email me at tom@marketvolt.com to learn how we help businesses tune up their sales stories and marketing content. For no charge and no strings attached, I’ll review a marketing piece or the front page of your website and offer some suggestions. 

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

Our company made a marketing mistake.

I’m going to tell you about so you don’t repeat it.

We sell email marketing software to many schools and school districts. So we recently ran a print advertisement in the membership directory for the Missouri Association of School Administrators (MASA).

The ad included the address for our website designed specifically for schools and districts: k12.marketvolt.com.

In the same MASA directory, there’s an ad for the AdvancEd Improvement Network. Their ad also included a website address: advanc-ed.org/MASA.

We got our ad wrong. They got it right. Do you see it?

That web address — advanc-ed.org/MASA — redirects to their front page. They could have sent traffic to their site with the shorter “advanc-ed.org. But they added “/MASA” to the address?

Why? So they can measure whether the ad worked. When they review website traffic data, they can see exactly how many people landed on their site via advanc-ed.org/MASA.

I assume that address is unique to that ad. So they can measure exactly how many people landed on their site because of that ad.

We can’t measure our ad’s effectiveness because k12.marketvolt.com is not unique to our MASA ad. That address is on business cards, email signatures, trade show banners and other marketing pieces.

So we can count how many people reach our site by entering k12.marketvolt.com, but we have no idea whether they got their because of the MASA ad.

Sure, we can ask new prospects, “How’d you hear about us?” But that never generates meaningful data.

So when we debate whether to run an ad in next year’s MASA directory, we’ll be flying blind.

Shame on us, especially because we did not practice what we preach. For years, we’ve emphasized the importance of trackable URLs.

Print advertising still can work. But it works best when you can measure and test.

We blew it this time. And we’re not alone.

Advanc-Ed’s was the ONLY ad in the directory that is trackable. I recently paged through some local business journals and found ZERO ads with trackable links.

Creating a trackable web address is not difficult. Web developers can easily set a unique address — i.e. k12.MarketVolt.com/MASA — to redirect to any other page (such as the front page). WordPress and other web publishing systems include plugins to allow non-technical people to create redirects with ease.

Better yet, you can create a custom page for a given ad. Rather than redirect k12.marketvolt.com/MASA to our front page, we could create a specific page for our MASA audience. Trackable and more effective tailored content.

The thing we shouldn’t do, the thing you shouldn’t do: Put that generic link — www.oursite”.com — without trackability. If you can’t track it, you can’t know if it’s working. So you’re potentially throwing money down the drain.

p.s. Many advertising reps for print publications. Hate this trackable link idea. These are the ad reps who don’t want you to measure traffic precisely. They fear you’ll conclude the ad didn’t work (and you’ll have the data to prove it). Don’t let them talk you out of customized links. It’s your ad, your link, and your business on the line.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. Wondering how to improve your marketing content so it resonates with your audience and doesn’t fall flat? We can help you do that — without dirty tricks or garbage data. Email me at tom@marketvolt.com to learn how we help businesses tune up their sales stories and marketing content. For no charge and no strings attached, I’ll review a marketing piece or the front page of your website and offer some suggestions. 

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.

My favorite marketing forum lit up yesterday when someone complained about Gmail putting the emails he sends into the “Promotions” folder.

Several years ago, Gmail introduced folders (“tabs”) to organize incoming email into four categories: Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.

Most marketing emails sent through third-party software land in the Promotions folder.

Yesterday, an unhappy marketer complained in the forum about the Promotions folder: “This means that a large chunk of emails might not even get noticed, much less opened or read. Are there any ways to get around this?”

Several marketers echoed the complaints and offered various tricks to get mail to the “Primary” folder.

Others suggested quitting email marketing altogether.

I posted the following to the forum:

Fearing the Promotions folder is like fearing the Boogie Man. When I was a little kid, I used to peer under my bed before I went to sleep to make sure the Boogie Man wasn’t hiding there. I got over it. Get over your fear of the promotions tab.

Tons of data show that open rates haven’t decreased significantly b/c of the Promotions tab. So the initial premise (“a large chunk of emails might not even get noticed”) is simply wrong.

We paid careful attention to our numbers when Gmail introduced tabs and we confirmed what the other data show…People still open emails in the Promotions tab. And when they open those emails, they’re not surprised or annoyed to find that they’re promotional emails so opt-out rates actually went down a little bit.

Spending lots of time and energy trying to outsmart google is time wasted.

Marketers make all sorts of assumptions about why some tactic will work or won’t work.

Then they waste time, money and emotional energy acting on those assumptions — chasing false hope or fleeing the Boogie Man.

There’s a better way: Spend time (and perhaps some money) collecting and analyzing the data. Then your conclusions will be rational and fact-based, rather than emotionally-charged assumptions.

Tom
MarketVolt

p.s. Wondering how to improve your marketing content so it resonates with your audience and doesn’t fall flat? We can help you do that — without dirty tricks or garbage data. Email me at tom@marketvolt.com to learn how we help businesses tune up their sales stories and marketing content. For no charge and no strings attached, I’ll review a marketing piece or the front page of your website and offer some suggestions. 

p.p.s. If you like these emails, please do me this favor: Forward this to someone who might also enjoy it and encourage them to sign up for future emails on our website at MarketVolt.com.