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Give your emails a fighting chance

Chris Rand — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:00:15 +0000

It's amazing how many people assume that marketing emails which don't bounce back have been read by their recipients. In fact, the response rate of your emails may be much better than you think. But only because far fewer of them get read than you imagine. After your email has disappeared into the void (and not been returned), it has to negotiate a long list of tricky hurdles: spam filters at the Internet Service Provider level; firewalls at the recipient organisation; personal spam filters; recipients not liking the subject or sender and binning the email; and recipients not being able to read the email because of the formatting. If you lost just 10% of your emails at each stage, that's nearly half of them down the drain straight away.

Yet if you sit down and write me a personal email right now, the chances are I'll get it. Why should the same not be true of broadcast emails? Somehow my spam filter and my eyes (looking at the sender and subject line) can tell what's a one-off, potentially important email and what's just someone trying to half-heartedly give me and a thousand other people a tired, impersonal marketing pitch. We all need to make our marketing emails much more personal.

For more thoughts on this topic, have a read of Email Marketing: Sent Does Not Mean Delivered on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog.

Give your emails a fighting chance

Empathy has always been the key in industrial marketing

Chris Rand — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:23 +0000

There's some discussion going on in the more academic marketing world at the moment over whether emotional marketing has finally been beaten by rational marketing. This might seem a world away from our everyday concerns in the business-to-business sectors, but it does have some relevance. In Right-Brained or Left-Brained Branding? on Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog it highlights that this move might just be a misreading of consumers wanting reassurance rather than indulgence, a situation which most industrial marketers will take for granted as being normal. The article suggests that a balanced approach is surely still the best way, and empathy might be the big winner in your marketing message. I agree, but I suspect you instinctively know what people are more likely to respond to out of these two marketing scenarios: "Here’s the best Widget in the world at this price. Look at the updated benefits and features it offers” or “You can have our updated Widget that has the new features you need to make your life easier (demonstrating how) for less than you would expect to pay".

Empathy has always been the key in industrial marketing

Website redesign from the inside out

Chris Rand — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:00:30 +0000

Today I have a tremendous article which I want you to file away somewhere safely for the day when you decide to "redesign" your company's website. Redesigning Your Website: Who's Taking Care of the Content? on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog discusses the most important omission from almost every corporate website redesign: what is actually going to go on this great new website.

If you talk to website designers, you'll find that nine times out of ten, when they're approached by a client, they're told: "We'd like a redesigned, more modern website, which is easier to navigate around, looks cleaner, and is more consistent." Whilst these are all laudable things to do, they're the equivalent of saying: "Our company's products are a bit old-fashioned, can you come up with a new logo?" The look and feel of things is important, but it can't make up for a lack of substance.

Now, most website designers know this. But you won't hear them say: "Great! I assume that you're improving the content and facilities on the website, and you want a redesign to integrate these efficiently!" Why not? Because like any consultants, they tell you what you'd like to hear. If you want a paint job, you can have a super paint job. Why make you rethink employing them?

But don't think a paint job will disguise the product underneath. A website redesign should mean a redesign …from the inside out.

Website redesign from the inside out

I'd never thought of that

Chris Rand — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:00:43 +0000

You may be one of those people who think brainstorming is a woolly management idea which takes your team away from their real jobs, yet produces very little (while requiring significant expenditure in biscuits). But most people who have attended a brainstorming session run by an experienced facilitator will be great fans – I became a convert many years ago after attending one at an open day run by a local management consultancy.

However, it's quite possible to run a really good session without professional outside help. The Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog explains what you need to know in Take Your Brainstorming from Good to Wicked-Good, where author Paul Williams explains that it's how you analyse the ideas which makes the difference.

Online marketing is a classic case of where your sales team can come up with some real eye-opening insights if you give them a chance, and a brainstorming session may be just the place to do it.

I'd never thought of that

Identifying your top keywords

Chris Rand — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:00:07 +0000

Most of the people looking for your products and services online use the search engines. Some of them will find you because they've typed in search terms – or "keywords" – for which you do well in the search results. You can see what they typed in by consulting your visitor statistics. But others type in keywords which you don't do well for, and they never find you. What are they typing in? It's imperative you find out, and work on ranking highly for those keywords too. You can guess some of them – others you can find out by research. But ranking reasonably well for everything relating to your products and services is only half of the battle. You then need to determine which keywords get you customers, not just any old visitors. They're the ones you should focus on.

Finding them takes analysis and patience. But it's one of the most fundamental aspects of a successful B2B website. That's why we launch into the subject in weeks 2 and 3 of the Insider Programme, which I hope you'll consider joining.

A short article on Marketing Profs Daily Fix called Keywords, Keywords, Keywords talks about a good presentation which you might like to download. Follow the link there and the PDF slideshow you want is called Keyword Research – Do's and Don'ts (September 16, 2008).

Identifying your top keywords