Chapter 12

Crafting Your Marketing Message

In This Chapter

Getting people to pay attention to your message

Using digital technology to your advantage

Using images in your messages

Using customer profiles to customize messages

Much of this book focuses on the mechanics of database marketing tactics. I talk a great deal about analyzing data to identify target audiences and measure results. But the customer data that underlies all this analysis can also be helpful in crafting the messages that you want your customer to hear.

In this chapter, I talk about using what you know about customers to make your communications more relevant. Given the current state of technology, it’s possible to craft communications that are highly customized and personalized to individual customers. This personal touch helps immensely in getting your message heard.

Getting Your Message Heard

The first step in getting a customer to respond to your marketing communication is getting them to pay attention to it. This is actually a two-step process. It has to first avoid the recycling bin. Next it has to be read. Only then will you have any hope of coaxing your customer into action.

Getting past the recycling bin

First impressions are lasting impressions, as the saying goes. The first decision a customer makes when they receive a communication from you is whether or not to immediately recycle or trash it. In most direct marketing campaigns, the bin wins more often than not. For that reason, it’s important to put some thought into how you wrap your message.

Whether you’re communicating via direct mail or e-mail, you have limited opportunity to create a first impression regarding your communication. There’s only so much you can do on an envelope or catalog cover to encourage people to open it. In the case of an e-mail, all people see is the sender and the subject line.

Identifying yourself

Every spring, it seems, I get a series of solicitations that are intentionally made to look like tax return checks. They come in a brown envelope with a clear plastic window. They have some variation of “Department of Revenue” in the return address window. And they often have some crafty, but meaningless, legal mumbo-jumbo printed on the envelope. In short, the whole package is dishonest.

I’ve learned to spot these things pretty quickly. And they always end up in the recycling bin. But I tend to open them first. My philosophy is that some business has been kind enough to inform me of their dishonesty. I’d be foolish not to actually take advantage of that information and avoid them.

It’s important to identify your brand clearly. Trying to fool people into thinking your communication is from someone else is not a particularly effective strategy. It may get them to open your communication, but it actually makes them more likely to discard the letter or e-mail. And the impression you leave with the customer is that you’re dishonest.

If you’re not proud of your brand, then it might be time to look for another one.

This is equally true of e-mail. In fact, with e-mail it’s even more important to be forthright about who you are. You can be thrown into the spam list with literally a click of a button. And once you’re spam, you have lost your connection to the customer who put you there.

Making the most of the “envelope”

Personalizing your direct mail helps to get it opened. Or more precisely, not personalizing mail pieces helps get them tossed. I almost never open an envelope addressed to Resident or that contains the bailout phrase or Current Occupant.

You can also use the envelope to help entice the customer. Giving a hint of what’s inside can be an effective way of getting them interested in your communication. Discounts or special offers, in particular, should be announced somehow on the envelope.

E-mail and other electronic channels provide less flexibility. In these channels, your envelope is essentially the subject line of your e-mail. You don’t have a lot of space to work with. This makes it particularly important for you to put some careful thought into what goes in the subject line.

Some marketers are fond of including the recipient’s name in the subject line of the e-mail. The idea is that this makes the communication seem more personal. My own take on this is that it seems a little contrived. People know that marketing e-mails are not “just for them.” Besides, subject line space is limited. I’ve always felt that it could be used more effectively to generate interest in the communication.

Making sure your message is effective

Once your communication gets past the recycle bin, you’ve got an opportunity to be heard. Books have been written on the subject of creative work and copy development for marketing campaigns. Advertising and direct-marketing service providers employ stables of people to craft communications. But when you’re evaluating a direct mail piece, there are a few things you should be looking for.

Does the message reflect your marketing strategy?

It’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the look and feel of a direct-mail piece. The folks who develop marketing collateral are talented artists in their own right. And they can put together some dazzling and visually stunning work.

But you have a specific business goal in mind. Impressive graphics can distract from that goal. You need the message to be simple and clear. Being visually appealing is good, but not if it distracts from the goal of your campaign. Keep the communication on strategy.

Is the offer clear and concise?

You want your offer to be immediately recognizable. And you want it to be clear. Don’t clutter up the mail piece or e-mail with a bunch of unnecessary buildup. Your offer needs to be the star of the show. You will often hear the offer referred as the hero of the message.

One common mistake is to get too cute with your offer. As a general rule, you don’t want to confuse the customer by making several offers at once. If you get your customer comparing different offers, you’ve distracted them from the interest in your product that your communication is trying to create. For example, if you’re trying to sell car leases, feature the monthly payment prominently. Don’t confuse your audience by also featuring the payment on a five-year loan. This gets them wondering if either one is really a good deal.

Don’t forget the call to action

Every marketing communication needs to be clear about what you’re asking the customer to do. Be explicit about how the customer is to take advantage of your offer.

It’s okay to give the customer options. You can tell them to visit your store or go online to take advantage of this discounted offer. In fact, most marketing communications these days contain a reference or link to the company’s website. It’s become routine practice.

In addition to being explicit about your call to action, you need to create a sense of urgency. Expiration dates for offers are an effective way of doing that. It’s also common to reference limited inventory with phrases like while supplies last. However you do it, you want to plant a seed in the customer’s mind that there is a downside to waiting.

Direct marketers all learn, some sooner than others, not to overdo the call to action. Decades of evidence from marketing campaigns across all industries points consistently in the same direction. Straightforward is better than clever. Simple is better than complicated. Clear is better than subtle. Understanding your call to action should not require an intellectual effort on the part of the customer.

Using Technology to Customize Communications

It used to be that printing your customer’s name in the salutation line of a letter was considered personalization. Those days are long gone. Your ability to customize and personalize your communications is almost endless now. Everything from images to copy can be presented to the customer based on information from your marketing database.

In this section, I talk about the process of customizing both online and offline database marketing communications. Technology has reached the point where you can make your messages as unique as snowflakes. By inserting content based on unique customer attributes, it’s possible to create a campaign where no two messages are exactly alike.

I focus on e-mail and direct mail in this section, but customization opportunities exist across all customer touchpoints. In Chapter 13, I address the use of customer data in the online and mobile world. And in Chapter 17, I talk about using customer data in call centers and at the point of sale. The sort of you know me experience that customization and personalization provide to customers is now expected.

Customizing e-mail messages

It’s probably not all that surprising to you that e-mail messages provide a great deal of room for customization. These messages are constructed out of frameworks that allow for content to be dropped in based on various parameters.

A simple example of customization relates to the links to your website that you include in your e-mail. Online marketers have learned there are much more effective ways to direct customers to their websites than to simply send everyone to their home page. For one thing, websites have gotten huge. And no matter how well they’re designed, they take at least a minimal effort by users to learn their way around.

If you send out an e-mail advertising a back-to-school discount on clothes, why not send the customer directly to a page on your website that shows children’s apparel? What’s more, you don’t need to send everyone to the same page. If your database happens to contain data on the ages of the children in each household, you can actually vary the links based on the ages. High school students wear very different styles and sizes than kindergarteners.

This same thought process applies to images. When a customer opens an e-mail, the images that are associated with that e-mail are not inside the e-mail, so to speak. What the e-mail contains is links, or pointers, to a server where the images reside. That’s what allows users to block images. They tell their e-mail service not to download those linked images.

But there’s an advantage to this architecture: You don’t have to point all customers to the same image. Based on individual customer information, you can place different links in different e-mails.

And there is nothing special about images. You can do the same thing with text. Rather than including text in an e-mail communication, you can embed it in what amounts to an image. You then place a link in your e-mail that points to the particular version of your message which you think is most relevant to your customer.

An ancillary advantage of treating text this way is that it gives you greater control over how the text actually appears in the e-mail. Text files don’t give you nearly as much flexibility (or control) over how your message appears. But you have all the flexibility in the world if you embed it in a linked file.

Customizing offline communications: The power of digital printing

As with online content, you have a great deal of flexibility in the way you construct your printed communications. Printing has come a long way since Gutenberg. It’s now quite cost effective to use color digital printing to customize and personalize your offline communications.

Constructing a printed marketing piece is very similar to constructing an e-mail. You put together a framework that contains the basic text or outline of how you want the piece to look. This framework contains placeholders for where you want to customize content.

The digital printing press has access to the universe of images that you want to include. It also contains your customer list along with the data that drives the customization. As it pages through your customer list, it uses each individual customer’s attributes to choose which images to print on the mail piece. As with e-mails and online content, you can customize images or text in your printed pieces.

There really is no limit to your ability to customize printed content. Even catalogs and magazines can customize their content based on customer attributes. Magazines in particular can benefit from customizing their advertisements to specific consumer segments. This is a selling point with advertisers because they know they are reaching the audiences they want to reach.

Using Images in Your Messages

A standard rule of thumb in direct marketing is that the copy in a communication is what sells, not the images. The offer and the call to action need to be explicitly stated. But that’s not to say that images don’t have their place. In this section, I give a couple examples of effective ways to use images in your direct marketing communications.

Integrating your message with advertising campaigns

The first challenge in marketing to consumers is to make them aware that you exist. Much of your company’s marketing budget is spent doing exactly that. Advertising is largely concerned with establishing brand recognition and keeping your brand top of mind for consumers.

Advertising, particularly TV advertising, is largely a visual medium. Companies regularly employ celebrity spokespeople precisely because people recognize them. Others use well-established cartoon characters or develop characters of their own to build recognition. Animals are popular as well. MetLife has adopted Snoopy and even given him his own blimp. I’ve kept a lifetime tally of how many sports trivia questions posed by the AFLAC duck I’ve gotten correct. (My total stands at one.) One of the more endearing examples is the Travelers Insurance dog, Chopper. I’m told that Chopper was rescued from an animal shelter by an employee of the advertising company that produces the TV ads.

Take advantage of this association. By putting your company logo or iconic advertising image on your mail piece, you gain instant recognition. In the case of direct-mail pieces, put it on the envelope. Prominently displaying your logo on your communications is better than any introductory paragraph you could write.

Using customized images in your communications

One commonly referenced hurdle that marketers need to address is convenience. You need to make it easy for the customer to do business with you. Many marketing communications reference some variation of visit a store near you. In the case of direct-marketing communications, you can do better than that.

If you’re trying to drive customer traffic to “a store near them,” show them where it is. If you’re mailing a postcard or letter, you know where they live. And you know where your stores are. So give them a map. Including a link to a mapping website is standard operating procedure with e-mails. But in the case of a direct mail piece, it’s still possible to print a map that will get them where they need to go.

Being relevant to the customer is another key marketing challenge. You can use images in this regard as well. Including images that reflect their past purchases is a good way to be relevant. It shows that you understand and value your relationship. This idea is best illustrated with a couple of examples.

Every once in a while, my wife and I get postcards or letters regarding our cars. The messages vary. Sometimes they want to buy them back or take one on trade for a new car. Others are service reminders.

The communications that really impress me are the ones that actually show a picture of the car we have. One company in particular actually gets the color right. They also reference the make and model and even the year in the text of the solicitation — but the image really drives home the point that they’re paying attention to who they’re talking to.

Another example that impressed me relates to a recent cruise that I took with my wife. A few months after we booked, we got a notification that it was time to book our shore excursions. The e-mail contained a list of the available excursions on that particular cruise.

But the e-mail also contained images that portrayed those particular excursions. In this case, the images actually sold us. The majestic landscapes that were portrayed got both of us thinking, “We’ve gotta see that!”

Getting the Product Right

To be effective, you need to clearly define the goal of your database marketing campaign. That goal needs to be specific. But usually it’s not so specific that it’s limited to a particular product. You may be trying to sell cars. But you probably aren’t going to run a campaign to sell 2013, black, four-door sedan hybrids with leather interior and chrome wheels. You have a more general goal of selling your brand of cars.

You have some flexibility in what particular products you feature in your messages. As with practically every other aspect of database marketing, your customer data can help.

Past purchases are the obvious place to start. To continue with the automobile example, you can customize your messages according to what type of car each customer is currently driving. If someone is currently in a high performance two-door convertible, featuring a picture of a pickup truck is probably not going to resonate. And vice versa.

As I mention earlier in this chapter, when you communicate using e-mail, you have some flexibility in the links you include. This is a situation where you can take advantage of that flexibility. You can send each individual customer to a page that reflects their current taste in automobiles.

If you don’t have past purchase data, you can still customize your product messages. Your customer profiles give you a good sense of the demographics associated with different product types. Minivans are popular with families with children. Pickup trucks are popular in rural areas. Sports cars are popular with single women and middle-aged men.

You know a lot about your customers’ preferences. You may know directly from past purchases what your customers are interested in. Or you may infer it from analyzing customer profiles. In either case, use this information in deciding how to position your product offering in your message. As always, being relevant to the customer is what drives the success of your marketing campaigns.

Using Customer Profiles to Craft Messages

Designing database marketing collateral, crafting e-mails and direct mail pieces, and writing copy require specialized talents. Most companies have dedicated resources for these tasks. Often external agencies are hired to do this work. So you probably won’t be the one doing the so-called creative development.

Your interaction with your creative team generally revolves around something called a creative brief. This is a document that lays out the business opportunity, goals, strategy, and other details of your campaign. It’s beyond my scope here to discuss how these briefs are developed. There’s quite a bit of literature available on this subject, including a section in Marketing For Dummies (Wiley, 2009) that lays out the process.

My point here is that your customer data plays a significant role in the development of these briefs in two ways:

It’s important for whoever is developing the creative content to clearly understand the target audience.

To create customized versions of the communication, the developer needs to understand what data is available to drive customization.

Speaking to the target audience

Understanding the target audience is fairly straightforward. You can be quite specific about it, in fact. This is one advantage that database marketing has over other marketing — and especially advertising — channels. You don’t have to rely on market research or inferred profiles of your audience. You know precisely what rules were used to pick your target.

The definition of your target audience also constitutes a profile of that audience. And it’s central to the messaging strategy. You speak very differently to families with young children than you do to retired grandparents, for example. Even if you’re trying to sell them the same product, the emotional connection you attempt to make is different.

This example points out a common occurrence. Your target audience will frequently be made up of more than one customer segment. In the case of products — toys, for example — that are targeted at young children, the child isn’t the one making the purchase. But both grandparents and parents buy presents.

This means that both these segments are perfectly viable audiences for a campaign marketing a particular toy. As I say earlier, the messaging strategies for these two audiences will be different. So you need to customize different versions of your communication to different segments in your overall target audience.

Customizing the message

Your audience selection criteria are critical to your messaging strategy. But these criteria aren’t the only information you have available about your customers. Earlier in this chapter, I point out the value of varying the product message based on past purchase history. This sort of versioning can be extended to a wide range of customer data.

A number of years ago, I was involved with a customer-retention project for a company that owned a number of resort hotels. They were concerned about their cancellation rates for booked rooms. They didn’t really have an interest in trying to address the problem through discounts. So they tried a different strategy.

The strategy was to create a communication stream that was intended to build up excitement about the upcoming vacation. It included notifications about various entertainment and dining options available in the area. But the flagship component of this stream was a letter that was triggered by the initial reservation.

This communication was vastly more than a simple confirmation letter. It was a high-quality, highly customized, full-color, glossy introduction to the resort the customer had booked. It took full advantage of the digital printing technology mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Everything in this letter was customized. A cartoon character greeted the family by name in a speech balloon. The restaurants described in the letter were specific to the particular resort that had been booked. The activities that were suggested were based on whether or not the reservation included children.

Even the images in the communication were customized to the reservation. The room photos reflected not only the booked resort, but the booked room class. Even the photos of the swimming pools varied according to the travel party details. Families with young children were shown the children’s pool. Adults traveling alone were shown the pool with the swim-up bar.

And it worked. We quite quickly experienced a significant drop in cancellations. By being extremely relevant to the customers’ particular attitudes and expectations for a vacation, we managed to build and maintain excitement about the trip. And we got a lot of positive feedback from guests strongly indicating that our communication stream had an effect.

As a side note, this example is relevant to a topic I discuss in several places throughout this book. The subject is data gathering. In this case, much of the data that we wanted to use to customize some of our messages was not being captured anywhere. To really get this project off the ground, we had to first make some changes in the information that was being gathered when reservations were being made.

The story of my involvement in this campaign has an epilogue. Years later, I was on the golf course hundreds of miles away from my old employer. I had been paired up with another golfer that I didn’t know. We got to chatting as people do in that situation.

Quite at random, the subject of one of those resorts came up. And it came up in the context of the communication stream that I describe above. Apparently that campaign was still being used. And this guy couldn’t say enough about how impressed he was with the attention to detail. Furthermore, he said that his first vacation had been so awesome that he and his wife were going back next year.

Needless to say, I gave myself a little pat on the back for our efforts. I then proceeded to hit a high, arcing drive directly into the lake.