DM / Email / SM … the same rules apply

I got a piece of direct mail yesterday that seemed to bring together a lot of different ideas.  My thinking was undoubtedly influenced by the #digitalleap twitterstream, which I dipped in to on Monday. Also, many of the arguments about social media being just another form of communication were fresh in my mind having listened to the excellent Six Pixels of Separation #159 podcast on the train home yesterday evening.

As an aside, personally I find JayJay’s notes about Digital Leap to be a far more detailed and coherent summary of the day than the twitter #hashtag.  To me it doesn’t matter that this is one person’s point of view and she’s espousing it away from where the main online conversation is likely to take place.  Why? Because I trust her point of view and think the permanence, readability and searchability of JayJay’s notes to be superior.  I think that there’s probably a whole blog post just on this topic – but for now that will probably have to wait.

Outside of CAFOD mailer

Anyway the direct mail piece was from a charity that I’ve given to in the past.  What I loved about it was the language used, how on message it remained and the calls to action that were used.  It got me thinking about how similar this sort of communication is actually to the digital methods that many would say have superseded direct mail.

This is the mailing as I received it.  Immediately it had done all of the right things.

1) Their targeting data was good – and their delivery mechanism was sound. (The piece was delivered and had got in to my hands. I presume I was targeted through the Gift Aid scheme in which you provide your addresses.)

2) I recognised the sender (branding).

3) The subject line attracted me (alongside the crunch that told me there was something other than paper inside the envelope).

4) All of this led me to open the communication (envelope).  If steps 1-3 weren’t in place the mail either wouldn’t have got to me or I would have thrown it straight in to the recycling bin.

Compare this to the cardinal rules of email marketing.  The only significant factor missing is receiving the message at the right time.

This was what was inside of the envelope.

Inside of the envelope

What struck me first of all was the consistency of the message.  On the envelope I’d been warned that I would be asked to tell them what I think and the contents delivered.  This core call to action should sound familiar to the social media fundraising mantra of building influencers and friends and understanding them and their commitment to your cause as a first step.  It’s certainly no new idea, more like fundraising 101 – people give to causes they believe in that are articulated well and to their friends.

Anyway, the entire pack had been carefully designed.  I thought the addition of a Fairtrade teabag and the second line of the headline “Will you tell us over a cup of tea?” was a masterstroke.  Throughout the covering letter and the survey the language used was chatty and informal and the graphics complemented this.

Every opportunity was used to tell the little interesting stories that fit with the brand messages that the charity is waiting to push.  It informed and cross-sold, but at no point did I feel I was being pushed.

I was left in no doubt that the purpose of this mailing was predominantly a listening exercise. The paragraph requesting donations was actually the top paragraph of page 2, and it was a simple understated, “when you’ve completed our survey, would you consider making a donation” backed up by the following line which was underlined, “We really do want to hear your opinions, whether you choose to make a donation or not.”

In the UK, I think this approach fits the university sector well.  It’s actually the approach used by my alma matter, the VC wrote to me saying something about how she wanted the alumni to help keep the university honest.  A clear message that as alumni that we are the probably the most visible aspect of the brand that the university has.

In the institution in which I have worked for the past seven years, I’ve long argued that our alumni base is probably more important to us as influencers than as a cash cow to be milked.  And I also argued that setting up our alumni association from scratch one of the key things we needed to do was to locate and listen to our alumni before anything else.  What’s more we needed to listen harder to our alumni who were distance learning students who had never set foot on the university than might be necessary for more conventional students.

We built the numbers very quickly and did a lot of listening and surveying but we always had a problem with segmentation.  Our surveys were rudimentary and nothing like as elegant as the one I got in this mailing.  When I get a chance I’m going to scan and save it here as it really is an exceptionally well executed.  It will provide a tonne of information that the charity can use highly effectively to both reduce their costs in communicating with me, recruit me as a volunteer and improve their likely return by targeting me with the key messages that matter to me.

However it’s also written in language that encourages and reinforces all of the brand messages so I’d imagine quite a few people will get to the end of the survey and will feel compelled to add a donation.

Thinking about it after a while I realised that there was one extra thing that could have been done, but for me this was the only fault.  This minor thing was to separate the email address from the donation box.  Ideally they should have also used a quite statement about helping them reduce their communication costs / or communicating electronically to save paper.  The reason for this is that some people will take the charity at their word and just fill in the survey, but not realise the savings that the charity can make in dealing with the person electronically.

Elections & direct mail

It’s been an interesting run up to the European elections which are happening on Thursday.  The only marketing messages I’ve actually seen are outdoor (posters – mainly Conservative on the drive over to Skegness at the weekend) and direct mail shots that I’ve received at home.  Some of these appear to have been direct mail pieces – others pamphlets shoved through the door.

So far I’ve had stuff through from the BNP, UKIP, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Labour.  Interestingly the Conservatives have written to my wife twice, and my wife got a much more detailed leaflet from Labour than I did.  What was interesting about the Labour leaflets was the bits that they’d omitted from the leaflet to me were the bits I would have been most interested in.

None of the leaflets have done anything to make me want to vote for the parties concerned.  If anything that Labour think I’m not interested in their green policies has made me even more skeptical as to whether they deserve my vote.

In fact, the only leaflet that made me want to take action was that from the BNP.

I wanted to return it to their adpost address pretending to be a Mr. Singh in living at either 33 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JT or 110 Gloucester Avenue, London, NW1 8HX. They are the head offices for Clearchannel and Cymba who I believe ran their outdoor and SMS text messaging campaigns respectively.

(As a side note I find it interesting to see the backlash that Clearchannel have faced and wonder how this sort of new transparency is going to affect who companies accept as customers in the future.  I use “believe” purposefully in the previous paragraph as I’m guessing Cymba are the BNP’s SMS provider based on the number used and I’ve only seen Clearchannel mentionned on blogs and in a piece in Marketing Week – althought this piece has now been removed – hence the link to Google cache.)

In the end I settled for throwing it (and all of the other leaflets) in the recycling bin.

What was interesting for me was that compared to some of the recent …. is dead memes that have been circulating with respect to various web-based tools / sites the direct mail as a dead medium meme is positively prehistoric.

For what it’s worth I’ve not given up on direct mail yet.  As a mass marketing medium it’s definitely an expensive channel.  However for high value personalized sales I think it still has some merits as long as it’s done well.

By that I mean that some thought has gone in to the mailing and the right actions are taken before, within and after the mailing. i.e. the correct person is identified and forewarned of (agrees to) a mailing, the mailing is memorable and the person is followed up after the mailing, if the mailing itself doesn’t generate measurable/monitorable action.

I guess in a world where pull communication is becoming more mainstream any push communication needs to be handled with extreme care to ensure that the “buyer” (for want of a better word) emerges positively from their moment of truth.

UoL Marketing Training Part 2

Phew – glad I don’t run courses every day. I really had forgotten how tricky it was. I think it went OK in the end and apparently from the feedback forms (which I haven’t seen) there’s pretty good evidence of learning and people getting a lot out of the course.

The slideshares are linked below and the YouTube videos we showed were:

Education 3.0

A dramatic shift in Marketing Reality

The role of customer service in a downturn

We also showed an advert for Magnet kitchens (and we should have showed one from Chicago Town in relation to the Pizza Game).

Thinking about if I were to run this course again, I think we’d need to think about the following:

• It was too rushed – we should have it in 3 day course, but I understand that people struggle to turn up for even two days.
• There were some specific issues related to the business game, in terms of timing and introduction (and I think there are a few places where the in game instructions aren’t all that clear).
• We need to be more prepared – in terms of understanding the audience and knowing the material and knowing what everyone actually knew (I wonder if we covered some things that the audience already knew too slowly, especially on Day 1)

I think the amount of content would probably have been OK if we were delivering to one sectors, but the audience was drawn from fairly dissimilar university / public sector backgrounds. It took most of the first day for my co-host and I to get a bit of an understanding of our audience and the challenges that they faced and even by the end of the course I don’t think we had a full understanding. This meant we weren’t really sure what the most important points to get across were.  At the very least if this module is run again it’s worth getting the students to fill in a mini profile/questionnaire before the

On day 2, my co-host and I were still discussing what order to talk about different areas fifteen minutes before we were due to start – it really was a case of just in time delivery, especially when the printer does it’s usual trick of jamming because you’re in a hurry.  On the downside this meant that we didn’t know the slides as well as we should have, or who was going to say what.  There’s certainly a couple of mistakes in the slides/handouts because I was rushing, however I wonder how much they showed?

Competitor Market Research

I had an experience the other day that made me question the logic behind appointing external market research companies.

The background is that our information centre received an email that they forwarded to me from a Business Analyst within a market research firm. The firm had been commissioned by a client an online law degree provider based in the UK to explore the feasibility of launching its online law program in Canada.

Given that I currently work for the largest university provider of UK law degrees and I’m about to move to another large distance learning provider (who in the interview task asked me to deliver a presentation about marketing a law degree) my interest was naturally peaked. At the very least I wanted to know who the additional competition would be. So I duly emailed back saying I’d be very happy to talk to them.

The phone call itself was odd, as the market research company were based in India and there was a bit of a delay on the line. I found out who the client was, their current thinking about pricing and a little about what positioning and entry strategies they were thinking about.

But I can’t work out, what if anything from the interview, that the market research firm will be able to feed back to their client (that the client doesn’t know already).  Most of the questions that they asked weren’t relevant to me as a competitor, as they were questions that needed to be directed elsewhere.

I’m amazed at how inefficient this piece of research was.  It provided very little in the way of competitor information and certainly no market understanding.  I didn’t say too much that couldn’t have been gleaned from our website.  I was honest and didn’t lead them to any false assumptions, which as a competitor I could have been tempted to do.

A different and more fruitful conversation may well have taken place if the client had contacted me / or one of my colleagues directly.

UoL Marketing Training

I’ve somehow got myself involved in delivering a two day Marketing planning training course to staff from across the university as part of a Chartered Management Institute Diploma in Management. The syllabus is as below:

1.1 Explain marketing as a management process

1.2 Describe the role of marketing in identifying and predicting the needs of current and potential stakeholders *

2.1 Discuss the current position of the organisation within its chosen sector or market

2.2 Determine a future market or sector position for the organisation in line with organisational objectives

2.3 Identify other parts of the organisation which are impacted and involved in a future market or sector plan

3.1 Construct a marketing plan that supports current market or sector and targets potential new markets or sectors

3.2 Evaluate the support necessary to implement the plan

3.3 Implement the marketing plan

3.4 Assess the progress of the plan, through monitoring, reviewing and end evaluation, in the achievement of organisational objectives

Most of the first day will be taken up with an specific game which looks interesting whilst the rest of the training is a combination of material that I and a colleague of mine will be delivering. At the moment I’m grappling with the content that we’re meant to deliver to see how we can make it more exciting than delivering a bland powerpoint driven lecture.

The game will actually cover the evaluation of most of the learning outcomes.

The exception is 1.2 (Describe the role of marketing in identifying and predicting the needs of current and potential stakeholders). This will be assessed by a brief report of 800-1000 words that should apply to the individual’s role.  If there’s no marketing element to their role, then they need to write about the University of London (or your own institution) as a whole. The hand-in deadline for the report is Friday 12 June.

For me it’s funny to be reminded how simple things can sound in theory.  It also reminded me how little I trust the traditional marketing models and how applying them in practice is frought with difficulty.  I was also glad to see this echoed in a piece on the CIM website.

Some useful links for the essay:

Openlearn material on this topic
Wikipedia on marketing management
CIM piece on the changing nature of marketing

The world’s local bank

I’m one of those odd people who pay attention to advertising. I especially pay attention to HSBC because I think that their tagline could easily be adapted by my workplace to “the world’s local university”.

Anyway the photo below is a bit of an ad that they are running at Heathrow. Its for their premier account. It went the full length of the tunnel to Terminal 3 but I thought that this was the most apt panel to me.

The answers were:
Boston ~ $44,000
Oxford ~ $30,000
Beijing ~ $1,250

Startling isn’t it considering we live in a globalised world. I wonder how the value equation is shifting especially as an undergrad education through Fudan or Beijing Normal will carry similar weight to that from Oxbridge or the Ivy League.

Superbowl ads

I’m always interested in what goes on in terms of the superbowl. I don’t mean the game (although I understand it was a good one this year) but instead the adverts that they run in the breaks.

I mean if you’re going to spend that amount of money on an advert you’re going to try to get it right.

What’s more you’ll want to maximise your advertising as far as possible.

Unfortunately being in the UK I wasn’t able to follow all of the ads but I spent a little time last night tracking down the ones that got a good buzz on twitter.

What I’ve found interesting is the number of adverts that have been taken down. These are adverts that haven’t been modified.

Why companies zealously enforce copyrights on advertising in a globalised world I really don’t know. Surely people talking about your brand and your advertising is a good thing!

What I’m really waiting to see is whether anyone is going to be brave enough to publish any metrics.

Go to work on an egg

I’ve been meaning to write about the bus stop outside work for some time.  It’s currently being used as part of the Cadbury Creme Egg campaign, which according to Brand Republic was done by Saatchi & Saatchi.

The easiest way to explain this is watch the video below.  When I first saw it a few weeks ago I thought wow what an innovative way to get people to engage with a brand. After all, when you are waiting at a bus-stop what better things do you have to do than play at smashing eggs on a 48″ touchscreen (that’s a guess it might be bigger/smaller).

It’s amazingly on brand and the timing is good (72 days to Easter) or so their website says – great example of integration. However why hasn’t the game been ported to the iPhone?  It seems like an obvious and cheap extension, and a great way to capture data.

Anyway I’ve played on the bus shelter, however having walked past the bus-stop probably 100 times over the past week I haven’t seen anyone else engaging with the advert.  I wonder why that is?

Back in the office

It’s always strange going back in to the office after more than a few days away. Today was no exception.

The day didn’t start that well as a meeting I was looking forward to with our ad agency had to be cancelled at the last minute. Then within a relatively heated exchange in a meeting of five-six people a colleague of mine made the mistake of asking whether I trusted them to do a particular task.

How do you answer a question like that, posed in the heat of the moment? I chose the, “No, you’re right (in this case) I don’t trust you” route. However the words in brackets were probably not heard, and the more I think about it the more I think about this colleague the more I wonder whether I do trust the colleague at all. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how this will play out in the longer term!

I was going to go on to blog about something else and it’s implications to what I do but instead I’ll give some further link weight (in case it still counts for anything) to this post about oohgle.

Instead a conversation on Squared Peg and some related posts has taken my eye and brain in a different direction.