The Direct Marketing Voice

Tag Archives: postcards

Postcard Marketing: The New Cutting Edge Medium?

Posté par Jamie Matusek le May 24, 2010 – 10:26 am

RISMedia announced the findings from a new HomeGain marketing survey where real estate agents indicate postcards are yielding the highest response over popular social media platforms. The article titled, Social Media vs. Direct Mail goes on to share that even though this type of marketing has been around for decades, it is still working.

QuantumDigital was in fact founded to help agents with making a name for themselves in their local markets using postcards. Technology has improved allowing agents to send personalized postcards to drive potential prospects online where they can view more information about themselves and their listings. The new TriggerMarketing™ automated marketing system has also been developed to close the loop between sending a postcard and receiving a real-time warm lead.

It shows that marketing success is truly achieved when you use a mix of mediums for prospecting — postcards, printed materials, websites and social media can all be used in conjunction to drive awareness and response.

Landing Page Design Best Practices

Posté par Jamie Matusek le November 2, 2009 – 10:41 pm

dans Marketing Strategy

Six Tips to Improve Conversion

In preparation for the “Leverage Search and Ye Shall Be found” webinar that I’m serving on this Thursday, I was on the hunt for tried and true best practices for landing page designs. Not just any tips, but landing page design tips to improve conversion. After all, isn’t that what all of us marketers are after?

Here are the 6 tips as stated by Interactive Marketing (rephrased just a bit) — all of which I agree with based on testing my own campaigns and capturing results.

1) Create a Strong Headline

Use headlines that clearly state the biggest benefit(s) that your product offers. Tell visitors exactly what they can expect to receive out of your landing page.

2) Compelling Offer

Your offer is the second opportunity to improve conversion. It is your “call to action” so make it bold and relevant.

3) Lead with a Strong First Paragraph

It must be written with strong benefits that capture your visitor’s attention and make them want to continue reading.

4) Product/Service Benefits

List your benefits in the order of your product’s “value hierarchy” to your target market. In other words, state your product’s strongest benefit first, and its weakest benefit last. I’d personally recommend leaving off the “weakest benefit.”

5) Relevant Imagery

The best practice is to use images that clearly portray the biggest benefit your product or service offers your customer (rather than generic “feel good” stuff like unknown logos and clip art). Studies show that product images usually work best when placed to the left of your product description (or lead paragraph) since it makes it easier to read your copy from left to right. Plus, people like to read “captions” under your images almost as much as they read your headlines. So, add powerful captions and make your images clickable to the order/sign up page.

6) Professional Look & Feel

According to a recent study by Stanford University, 46% of Web sales are lost on websites that lack the critical elements that build value and trust with website visitors. The number one reason the people indicated why they wouldn’t buy from a website was because it had an unprofessional “look and feel” that lacked credibility and did not “feel” trustworthy. Having a professional look, and trust building logos (such as VeriSign and BBBOnline certifications) help convert significantly more of your website’s qualified visitors into new customers.

Here are a few landing page examples that are proving to yield results for QuantumDigital:

Postcards

Business Cards

MapMail Targeting Tool

If you are interested in learning how to write for SEO success, gather highlights on paid search campaigns and more tips on landing page and campaign best practices check out the free webinar featuring Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, Successworks; Teal Murley, Client Services Coordinator, Oneupweb and yours truly.

Until then,

Jamie

Twitter vs Postcards: The Emotional Impact

Posté par Luis Paez le July 10, 2009 – 2:57 pm

dans Digital & Social Media, Direct Mail Marketing

If you run a business, you may have heard that social media can help your website in terms of SEO and web traffic. However, consider the impact of a postcard alongside a message sent by a social media such as Twitter. In your own life, think back to SMS or Twitter messages that you received from a family member recently. How valuable was that message to you? Now think back to a postcard that a family member recently sent to you. How valuable was that message? How did it make you feel?

Most people would say that the sheer fact that someone took the time to send something in the mail, added to the message’s meaning because we know that sending something in the mail is a bit “harder”. Thus the emotional impact of the message is larger than an easier-to-publish medium, such as Twitter. This is not saying that Twitter does not have a place in your marketing, but it does show the need for traditional media to complement social media.

Why? Because people are emotional, first and foremost. In Jonah Lehrer’s book How we Decide, he expands on the idea:

This [idea] directly contradicts the rational models of microeconomics; consumers aren’t always driven by careful considerations of price and expected utility. You don’t look at the electric grill or box of chocolates and perform and explicit cost-benefit analysis. Instead, you outsource much of this calculation to your emotional brain…

So as marketers, when choosing the media that you communicate with, and also when creating the message itself, both components must revolve around emotion. In fact your whole process must revolve around emotion. Emotion not only will sell your product/service, but It might even turn customers into fans – and maybe friends – by enabling them to love your brand, your team and your customer experience.

The Direct Marketing Voice Links 7-7-2009

Posté par admin le July 7, 2009 – 9:44 am

dans News & Trends

Email and Social Media – 7 tips for getting the most out of your campaigns

via blog.marketo.com Use Similar Voice:Your brand has a personality. Let it shine through both social media and email,but make sure they both have the same mood and tone. Don’t let emails be boringwhile social media posts are fun and edgy. Instead, try to design email to looklike your social media voice sounds. This is a great way to help prospects andcustomers become more familiar with your brand. Don’t Duplicate Content: It’s understandable that a prospect or customer may opt-out of your email or unfollow/unfriend you if all you do is post the same news over and over againon different sites and through email. You must adjust your messages for eachsite to keep readers interested and engaged.

How They Did It | Deliver Magazine

via www.delivermagazine.com Q. Why is direct mail an effective tool during difficult economic times?
CDM: Typically, there’s a lot less competition in the mail, and that’s even truer now that people are cutting their spending. So, if you are in the mail and all your competitors aren’t, then you’re going to get a lot more readership, and a lot more of your stuff is going to be opened and acted on. And, clearly, mail is still effective; otherwise, people wouldn’t use it at all.

Author Explains How Bold Brands Can Keep Customers | Deliver Magazine

via www.delivermagazine.com Q: What do direct marketers in particular need to know about responding to turbulence? A: I’ve always thought that direct mail was one of the best concepts for marketing because you can tailor your offering. Rather than send a big blast with the same offer to a million people, you can move into one-to-one marketing — if you have a robust customer database. If you have enough information about the individuals you’re targeting — occupation, income, age and so on — you’ll stop mailing offers to people where there’s no chance of them buying.

Starbucks direct mail delivers

via www.examiner.com Starbucks recently launched a new direct mail campaign that gets people going. The campaign is comprised of a mini-envelope reminiscent of a wallet. The copy on the exterior simply states, “Give your wallet the day off.”

10 traits of successful messaging

via www.imediaconnection.com Here are 10 characteristics of good messages that get results. Incorporating these attributes into your messaging will help you get heard, be remembered and, most importantly, prompt customer action. Effective messaging that reaches out, grabs the intended audience, and draws them in typically contains a number of the following: 1. Targeted Good messaging first identifies the audience you’re attempting to reach and answers the question, “What’s in it for them?” Once you define who the audience is, state the value they can expect from your product or service in terms they can relate to and understand. Keep in mind that your message may have to be restated for different audiences.

Catering to your Tribe’s Needs (a.k.a. Customer Needs)

Posté par Luis Paez le June 17, 2009 – 2:43 pm

dans Marketing Strategy

You may have heard of Seth Godin’s 1998 book called Tribes: We need you to lead us, as it’s slightly popular being the #1 bestselling book in Amazon’s Psychology > Leadership category, and #7 in the Business > Leadership category. It seeks to describe the changing nature of our social relationships in business and marketing. In a sense you can consider the increasing “niche” groups these “tribes”. The ease with which information is shared means you can create a tribe of cell-phone enthusiasts – or more appropriately – a new product/service.

An interesting thought that is an offshoot of this theme is that our job as marketing professionals and brands, is not necessarily to give people a product, but it’s to facilitate connections and communication between them. For a synopsis of this idea, view this video, published by a Norwegian marketing agency.

At QuantumDigital, we’ve been enabling our clients to support the links between their customers for years. For example, a real estate Just Listed card does just exactly that – it enables a real estate agent to send a notice to their contacts about a recent listing from one particular client. Contacts get updated about their favorite agent and have an opportunity to pass around the card to their friends. It’s about connecting your network to one another. The more an agent helps connect people, the more recognition and word of mouth referrals come their way.

On a different level, however, this “Tribes” concept challenges us to think differently about our brands, too. Is it postulating that the strongest brands in the future will create a distinct identity for their “tribes”? If so, then will real estate companies that characterize themselves as “eco-friendly” corner the market on people who identify themselves as environmentalists? In retail, will companies like Wild Oats / Henry’s Markets corner the market on those who are both health-focused & socially-conscious? That’s the suggestion being made, as the more competing brands enter an industry.

If you’ve got an unclear identity – or rather, if your customers don’t share an obvious clear, unique identity – then more work is required to use Pareto’s principle to identify the few that produce 80% of your revenues. Ask them who they think you are, and perhaps you can pare down the image to a pair of keywords. The more questioning, the better because as a leader, your tribe needs you.