My Loss Was My Copywriting Gain

I'd just written an email for Your Life Your Style customers. I went to the loo and when I got back, someone had inadvertently logged into the website administration and my email was lost. I wrote it once more and clicked to send a test email. The website software froze and again I lost it.

Strangely I was not dishearetned or frustrated by this. Because you should re-write and re-write and re-write again. And ideally you should not refer to what you already wrote.

When you've gone through the process of writing copy a few times, the ideas are firmly lodged in your brain, so you don't have to think about what you're saying. You become one with the copy, grasshopper.

What comes out of your head when you re-write on a blank screen is sharper, leaner and more natural.

Funny Marketing

I was interested to read in the ClickZ newsletter that the late US comedian Red Skelton used to collect the addresses of members of his audience, then write to them next time he was due in town. A simple but very cost effective tool for selling tickets and building a fan base that most acts fail to exploit to this day.

Is Newspaper Advertising Worth The Paper It's Printed On?

The question in today’s digital world is, how much do you need print?

Is advertising in newspapers anything more than an expensive habit? With readerships are dropping faster than Russell Brand's trousers, the return on investment is increasingly poor. Concentrate instead on competitions, giveaways and PR, which are low cost and have more impact.

Then there are fliers and season brochures. No doubt some customers pick one up and buy a ticket but many are consigned unread to the recycling bin. The one kind of print worth sticking with is the targeted postal mailing. Research suggests that a brochure or letter in people’s hands at home stimulates both phone and online sales.

Print also means posters. These are another questionable use of a limited budget because only a handful of theatre posters obey the two golden rules for this form of advertising- use emotive visuals accompanied by seven words or less. The exception that proves the rule is the current campaign for David Pugh’s production of Calendar Girls- a row of apparently naked women with their naughty bits covered and the tag line ‘All will be revealed on…’

Faking It

Does authenticity matter, asks Seth Godin. If the fake Rembrandt has fooled the experts, if Shakespeare didn’t write parts of his plays, if Churchill put his historic speeches on record after the event, if some of The Beatles’ songs weren’t recorded by all four of the Fabs, does it matter?

If the effect of the fake on you is the same as the ‘authentic’ version, it probably doesn’t. It is, if you like, all in the mind, and we should all trust our own feelings not what we’re told to feel. In business, it does matter though, because, if someone deliberately sells a fake Rolex, no matter how authentic looking, as the real thing, and they therefore charge a much higher price than justified- that’s fraud. And if you tell a customer something that isn’t true, you’ll be found out eventually, seriously damage your reputation- and may even be prosecuted.

Humane Resources

Human Resources have a deservedly bad image. In my experience the term exactly sums up the attitude of too many people doing that particular job. They don’t regard employees as people, simply ‘resources’ that happen to be ‘human’ as opposed to technical or whatever. The main point of their jobs seems to be to find clever ways to exploit employees or get rid of them.

What a joy, then, to hear about the human resources people at Zappos- the hugely successful American catalogue shoe retailer. They want the best, most committed people to work in their phone sales department. So, they train them for four weeks on full salary and, at the end of that period, they offer them a $1000 to leave! The theory being that if the employee would rather have a few dollars than work for them, they’re not the kind of committed people they want.

This is brilliant because one of the biggest problems most of us have as employers is the time it takes to find out that someone isn’t right for the company. This way you have a good chance of weeding them out early.

Then when these people work for Zappos, they’re given free rein to do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. There are no scripts, standard responses, jobsworth attitudes or time targets. Every aspect of the way they treat their employees is an anathema to most Human Resources people and their patrons- Accountants.

For more about the radical customer-first approach of Zappos, read this article by Bill Taylor.

Page Turner or Turn Off? Part Two

I was surprised to go into a Bose shop recently and be told that they don't publish a cataloguie because people can go to the website. This is very shortsighted. Brochures drive large numbers of people to websites as well as generating sales in their own right.

Now where was I? Oh yes. Let’s turn to the inside pages. Most people automatically look at a point slightly above the centre and to the right, so if you want them to look at the rest of the page, you must lead them round it. A good layout uses a face looking inward or a curving body to move the eye in a circular motion around the whole page and to focus it on the key information. Painters have been using this and other rules of composition to control eye movement for hundreds of years - check out Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus.

As for the words, the best brochures sell benefits not features. Since this is a basic rule of marketing, I’m surprised how often it’s broken. For example, just because the show won Best Musical Award, it doesn’t follow that your customer will enjoy it; there’s a world of difference between Les Mis and Hairspray. The best copy talks to the reader about what they want: “When you leave the theatre dancing down the street, you’ll know why this show won Best Musical Award.”

When it comes to design, the marketer stays in control of the best brochures. Designers may love pink type coming out of a red background but we know our customers won’t be able to read it. They may use 8 point type to make more room for images but we know it must be at least 12 point. A good designer will make the brochure look lovely but the good marketer keeps the artist’s feet on the ground and insists that important messages are communicated clearly.

Finally, the best brochure will have been checked by independent readers, who will have included older customers if they make up a significant proportion of the audience.

There are many more techniques that a brochure specialist can suggest to boost sales but simply incorporate the above and you’ll ensure that your brochure is a page turner instead of a turn-off.

Is Your Brochure a Page-Turner or a Turn-Off?

What makes the perfect season brochure? A winning formula involves more than making it look pretty. If the brochure you’re involved with isn’t using the following techniques and quite a few others, then you’re losing sales.

Let’s begin at the end. If the brochure has been displayed back to front or thrown casually on a table, its back cover may be the first sight the customer has of a brochure, so a good one will have the venue’s name clearly displayed for people who know your business and will actually pick up a brochure for it.

When you put something on the back cover, it’s like shining a Super Trouper on it. Along with the inside covers and the centre spread, it’s one of the ‘hot spots’ that get noticed. A well planned brochure won’t waste these positions with boring information like How To Find Us or Terms & Conditions, because these are the best pages to sell the most valuable products.

Flipping the brochure over, the front cover will be shouting ‘PICK ME UP!’ It will use more tricks than Paris Hilton to grab attention, apart from forgetting to put knickers on. Look at magazine covers- you’ll nearly always see one big image (probably an attractive face (probably an attractive famous face)). An unusual picture can also make an impression. What they won’t have is a lot of tiny images, because trying to please everybody pleases nobody.

The brochure cover will use strong colours, especially red since that’s a colour more likely to appeal to women who form the majority of shoppers.

Notice how the most important reasons for picking it up are at the top. A designer sees the whole cover on a screen but we know that our piece of print may be stuck behind something on a tiered rack, so we need the venue name and the key products to be featured on the visible area.

Next time, we'll look at the inside pages.

How To Write

While I was preparing some advice for a client on writing press releases, I came across these words from the nineteenth century writer John Ruskin. The points he makes apply to any kind of writing- press releases, blogs, direct mail, novels:

"Say all you have to say in the fewest words possible, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will be sure to misunderstand them."

Open The Envelope

I nearly threw away the mailing that arrived covered in information about the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. I’m in favour of charitable giving but I already give to many other worthy causes. It was only my amusement at their fundraising event's title- Save Our Soles (say it out loud) that made me open the envelope. Imagine my surprise to find it was actually a mailing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

I expect it was a charitable gesture that encouraged the CIM to let the RNLI provide the envelopes but (and I'm finding it quite exciting to be critcising the CIM for poor marketing) it was a mistake. Effective mailings start with the envelope.

If you want to support Save Our Soles day, go to rnlisos.org.uk

How To Market Yourself Out Of Existence

Around Christmas, I seemed to be getting an email from HMV every other day- on one occasion there were three emails in my inbox. It's probably not a coincidence that the other day I read that their shops' seasonal sales are disappointing. I sympathise with them but bombarding their customers with sales emails is not the answer. It's an abuse of the permission I gave them to email and, like others before them, they'll probably find it backfires.
The maximum I want to hear from even my favourite businesses is once a week and then only if they have something interesting to say. i-tunes tell me weekly what's new and I'm grateful. Play.com (my favourite online CD/DVD site) mail me every couple of weeks or so and that's even better. Email me too often and I'll do what I've done to HMV- unsubscribe!