That might be a slight exaggeration, but if you are doing email marketing, you can’t spend enough time crafting the correct subject line because even if you only have a 7% or 8% open or click rate, I promise you that 100% of your list is seeing your subject line (minus those pieces that go directly to spam).

So if your subject line is something like: “May newsletter from mycompanyname”, you are missing your single biggest opportunity to get your message out there.  Make the time to craft a headline that mean something – what you are talking about; what you are offering; the action you want them to take.

In direct email marketing EVERYTHING has to lead to an action.  Your subject line has to get their attention and get them to open before deleting.  Your headline has to entice them to read the first paragraph.  The first 5 words of the first paragraph has got to get your prospect to read the whole sentence and the first sentence should get them interested enough to read the whole paragraph.  And so on and so on.

If you want to do this well, look inside first – brilliant copy is a help, but brilliant copy comes from knowing your target – who they are, what they care about, what their pain is – and knowing yourself.  Knowing what value you really provide. (We can help you figure that out if you need assistance).

So don’t waste the space.  If you wouldn’t open it, why should they?

I got the following email below the other day, and after thinking about it for a minute, all I could do was think about it and then laugh.  If you are an SEO company and make your living helping others get found, why are you sending me unsolicited emails for your service?

Don’t you get that SEO is about helping people who are looking for your products or services find you.  And if you are an SEO expert, shouldn’t I be finding you when I search – you really should not have to solicit me with a cold email.  So the quick lesson here – make sure the way you are marketing your business fits in with both the image you want to portray AND with the way your potential customers would encounter you.

The email…

I am Ashu

We are a Delhi-NCR, India based, and leading web services company with main competency in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), working as an outsourced vendor for many reputed SEO agency based in USA, UK, Canada and Australia. 

We have a dedicated team of 300 professionals to serve you. We provide the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM solution with top ranking on major search Engine as Google, Yahoo and Bing as per the current status of website and requirement.

We work on on-page factors, off-page factors and site wide factors of website. We always adopt the ETHICAL SEO process/White hat technique; also follow the guidelines of Google and major search engine for SEO result.

We follow these below point in consideration.

•Ethical process and white hat technique only.

•Agency Client Oriented Approach in our process.

•Sign-up the NDAs ( Non-Disclosure Agreement).

•White label for client re-selling and re branding.

•Facility to provide effective Online Project Management Tracking tools.

•Frequent reporting with all required format and information.

•Timely and smooth communication etc.

We can assure you of getting high SERP (Search engine Result Page) with our high track record of success. Our SEO solution will help to increase the traffic and sales lead to your website.

We are looking forward starting a long and healthy business relationship with you. We will be happy to AMAZE you with our work. I will really appreciate if you please let me know your SEO requirement.

Kind Regards,

Ashu

(Manager of the (Marketing Department)

I maintain that human beings are hard wired to give more referrals. It’s an innate, primal instinct that we have, about at instinctual and nurturing to one’s soul as watching a campfire crackling on a cool autumn night. But, like those missing campfires that we don’t have often enough, we let silly, silly things get in the way of those referrals that we need to pass.

In the days of the cavemen, we learned to both pass on, and respect the passers, of knowledge of life. Things like the streams with the best water,  easier ways to collect and store berries, and better hunting grounds. Today, we still need to pass on information about life – like:

• Who has the best pizza that would deliver here?
• Where to get my hair cut?
• What accountant is the best to help my business thrive without bankrupting me in fees?
• How can I keep all of my customer’s information straight?

Often, this is a refer-ability problem for the business, and one that as a business owner or manager you must solve in order to get more people to refer you more. Specifically, you need to answer for your customers “How do I refer you?”  When you do this, and the better you do this, the more likely that you will get more referrals, more quickly and  in the way that you can best react to them.

When I get to this part of a conversation with a client, I’m very often met with statements like “They just hand my card to their friend and they call me, its that  easy”. So let me ask you – how many of your clients carry your card with them everywhere they go? Maybe one percent? And when you get a strange card from a friend, how often do you call it (if you don’t misplace it first) About 1/3 of the time? Oh dear- those numbers aren’t good at all 1/3 of 1%.  No wonder you don’t get nearly the amount of referrals that you deserve!

And any time that someone passes your name as a referral they are taking a risk. It involves a stake of personal prestige, self-import and ego. All of those factors go up when you give a great referral.  All of those go down when you give a marginal or bad one. So we’re playing with the math of ego. An issue we need to solve before you can get more of the referrals you’ve earned, is how you minimize the down side risk for your client or referrer of making the referral, and how you maximize the upside.

How can you do this? Here are a few examples:

• A Free seminar/webinar with coupon (that your referrer just happens to have one of..)  This works much better when people are known to actually have to normally pay to get in; or if they would be attending themselves, but usually works anyway.
• Free appetizer with dinner purchase- (you’ve given value, not money away, and really, what’s the mark-up on most appetizers?)
• Invitation to a “customers only” user group.  The added benefit there is that a prospect will get to know several of your satisfied customers.

What isn’t a best practice (anymore, at least) is a “free one hour consultation”   All too often this is a thinly veiled sales pitch with relentless hounding afterwards.   And who wants to subject a friend to that?

So, is not knowing how to refer business the only thing keeping you from getting more referrals?  No, you also have to:

• Know the symptoms of the person needing the referral
• Know what will happen if they do refer someone
• Know a secret to share

And please- NEVER, ever pay for a referral.

I know, kind of a strange title for a blog post, but this has been bugging me for as many years as I have had kids that are potty trained. (Disclosure – I have sons age 12 & 13 and a daughter who is 4).

Here is my question and the prompt for this post: Why the heck can’t a business that focuses on kids have restrooms that are kid friendly? For most parents it is an annoyance that their children simply outgrow. For me as a marketer, this is simply a detail that is consistently missed when a business looks at its target customer and what they need to be comfortable.

This really started bothering me a few years ago on a trip to Disney World. Really. A theme park designed for kids. And the Magic Kingdom is focused on the smaller ones. But I don’t recall a single restroom that we walked into having a toilet that was sized for a child (and they do make them). A couple of times I remember seeing a urinal on the wall low enough for a 10 year old – but not for my (at the time) 6 and 7 year olds. And then the sinks are all at adult height – so if you want to practice and teach your kids good hygiene, you have to pick them up and hold them while turning on the water and getting the soap. Disney is usually so good with the details – I could not believe how consistently this set up was the case. And it wasn’t until we got to Epcot on the last day that I finally found a rest room that had kids in mind. If you do the math, you can see that this has been bugging me for 5+ years.

Then last evening, I took my daughter and one son to Chuck E. Cheese’s. You know, “The place where a kid can be a kid” EXCEPT in the restroom. Everything there is adult size and even the paper towel holders were higher than a 4-year-old could reach. So this topic once again popped into my head – with one additional thought: If this place is marketing to families with kids, why don’t they have a family restroom (like a lot of the malls and even BJ’s does? ( I so enjoy taking my daughter into the men’s room ).

So my plea to anyone who targets families with small children is to please look at your total establishment. Your decorations, theme, menu and supporting items may cater to the kids. And you can show how much you care about your target market by making them (and their parents) a little more comfortable when nature calls.

At the opening of Law & Order is a line that I think every CEO, VP of Sales and VP of Marketing should memorize and remind themselves of every day: The police are responsible for investigating a crime and the District Attorney’s office is responsible for prosecuting it. This is their story.

If you substitute Marketing for “Police”, Sales for “District Attorney” and Lead for “crime”, you have a good rendition of how a modern sales and marketing team should work together – Marketing investigating an opportunity (lead) and Sales prosecuting (closing) it.

And when the lead doesn’t close, just like the police do when the suspect isn’t successfully prosecuted, you don’t close the file – you put it aside in case new evidence comes to light. In this analogy, a lead that did not close but continues to respond to offers for webinars, white papers or other marketing activities may once again become a lead later.

Sadly, it often doesn’t work this way. Many times we see the equivalent of the US Justice Department where the same team is both investigating and prosecuting a lead – and it’s a special person indeed who is good at both disciplines.

The marketing process in today’s digital, search driven world, has to encompass the entire customer buying process – including sales. From the first impression a prospect gets (when you don’t even know they are looking at you), through the sales process  (no matter how many times it starts, stops and resets), on to the close and finally in making sure that a customer is a long term, delighted evangelist, your marketing and sales team (along with support/customer service) must be fully aligned. If not, you are leaking leads and losing share of wallet and delight.

If you think (or know) that this is an issue in your organization, the time to fix it is now;  before you spend more money generating leads that don’t close or trying to save customers that aren’t thrilled.

Take the time and man power to track your opportunities from source through to close and then experience as a customer. Or spend the money to get someone to do this for you (and yes, we do this every day).

Waste and inefficiency is a standard in government – there is no incentive to do more faster. But in business, your bottom line depends on stopping the leaks and speeding the process.

Ok, I’m not much of a basketball fan.  But even I’ve been fascinated by how Jeremy Lin both became a basketball and pop-culture phenomenon, as well as an almost ignored player, until suddenly he exploded suddenly on the scene.

Lin’s game is predicated upon doing all of the basics extraordinarily well, and being able to perform them under extreme pressure consistently.  As it turns out, this approach outweighs some fantastic things like, say: raw athletic talent and sheer height.

Similarly- many of the best marketed companies use the top secret marketing recipe of… getting the basics right.  It’s the basics:

Not millions in advertising spend.

Not the flashiest logo.

Not even brilliant Public Relations stunts.

Good, interesting content, simply distributed and a quality customer experience.  Everything else gets people talking, but not buying.

Lin’s game took years of practice before he became an overnight phenomenon.  He didn’t play in the limelight of a top division 1 school, but kept working steadily on getting better.

Great marketing usually takes time to create from nothing.  There is no secret formula to earning untold millions.  Flash is easy, Flash is exciting, Flash gets attention..  But it doesn’t consistently get predictable results.  There is no simple work around for the hard work of marketing.

Because of his prior years of hard work, when Lin finally got a chance to play in a game, he had developed the tools and skills he needed to succeed.

At Leading Results, we don’t promise quick results.  Most of our clients either do the hard work or pay us to do most of it for them (there are some things you just have to do yourself). And in doing the hard work – gaining new insight into your business, your customers, your service – there is also a good chance that you will get to experience marketing lin-sanity.

We preach and we practice that you have to put strategy before tactics. For Jeremy Lin, the strategy was practice, the tactics; well, his results speak for themselves.

A very dear friend of mine can boast that he’s half the man he used to be:  He’s much healthier now, more vibrant and much more able to play with his kids. His biggest change?  He cut out the deserts, exercise more and eat more vegetables.

No, really. That was it.

Nothing fancy.

Nothing expensive.

Nothing super-crazy high-tech.

And that achieved amazing results.

I’ve observed that something similar has been happening to marketing in today’s environment.

Wild, crazy promotions still get plenty of attention and glitz and glamor – but they rarely drive revenue, and even more rarely drive profits.   But it’s very easy for businesses to become addicted to the ‘sugar rush’ of a rapid influx of customers (A la Groupon) even if that rush is rapidly killing your business.

All too often I have friends who go to take advantage of a Groupon offer and wait for a long time for poor service from a harried and beaten up staff that is working with lots of product out-stocks.  As a result, that store just lost money to loose a customer.

But when I talk to the business owners about it afterwards, they report it was a huge rush of revenues, excitement and new faces they never saw before.   Only afterwards do they realize that the new faces never returned, the increased revenues were overrun by dramatically increased expenses and the excitement (insanity) led to their top employee realizing it was time to start looking for a new job.  This, is marketing Ice Cream.

Don’t get me wrong – I love having Ben and Jerry’s as much as anyone else (Phish Food is my personal favorite, for the record). But have it too often and it leaves you fat, lethargic and unable to compete and play and win the game in the long term.

Customer interaction, process and follow through are all things modern marketers need to consider. Those are all the soft touches that take actual work and consideration to get to completion. Yet these touches are a core part of the customer experience workout regimen that marketers rarely get a chance to touch.

These are the same user experiences that Disney and Apple consistently get so right that helped make both companies the powerhouses they are today. And they are the vegetables that build our business bodies for the long term.

In the end, we want a shortcut and there are some – like all of the cool high-protein exotic super fruit laden drinks and snacks. Broccoli, Bananas and Strawberries work wonders.

But while the nutrition is a key ingredient, exercise to build stamina and strength is still required and still takes time. Those are the boring basics.  But those boring basics make the fancy stuff work much better- because you have a solid foundation to build upon.

I seem to hear the same question, a lot, lately… Do you know a senior (or director, or manager level) marketing person that I could hire that is any good?  And of course, I also answer they can hire me part time – but that’s not what they want.

These are mid-sized to larger companies that want to hire good marketing staff for leadership and execution and they are struggling to find the right person.  I even heard of a recruitment firm that specializes in placing marketing people that is not taking any new clients for 45 days because they have too many open req’s and not enough candidates.

What the heck is going on?

Here’s my take on it.  Google (and Bing, and Yahoo, and Yelp, and Facebook) have turned the world of marketing inside out in just 7 short years.  And like the buggy builder that was put out of business by the automobile, the traditional marketer – even those with decades of experiences – is quickly being overcome by the current market forces.

Its not just technology.  Email marketing metrics and tracking, pay per click, conversions, click-through rates, streaming video, tagging, etc, etc, etc  are all new terms and concepts in the last decade.  But marketers have always had to adapt and adopt new technology. From print to radio to TV to cable to Web.

Its not just changing behavior.  As marketers, we have always had to adjust to shifting consumer sentiment and habits – both major and minor  (have you watched any of the videos for Billy Joel’s “We didn’t Start the Fire”?).

It is the collision of the technology and the shift in behavior.  What is astounding and confounding many marketers is the speed at which it is happening and the complete and absolute manner that the consumer (B2B or B2C) has taken to using technology to reject, hide and ignore traditional marketing methods.

For many years we as consumers have been fed up with being sold to, lied to, over-promised and under-delivered.

With social networks, we can easily solicit the real world experience of a few we know or hundreds we don’t.  Sometimes within seconds.

With the search engines, we can find that one specific piece of information we need to make a decision on a product or service, and we can easily see the alternatives and the prices.  We also see alternatives, hidden tricks to your company’s practices and information from every third customer who felt they got a poor deal from you.  Ever.

As consumers, we have wrested control of our commercial lives back from the corporation.  And many, many, traditional marketers – those sitting behind desks or in cubicles, doing it the old way – haven’t figured out how to react and work with the change they embrace in their private life as part of their corporate role.

As marketers, we have to meet the consumer for our product or service at their point of choosing. We need to give them the information they want, the way they want it at the place of their choosing (web, email, direct to door, Facebook).  And to do that, we need to really, really, understand our product and the problems it solves or desires it fulfills.

Marketers used to have to dream up the image and messaging of where they wanted to go, and then create the experience or messaging to get there.  No more.  Now you have to actually understand the true value you bring, and you need to make sure the entire company delivers on it consistently.

The smartest companies are spending millions of dollars gaining consumer insight and acting on it – for product development; for messaging; for education; for everything. Being market driven, when your consumer can hide until they want you, takes on new urgency and critical path importance.

So if you’ve read this far, and you are looking to hire a marketing person, make sure they get the technology, the behavioral change AND the impact of both together on your ideal customer.  And if you are a marketer, make the decision to be accountable to the marketplace and to be out in the marketplace with your customers and potential customers.

The days of marketing from behind a desk are dead and buried.

While attending a reception at a big conference last nite, the person I was chatting with at one of the “bars” asked for a glass of wine. The bartender had just finished one bottle and needed to open another.

We stood there in amazement and watched as she took a waiter’s corkscrew – like the one pictured here – and proceeded to twist the metal all the way into the cork, and then try, with sheer muscle to pull the cork out (almost an impossible task for anyone but the strongest or those willing to get wine all over themselves). She had no idea how to use the corkscrew correctly in leveraging the end on the bottle to pull the cork out, so my friend came to her rescue and show her. (If you don’t know, you can learn here)

So what does this have to with marketing? In a way, everything. Lets start with the obvious – are your people trained correctly to work with your customers? Do they know how to use the tools that make serving your customers easier, more effective or simply excellent? (she clearly missed the lesson on opening a bottle)

The less obvious lesson here is leverage. What is your force multiplier for your marketing? How do you get your word out through your alliances and partners? What are you doing to delight your customers so that they talk about you. Where are you spending time in creating content and making sure it has permanence for long term (long tail) search value. Who in your company is your evangelist or evangelists and what tools have you given them to keep getting the word out for you. Why are you doing anything in marketing that is not repeatable and leverage-able because all the cost and time is invested in the first time you do anything.

So, unless you don’t have to do marketing, because demand for your products and services is unlimited, take a step back and look at your leverage points. Where can your partners, your alliances, your customers and you employees help you further develop your business – new customers, current customers and service excellence. And think about the corkscrew and leverage – as I see it, you have 3 choices when it comes to opening that bottle or in your marketing:

1. Use brute strength to force the issue (and exhaust yourself and make a mess)
2. Use the tool correctly and make your life easier
3. By a bottle with a screw-cap and take the simple way out (and with marketing, that means getting some help from a professional)

This post was kicked off by a discussion I had regarding the direct response article on Seth Godin’s Blog.

It’s true that more and more marketing dollars are being held accountable, for good reason.  Simply “getting your name out there” has generally stopped working, unless you have millions of dollars to throw at the problem.

“What can be measured gets done” is true.  It’s also true that if it’s not measureable, it is much harder to make ‘better’.   Insomuch as marketing is both art and science, Seth is complaining (and I agree) that the art is quickly leaving in favor of rapidly split-tested data that is scientifically rigorous.

This creates, as I see it, the following implications:

1)   Measurement can be done by teasing out external factors to see how well a given branding style campaign has done.   But it is not easy, or as accurate so it often falls to ‘doesn’t get done’.

2)   There is still great art inside of marketing- insomuch as the traditional functions of Public Relations, Journalism and marketing are quickly merging to become a hybrid profession of the future (present?).  This new profession has much art to it, and can be minimally influenced by raw statistical data.

I’ve yet to see a specific college marketing program churning out 22 year olds who are good journalistic researchers and interviewers, who know basic video production and HTML skills, and have a baseline knowledge of business and psychology.

3)   I suspect that broadcast media specifically do NOT want their effectiveness measured for many of their advertisers. My estimate for when I do see TV commercials (and not fast forward through them) is no more than 20% are effective at generating a specific memorable message, to a specific audience that knows what to do next if they want to consider seriously buying a new Hyundai, Chimney/fireplace, Verizon Android thing, or prescription drug that will revolutionize your life if you are willing to deal with ‘minor’ side effects that take 45 seconds to explain.  I don’t actually mind commercials personally- but I can’t recall the last time the person I was watching TV with paid the slightest attention to the commercials.  Usually these are fast forwarded over.

4)   I’m not a huge believer in advertising.  BUT- As prices continue to drop, we will see more of a comeback.  As advertisers are forced to keep up with the new psychology of marketing, they will develop better, more interesting, meaningful and ‘artful’ commercials.  Commercials as entertainment have tremendous value.  There will always be ad supported media, as there will always be someone willing to pay some price to be affiliated with somebody else’s brand, or to speak directly to somebody else’s customers.  When I was growing up, there was the constant conversation in the background that my favorite childhood TV shows- Transformers and GI-Joe were really half-hour long commercials for the toys.  Soap Operas got their name because their primary sponsors originally were soap companies.  We will, I believe, continue to see a merging of the offline and online.

We want the entertainment.  Cheap.  For that, we are generally willing to pay dearly in wasted time.

The formula for a good advertisement is still there.  I suspect we will be seeing more minute to 2 minute commercials, which are better for quality storytelling, as evidenced by the allegedly sold out 2012 Big Football Game (no, they haven’t been sold out at anything approaching full price since at least 2006, likely earlier).  The rumor on why that is, is that 2012 many advertisers bought 1 to 2 minute spots.

In order to tell meaningful stories.

That we might care about.

Care enough about to remember.

Care enough about to act on.

That doesn’t come without art, and doesn’t come with simply splashing a logo on the screen for a mechanically recorded, but mentally ignored ‘repetition’.