You’re Probably Going to Fail at Content Marketing

May 7th, 2013

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – April 2013
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Sorry, I’m usually not a pessimist. I don’t WANT you to fail. But for the small to medium size business in the document industry, starting and maintaining an informational content strategy to generate brand awareness and attract leads is a tall order. Most of the organizations that try don’t get the results they were hoping for.

There are three different scenarios I’ve seen played out over and over again:

1. A partial effort yields little in return – Companies publish one or two articles a year, or manage to publish a quarterly newsletter. There is no consistency and they are not present in enough channels or outlets to reach enough of their audience. Quite often there is little or no effort to build their contact list.

Organizations that have an active but inadequate content marketing strategy won’t be top of mind when prospects begin their research into vendors worthy of consideration for their next purchase. They are likely to be out-marketed by their competitors and are therefore pushed to page 3 or 4 of search results on their key phrases – practically useless. 75% of searchers never get past the first page of results.

2. Started off with a bang, then died a slow death – We see this a lot, especially with newsletters. The first issue is well-planned and delivered with fanfare. Then eventually publication dates are missed, the quality of the content declines, or both. Most often, the schedule continues to slip until months go by with no newsletters being distributed, blog postings, or articles published.

Companies often don’t realize how much time and work it is to create content on a regular basis. The missed deadlines are the result of resources being pulled away from content marketing projects (which was never a primary responsibility for them anyway) and onto something more urgent.

3. Never really got started in the first place – We’ve worked with customers who have been planning to embark on a content marketing strategy for months, sometimes even years, without ever getting out of the starting gate. There is always something else that needs to be done first – new product introductions, web site re-design, hiring a new sales manager, upgrading the CRM system, cleaning up the contact list. The list is endless.

Waiting until every detail is perfect is a death sentence for content marketing strategies. It is much better to begin creating and publishing with what is at hand and then adjust the elements later. While they are wasting time getting all their ducks in line, competitors may be establishing themselves as the primary source your prospects are trusting for industry information. Being first, even if it isn’t perfect, is an advantage.

As you might have guessed, there are things you can do to increase your chances of success with content marketing. Following the same old pattern that hasn’t worked in the past isn’t one of them. There are lots of suggestions I could make. Here are my top three. If you do only these three things your content marketing strategy will be outperforming most other small and medium size companies that continue to wallow in the ineffective half-hearted efforts that you have abandoned.

1. Make a plan – We really like editorial calendars. They provide a deadline date as well as a planned set of topics you are going to cover. Many of our clients find the editorial calendars we prepare for them to be extremely helpful.

2. Be accountable – Make sure someone else in the organization is going to be looking for results on a specific day. Even more motivating is to commit publically. Let your audience know that your newsletter or blog articles will be published on a set schedule.

3. Get started – I can’t stress this enough. Getting started is sometimes the hardest part of any project. If you decide you don’t have the resources to sustain the effort you can line up some help. Do not wait, do not let any other urgent circumstance knock you off target. And by all means, do not grant you competitors a head start!

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5 Reasons You Need an ADF

May 7th, 2013

ADF 2013

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – April 2013
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Automated Document Factory technology has been around for a long time now. The basic functions are pretty easy to understand, and the benefits are clear. So how come there are so many mail shops that still rely on a clipboard as their primary document integrity solution? What is it that makes these companies insist on the same production methods we were using in 1983?

A major barrier has always been the cost. ADF’s can be expensive! I think it is the high price of the software, the annual software maintenance, and a substantial professional services contract to get it all working that has caused a lot of organizations to decide they can do without ADF.

I also think that some shops have been able to get by without investing in new technology because the applications they ran were relatively simple. The opportunities to make an error were few. When mistakes happened, the negative impacts were manageable.

This scenario is becoming less common. Wider data availability and modern document composition software make it possible to create highly-personalized documents and multi-channel communication strategies. The design and development investments are much more demanding than was required by the old mass mail methodology. Combined with the fact that companies are sending fewer pieces of mail, the greater investment in personalization and integration is making each piece more valuable than ever before. The impact on ROI when an error occurs or when a piece fails to make it into the mail stream is driving demand for better controls over mail production processes.

In my opinion, every company that produces mail today should have at least some ADF capability. To go without communicates to customers that the mail pieces are not important. This is exactly the opposite of what people in the document industry should be doing today! Investing in the changes to ensure every piece is tracked and delivered on time shows customers that mail service providers and in-house mail operations recognize the value of the mail they handle. Doing this efficiently and keeping costs under control requires automated document factory functionality.

Here are 5 reasons why I think automated document factory capability is a requirement for any document operation:

1. Regulatory Compliance: Simple mistakes like double-stuffing envelopes, duplex printing errors, or pages out of sequence can easily be prevented from ever becoming a privacy violation if ADF solutions are in place.

2. Multi-Channel Marketing: Campaigns that count on mail pieces linked to other events or messages to produce results will result in a dissatisfactory response rate if some pieces are not mailed or other errors make them ineffective. Using ADF reduces exposure to these risks.

3. Higher Productivity: Extra time spent trying to balance batches, looking for double-stuffed envelopes, or reprinting damaged pieces just drives up the prices. ADF solutions can reduce or eliminate wasteful practices in the document production workflow.

4. Professional Management: ADF-supplied statistics about jobs, employees, or equipment can shine a light on areas that need attention such as machine maintenance or operator training. It can also help managers make intelligent long-term decisions about upgrading or replacing equipment or on-the-spot judgments about scheduling, staffing, or job mix.

5. Competition: Any organization without an ADF is competing against other shops that do have this capability, putting them at a disadvantage from the start. This is true for outsource service providers, but also for in-house operations supporting organizations that frequently weigh the benefits of outsourcing print and mail operations vs. keeping the work in-house.

Today’s automated document factories are less expensive to implement than in the past. Some vendors of these solutions have moved functionality to the cloud, making investments in dedicated servers and individual copies of the software unnecessary. Any company that is interested in long-term growth should be looking into ways they can add ADF capabilities to their workflows. If you considered the idea years ago and dismissed it as too expensive or unnecessary it is time to re-evaluate in terms of today’s business and regulatory environments.

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Back to the Basics – Content Marketing Concepts and Benefits

April 4th, 2013

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – March 2013
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We’ve been writing about content marketing since we started this newsletter a few years ago – even before that, actually. But it has been quite a while since we addressed the topics of exactly what content marketing is and how companies benefit from using it. There are some misconceptions worth clearing up.

The name, content marketing, is a little misleading. We didn’t coin this phrase. I don’t think there was a name for the practice when we started doing it in 2006. The way we use content in this strategy doesn’t really have much to do with marketing at all. It is more about presence, reputation, and awareness.

Content Marketing ≠ Traditional Marketing
Content marketing isn’t linked directly to sales. Believing that it is causes anguish when businesspeople publish an article on their web site or distribute their first newsletter and the leads don’t start pouring in. This does happen sometimes, but immediate results like those are sort of a bonus. Generally, the benefits from a content marketing strategy take longer to develop.

Simply put, the purposes of content marketing are to make a favorable impression in the minds of prospects by delivering valuable information, being memorable, and being findable. Obtaining these objectives will have a top line impact – though the contributions from long-term content marketing strategies are not always obvious. For content to be effective it must be heavy on informational value and very low on persuasive marketing language. The selling part of content marketing is very subtle. Your material should support your business objectives without blatantly promoting your own products.

Specific Effects Not Always Measurable
I had a conversation with a customer about this subject not too long ago. I pointed out they might never be able to pinpoint specific results when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy. The data may not exist or the interrelated nature of various elements of the strategy will diffuse the effect of individual actions.

  • How many current customers decide not to switch to a competitor because of the industry knowledge communicated through your newsletter articles?
  • Which short lists of vendor candidates included your company due to your case studies or white papers?
  • How many new prospects found you via search engines that indexed your articles posted in blogs or published in trade magazines?

In most cases it will be impossible to answer these questions. All those actions can contribute to the final results in different ways for different customers.

Consistency is Key
Because the benefits of content marketing don’t follow a schedule, one of the most important objectives for a business to achieve is consistency. Companies that miss newsletter publication dates, cease posting Linked In updates, or experience long gaps between blog postings run the risk of not being on the radar during the critical early stages of B2B buying decisions. This is the time when prospects are figuring out which vendors are worthy of consideration. Failure to be top-of-mind when this research begins can exclude your company from opportunities before you are even aware they exist.

Unfortunately for most small to medium-size companies, consistency is the most difficult part of a content marketing strategy to accomplish. We’ve seen countless examples where companies start posting, publishing, and distributing informational content. Then they just stop. The reason? Something more urgent came up and the resources that were performing the content marketing tasks were pulled onto other projects.

Old content that never changes does not attract attention from prospects. Nor does it impress the search engines that reward regularly-updated web sites with higher page rankings. 75% of searchers never scroll past the first page of results. Your links that drift to pages 2, 3, or beyond are probably not contributing to new lead generation, though you may never know it. The inability to consistently publish content will definitely have an effect on search engine rankings. Being findable by prospects who are not already in your database is pretty important when it comes to list growth and new lead development.

Understanding what content marketing is and what it is not is a necessary step in the development and execution of your strategy. Those that are unable to make the distinction between traditional marketing and content marketing tend to have certain expectations of short-term results. Disappointment in early performance of the strategy leads to abandonment of effort thereby securing a future return of dismal proportions. Those that look at the individual parts of a content marketing strategy as integrated pieces of a whole and focus on accumulated benefits over time will have a tendency to carry on and reap the benefits as they develop.

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Forget about Big Data Until You Have Mastered Little Data

April 3rd, 2013

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – March 2013
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In the document industry we’ve been talking about personalized customer communications for a long time. Over the years capabilities have evolved and the concepts have been rolled out by industry experts, vendors, analysts, and journalists under a variety of names:

Versioning, Segmentation, Database Marketing, One-to-One-Marketing, Target Marketing, Selective Inserting, Transpromo, Variable Data Printing

All these methods or strategies are a little different from one another. But the overall idea is the same: use information we have about individuals or groups to present them with variable messages that are relevant to them. The latest buzz word is Big Data.

Some Can, Some Can’t
Some organizations are doing a fine job at putting personalized communications concepts into practice. They are way beyond the mass-communication approach that used to be the norm. Other companies are barely able to address their customers by name, much less compose variable messages that may be based on a number of disparate data points. Why is that?

It isn’t because we don’t have the software. I’m not talking about super-sophisticated artificial intelligence here, just your standard document composition systems. The functionality available in modern software makes it fairly simple to create fully variable documents, even with entry-level document composition products. Document designers who are too young to remember when floating a comma to the end of a salutation line was a programming task may not appreciate the efficiency of variable data document design today. Creating highly personalized documents is easier than ever before.

The hardware isn’t really a limitation anymore either. There are all kinds of printing devices in all price ranges that can produce monochrome or full color variable text and graphics at production speeds. Mail inserters are programmable and reliable to stuff the right inserts into the right envelopes. Even tabletop models can do this today. Inkjet printers installed at the end of inserter lines can spray variable messages right on the outside of the envelopes.

Goodness knows we’ve got the data, so that’s not the problem.

Not Much Seems to Have Changed
So why are companies still churning out generic mail? How come I still get customer acquisition pieces for products I already own? Why do I get statements for my dormant health savings account with the 2-cent balance (they’ve been coming every month for over three years)? My airline frequent flyer clubs know my address and my flight history. Why would they send me emails promoting fares on trips departing from cities thousands of miles away? Can’t the utility company think of a new statement message? It’s been unchanged for the last four years!

Perhaps I’m overly-sensitive about these things, having spent my career in the document business. Maybe the average consumer pays no attention to the messages so the companies producing them are not inclined to put resources into projects to improve them. However, there seem to be plenty of examples where personalization, versioning, variable data, or whatever you choose to call it has made a significant difference in results. There is evidence that improving the relevance of the message raises response and conversion rates.

Start With What You’ve Got
It seems to me that companies could make a big difference in the effectiveness of their messages and the impression they make on customers and prospects with just a small increase in effort. And it won’t take Big Data to do it. Most companies don’t really need to combine details such as an individual’s web browsing history, their in-store purchases, and psychographic profiles to send communications that are more meaningful. Using only the data they already have is enough to make a difference.

It’s great to think about how hyper-personalized communications can be used to finely target messages to customers. We shouldn’t abandon that goal. For most organizations however, that level of sophistication is a huge leap that will require the restructuring of many inter-related workflows throughout the organization. It can be done, but those are probably long-term projects. In the meantime, there are benefits to be had from simply being smarter about outbound communications and using “Little Data” to stand out from the competition.

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Has this ever happened to you?

February 27th, 2013

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – February 2013
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A prospect sees your ad or finds you via internet search, calls you up, and orders your product.Excited Man on Phone

I’d be pretty surprised if something like that happened in my business. Thrilled! But still surprised. I suspect you would have a similar reaction. Most of us sell products or services that are solutions to complex problems. Our customers in the document industry have a lot of variables to consider. Buyers just don’t make purchase decisions about such solutions without doing some pretty extensive research. By the time we hear from them, they probably already know a lot about us.

A good portion of this research occurs under the radar. We may not know it is happening. Business to business buyers typically don’t approach sales representatives until they have investigated their options, compared competing solutions, formed an opinion about possible vendors, and possibly even eliminated some vendors from further consideration.

Give ‘em a wink
Unless buyers miraculously start purchasing our wares on a whim, we should probably be concentrating on making sure those early-stage buyers remember to consider our companies when they start shopping. Equally important is providing the kind of information that helps those buyers decide to keep us on the list so we’re still there when they are ready to make their next move.

Advertising can play a part in the first objective – awareness. It can be expensive of course, but purchasing ads can be an effective strategy to get the attention of your future customers. When it comes to encouraging prospects to give us a chance at their business, however, ads alone are not going to do it. For that we need content that does more than just deliver a sales pitch.

We flirted for their attention; now let’s work on getting a second date
Brand awareness is absolutely necessary. But convincing prospects that we are legitimate contenders, that we know our stuff, and we understand their business requires meatier content. This is where items such as white papers, comparison guides, informational articles, and case studies come into play. Materials such as these are the proof that we can back up the claims made in our advertising. By consistently making this type of content available we create reputations as knowledgeable and trusted sources of information.

Nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers say they rely upon their own research to decide which companies to contact about purchasing their products. If as vendors of these products we don’t provide enough information that prospects can use in their evaluation, the chances of making the short list of companies invited to present proposals are diminished.

We are in a long-term relationship
That is why Print/Mail Consultants publishes articles, newsletters, videos, and more. It is why we travel to conferences to make presentations. We really don’t advertise much at all. We try to make sure that every piece of content that we deliver conveys the message that we know what we are doing and we understand the challenges of those organizations we’re trying to help.

These approaches work. I’m writing this article a few days after one of our videos was posted. It has had about 500 views so far, which is great. That is 500 people in our audience that have been exposed to our company name and consumed a little bit of content that shows we’re up to speed on what is going on in the industry.  Even better, we’ve signed up several new subscribers to our newsletters and gotten two unsolicited phone calls asking about our services.

It doesn’t always work out this way. The real benefits of creating and publishing informational content are usually cumulative and long-term, so it is difficult to tie one particular published piece to specific prospect actions. But overall I am convinced of the effectiveness of the approach. We’re constantly trying new things and we intend to continue with the strategy that has been paying off.

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Envelopes Could Be the Problem

February 27th, 2013

Envelope

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – February 2013
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There are a lot of ways you can improve the productivity of your mail inserting operation. Often, mail center managers leap directly to changes in their shop equipment. Faster inserters, automated job change-over, and camera-based monitoring and tracking are solutions that are frequently implemented in attempts to get more mail through the operation on every shift.

Those are all great moves to make. Any of them might be just what is needed in a particular operation. But those things cost money. Getting approval for capital expenditures may be tough. What if there was something you could do to help you meet SLA’s more consistently, raise quality, and lower your labor costs without ever having to make a huge investment?

Save some money – fix your envelopes
Surprisingly, improving the quality of the envelopes has the potential to make improvements in inserting operations without requiring extra money. This is an area that is often overlooked as a productivity enhancing tactic. But fixing problems with materials often results in improvements that can exceed the performance bumps that one can expect from investments in new hardware.

When you do decide it is time to invest in higher speed inserting equipment, the demands put upon the envelopes are even greater. Not all envelopes are designed for the stresses of a high speed environment. In fact, some managers have experienced initial disappointment in their new equipment because the output is actually LESS than their old machine – at least until they work out the material problems.

Operations managers have a tendency to blame the equipment for the downtime that takes a big chunk out of the finished-pieces-per-hour statistics. But in fact there are many factors that can have an effect on those numbers. The machinery itself is one factor, but often the impact of the envelopes running on them is not given much thought.

Changing envelopes from problems into assets
Here are some ideas that will help to ensure that your envelopes are part of the reason for high productivity instead of the cause for disappointing results:

  • Avoid manufacturers that produce envelopes only with die-cut production techniques. With die-cutting it is difficult to maintain consistency.
  • Use diagonal-seam envelopes. Side-seam designs have a tendency to cause inserts to catch and the seam glue can sometimes cause the inside surfaces of the front and back of the envelope to become stuck together.
  • Provide Purchasing and your envelope vendors with the material specifications for your inserter. These should be available from your equipment vendor.
  • Ask your equipment vendor for advice or referrals to envelope manufacturers. They probably know which vendor’s envelopes work well on their machines and which don’t based on the experience of some of their other customers.
  • Inspect envelopes for damage. This can be caused during delivery, from being stacked too high in the warehouse, run into by forklifts, etc. If material is consistently arriving from the vendor in poor condition you may have to insist on better packaging. If it is getting damaged after being received you may have to discuss the problem with the warehouse people.
  • Store envelopes in a climate controlled warehouse. Humidity change is a major problem. Paper warps when the moisture content changes. Also acclimatize envelopes planned for the next day’s use by moving them into the production room the day before.

When looking for ways to improve the productivity of your inserting operation, don’t overlook the obvious. Envelopes and material can be a huge factor and one that can be easily corrected with little or no expense.

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Adjusting Your Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013

Messy Documents

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – January 2013
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Companies starting up a strategy to use content to achieve brand awareness and nurture sales leads don’t always go into it with a well-developed plan. In fact, it seems that most of the efforts are pretty haphazard. I’m all for getting started whenever you can – a scattered effort is better than no effort at all. But if your content marketing strategy isn’t producing the results you intended it might be time to take a step back and make some adjustments.

Here are a few keys to success.

Provide material that matches the interests and objectives of your audience
This advice goes beyond simply covering the right topics. I assume you’re already doing that. What we’re talking about here is recognizing that prospects require different content depending on where they are in the buying process. In the early stages, raising awareness and building a reputation is most important. After that, potential customers are looking for a reason to do business with you. Your content must demonstrate how your products solve problems that your audience is facing. In the final stages before making a decision, future customers will be comparing vendors. Items such as case studies and white papers address those needs.

Always encourage the next step
Although you might be monitoring prospect activity on an individual basis, you never know when something may happen that makes them decide they are more serious as buyers. Including a clear call to action in your communications is a great idea. Keep giving prospects the option to download in-depth material, schedule a demo, or take other actions that usually lead up to a sale.

Review your content for quality
Lots of companies get a head start on content generation by raiding existing material. That material was developed for a different purpose. It is often too sales-like, plugging your products as the sole solution to a myriad of customer problems. A focus on informational value is more appropriate for a content marketing strategy so you may need to re-work some of the material. You’ll also want to make sure that your content isn’t too dated. If the Resources page of your web site still includes advice on how to benefit from postage rates that changed four years ago you should probably just remove it.

Improve the chances of your content being found
Relying on a single channel limits your reach. So many companies publish content to their web site or blog and then sit back to wait for the leads to roll in. They are usually disappointed. There are lots of outlets for informational content you create, start using them. Fortunately, publishing to additional outlets doesn’t necessarily require you to compose all new original articles. Often you can use the exact same content in multiple places or make minor modifications to repurpose an article for a particular audience.

If you are going to the trouble of creating and publishing content you might as well get as much benefit from those investments as you can. It really doesn’t take much more effort to think about the desired outcome as you create the content. In fact, it’s less stressful than rushing around at the last minute and churning out something that might not represent your company in the manner you intended.

One step you can take that will make a big difference costs you nothing. It’s an editorial calendar that lists the kinds of content you will be publishing over the next year. Our clients who have done a calendar are surprised at how this simple step gets them thinking strategically about their content marketing efforts. We sometimes help customers put their editorial calendars together. If we can help you with yours, please drop us a line.

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Move Update: Not as Permanent as You Think

February 4th, 2013

Returnt to sender graphic

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – January 2013
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Recently we’ve started to get a lot of mail at my house that is addressed to Helen, the previous owner. The pieces are all properly addressed. They have First Class postage and valid IMb barcodes. Two things got my attention:

1. The variety of the mail. We’ve gotten pieces that look like legitimate checks, some seemingly important notifications, renewals, and advertisements.

2. This is a new phenomenon. Prior to now, we hardly ever got any of Helen’s mail.

I was a bit baffled until I started to think about when we bought the house. It was about four years ago. Then it started to make sense. Up until now, all the First Class mail that was addressed to the previous owner was probably getting forwarded to Helen’s new address because she filed an address change with the Postal Service when she moved.

Mailers that were corresponding with Helen were using the National Change of Address database (NCOA) to direct the mail pieces to her new address. But Helen’s NCOA record was purged after 48 months. With no forwarding order in the NCOA database anymore, the mailers are addressing the pieces according to the old address they have on file.

Therein lies the problem.

In my experience with mail centers almost all of them use an approved Move Update method to improve the deliverability of their outbound mail. But permanently modifying the source records with updated addresses rarely gets done. Changing the mailing files on the fly is a temporary solution.

Fixing address records permanently isn’t an easy problem to solve. Often the corporate databases that provide mailing addresses are far removed from the actual file that is used by document operations to print the mail pieces. The source data may not even be in a central location, with different departments all maintaining their own set of records. It is conceivable that the same customer may have different mailing addresses in different departmental files. Finding the right database to update could be difficult.

This gets even more complicated if the print and mail work is outsourced. The service provider may have the capability to identify the address changes but they frequently have no direct business relationship with the departmental owners of the data.

Common Move Update Compliance Methods
Mailers that use FASTforward© to change delivery addresses with optical mail sorting equipment also encounter barriers to updating source data. In-house sorting operations or presort service bureaus may or may not return usable updated address information that is applied by their machines. FASTforward© will be replaced by NCOALink MPE as of January 27, 2013 but the file updating issue will remain.

Address Change Service (ACS) is a post-mailing method of receiving change-of-address or information on undeliverable mail pieces. The USPS returns the data in electronic form to the mailer. The difficulty in dealing with ACS data is that by the time the address changes are received, the file that was used to create the mailing may no longer exist. It may have been a data extraction from a larger database. Sequence numbers or mailing piece ID numbers applied at the time of mailing may no longer be meaningful. Matching the ACS data back to main database could be difficult.

Mailing operations that use NCOALink to change addresses prior to printing probably have the best chance of getting source records updated since the address changes are discovered while the mailing list is still in the hands of document operations.

But using feedback from any Move Update method to change the source addresses is not something that mail operations has the authority to do. They don’t have the access. They may not even know where the data resides.

Impacts of Undeliverable Mail
Obviously, efforts to create and mail documents that will not reach the intended recipients are wasted. Money spent on materials, consumables, labor, and postage will never be recovered. Depending on the frequency of communications and the actions of both the intended recipient and the actual recipient, this could go on for a long time. The USPS will deliver the piece to the valid address on the envelope. If the residence is occupied, it will be up to the resident to return the mail piece so the sender can take corrective action. Some consumers may simply throw the mail in the trash.

The customer may notice that she is suddenly not receiving mail that has been successfully delivered to her new address for the last four years. A call to customer service can initiate a lengthy and expensive research project to determine the reason for the missing mail. In the case of checks, stop-payment orders and re-issuance might be required. In any case, the customer relationship is damaged.

Is There a Solution?
The best approach to prevent the problems stemming from expired NOCA records and subsequent mis-delivered mail is passing source files through NOCA on a regular basis and updating the records. As I have noted, this could be challenging given the disparity of customer databases in large organizations.

Document Operations is the department most qualified to take ownership of such a project. An outreach effort will be required, but could be well worth the time invested. As a bonus, establishing a channel of communication with multiple departments within an organization is almost always beneficial to corporate document operations managers.

As I write this, I realize that I filed my own change of address four years ago. If I am getting Helen’s mail, I wonder who might be getting mine.

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Shooting Yourself in the Foot – Part 2

December 27th, 2012

From the Customer Retention NOW! Newsletter – December 2012
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Conclusion of a two-part series about mistakes that can ruin a content marketing strategy

Xray shot in footIn the last issue, we pointed out some commonly-overlooked things that can wipe out all the hard work involved in creating and publishing content. There’s plenty of advice on the internet about things you should do with content. This series is about things you should NOT.

Here is the LINK to part one of this series.

Mistake #5 – Publishing content of low quality
If your objective is to develop a reputation as an expert resource, or you want to portray your company as one that produces high quality goods and services, then everything you produce should be of high quality. Check each piece of content to make sure it reflects well on your organization. Mistakes will happen (we made a couple of errors in part one of this series – did you catch them?). But taking the time to edit and review will increase your article’s sharability and impact.

Mistake #6 – Burying the message
You may have a bunch of products you want to promote, or tons of ideas to share. But putting them all in one email or blog is counter-productive. Keep the message simple and focused, and make sure that whatever text you’ve composed supports the action you want the reader to take. Anytime your audience has to figure out what you are trying to say, you risk losing their attention.

Mistake #7 – Failing to test
There are a couple of aspects to consider when it comes to testing. If you are creating pure marketing campaigns then most experts advise doing a split test, where part of your list receives one version of the message and another part of the list receives a different version. Analyzing the results helps you decide which version to use in future efforts. But you should also test all links, landing pages, and forms – even for one-off email blasts. If you are creating HTML emails, we recommend testing them using a variety of different email clients as each one may render your code differently.

Mistake #8 – Undefined objectives
If you don’t know what it is you intend to accomplish you can be pretty sure that your audience will be similarly confused. When asked about the purpose of content marketing, most business people will indicate it is a way to increase sales. Maybe so. But the objective of a particular piece of content or message may be centered on interim steps such as encouraging more people to sign up for your mailing list, visit your web site, follow you on Twitter, share some information about themselves with you, etc.

Mistake #9 – Ignoring the metrics
Chances are, the various channels of communication you use can provide some feedback. You may have to add some code or invoke some options to enable this capability. Checking the metrics is a great way to find out what is working in your content marketing strategy and what is not. Email systems may tell you about opens, unsubscribes, clicks, or forwards. Web site analytics can tell you about visitor traffic. And tools available for social networks will report on views, downloads, retweets, etc. Some systems can even tie together the activity of an individual contact over time, giving you an opportunity to make personal contact at an opportune time or do some lead-scoring. (Our Ready Communications program does this. Shoot me an email if you want to find out more).

We know how hard it is to plan and execute a content marketing strategy. There is content to develop, channels to manage, software to learn, and efforts to coordinate. It would be a shame to have all that work go to waste.

If you notice some of these mistakes being made in your own organization, get them fixed and move on. The good thing about content marketing is that it is a long-term strategy. Making a mistake or two along the way does not keep your efforts from producing better results once the errors are corrected.

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Direct Mail and Privacy

December 27th, 2012

Binoculars and pages

From the Practical Stuff Newsletter – December 2012
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I recently read a research paper about direct mail advertising that was published by some university professors. They were looking into American attitudes about the relationship between direct mail and consumer privacy.

As the researchers found out, it was difficult to separate the privacy concerns from general feelings regarding direct mail. They looked for surveys and research done in the past and determined that they were all flawed or skewed in one way or the other, based on the way that questions were posed and the ranges of responses that were allowed. So they did their own survey and in their paper reported the results from a question about supporting a Do Not Mail list that would reduce the amount of advertising mail that consumers received in their mail boxes.

Predictably, a vast majority of the respondents (81%) said they would support such a list.

DNM to protect privacy? Seems harsh!
For a postal system that spends a good deal of their resources delivering direct mail advertising and entire industries that support direct mail with their goods and services, a DNM registry modeled upon the Do Not Call list that regulates telemarketing could be devastating. Do Not Call may have had some privacy aspects also, but mostly people found telemarketing calls to be intrusive. They seem to be thinking the same way about direct mail.

It wasn’t entirely clear how much consumers were concerned about their actual privacy when it comes to direct mail. Some legal cases and studies in the past revolved around the concept that the use or sale of something as basic as a name and mailing address as a way to promote products or services was a privacy invasion. None of these lawsuits were successful.

Darned if you do, darned if you don’t
What a double-sided dilemma for the direct mail industry! On one hand, using available data sources to compose highly variable messages and offers can make consumers even more uncomfortable about their privacy. On the other hand, generic communications delivered through programs like Every Door Direct Mail can be wasteful and just serve to reinforce the notion that all direct mail is junk (and that the Postal Service doesn’t care)!

For 40 years consumers have had the option to use the Direct Mail Association’s Mail Preference Service to try and control the advertising mail that comes to their mail boxes. As the study points out, marketers who do not belong to the DMA are not obligated to use their suppression list. Whether non-DMA mailers account for a high percentage of the volume or consumers are distrustful of the Mail Preference Service and don’t sign up, the study reveals that only about 1% of direct mail is blocked via the DMA Mail Preference Service.

Playing offense makes more sense
I think we need something else that will give consumers the control they want, without cutting the entire direct mail industry off at the knees like an all-or-nothing Do Not Mail list could do. Companies still need a way to connect with potential new customers. Direct mail may seem intrusive to some consumers, but it is certainly less so than phone calls, emails, or text messages. Developing easy tools that allow consumers to decide the kind of direct mail they receive, from whom, and how often may be a way for this channel to thrive.

The good news is that we’re already half way there. By 2014 almost all of the individually-addressed direct mail pieces in the US postal delivery system will be identifiable by way of intelligent mail barcodes. Imagine a smartphone app that allowed a consumer to scan this barcode and then transmit preference information to a trusted entity like the USPS. The privacy concerns would lessen, I think.

The US Postal Service could forward this information on to the mailers and then set traps on the sorting equipment to make sure the marketers have complied.

By undercutting more drastic Do Not Mail regulations, the marketers and the Postal Service could benefit from the continued existence of a viable direct mail channel. Consumers benefit from removing themselves from mailing lists that do not interest them, with the confidence that their wishes will be carried out. Everybody wins.

There are ways these ideas could be expanded, opening up new revenue streams for the USPS. I’ll write about those someday. In the meantime, if you feel like discussing the merits of these thoughts, or have some other ideas, please drop me an email or give me a call.

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