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You know online content should have a more conversational tone than other marketing materials. But remember that “informality” isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. “Conversational style has room for plenty of variation,” says Rick Sloboda of Webcopyplus. “For example, a conversation with your banker will differ from a conversation with your spouse.”
To find the right tone for your customers, Sloboda has tips like these:
Keep your voice active—not passive. A simple change from “You will be contacted by the next business day” to “We will contact you by the next business day” makes the statement appear less stiff and more trustworthy. “Web copy in passive voice sounds more formal,” he explains, “but it can also sound vague, unreliable and possibly deceptive.”
Recognize the importance of contractions. While you don’t want to overuse contractions, consider how they transform “Do not hesitate to give us a call. We would be happy to help you” into the far more inviting “Don’t hesitate to call us. We’d be happy to help.”
Keep paragraphs short. Big blocks of text look daunting when someone’s browsing online. So stick to brief paragraphs. And even include the occasional one-liner: “These are great for emphasis,” says Sloboda, “and invoke a casual tone.”
Mix formal and informal vocabulary. Real-world conversations tend to draw words from across the formal-informal spectrum. So make your content “sound” more realistic by balancing highbrow (substantial/myriad/numerous) with lowbrow (plenty/lots/tons).
Reach out to your customers with a more relaxed online tone, but don’t get sloppy about grammar and spelling. It’s one thing to let your hair down—another entirely to look unkempt.
Source: Webcopyplus.
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“I love to do business with small businesses—in-store, online, for myself, for others, for pleasure, for work—it doesn’t matter to me,” writes Guy Kawasaki at his eponymous blog. Based on his experiences, he has 10 tips for making the customer experience enchanting. Here are four:
Staff your frontline with personable, passionate employees. Customers want to interact with friendly people who care about your product or service and know what they’re talking about. “Ask yourself this question,” he says. “Is the first impression of my business a good one? Because if it’s a bad one, it may also be the last one.”
Build a customer’s trust by trusting your customer. If you need inspiration, Kawasaki cites Nordstrom’s famously liberal return policy, which clearly indicates that the retailer thinks highly of its customers. “If you trust me, I’ll trust you, and we can build a relationship.”
Avoid placing unnecessary barriers in the path to a sale. When someone wants to do business with you, make it as easy and painless as possible. “Don’t ask people to fill out 10 fields of personal information to open an account,” he cautions. “Don’t throw up a CAPTCHA system that requires fluency in Sanskrit.”
Deliver bad news sooner rather than later. Even the best-run companies encounter the occasional problem, and withholding information from customers is a mistake—especially if they figure out what’s wrong before you get around to telling them. “[L]et them know how you’ll solve the problem at the same time that you’re letting them know it exists,” he suggests.
The single most powerful way to enchant me is a ‘yes’ attitude,” says Kawasaki. We’ll bet most of your customers—and potential customers—would agree.
Source: Guy Kawasaki.
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In a recent post at Bazaarblog, Tara DeMarco reports on author Erik Qualman’s concept of the “social media escalator.” It’s his design for the graceful entry of businesses into the social realm. According to Qualman, no one would walk up to a group of people at a party and say, “Excuse me … Can we talk about why I’m great for the next five minutes?” But that’s what far too many businesses are doing at social sites, he argues: They jump in and immediately begin selling.
Instead, Qualman suggests, businesses need to take these four steps to enter social media the right way:
Step 1: Listen. See what people are saying about your brand, your products and your industry before jumping in.
Step 2: Interact. Join the conversation in a way that adds value. “You have to contribute to conversations people are already having to gain an audience,” DeMarco notes.
Step 3: React. “If 70 percent of people are saying they like something about your product, how quickly [are you] changing your product to deliver more of what they like?” DeMarco asks. Conversely, if people are talking about what they don’t like about your product or brand, how quickly are you working to fix it? This stage is where many companies drop the ball, she notes.
Step 4: Sell. Now is the perfect time to seamlessly add in a little self-promotion. “If you’re reacting to customer feedback to constantly improve your offering, selling will come naturally,” DeMarco says.
You, too, can master the social graces. Businesses can best enter social sites by listening, adding value to the conversation and responding to customer preferences. The final, selling stage then becomes a natural part of the process.
Source: Bazaarblog.
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Every email list is going to have subscribers who sign up and then apparently vanish. “They may have opted in to a specific offer, then disengaged once they obtained the coupon, free content or other benefit you promised,” writes Karen Talavera at MarketingProfs. “Or they joined your list while in the market for your product or service but soon afterward their needs were met and they never bothered to unsubscribe.”
Inactive subscribers frustrate marketers because we don’t know what went wrong. Reasons they ignore us include realizing our product or service isn’t a good fit, waiting patiently for more relevant content, or fuming over bad customer service. In other words, it could be just about anything.
So, how can you deal effectively with inactives? Talavera offers this four-step strategy:
Conduct a reactivation campaign. Create an agreed-upon definition for “inactive” and reach out to that segment with special incentives for opting into your list once again, confirming permission or providing expanded information.
Make contact via social networks. “If you can get an active connection going in a social-media environment,” she says, “chances are the next time your email message arrives, that list member will pay more attention to it.”
Attempt offline communication. If you have an inactive’s telephone number or physical mailing address, go ahead and touch base. Those who “might be ignoring their inboxes or those who simply might have changed email addresses and need to provide you with the newest, most-relevant one, might well appreciate the contact,” she notes.
Reduce frequency, or cease contact. “You don’t need to wipe them off your list,” she says. “Simply don’t email them as much, unless and until they show an increase in responsiveness.”
Connect or disconnect. Inactives on your list aren’t harmless; their presence can damage your metrics and deliverability. Get them to re-engage, or let them go.
Source: MarketingProfs.
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First things first: What is Google PageRank? It is an algorithm
created by the founders of Google to estimate the importance of web
pages. The basic idea behind the PageRank algorithm is the fact that
a link (also called hyperlink or backlink) from page A to page B can
be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the
number of links pointing to a page, the higher its PageRank, and the
higher its rankings inside Google’s search results.
One detail that you need to keep in mind is that each link has a
specific value, which is determined by the PageRank of the page
where the link is located divided by the total number of outgoing
links on that page. For instance, if a page has a PageRank value of
8 and 4 outgoing links, each of those links will pass 2 points of
“link juice” (the calculations on the algorithm are more complex, but
this is the basic idea).
Most people focus on getting external links to increase their
PageRank, but they forget that internal links also pass link juice,
and this is how you can create PageRank within your websites.
Now let us use a simple example to illustrate the concept.
Suppose that you just created a website with one page only, the
homepage. At this point your website has a PageRank of 0, because it
is not even indexed by Google.
You then convince a friend to link to your website. The page where
the link is placed has a PageRank of 10 and 2 outgoing links, so
your website is receiving 5 points of link juice from that link.
Now your website would have a PageRank of 5. If you then proceed to
create a second page on your website, linking to it from the homepage,
that second page would also receive 5 points of PageRank from the
homepage link, increasing the total PageRank of your site to 10.
And there you go. By adding a second page to your site your managed
to actually create PageRank.
As we mentioned before, the calculations of the PageRank algorithm
are more complex, but the basic concept remains. That is, every time
Google indexes a new page from your website, the total PageRank
within your website will also increase, because that page will be
receiving link juice from the other internal pages of your site.
Getting external links is obviously essential to having a high
PageRank, but increasing the number of pages that Google indexes
from your site can also help, and most people neglect this.
For example, if you are trying to position your mini website on
the first search result for a specific keyword you could try
adding more pages of content to that site, to increase its overall
PageRank.
Finally, if you want to monitor how many pages Google is indexing
from your website, simply search for “site:yourdomain.com” on Google.
Source: DailyBlogTips
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Quick quiz: Have you ever walked into an airport, noticed that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter and still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there was no one in line for the teller?
“If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these questions, you’re not alone,” say Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff in a post at the Harvard Business Review blog. Their recent research has revealed a fascinating new consumer reality: “Most customers these days demonstrate a huge—and increasing—appetite for self-service,” they report.
Some of their findings:
- Today’s customers value electronic self-service just as much as using the phone to get help from a live person.
- By and large, that holds true regardless of age, demographic, issue type or urgency.
- A staggering 57% of inbound calls to companies come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company’s website.
What makes self-service so appealing? The lousy level of live service being offered is one factor (if you agree with the fascinating reader comments accompanying the blog post).
But on a psychological level, “it might have more to do with the unique element of control that self service affords,” these authors suggest. “Skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the ‘out’ they’ve been looking for all along.” Ouch!
The message for marketers? Better focus on polishing your self-service technologies—just in case your customers prefer DIY.
Know when to zip it. “Running your company as if customers want to talk to you … [is] potentially undermining your efforts to build longer-term loyalty,” Dixon and Ponomareff conclude.
Source: Harvard Business Review.
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Especially in this economy, small businesses are tripping over themselves to tell customers about their low, low prices. But in an article at MarketingProfs, Dan Hill argues strenuously against price-leading campaigns and gives reasons like these:
It is not a sustainable long-term strategy. “One of the key advantages of a sale is the element of surprise,” he says. And the stopping power of a low price will fade quickly when repeated surprises lose their power to surprise.
It reminds people that they’re paying money they don’t want to pay. Research has shown that any price tag produces disgust in a buyer’s mind. A discounted price doesn’t cause positive feelings—it simply lessens the degree of disgust.
It shifts a customer’s mind from right-brain emotion to left-brain analysis. “That’s a bad tradeoff, given that everyone feels before they think,” he notes. Especially when you consider an IPA study that found “emotion-oriented campaigns generate twice as much profitability as traditional, hard-sell, reasoning-oriented campaigns.”
It undermines brand loyalty. Long-term customers will wonder why anyone walking in off the street gets the same deal they do. But that’s not the only problem. “Current customers pay less for goods they were already buying (and may not buy again at full price),” he argues. “As for new customers who bought because of a deal, their loyalty is less real than the profit margin sacrificed.”
It causes buyers to question what your company stands for. “With price-leading advertising, a company’s identity becomes fuzzy,” he says. “Suddenly, you are either a discount brand or you’re signaling a lack of confidence that, in dating as in commerce, is not attractive.”
“Leading with price suggests you have nothing else to say or show in advertising,” says Hill. “Price as your main attribute doesn’t mean anything.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
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In a post at the Email Marketing Reports blog, Mark Brownlow examines mistaken assumptions that can seriously damage the long-term success of an email program. Our basic beliefs about how our emails work aren’t as self-evident as we’d like to believe, Brownlow notes; in some ways, we operate in the dark. “And all the while revenues are melting away silently, like sand in an egg timer.”
Brownlow offers examples of beliefs that might be holding you back. Among them:
You read more into the customer relationship than actually exists. “Unfortunately,” Brownlow says, “the word ‘relationship’ conjures up images of long-term loyalty and selflessness. It seduces us into assuming a level of devotion that simply doesn’t exist among email subscribers.” If you need proof, he argues, compare the open/response rates of the last 10 emails sent to customers with those sent to your family and friends.
You believe subscribers use email just like you do. “The email marketing ‘community’ is, in general, a high-tech community with busy email accounts,” says Brownlow. “So it’s easy to imagine our subscribers are the same. But they are not.” A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that a third of US email users don’t check their email on a daily basis, he notes.
You forget that subscribers also receive messages from your competitors. That 20% holiday discount sounds spectacular when you compare it to your previous offers—but it won’t stand out in a subscriber’s inbox if everyone else has the same idea. “[T]he value of what you send depends on the absolute quality of your content/offer AND on its quality relative to what others might be sending,” he notes.
Step back and shine a light. Take the time to consider how unfounded assumptions can drive bad decisions in the whirlwind of ongoing email campaigns.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
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“People use LinkedIn to connect with coworkers and industry peers, get business advice, and even find new jobs,” writes Diana Freedman at HubSpot. “It’s a great place for businesses to make relevant LinkedIn users aware of their brand.” But, she cautions, those positive outcomes won’t happen if you make mistakes like these:
Failing to answer questions. When you respond to business-related questions at LinkedIn’s “Answer” section, you establish yourself as an expert—and it might even generate new customers. “Take a few minutes each day to look at the new questions in your industry,” she suggests, “and see if there’s one you can provide a helpful answer to.” Be careful, though, to reply without blatant promotion of your product or service. “If you were in a bind and reached out to a community of peers for help,” she explains, “would you want the only response to be ‘Give me your money’?”
Failing to complete your personal profile. If you want to build trust, you have to let others know who you are. “Describe your role at your current and previous companies,” she advises, “and provide links to your website and any relevant profiles,” such as Twitter.
Failing to post status updates. Don’t worry about the apparent redundancy of posting updates at LinkedIn when you’re already active on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a good chance your LinkedIn network has business connections who wouldn’t see your updates in other venues. “It’s ok to re-purpose content across all of the social channels, as long as you’re not duplicating the content,” she notes.
Active, transparent participation at LinkedIn will deliver the best networking results.
Source: HubSpot.
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“Just a few years ago, I could count on receiving a mailbox-full of direct mail nearly every day, including the crown jewel of direct marketing, the BIG direct mail piece,” writes Dean Rieck at Direct Creative. “Thick #10’s, fat 6×9’s, and beefy 9×12’s once stood atop the mountain of attention-grabbing communication.”
Although the recession and a shift to online marketing channels made direct mail seem expensive and outdated, it hasn’t gone away—for one simple reason: “What people are discovering is that traditional media, including direct mail, still work. That includes the big direct mail piece,” according to Rieck.
Here are a few of his reasons why big direct mail pieces might be just what you need:
- They face little competition in a recipient’s mailbox. “A mail stream full of dinky formats makes larger formats stand out,” he notes.
- They provide extra space for marketing copy. “[This is] the driver in any direct mail campaign.”
- They encourage recipients to focus on your message. People will give a bulky direct mail piece more consideration than the second or two they spend on an email’s subject line.
- They give your company an innovative image. “[T]hose big packages seem novel now,” he says. “They let you zig while everyone else zags.”
This might be the time to test a large direct mail piece—an old media stalwart might just deliver new media results.
Source: Direct Creative.
You know online content should have a more conversational tone than other marketing materials. But remember that “informality” isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. “Conversational style has room for plenty of variation,” says Rick Sloboda of Webcopyplus. “For example, a conversation with your banker will differ from a conversation with your spouse.”
