As we continue the discussion of how advertising works differently in different media, we enter into the new, scary online world of Email, Websites, and Social Media.

Today’s topic is Email.

At a fraction of the cost of direct mail and with the availability of templates and email services, many consider Email to be the easiest, most inexpensive way to reach your customers multiple times with multiple offers and tons of information. Some call it the perfect solution to more costly traditional advertising.

And in many ways, they would be right. Here are some of the inherent advantages of Email Marketing.

• It is relatively inexpensive to use. Constant Contact, one of the largest email services, offers plans as low as $15 per month, and only $30 per month for lists up to 2500 emails. That’s $360 per year, or the equivalent of 818 first class stamps.
• You can do it as often as you like at no additional charge.
• It is quick. Within minutes of hitting the send button your Email is in the inbox of your recipients.
• It is easy. You can write, edit, format, add pictures, do surveys and more with just a minimal amount of computer skills.
• You can track your results quickly. Three simple ways to track the ROI include: How many emails get opened? (Is this number growing or shrinking?) How many coupons were used? How many people are subscribing/unsubscribing? If your list keeps growing, people are finding value in the info you send.

Email might be one of the best ways to utilize the new technologies to grow your business. But you have to cross a few hurdles to get there.

First, there is the list. Where did it come from? Who is on it? Do the people on the list want to get your email? To be successful, your email list has to be permission-based. It has to be people who gave you permission to send them stuff, people who want to hear from you. Otherwise, you’re just sending spam and making people angry at you.

How do you get a good list? By asking for it. Put a fishbowl on your counter and ask customers if they want to sign up. Offer a $25 gift certificate drawn monthly for anyone who signs up that month. Put a link on your website (Wait, you don’t have a website? We’ll discuss that next). Put it on your Facebook page, register receipt and front door. Ask, ask, ask.

Second, you have to commit to sending out regular emails and checking your list regularly for accuracy. How often should you send out an email? Some people say weekly, others say daily. I say, whenever you have something new to say. At the very least, say something once a month so that the people on your list don’t forget about you. At the very most, say something new EVERY time you send an email. And check for bounce backs. If an email address doesn’t work, delete it.

Third, you have to have a thick skin. People will unsubscribe to your email for a variety of reasons and you’ll get a report of it. You can’t take it personally. But if too many people unsubscribe, either you have a bad list, or you’re sending out a bad email (probably both). Tweak your message and see what happens.

The bottom line is that Email can be an extremely successful marketing tool if you follow these simple practices:

• Get a good list. Get permission up front and let people know what they are signing up to receive. Grow your list by asking everyone everywhere if they are interested.
• Use a professional service to send your email. I use Constant Contact, but there are other services. The professional services have templates for you to use, know how to avoid spam filters, ensure that you use best practices such as unsubscribe notifications, and can manage your lists more efficiently than you ever could.
• Add pictures to your emails. A picture may not be worth a thousand words, but images are eye-catching and interesting. They also help the people who just like to skim and scan move from topic to topic.
• Make the content fresh and new. Say something new with every email. It doesn’t have to be a discount or coupon, but it does have to be fresh and new and consistent with your Character Diamond.
• Send it out often enough to be remembered but not so often as to be annoying.
• Measure the ROI. Is your list growing or shrinking? Are more or less people opening each email? Are coupons and special offers being used? If the ROI is not good, keep tweaking the message until it turns around.

If you have the time to write the copy, you have the time to send out Emails. And at the current rates, it is an affordable way for you to reach your loyal customers often and keep them coming back regularly.

If you can grow a good list, you should definitely be doing Email Marketing.

Do you agree or disagree?

PS Sign up for the Toy House Email Newsletter at http://www.toyhouseonline.com/.

Every form of advertising has it’s pros and cons. Magazines are no different.

To understand magazine advertising, you have to understand the magazine business model. Ray Bard of Bard Publishing explained it best when he said:

“When you’re thinking about writing a book on a subject or considering a
business to go into, it’s essential that you find out 2 things:

1. How widespread is the public’s interest in it?
2. How deep is that interest?

“If interest is not widespread and not very deep, you’re looking at a Puddle. Never invest time or money in a puddle.

“If interest is widespread but not very deep, you’re looking at a Swamp. Be careful of swamps. They look like oceans at first because everyone is interested. But that interest is shallow, not deep enough to drive action. Investors go broke when they see a swamp and think it’s an ocean.

“If public interest is wide and deep, you’re looking at an Ocean. But you’re going to need a platform on which to navigate your ocean. If you don’t have a platform, you’ll drown. And you’re going to need a plan or you’ll drift.

“If public interest is narrow but deep, you’ve got a Well.
Don’t underestimate it. You can draw a lot of water from a well. I once knew a
writer who wrote a book called The Care and Feeding of Quarter Horses. The book held no interest for readers who didn’t own a quarter horse, but those who did had deep enough interest to buy the book. It was extremely successful.”

Magazines are Wells. Interest is narrow but deep. If you sell to rock climbers, there are magazines exclusively for rock climbers. If you sell to perennial gardeners, there are magazines for perennial gardeners.

No matter how niche your product, there is most likely a magazine that perfectly fits that niche. And unlike almost all other forms of traditional advertising, only magazines can consistently give you potential customers that exactly fit your profile.

So what’s the downside? Two things…

• Frequency
• Cost

The more niche the magazine, the less often it is produced, meaning the less often your ad has the chance to be seen. And being a passive ad, there is the possibility it won’t get seen at all. This can be tough if you’re trying to promote an event or special sale and you miss getting seen in time. This can also be tough if you’re trying to raise top-of-mind awareness (branding). Since frequency is the key to memory, lack of frequency works against your long-term goals.

And costs for magazine ads can be astronomical. If it’s a full color magazine, you probably need a full-color ad just to have a shot at getting seen, and those ads typically cost more.

But if you think a magazine might be the right avenue for your advertising campaign, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Make sure the readership fits your customer profile as closely as possible. Ask your current customers what magazine they read to help you choose which magazines would be the best fit.
• Understand the goal of the magazine and match your ad to the goal. If the magazine is used primarily to give event information, you should advertise your events. If the magazine primarily is used to give information, make your ads informational.
• Ask for discounted rates and priority placements in return for signing full-year contracts. The best customers get the best ad placements. Be one of their best customers.
• Use professional production for your ads. The magazine is using professionals. You should too.
• Keep it simple. Print ads are like billboards, only a limited time to get your attention. Your ad should be able to attract someone’s attention is less than 3 seconds. Pay special attention to your headline and your graphics.

One of the biggest benefits of magazine advertising is the fact that people hold onto and re-read magazines often, giving readers multiple chances to see your ad. Add to that the chance to reach your very specific niche audience and magazines can be the well that fills your profit tanks full.

If there is a magazine with the exact right readers, a purpose aligned with the purpose of your business, a decent frequency, and a cost you can afford, you should consider it as a viable advertising option.

Do you agree or disagree?

A continued discussion of how ads work differently in different media…

Ready, aim, fire!

Shotguns are different from rifles. Rifles fire bullets, singular masses of metal propelled by gunpowder that make a single, clean (deep) hole in the target. Shotguns fire shot, a collection of small pieces of metal that scatter somewhat as they fly giving you a wider margin of error for hitting your target, but penetrate less deeply.

Direct mail is a lot like a shotgun, a scatter shot approach to finding new customers. You purchase a list of potential customers, create a mailing piece, send it out with a message that has wide (but not deep) appeal and hope you get a return. Unfortunately, the average return rate is usually less than 3%.

There are two problems with this approach:

• The list
• The message

It is difficult to get a quality list. People are more private and stingy with their personal information. They only give it freely when there is a promise not to sell or trade such info away.

The list makers all claim to have great lists, but there is a good chance they had to beg, borrow and steal to make a list that might actually get you a decent return.

Plus, these lists are based on basic demographics with no consideration for the all-important character traits these potential customers have. Demographics are far less important than psycho graphics for determining who will be most receptive to your message.

Creating a list on your own takes time and generally only gives you a list of current customers, not a list of potential new ones. This is okay if your goal is to get more repeat business, but not a way to generate new clients.

But let’s say you are able to get a quality list of potentials at an affordable price. What are you going to say to them? How will you entice them into your store? A coupon? A discount? A sale?

While effective at drawing certain customers, coupons and discounts have some negative consequences, too. They signal customers that your prices are too high in the first place because you’re so willing to lower them. They teach customers to wait for the next coupon or discount or sale. They tell your customers that prices are negotiable.

Also remember, the bigger the offer, the bigger the return (and the bigger the consequences).

You could make your mailing piece about a product, but you’ll only be able to attract a portion of the list that is currently in the market for that product.

Now you see why although 46% of all adults read their direct mail pieces, 97% of the recipients of a typical mailer casually toss it aside and take no action.

If you’re going to do Direct Mail, follow these tips:

• Get your list from a reputable source or create your own. In this world of spam, permission is necessary to even get your mailer seen, let alone acted upon.
• Ask for details of the list that go beyond age, gender, and income. Demographics such as these are not guarantees of matches for your brand message.
• If you are sending multiple mailings to the same list, limit the coupons to once a year so as not to train them to wait for the next deal
• Make your message as powerful as possible. Your message is like a magnet. It’s power to attract is proportional to it’s power to repel. Although some will be repulsed, others will be empowered to act.
• Measure your results. A typical Direct Mail to a purchased list will garner about 2-3% response. Can you live with that? A good quality list with an above average message sent at the peak time of your season might get as much as a 5% response. A great message sent to your personally created list (your known fans) at the perfect time can get you a 9% response.

We only use Direct Mail once a year to thank our loyal customers for doing business with us. We send a postcard at the end of October with a message consistent with our Character Diamond and a coupon worth $20 off a $100 purchase (our only coupon of the year). Our return last year was 9.2%. Of course, the list was of high quality – all customers who had purchased from us in the past and asked to be on our mailing list. And the message was spot-on, hitting all the right buttons that made them customers in the first place.

Still, 90.8% of the postcards did not come back. And if you do the math… We generated over $100,000 in top line sales, but at a cost of almost $18,000 (printing, mailing and discounting costs). The biggest question is… How much of that was sales we might not have received otherwise? After all, the list was our greatest fans.

Use Direct Mail only if you know you have a quality list, know exactly how to say something powerful to them, and are willing to absorb those costs involved.

Do you agree or disagree?

Continuing the discussion of how ads work differently, lets talk Yellow Pages.

For some of you, your Yellow Pages probably take up half or more of your ad budget. I know. We used to be the same way.

Unfortunately, Yellow Pages are only for those people who have lost the will to advertise. It is the last resort someone takes to find a business they have never previously known. It is the last place someone will look to find you if they have not heard of you through word-of-mouth or other forms of advertising.

Think about your own Yellow Page habits. First, do you still even use them? Or has Google become the directory of choice? Second, are you looking up a phone number of a business you know or a category of businesses you don’t know?

The Yellow Page reps have plenty of seductive statistics telling you things like how 88% of all people surveyed would go to the Yellow Pages first if they needed to find a plumber. Don’t get trapped by the numbers. Ask yourself WWYD?

Here’s what really happens… Your toilet has sprung a leak. You have no clue what to do. you don’t know any plumbers. You reach for your phone. The first person you call is…

Your Dad. (Or spouse, or best friend, or boss or co-worker)

You ask them if they know a good plumber. By the time you get to the phone book you already have a name in mind of who you will call. The Yellow Pages only supply the number, not the name, not a referral. Think of it as an info guide, not a form of advertising and persuasion.

Forget all the statistics. As Winston Churchill said, “The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.” The real truth is that you want customers to be thinking of you long before they need a phone number. You want them going to the phone book for one reason only – to look YOU up because they have already decided where to go, they just need a phone number and directions.

So when do you use Yellow Pages for advertising?

• When you are getting traffic from outside your own phone book region and need a place for people to find your contact info.
• When you are in an industry where no one advertises at all and the Yellow Pages are the only place to find anyone
• When you are in a town with an extremely high turnover rate where no one stays long enough to make friends for referrals.

If you’re going to do Yellow Pages, here are some tips:

• Get all the free listings you can get. Some companies have deals that give you free listings under certain headings. Ask your vendors and ask your Yellow Page reps.
• Go simple – Get your single line listing. If anything, add your website.
• Be realistic – If you don’t get traffic from a certain area, don’t go in that book. The expense will not pay for itself over the long run.
• Measure your online traffic to see if their online listing of you is giving you any referrals
• Ignore the secondary books in your market. If enough people ignore them, maybe they’ll go away.

Some people consider Yellow Pages the necessary evil of advertising. I question the necessary part. Your goal should be to get people thinking of you long before they reach for the book.

Do you agree or disagree?

As we continue our discussion of how different advertising media work, we come to my personal favorite.

Radio – the Marathon runner.

No, I’m not a runner. But I am in business for the long run. My time horizon for Toy House extends beyond my children. So I like advertising that also has long term benefits. Radio is one of those. A well-crafted long term radio campaign gives you slow and steady increases in top-of-mind awareness that builds upon itself exponentially.

Advantages? Here are some of the best:

• Intrusive in nature – You can’t turn off your ears. If the radio is on and you’re in the room, you’re listening. No mute buttons or fast forwarding like TV, no flipping pages like newspaper.
• Can reach a lot of people inexpensively – Unlike newspaper circulations in decline and TV viewers fractured by hundreds of choices, radio listenership is going up.
• Can get high frequency – Radio listeners stay fairly loyal to their stations and listen on a regular schedule
• Words are powerful

Television allows the combination of words and visuals to create a powerful message, but words alone can stir the heart just as compellingly. Forget the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

“In a thousand words I can have the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?” – unknown (anyone have a source for this quote?)

The key to Radio is repetition. You have to be on early and often, frequent and continuous. You also have to say something interesting. Like all advertising, boring ads never work.

Think about the average radio listener. She is probably doing something else while bopping along to her favorite song. Her mind is already half occupied. When the song stops and an ad comes on, her brain ignores the ad and fully engages the other activity until the music draws her partially back to the radio.

For your ad to be effective you have to say something more interesting than what she is currently thinking at the time. The biggest complaint from radio listeners is that there are too many ads. The solution is not to have fewer ads, but to have better ads, commercials that people want to hear.

That means stories. Yes, radio is about telling a story, painting a mental image, taking a listener to a new place in her own mind (your store).

If you want to do radio and be successful, follow these tips:

• Commit to one full year – it takes a long time of continual repetition until a radio campaign gains traction. Commit to a full year and stick it out. (two years if your product cycle is extra long like flooring or real estate)
• Run a Schedule with a minimum frequency of 3x per week – Sleep is the great eraser of the mind. It takes someone hearing your message three times in 7 days to have it sink into memory.
• Change your ads (but not your message) every month – Keep the campaign fresh and exciting
• Only make one point per ad – No one can remember more than one thing, so only say one thing
• Your name is more important than your address – They’ll google you if they have to find you
• Say something interesting – Stories are interesting. Unexpected is interesting.
• Don’t sound like an ad – Ads and adspeak are not interesting. Find a creative writer who doesn’t write radio ads, just persuasive, compelling copy.

Here are some samples of radio ads that tell stories and don’t sound like ads. My personal favorite is Men’s Bathroom.

Radio is the long distance champion of branding because of the relatively low cost of reaching the same people repeatedly week after week with a powerful message when compared to TV and newspaper. The downside is the time commitment.

It’s like the old Chinese Proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is today.” The best time to start a long term radio campaign is a year ago, the next best time is today.

If you’re a sprinter, looking for the quick hit, radio might not be your friend. It’s also not for the dabbler. It takes commitment and creativity to be successful. If you have the budget to run for a year, and a creative writer to convey your message powerfully through words, radio can be your best friend.

Do you agree or disagree?

PS You CAN be successful on the radio for short term events, too, but it takes a whole different way of scheduling. Send me an email and I’ll tell you how to run that campaign, too.

We’re discussing how ads work differently in different media.

Today the topic is Television – the Superbowl of advertising.

Just like the Super Bowl that everyone seems to watch, even if they are not a football fan, TV Ads get seen every day by people who are not fans of commercials (except, of course, the Super Bowl commercials. Ironic, isn’t it?)

The strength of television programming is it’s ability to tell a story. Whether a serial like a sitcom or drama, or a one-time event like a Hallmark movie or sports, television is the story teller of our age.

Therefore, the strength of television advertising is in the ability to tell your story.

Television allows you to combine powerful words and music with compelling visual images to create an amazing experience and tell a wonderful story in a short window of time.

The downside? Money. It costs a lot of money to produce a quality ad that people might actually watch. It costs a lot of money to put that ad out there enough times to be seen and remembered. It costs a lot of money to run a television campaign and keep it fresh and in front of your customers over a long period of time until they are in the market for your product and are finally convinced to buy from you.

It can also be expensive when you do it wrong. And believe me, many advertisers get it wrong. Here are the three most common mistakes:

• Using humor without reinforcing the brand (Quick, name the Super Bowl advertiser with all the monkeys at work. I’ll bet less than a third of you were right.)
• Making the ad entertaining but not telling anything about your company (How many people thought GoDaddy was a softporn site for men thanks to those Danica Patrick ads?)
• Trying to say too much (Most local ads do this, packing way more info into an ad than anyone could possibly remember)

If you’re going to advertise on TV, follow these tips:

• Get professional production. Lousy looking ads with bad audio or video give the wrong image of your business.
• Get people’s attention in the first 3 seconds (before they can grab the remote).
• Make one point and only one point in your ad. Everything else is just clutter and another reason for someone to tune you out or forget what you say.
• Use emotions. Emotions connect your brand better than humor or cleverness.
• Only use humor or cleverness if it reinforces your brand, otherwise the humor will trump the message and the message will be lost.
• Make your images move slowly across the screen. They will be seen even by people fast-forwarding their DVR’s.
• Schedule your ads so that they get a good frequency (reaching the same people more than once). Frequency is just as important as reaching a lot of people.
• Keep it up. Branding campaigns take time to get traction. It’s a long term commitment.

If you have the guts (and the money) television can be a powerful advertising tool, especially for building brand awareness. But beware. Your ads can just as quickly be ignored.

Thanks to remotes and DVR’s (and boring, unemotional commercials), television ads can become as invisible as non-relevant newspaper ads. It takes planning, dedication, time, and a producer who understands your message and knows how to portray it powerfully.

Do you agree or disagree?

Most advertising fails because it is the wrong type of advertising for the medium in which it is placed. As I mentioned before, I’m going to discuss a variety of advertising media and how they work best (and worst).

First up is Newspapers – the medium of Relevancy.

To start, let’s identify the elephant in the room. Yes, newspapers are shrinking in numbers, size and circulation. Yes, many are predicting the demise of the newspaper as we know it within a decade or less. But they still have a wide audience of dedicated readers today. I’m one of them. I read my local newspaper cover to cover every single day.

Yet, I cannot remember a single ad I saw in yesterday’s paper.

Why? None of the ads were relevant. (Half the stories weren’t relevant either, but that’s another discussion.)

Think about how people read newspapers. They scan the headlines looking for something of interest. (Newspapers have people who only write headlines – specialists at getting your attention.) And if the headline is successful, the reader might quickly skim the first paragraph to see if they are interested in reading further. (Journalists pack that first paragraph with the main point of the article, knowing that most won’t read a single sentence more.)

The newspaper is all about scanning and filtering, looking for something that is relevant to the reader.

Therefore, to have your ad work in a newspaper, it has to be relevant to the reader. Just mentioning your company’s name isn’t relevant. Sorry, you just aren’t that important. Relevancy comes from talking about a product or event. Are you having a huge furniture sale? That is relevant. Are you the new distributor for a well-known brand? Relevant.

If you run an ad with a big sofa pictured, you’ll attract everyone reading that page who is currently in the market for a sofa (and no one else). If you run an ad with the headline, “HUGE TOY SALE” you’ll attract everyone currently in the market for toys.

To be successful with newspaper ads follow this advice:

• Make your ads Relevant by focusing on a product or event.
• Understand that regardless of what the salesperson told you, only the people currently in the market for your product will even see your ad
• Use a clear picture of a product or a catchy headline to grab the customer’s attention
• White space is your friend – it makes it easier for customers to see your picture or headline
• Don’t use a full page – most people don’t even look at it because there is no content on the page – a half page or less has the best chance of being seen
• Don’t make the ad about you or your business. You aren’t that interesting or relevant.
• Inserts work only if your market is the Transactional Customer

Newspaper advertising is for selling products and announcing events. It’s not very good at branding your company or mission.

Relevant wins in newspapers. Everything else is invisible. (The same is true for advertising in online papers.)

I challenge you to pick up today’s paper and carefully read every ad. See how many are about products or events. See how many use a catchy headline or picture to grab your attention. And see how many would have been invisible to you if not for this assignment.

Do you agree or disagree?

You’re not sure where to spend your ad dollars. It is hard-earned money and you need to make the most of it. You ask all your buddies in the industry where they get the best results. Unfortunately, twenty questions garner twenty responses, all different. You’re still confused and unsure.

Which medium will work best for your ads?

Three of your colleagues really like TV, but three hate it. Four swear by direct mail, but five call it a waste of money. Radio, newspaper, and yellow pages also receive mixed reviews. Add in the lukewarm repsonses to websites, email, and social media and there is no clear cut answer… until you change the question.

How does each medium work best (and worst)?

Why so many answers to the first question? Most businesses don’t understand how ads work. Every form of advertising has its pros and cons. When used properly any one of them can be made to work. When used wrong, it is just a waste of money. To be successful with your ads you have to know two things:

1. What are my objectives?
2. How does each medium work best?

The first question is up to you. I’ll help you with the second question. And when you know these two things it will be easy for you to choose the right medium and tailor your message to work best.

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss the different media and how they work, including:

• Newspaper
• Television
• Radio
• Magazines
• Yellow Pages
• Direct Mail
• Email
• Websites
• Social Media

(Is there another medium you’re considering that is not on the list? Send me a comment and I’ll add it.)

Stay with me on this. There is some eye-opening information coming.