Differentiate or Die

Sorry, this is a re-post. The original post broke an RSS feed and I had to remove the code.

yea, sort of a catch your eye Google alert huh?

So I had the pleasure about a month or more ago to attend a Returnpath event here in Dallas where you could gather fresh new ideas and learn how some of the smartest and most adventurous email marketers tackle today’s biggest email challenge. They had people from imc2 and Crosstown Traders speak at the event to explain how some of their best common practices changes increased their bottom line.

Bonnie Malone Fry Director, Strategic Services and my newest friend in this fun industry, gave a presentation titled Differentiate or Die. In this presentation they talked about how Information overload can be real, which sort of links back to my Email Bankruptcy post about a week ago, and how we can learn some new bold new approaches to the same old marketing best practices.

She opened with some catchy stats:

• More than 3,000 new books are published every day
• There were 715 new magazines launched in 2007
• 827 movies are being released this year
• A week of The New York Times contains more information than a
• person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century

In this presentation she was basically trying to get all the marketing and email people at the event to think what can you do to stand out in this ago of information overload? Be Different she shouted… Don’t do the same ole’ thing…

Example:

ReturnPath said for users to turn their homepages into a capture form and the example they used was Barack Obama’s home page. First-time visitors to Barack Obama’s website see a simple homepage optimized for email capture. It includes a photo of the candidate and his family with the words "Join the movement" and a form field for email address and zip code. There’s also a "Skip the sign up" button that takes you directly to the website without having to give an email address. The regular homepage has the email capture prominently displayed on the top left using the copy "Get involved" Aside from the prominence, which we at Return Path have been preaching for ages, the copy is good too. By using language that resonates with the Obama crowd – they increase the chances of getting sign ups. Remember, generic marketing copy never works well.  "Sign up now!" would fall flat, especially when marketing a campaign known for its soaring rhetoric.

I don’t want to give all the content away of the seminar’s, but I can say I know ReturnPath is on the right track here.

Take a look at:

1. How your capturing information as stated in the example above.
2. Are you writing to much into your bulk emails to people? As ReturnPath said, Less CAN be MORE. Don’t force people to move your email to the read
3. later folder.
4. Do something different in your marketing. Free shipping is old news. Give a class or something on products or services.
5. Are customers actually seeing the relevancy they expect in your newsletter? Is this one to one messaging. Take the segmentation a step further. Presumably if you know what shoe they bought, you also know whether or not they are a guy or a girl. Sending separate men’s and women’s versions of shoe marketing can help. You can even hit them up when a certain style of shoe is going out of style and they might want to stock up on that version in case they liked it.

-Dennis
Eloqua

Don’t just send, Deliver!

Last 5 posts by Dennis Dayman

• Delivery and deliverability debunked - May 7th, 2012
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• Canada’s anti-spam law won’t take effect until 2013 - April 28th, 2012
• Mr. Dayman Goes to Washington - April 2nd, 2012
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