Ad Cat Media - High Potency, Cost Conscious Advertising

It Always Pays To Keep In Touch

When I was small, I rode the bus with my grandfather. As a reticent child, I was content to watch the passage of the cityscape outside the window. My grandfather spent the trip talking with people on the bus. Even at that early age I was impressed that he approached someone, started a conversation, listened to them and came away having discovered a common link. Maybe a place. Maybe another person. But when we stepped off the bus, he was linked to the people he talked with on the bus. He had earned a relationship. It was my earliest example of networking.

As an adult, the very word instantly conjures in my mind a bunch of people in a crowded room. A Chamber meeting. A leads group meeting for breakfast. A Sales Club gathered for inspiration from a speaker. When I remember those trips with my grandfather, it’s a reminder that networking goes way, way beyond that. Meeting anyone anywhere provides the potential for networking. It can include someone who shares an elevator, someone at church or the guy wandering down the sidewalk looking as though he is lost. It can include a customer when they pay out.

Networking is seen by some people I know as an exchange of business cards. Go to an event and come away with a fist full. The effort actually must go far beyond collecting cards. It’s the beginning of a relationship. That relationship may generate an immediate sale but most of us aren’t that fortunate. Over the long run, by maintaining and nurturing a relationship, the chances become better and better for a sale or a referral. Once the pipeline is filled, you can then anticipate regular sales success.

Nurturing many relationships at one time requires real effort. While my grandfather met people and heard stories, he didn’t keep up with the people. He had the gift of remembering names. Years later, when he saw someone he had met even just once, he could continue the conversation where they had left off.

On a professional basis, any business relationship has to be nurtured regularly or people forget what you do and how you might help them. They forget why it’s important to know you. Visiting face-to-face or making phone calls are important ways to nurture relationships. But as your prospect list grows, that can become unwieldy.

That’s the entire point of email marketing. I have clients who sell houses. I have others who sell furniture. And some who sell material handling machinery or security services. Think about it. None of those products and services fit the “grocery and gas” model where someone buys almost every day. If you buy a home, it may be a number of years before you are in the market for a house again. You get the picture. In the meantime, you want them to remember you.

My wife wrote the newsletter for a local affiliate of Weight Watchers® early in her business career. A very wise woman named Margie worked with her. Margie reminded my wife to touch base with someone. She said, “It always pays to keep in touch.”

So how do you keep in touch? The most obvious, cost effective way to keep in touch with large numbers of people on a regular basis is with email marketing. In terms of the most bang-for-your-buck, regular email marketing is hard to beat. It is really, really hard to beat. Each time your company’s name pops up in someone’s in-box they think of you. Each time they see your subject line, they are reminded that they have a business relationship with you.

I can show you how easy it is to get started with email marketing. I can show you how cost effective it is. I can show you why you might be missing an opportunity.

Give me a call. Or drop me a line...

David Stewart - Ad Cat Media

(502) - 235-1628 - dstewart@adcatmedia.com

 

 

 

Keeping An Important Relationship Going

As someone who uses email as part of my and my clients' marketing efforts, I am sold on the value of email campaigns as a way of bringing in and keeping customers. The main point I stress about emails is that they're different than radio, TV or newspaper ads. Rather than use an email campaign to broadcast the news of “This Month's Special Deal!!!” (though that can be an important part of the campaign too), the point of an email campaign is to provide content to your customers (who asked to be on the email list in the first place) that is interesting, educational and valuable to their needs.

The reasons for this are very basic. Customers who don't find any thing worthwhile in an email campaign will cancel their subscription. If you only push special deals, your customers will either tune you out because they don't need anything today or because they just bought something off the your discount ad and won't need anything else in the foreseeable future. Interesting content keeps people signed-up to continue receiving your emails until they are ready to buy again.

Another reason for good email content is encourage your subscribers to forward the email on to a friend. The friend finds it of interest and signs-up for the email as well. We all know this. How many jokes or pictures or articles from our friends and family do we then forward to our own contact list? For most of us, it happens every time we open our email accounts.

Educational content in emails helps as well. It provides value to the customer. It establishes you as the authority. And it can remind your customer why they need to buy. Now.

Some clients who are just getting started with email marketing don't initially understand that the emails, and other forms of social media, are different than more traditional forms of marketing and advertising. An email campaign, done properly, helps you form and maintain a relationship with your customers. People may not eat barbeque, buy furniture or change houses every single day. The purpose of your email campaign is to maintain that initial relationship with your customers. The relationship that began when some one signed up for your newsletter. The relationship you want to maintain until your customer is ready to buy again. The best buying experience in the world is no good unless your customers remember to come back to you.

Always Prospect For Gold

I called my bank the other day and asked to speak to Customer Service. The nice lady checked my identity carefully by getting pertinent data from me including my email and phone number listed on the account. Then she asked if I wanted to add a second email and a mobile phone number (never hurts to ask).

The conversation I had with her reminded me of the most difficult part of email marketing. The most difficult part is getting email addresses. A fresh, accurate list of people who want to hear about what you sell, what you think, or the deals you offer is a gold mine. Collecting those addresses is the first job.

If you are thinking about email marketing, here are some things to remember about your contact list.

1. Market to people with whom you have a relationship. They can be customers, people who have made inquiries, names from networking events & trade shows, etc. Most people will agree to be included in your emails.
2. Always allow those who get your emails an easy way to opt-out. Subscribers who agree to receive your emails and can then opt-out easily don’t leave angry.
3. Think about how you want to market to your list. If it is important to segment your emails, start from the beginning to differentiate people in the list. Once you start your email marketing program, it’s much easier to put groups together, for a “Merry Christmas” email blast for instance, than it is to break the master list into groups after the fact.
4. Train your staff to get this information too. Make it a procedure so the data collected is consistent and complete.
5. Remember. It’s important to always ask permission.

Starting with a “clean” contact list made up of people who want to hear from you is a huge step toward a fruitful email marketing campaign.

Next time:     Why would anyone want to hear from you? Or, how you keep your subscribers coming back.

Are You Thinking?

My Uncle George was a highly successful entrepreneur, an intuitive engineer, a skilled machinist, a born-again Christian and a pillar of his community. George loved to tell stories. At family gatherings, a group of brothers and cousins would gather on the front porch to eat peach ice cream in the Georgia heat. People would rock on their heels, lean against the rail or sit in one of the wicker chairs. Regardless of who started the stories, George always had his own to tell.

In our younger days, all the cousins heard from George if he thought any one of us had ventured off the straight-and-narrow. The one-way conversation always began with George saying, “Let me tell you a story.” Most of the time we came away from a  session having learned a valuable lesson.

I worked with George for a number of years. Working at the family company taught me valuable lessons about managing people and running businesses. One valuable lesson was that I couldn’t work for family.

During those formative business years, I learned how wise George was in the ways of the world, of business and of people. The lessons he taught me did not all began, “Let me tell you a story.” Nonetheless, I am no longer young, George is gone and his lessons have stuck with me.

George was succinct with his lessons. Any given lesson could be summarized with a single sentence. One of many that stand out in my mind when the occasion arises is, “Someone who stands on their principles has quit thinking.”

George’s understanding of the part principle plays in all our lives strikes close at home for most of us. That lesson has resonated with me in recent years with the lack of progress in resolving the problems facing the United States. There are so many people “standing on principle” in Washington, in state and local governments that our government can’t get anything done.

It strikes even closer to me on a regular basis when I approach a prospect.

All of us have know the sales training bullet point that admonishes us to “overcome the objections.” What specifically are those objections though? The objections we often face are business principles. These principles have helped our prospect get successfully to where they are on the day we make a pitch to them.

When I face a prospect to sell myself, my company and my offerings, I see it not as a presentation of pricing or features. My prospect’s entire business started and prospered with ideas about a better way to do things. The successful ideas became guiding principles.

What is the point of my being there? My job is to get the thinking started. I want my prospect to think about the ways I can help grow the business in the future. Once the thinking starts, we are both on the way to success and growth.

 

 

Watching Carefully - On the Road to Profit

I was raised with dogs. One of the first black & white pictures my parents took of me was with my grandparents and Gypsy, their white spitz. In my early years in Africa where my father built and ran a hospital, there was Buck, a German shepherd with a real ability for hunting wild game. There still remains in family lore the story of how Buck stole a rare, canned ham that had been shipped from the United States over months and months of travel to reach us. Buck ate the whole thing. Not only was he “sick as a dog,” my father always ended the story with “I thought your mother was going to kill him.” Buck was inadvertently speared by one of the African hunters while chasing a large antelope through thick underbrush and died.

The first dog that my brothers and I claimed as our own was in Africa as well. Ahab, a basenji, was as consummate a hunter as Buck had been. I watched him run down rabbits on open ground. One day he tackled a wild boar that was three times his size. He was ripped to ribbons in the effort to pull the boar down. Tragedy in Central Africa was always possible.

When we came back to the United States, my parents had Shelties; skittish, high-strung dogs that could focus so completely that they lost track of what they were actually doing. Once, I watched one spinning madly on a dock in her excitement over something. She fell over the side of the dock and had to swim to shore. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.

During the early part of our marriage, my wife (who was also raised with dogs) and I did not have a dog. Then we decided our kids needed one. There was the sweetheart border collie-mix Daisy to begin with. My young son named her after the pretty woman character in the TV show, “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Then there was the lean, long-legged black and tan hound. We named her Missouri after my great-grandmother. I’m not sure how the good lady would have reacted to being remembered in that fashion.

A completely black husky-lab mix we found wandering in the country near our farm came next. Our kids were up and gone by then. Jude proved to my wife and me that we had dogs because we wanted them, not because our children needed companions.

My most recent rescue is a red border collie with gold eyes. Cooper is more intense and high-energy than any dog I’ve ever had. All she wants is a job. Since I don’t have a herd of sheep, we go to the park each morning to run. And to throw sticks. Time after time, I throw the stick. She takes off with every bit of energy contained in that lean red-coated body. Her job, which she does with every fiber of muscle and canine focus, is to bring the stick back to me and drop it at my feet to be thrown again. Time after time after time until I’m the one that tires and stops.

During those “work sessions,” I can be in the middle of a field, cock my arm to throw the stick and, before I release it, Cooper will take off in the direction I’m going to throw the stick. If I turn 90 degrees or 180 or whatever for my next throw, she’s off in the right direction before the stick leaves my hand.

I realized the other day how she knows in which direction I will throw the stick. In that flash of a moment when I cock my arm (which tells her that the stick is going out), she follows the glance of my eyes and heads in that direction. She never fails to be in the right place at the right time. Just as with the dog spinning off the dock into the water, there is a lesson in that.

For many years I worked as a vendor for a large national integrator of material handling systems. They were a tough, demanding customer that did really fine work for the end user. Their core strength lay in contract administration. Whether you were their customer or their vendor the only way to survive a project profitably was to understand the contract for that project and the integrator’s intent to make money in any legal manner possible. That intent wasn’t wrong in any sense. It just meant I always had to know the contract as well or better than they to avoid “project creep” for which I did not get paid. In many years, I never had a project with this customer in which I did not make a reasonable profit and, in some cases, a really fine profit. Across those years we maintained a friendly and viable relationship as well.

I see a lesson about this in my dog Cooper’s way of doing her job. She knows what is supposed to happen...I intend to throw the stick. She stays on target by watching the nuances of my actions. She knows the direction I’m headed with that stick in the same instant that I do. She always grabs the stick the moment it hits the ground. If the stick bounces (sticks do not bounce well or often), she is ready and catches it on the bounce.

We owe that to ourselves as businesses that survive and make a profit from our actions and products. Focusing intently on every written and spoken word from our customers, on every glance and nuance, allows us to know what they really want, insure they get what we’ve agreed to sell them and to make a profit for our company. That is the entire basis for business.

New Life

My granddaughter. How else can I say it? I'm in love. It's a good time to be a photographer...

From Ad Cat Media...

From Whence Comes the Magic At Apple Retail?

Earlier this year, the WSJ had a good article on "Apple's Retail Secrets." It's pertinent as a "read" since the architect of the Apple retail success, Ron Johnson, has been tapped as the chief executive of J. C. Penny (he moved from Target to Apple in 2000). Unfortunately, unless you're a subscriber to the WSJ (print or on-line), you won't be able to read any more than the tease. However, you can go to Business Insider's Link to the Article On Apple's Retail Success. The fact that I have to send you there for a good article instead of sharing the WSJ version is a nuisance and highlights my fundamental disagreement with WSJ's strategy of making articles difficult to share. But that's another topic for another day.

A number of people with whom I work are involved in retail and Apple presents some interesting ideas about how to control the experience people have in their stores to insure it is a good one. I deal with enough retail stores of all pursuations to know that many really haven't figured out how to maximize each customer's visit the way Apple has.

Beyond Apple's magic formula though is some very basic ideas that we can all take away and use for our very own. First, it's important to insure that customers walk into the store and immediately feel welcomed. Second, and this is where Apple took a different approach than many retailers, it's important to help solve customers' problems, not just to make a sale (obviously that has to come later). This is a key difference from the experience I have walking into a lot of stores. The subtly of this approach is that it forms the relationship with a new customer that will last whether they buy on the first trip or later.

That's one of the major take-away's of the article. We all have to sell to make a living. But it's the relationship we foster with our prospects that makes them customers. And keeps them that way.

Core Value? Or Eye Candy?

30 years is a long time. That's about how long it has been since I saw my first examples of inspirational posters. Beautiful pictures adorned with words such as “Courage” and “Communication” hung in corporate offices. The idea was to use them to motivate employees. I always thought they were eye candy; once hung they might have as well been pictures of flowers or snow-capped mountains. Certainly no one has ever told me they came up with a product that saved the company after studying a poster with the word “Imagination.”

Recently this came to mind when I read about an idea of how to take a motivational concept, put it in front of everyone and get each person in the company to use that concept in a way that drove the company forward to growth and greatness.

The New York Times Sunday Business section had an interview that caught my eye. In Corner Office, Adam Bryant interviews Lars Bjork, the chief executive of the data software company, Qlik Tech.

Asked to describe the culture at Qlik Tech, Bjork describes five core values that everyone in the company lives by:

• Challenge. “Always challenge the conventional” is the mantra of the principle. Why? He describes that “if you follow others, you can at best be No. 2.” His other point is to challenge other people in the company “because if you're complacent, you're not going to survive.”

• Move fast. Bjork points out, “It's O.K. to make mistakes” when building a “hypergrowth company...just don't make the same ones.

• Be open and straightforward. It's important to say something, Bjork says, when you sense things aren't going right. Plus it's important for everything to be on the table for the group to make the right decisions.

• Use teamwork for results. This ties in with the previous core value. Speak up “and you learn a lot from other people that way.”

• Take responsibility. Not only does Qlik Tech expect people to use their authority. It expects them to take responsibility beyond this basic authority.

Having “core values” is typical of many companies' approach to motivating their workforce. But Bjork's approach is to take the statement of these core values one step further. Under Bjork's guidance, Qlik Tech takes preaching about core values an important step further. This is my point here.

Bjork describes how, at each annual company meeting, awards for these five categories are presented to five people, or five teams, whom employees nominate as embodying a particular core value. To nominate someone for an award, you have to understand the basis for the award.

Tying each principle to an award is the extra step that makes the values a real part of the company culture. The annual awards take the core values from being a poster on the wall that employees pass by without seeing (or using) to being part of everyone's day-to-day consciousness.

Want to have everyone in your company respond to a set of values that will help your company succeed? Don't just put those values on the wall. Put them in everyone's daily consciousness. Put those values in people's hearts. Take an approach that will make them a real part of the company culture.

A Time To Learn, A Time To Heal

I've spent the last week in Africa. Africa is a place with which I'm very familiar. I was raised there. 
When I returned to the United States for high school, I was thirteen. I was more African in those days and not very American. There were many tough times over the years as I re-assimilated those traits and habits that helped me become an American. That included fighting in Vietnam. Over time, and without realizing it, I packed away so many of those habits, memories, abilities and understandings that had served me all my young life in Africa.

Then, after all these years, I went back. This past week reacquainted me with whom I had been in those early years. It also illuminated how much has changed in that time away.

I went back to teach nurses and other medical personnel how to use the Internet to communicate with their supporters. About how to magnify their efforts to reach further into the consciousness of people and organizations that are responsible for supporting the nurses' efforts to bring healing and disease prevention to people who often have never had any, much less adequate, health care.

I was the only non-medical person on the teaching team. The point of the entire week was two fold; first to educate these people with the newest developments in medicine and provide them with CEU's that allow them to remain certified in their host country. Then CEU's also allow them to practice medicine if and when they return to their home country. Secondly, it was a time of nurturing, respite and camaraderie for people who live with disease and illness, fear and deprivation, bureaucratic bungling and outright hostility towards them. They face all of this regardless of their value to the local community or the gratitude of people whom they heal and whose lives they touch. These nurses also live with the very real threats of their own illness, harm from thieves, and opportunistic officials. Often they live in barren circumstances far away from family, friends and familiar ways of going on with life.

The other lecturers brought lessons on STD's, Hardiness (for these people's own psyches), Traumatic Brain Injury, Typhoid Fever, HIV, CPR, Pediatric Development, Parasitic Infections, Care of the Muslim Patient, TB and Support System Failures for those facing the bureaucracy of NGO staff “back home.”

These people profoundly touched and impressed me by their example. There are some from very straight forward hospital situations in which they work. Others work in a war-zone type environment with many physical and emotional hazards as well as extreme deprivation when it comes to living conditions, support, medical facilities and companionship.

I am a photographer. I take pictures. As part of my agreement with the organization fostering this symposium, I'm documenting it in pictures. I also tell stories with words.

One woman talked to me about her concern with the possibility of posting pictures of the participants on the Internet where they could be found by officials she fears would expel her. She operates in a clinic for women in a country supported by this symposium. She's has been doing this for years. Four years ago, just before this same conference, the clinic where she works took care of an abused wife who had been badly beaten and raped by her husband. He came to find her, brought his AK47 into the clinic and shot four of her fellow workers dead. The gendarmes captured him but not before he wreaked his havoc. This woman was not in the main room; she was delivering a baby. She emerged to find the floor slick with blood, the walls splattered and her close friend who was the pharmacist gasping her last breaths from a chest wound. Two months later she was at this symposium. She then returned to the tiny clinic. One night, we talked about her job. She told me how fulfilling and satisfying her work is. There was no mention of the horror of four years ago; that story came from someone else.

Another woman works with street kids in a large city in middle Africa. These kids were sold by their parents, escaped and are now living on the streets. This woman has a shelter and tries to talk them into where they can be safe. They'll stay a while, disappear for days and then come back. The kids have learned to trust her because she shows up on the streets in the quiet hours of the late nights and early mornings where they hang out. She always comes alone. She is often the only person they know they can trust.

David Brooks had a recent article in The New York Times entitled "The New Humanism." In it he defines the meaning of “limerence.” He writes, “This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.”

The people with whom I spent last week are the perfect examples of people possessing limerance. They also possess courage and hardiness and love and so many other worthwhile traits. I'm returning the better for having been with them.

Read it? Blow It Away? Making People Want to Read What You Send.

I subscribe to every email newsletter I can find. I'm in the business; I like seeing what other people do.
That's how I learn.

What is the most important thing I've learned about email marketing? At least one of the most important lessons is how  essential it is to make each and every email I send interesting.

Not all my clients agree with me, at least on at the beginning of our relationship. I've had retail clients, for instance, who want to broadcast numbers. “20% OFF EVERYTHING IN THE STORE!”

Interestingly enough, my experience has been that type of approach is attractive to someone who has done a lot of advertising with TV spots and newspaper ads. Show a flashy panel with stars, exclamation marks, bold colors and an excited person jumping in the air to get the message across.

Why does that work? It works on TV or in newspapers because people are watching their favorite program or looking for sports scores, not because they are looking for a your latest ad. They keep skimming over the ads because they are still interested in their favorite show. The ad is not the reason for watching. Rather, it's like a suckerfish clinging to the side of a shark; the ad lives through the advertising cycle until, hopefully, someone is ready to buy.

That's not the case with email advertising. We all start off with what is really a gift to each of us. We start off with people's names and addresses who have done business with us or decided they would like to be aware of what's going on in our business. We want them to read our emails, month after month, year after year, until they are ready to buy. So how do we maintain their interest so they don't opt-out? We do it by making each email interesting without the reader needing to be interested in the deal that month. People will open our emails, scan them, find something of interest, and read it. They open subsequent emails because we have shown them they will find something of interest in each one.

Think about it. If your clients and customers (I need to write an article about the difference between those two people later) are on a long-term buying cycle, they don't want to just see 20% OFF! every month. Say you're a real estate agent. How interesting is it to your past clients to only see advice on how to get a home ready to market, what the latest interest rate is, or which part of the country has the highest housing prices? Month after month after month? They love you and they are immensely appreciative of the way you shepherded them through the purchase of their home (or they would have already opted-out). But how do you keep them reading your emails year after year? Use content that goes beyond just real estate.

Or think about a retail furniture store. If I purchase a new couch at a fantastic price, it gets delivered on time and the delivery guys (without tracking in mud or scraping the wall) are kind enough to put my old couch on the back porch until the Salvation Army can come by to pick it up, I'm really pleased. But if I'm happy with my tables and my recliner, how many months go by where I really, really want to be shown just the latest, greatest deal of the month on tables and recliners? There has to be something else in that email that keeps me coming back.

Are you seeing declining open rates in your own email campaigns? Have you been concerned about the number of people opting out each month? You and I need to discuss how to effectively counteract those issue. Drop me a line. I'll be glad to correspond or call you so we can talk. And I would love to hear about your own ideas.

Merry Christmas!