This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly Direct Response Letter - www.bly.com

Most of us tend to pick a domain name that is a variation of our name or company (e.g., www.bly.com, www.ibm.com) or area of expertise (www.coachville.com).

My friend, Internet marketing guru Fred Gleeck, says a better strategy is to pick a domain that is easy for people to remember without writing it down.

Example: to promote an engine additive that improves gas mileage, Gleeck reserved www.savegaslikecrazy.com.

Financial guru Doug Roberts promotes himself through speeches, but audience members had difficulty remembering the URL for his company www.channelcapitalresearch.com.

Since his investment method is based on following the Federal Reserve, he reserved the domain name www.followthefed.com, and that’s the one he gives during his talks. It is so much easier to remember!

This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly Direct Response Letter - www.bly.com

According to a recent study of online buyers, 43% of online buyers abandoned their orders at checkout. The most common reason, cited by 48% of those surveyed, was that shipping was too expensive.

Two solutions suggested by the study:

1. Offer free shipping.

2. Give buyers a choice of delivery options (12% of consumers said they will not buy from online companies that do not offer multiple delivery options).

Source: “Increase Sales With Online Buyers,” United States Postal Service.

This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly Direct Response Letter - www.bly.com

According to the U.S. Postal Service, 52% of consumers purchase
products advertised in the mail.

Unfortunately, that also means that a whopping 48% of consumers –
nearly half the U.S. population – never buy through the mail!

So if you compile a list of prospects, as so many marketers do,
the statistical probability is that half of the people on the
list never buy through the mail – and therefore won’t respond to
direct mail packages which ask for an order.

The solution: When doing mail order selling, ask your broker to
recommend only “response lists” reaching your target market.

A “response list” is a list of mail order customers … people who
have purchased products through direct response.

Just using a response list means you have eliminated the half of
Americans who do not purchase through the mail from your mailing
list, which should effectively – at a minimum – double your
response vs. compiled lists.

Thanks Bob!

If you do – then please take a moment to hear about my company and see if I’m a good fit for your particular needs.

I’m a freelance copywriter that’s been writing for technology companies since 1995.

Confession: I’ve been involved with “gobbledygook” in the past, but I’d like to get past that.

What I’d like to do is to connect with your customers and users where they live and breathe functionally, practically . . emotionally.

I’m interested in “moving the needle,” of course, and testing for the best conversion and sales results. But I really want to find out what’s unique and authentic about your products, your people and your customers. Then I’d like to move you into that zone beyond profit focus – the area where you’re accumulating evangelists first, laying the ground work for the money gusher that follows (something you can be proud of on multiple levels).

In short, I’d like to help you make a difference in the world – Steve Jobs style – with simple, clear, compelling messages that resonate with users.

Do you have a small project I could help with right now (as a test run)? If so, please call at your earliest convenience (949) 244-9440, or email service@qualitywriter.com.

Your marketing documents should act as natural extensions of your sales efforts. They need to be good enough to pay for themselves by consistently generating leads, appointments and closed business.

Take a look at your documents. Are they living up to that promise?

Where can you get more bang for your buck? I recommend stepping up your case study development process.

Case studies or success stories are perfect for a company your size. They speak directly to targeted industries and show prospects “social proof” of customers who’ve already succeeded with your solutions.

Now ask yourself: Do you have time to do the interviews, write drafts, follow up, edit, revise and get everything approved and set for layout?

I can help.

I’ve been writing case studies for leading technology companies every month since 1995.  Even better – I’ve sold millions of $$$ worth of software, hardware and custom solutions by telling customer success stories in print.

Check my site to see some of them.

If you like what you see, take me up on my latest special offer: Book me for 5 case studies by July 15, 2010, and I’ll throw in a free copyedit of any other piece of collateral (up to 10 pp).

Call me at your earliest convenience (949) 244-9440, or email me dunn@qualitywriter.com.

P.S. My project queue fills up quickly whenever I send out these letters, so please call as soon as you can. Thanks.

1. Case studies show how specific problems are solved. This is important. Web copy and brochures are often product- and service-focused. They make your solutions sound too techie and inaccessible. Most people are tired of reading overt product pitches with distant, corporate prose and 2nd person formality.
2. Lead generation. If you can get your vertical-specific stories into the hands of the right list, you have a much greater chance of developing quality leads.
3. Re-affirm your value in the mind of existing customers. When your customs get on a conference call with your writer/journalist and the solution team, they relive the positive experience. As they pace through all those good feelings again, you increase your chances for referrals and repeat business. The value of the initial engagement seeps in deeper when you revisit the experience with them.
4. Testimonials. You can use the customer “sound bites” you collect in the case study interview as tight testimonial quotes. Sprinkle them throughout your site, and you’ve just added another layer of gold.
5. Storytelling rules! People love stories about adversity and triumph (Hollywood knows this, Horatio Alger knows this, your mom knows this, you know it – it’s etched in the cultural gene code).
6. Demonstrate your company’s expertise without looking arrogant. Sometimes standard brochure and Web copy sounds egotistical with all that “look what we can do” bravado. Success stories allow the corporate entity to get out of its own way.
7. Connect with specific verticals. When customers understand how their specific industry benefits from your solutions, everyone wins.
8. Reposition your product to a different audience. You can base an entire marketing campaign on one case study. Simply capture the story of how a specific vertical used your solution and then mail to this target list (or Google AdWords, banner advertise, etc.).
9. Quickly, clearly communicate the ROI of your solution/product/service. Money and productivity savings are critical components in the “results” section of any good case study. When you gather these metrics from customers, you can bowl over new prospects with the info.
10. Your competition might beat you to it!

There are plenty more reasons to get your success story pipeline filled up. So, why aren’t you jumping at the chance? I understand, you’re busy for one thing. Here are some other reasons why I see companies avoiding this critical exercise.

5 Reasons You Won’t

1. Existing creative staff and agency resources are busy with other stuff
2. You don’t have a quickly executable process in place
3. You don’t know where to start, who to call or what interview questions to ask them
4. You don’t have time to do the background research
5. You’re afraid you’ll get stuck, miss your deadlines, or get distracted by some other project

So why not ask for some outside assistance? I can help you identify your best case study candidates and schedule customer interviews in a matter of days.

Get started right now – call (949) 244-9440 or email me at dunn@qualitywriter.com.

Remember, case studies open the door to meetings, demonstrate your company’s expertise and allow your customers to speak to your strengths.

In Part I of this coupling we talked about the “deconstruction” trend where pieces of creative projects are being farmed out. This installment goes a little deeper into the technology trends that are disrupting ad agencies, marketing professionals and creative leaders.

The upside? Where there is disruption, there is opportunity.

Let’s dive in. First, let’s state the obvious. The Internet is disrupting everything from traditional communication channels to consumer purchasing behaviors. TV stations, radio personalities and content publishers of every stripe have been freaking out and adjusting for some time now.

A lot of that evolution has been gradual. Today, however, there’s an extension of the communication disruption trend that’s rapidly changing the way companies decide how to market their products and services.

If you’re in the content publishing business or if you have any big-brand clients, you’ve probably noticed it.

The shift relates to a handful of concepts:

1. Real-time analytics from real-time search like Twitter, Facebook and Google results
2. Web scraping (real-time and sophisticated, in-depth, behind-the-Flash, behind-the-login-page scraping)
3. #1 and #2 combined with contextual analysis
4. Multivariate testing (Google Analytics, Optimizer)
5. Twitter testing and AdWords testing of titles, subheads and concepts

WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, PHIL?

What am I talking about, and what does this mean to marketers, copywriters and other creative professionals?

Here’s the gist — you need to realize that subjective, off-the-cuff analysis of markets is a vanishing practice. Creative, “gee I like this, let’s run with it” moments are gone. David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins did their best to kill it off, but it’s still the fall back position for lazy marketing departments. Some of these departments and agencies could be naked soon.

The five techie developments above show us what sells, what gets clicked, what’s working and what the crowds think. Testing (Claude Hopkins, Ogilvy- style) is more relevant than ever! It’s a science and it’s here now. If you’re interested in more, just surf around Wikipedia via the keyword phrases “text analytics,” “web scraping,” and “web data services.”

Analytics beats any whim or subjective position you have. Yes – I know – if you’re creating art, then you can be content with your own subjective analysis. But, it’s rare that those of us in the business world can produce art without being accountable for results. At some point, you have to sell something (even artists need to fill galleries).

WHY FACEBOOK KEEPS GRABBING HEADLINES

You may have noticed one of the latest marketing buzz phrases – contextual sentiment. This is what Facebook is up to with their “Like” buttons all over the Web.

There’s dough to be made by gauging and organizing the sentiment of people who are perusing the Web for products, ideas, services and entertainment. Facebook knows it… and journalists are obsessed with the story and the implications.

If you’re not Facebook, this can be done with sophisticated software. Big brands have been experimenting with it for years now. Some call it Web scraping or Web analytics.

Here’s a simple example. If you run scraped keyword streams from Twitter or Facebook through a sentiment analysis tool, you can see all kinds of actionable information. Let’s say you launch a new soda flavor. You can quickly understand consumer sentiment by monitoring channels like Twitter and Facebook.

At the root, it’s the transformation of unstructured data into actionable information. It can be used for all kinds of scenarios – public relations troubleshooting, customer service, R&D, polling/sampling opinion (without the focus group), product development and more.

Big brands are already integrating this “social media” sampling technique into their Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. One of the big benefits is that they get a clear indication of sentiment and the “reality on the street.” In the past, they had to rely on focus groups with preconceptions and gamed reporting from their own internal departments (sales, finance, product development, etc.).

Even economists and academics, who used to rely on gamed government reports that took months to assemble and arrived stale as a crouton, are getting into the game. They now look at diesel fuel sales today on specific shipping corridors, real-time turnstile data from specific train stops, and  It’s all harvested from Flash, AJAX programs, secure pages, images, Javascript and the like.

It’s mind boggling, really. Think about it. If you had this power, what data would you monitor? Interest rates? Gold prices? Credit score reports?  Salesforce data?  Apartment listings?  A competitor’s pricing?  Product buzz?  Customer complaints?  Financial transactions?  Bank balances?  Twitter?  Facebook?  Google Trends?  LinkedIn profiles?  Partner inventory?  Shipment dates?

BACK TO YOU – THE CREATIVE

Creatives in every line of work – Web development, art, writing, publishing, etc. – need to consider these trends carefully. From my perspective this trend looks like a boon to creatives.

Yet, to many organizations, it could mean that some of their services will go away. You can’t consult, for example, if your consulting guidance is based on premises that are counter to factual Web analytics. You may have to integrate these new technologies into your offerings, in fact.

How is it a boon? Creative matters even more today than ever before. People need you to test out ideas, push them out of their comfort zones and try new things. Companies need to round up whatever data and research exists then hand off projects to creatives that get it. Then you test… then you commit to what works. That’s a good recipe.

What’s become a commodity is the big agency’s powerful research and testing groups. They’ll be moving to new technologies and techniques. But these new methods should be fairly low cost. You may not need an army of people to pull it off. And as information becomes more available at a lower cost, you’ll see small agile creative firms making moves.

SOME EXTENDED THOUGHTS

Everyone has access to this now. This new world is here. Soooooo….

• Real-time analytics are showing companies who are willing to put in the sweat and the money exactly what’s going on with their products, services, brands, competitors, customer service, market perception… everything.
• In the information marketing realm – tips, info and tools are commodities unless they’re strikingly original.
• Pricing for boilerplate, templated or paraphrased/hi-jacked content and design is being ground down to zero. It’s a race to the bottom. That work is going overseas, or it’s going to the lowest common denominator companies. And Web analytics will bury the poor performers.

The information you have at your fingertips – your information tool box – is becoming less important. There’s plenty of free information out there that describes what you know, best practices, tips, tools, strategies and so forth.

That stuff is being commoditized.

Dan Pink goes into this in detail in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

He writes: “McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work,” writes Pink. (That algorithmic work is the non-creative stuff – the process work that can be duplicated in far flung locations.) “A key reason routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, non-routine, work generally cannot.”

If you think about it, there’s a perfect storm brewing. Globalism and outsourcing have flattened the earth. And now analytics are accelerating performance measurement and business intelligence capabilities.

So I circle back to the impassioned messages: Experience matters. Value matters. A creative, original filter matters.

WHAT TO DO? GET BACK TO BASICS!

How do you win in this wild new world of shifting marketing and production trends?

You focus on the key differentiators. Seth Godin talks about this a lot in Linchpin.

You’ve got to continue to develop strong relationships.

Stellar customer service, a sparkling attitude, personality, and your underlying creativity and uniqueness are the keys.

Execution wins business as well – think about speed of execution, shipping on time/on deadline, and delivering a consistent, quality product.

Of course you need to deliver value – quality, differentiation and uniqueness, and ’something extra.’

In short, you need to become more remarkable now. New technology trends are conspiring to make YOU a star.

WARNING TO CREATIVES PART I: YOUR CAREERS ARE UNDER ATTACK

If you’re a creative professional, you may have noticed a bothersome trend. In an effort to reduce expenses, clients are getting creative with the ways they deconstruct projects, bid them out and re-assemble the final product. (This applies to lots of different creatives including, freelance copywriters, strategy folks, designers, social media marketers, SEO specialists, content developers and Web developers).  

As a result, some of your work is becoming commoditized, broken into pieces and performed by someone other than you. There are lower-cost, dubious-value options out there waiting in the wings to snap up pieces of projects.

I’m not arguing that this is a particularly intelligent, productive or encouraging trend. I’m just saying that it’s happening in a number of settings, and, in many cases, you’re complicit. Yes you.

Let me discuss a few examples to illustrate my point.

Deconstruction and the Road to Mediocrity

Software developers used to scope, design and test a piece code from start to finish. That’s not always the case nowadays. Outsourced, off-shore software testing is becoming more and more common. Specialized shops that test applications and the platforms they run on (like testing a new Web app on every conceivable phone, OS and browser combination) eliminate this task from a typical coder’s project. There’s a company in Austin, Texas that’s doing this with great success. Everything’s managed stateside, but the grunt work is done cheaply elsewhere. Think of it as global specialization – where the “assembly line” is decoupled, sent to multiple specialists, then reassembled before launch.

You may have noticed the SEO copywriting trend, as well. For better or worse, companies are farming out articles to writing sweat shops and instructing them to assemble articles that are optimized for specific keywords (including headline and subhead instructions for keyword repetition). Then they send the completed article to a professional writer for editing, fact checking and re-writing.

As a professional writer, I find the practice ludicrous. It’s a process that’s flawed, spammy and basically ass-backwards. But I can’t deny it’s happening. Shameful admission: one of my clients in Eastern Europe pays me to write headlines and subheads for articles they’ve developed (they identify the keywords they need highlighted, and I try to make it work). Some of the articles are professionally written and some are atrocious. I flag the bad ones and have them re-written (via myself or another editor they use).

The trend is similar to the software development one. Publishers are attempting to decouple production and then reassemble the pieces. OnDemand Media’s Pluck is one example of this kind of low-cost, assembly line publishing.

With these types of approaches, some value is lost (maybe not so much with the software development example). You may have seen similar trends with your projects. Does the following sound familiar? A client asks you to produce a site, some graphic art or some copy that’s just like “competitor X’s site.”

The marketing director identifies someone else’s work that they like, and they encourage you to paraphrase, emulate or copy it. “Just make it like theirs, ‘borrow’ from it and you [as the creative] won’t have to do so much work,” they say. The result is unoriginal copy or design. [BTW - my advice is strap on your Pumas and run away from these clients as fast as you can.]

The point is, you can see, taste and smell the loss of value in these types of projects. Think about all those India-looking templated sites out there. They’re sterile. You know them when you see them. The treatments are flat, the colors predictable, and the layouts pure boilerplate. Some are worse than others, of course. There are, however, some nice WordPress templates that are produced by very talented designers and coders (and SquareSpace ones and Tumblr.. many others, I’m sure – this is a trend I’m watching closely).

Similar problems occur when people take short cuts with photography. How about those bland “business people at work photos?” Earnest looking professionals glare into the lens. They wear JCrew blue and khaki, and they always seem to be in these scrubbed, gleaming Formica white rooms. There are dozens of them on iStockPhoto, and they pop up all over the Web.  Anyone can get that stuff. Anyone can produce it. It’s a commodity.

Your Talent and Real-Time Creativity is Your Trump Card

The deconstruct and “farm out the pieces” train is gathering steam. Seth Godin talks about this in his book Linchpin. In a previous era, the strategy was applied to automobile manufacturing. Henry Ford developed detailed assembly processes that could be carried out by very specialized, low-skilled laborers along the line.

These days creative work can be made into an assembly line without borders… without a building.

Where does that leave you? In some sense your career is under attack. If important disciplines comes under assault as satellite teams are assembled and everyone meets up in places like BaseCamp and Google Docs, then there’s real value erosion from the client’s perspective. You may (like me) even have a hand in it. Heck, you may even use this approach to assemble teams of creatives. So, who knows where this is headed.

There are some easy answers, however. First – you must scamper back to value. Focus on originality and core competency. Your creative work, your artistry is what wins. You can beat a monkey on a typewriter. Your brilliance in the here and now beats any templated mash-up that a sweat shop can produce. That’s what brings the real dough. That’s what wins today’s contracts.

Think of it as a way to improve your gross margins. “How can you be remarkable?” as Godin might put it.

The companies and clients that don’t want the type of talent you offer are probably settling for mediocrity. They will be lost in the sea of noise. Their ads will not stand out, their white papers will not be downloaded, and people will land on their sites and get that ‘oh this was designed by low-level goons in Eastern Europe’ feeling.

So, if you’re a designer you need to be the one who pays attention to typography, usability, color choice and very specific business requirements. You have to listen. And, you have to find the clients who communicate their uniqueness, their goals and their fears directly to you.

Incorporate that into your designs, then collaborate with the Web development team, the writer, the photographer. Don’t be afraid to work with difficult people. Don’t be afraid to challenge your client. Argue with them (not argumentatively but in a Socratic way) with the fears, benefits, goals and aspirations of the company in mind.

If you’re a blogger or a ghost writer for blogs, stop regurgitating the messages of others. Stop chasing the link deals and trying to spam your way into Digg mentions, StumbleUpons, etc.

Promote your best, most unique ideas – even if it means taking a day or week off. Yes, you need to produce content consistently. . but you’ve got to rise above the noise and say something useful and unique each time you publish. Or else.. your days are numbered.

Bring ***thoughtfulness*** to your projects – as Tom Peters might say. (BTW his new book “The Little Big Things” is great.)

It’s important to understand some of these trends. The playing field is getting fluid with globalism, Web 2.0 trends, and unique developments at play. You need to pay attention.

Keep your eyes peeled for Part II of this article. There’s an interesting new technology wrinkle at play (it’s actually much more than a wrinkle – you’ve seen hints of it in Facebook’s recent announcements, and two of my uber-deep technology clients are raking in tons of cash by farming Web data – that’s all I’ll say). The point is, it directly affects you as a marketing and Web development creative. Stay tuned.

Please comment below and keep the conversation going. I’d love to hear your feedback and insights.

My attempt at concrete imagery.

When I think about design, layout and presentation, there are two books that I frequently come back to:

1) Colin Wheildon’s Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes

2) Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Wheildon’s book is a frontal assault on the lame-o typography mistakes that continue to occur today (especially in the amateur design Web arena). His findings are backed up by in-depth research about comprehension and reader retention.

Reynolds’ book is a more elegant assault on similar miscues in the world of PowerPoint and Keynote… or just presentations in general.

My simple recommendation?

Buy these books. Dog-ear these books. Keep them near Strunk and White. Savor them, review them, revere them, spoon them.

They’re gold and will help you win projects and the hearts of your clients.

Here’s a taste from Presentation Zen that talks about the “picture superiority effect”:

“When information recall is measured just after exposure to a series of pictures or a series of words, the recall for pictures and words is about equal. However, the picture superiority effect applies when the time after exposure is more than 30 seconds, according to research cited in Universal Principles of Design (Rockport Publishers). ‘Use the picture superiority effect to improve the recognition and recall of key information. Use pictures and words together, and ensure that they reinforce the same information for optimal effect,’ say the authors… The effect is strongest when the pictures represent common, concrete things.”

And from Wheildon’s masterpiece:

“.. the average advertisement is read by only four percent of the people on their way through the publication it appears in. Most of the time this is the fault of the so-called “art director” who designs advertisements. If he is an aesthete at heart – and most of them are – he doesn’t care a damn if anybody reads the words. He regards them as mere elements in his pretty design. In many cases he blows away half the readers by choosing the wrong type. But he doesn’t care. He should be boiled in oil.” [my emphasis]

These two guys think deeply about design, and they offer lots of undeniable proof for their theses.

If you’re a copywriter, art director, Web designer, SEO monger, marketing director (or VP or CMO), or a layout/design guru, please pick these up and study them. Your job is not finished when you complete your piece of the creative puzzle. You need to understand the other disciplines to make sure you’ve created something that’s usable, appreciated, and understood by your consuming audiences.

Do you have any other book recommendations that are crucial for publishing/Web development creatives? Please comment below and share your favorites. Thanks – Phil.

I was just listening to an interesting podcast on the way to work – Public Speaker Quick and Dirty Tips. This is Lisa B. Marshall’s ongoing blog and podcast that helps people deliver better presentations, improve their public speaking and communicate better overall.

The tips from this particular episode are great and very Web 2.0. For example, she recommends that presenters encourage attendees to take notes via Twitter so that their associates and followers can benefit (very viral). There are multiple benefits for all involved. The speaker enjoys more exposure. The audience gains improved retention (research supports that note taking improves retention). And, a collaborative environment is formed as everyone tweets and uses hash tags to follow along. Summaries and specific notes can be easily copied and pasted into other capture tools. Plus, the streams are searchable on search.twitter.com or organized via Twubs or Twitterfall.

I highly recommend you check this stuff out.

Do you use other tools when presenting? If so, please comment below about your tips and recommendations.