thinkTank Mail

Marketing in a Recession

Bob Baty-Barr — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:32:09 GMT

Wow, so it has been a while since I have blogged here - okay, you caught me... it has been a long time since I have blogged anywhere. With that said, I felt compelled to lend my voice to the many that have been blogging on the importance of marketing during a recession.

Yes, it has finally been officially confirmed that we are in a recession - DUH! So, my question and the topic for this blog post is simple -- Is marketing perhaps MORE important during a time of recession? The simple answer is NO!

Now, let's expand that thought and actually fill it in with some reasoning. Why would it be MORE important to market now? Some marketers would lead you to believe it is. Now having just finished that statement, let's be clear that it is ALWAYS important to maintain your marketing voice. A well structured communication/marketing plan is based on cycles that focus on the natural fluctuations in your business/industry. Unless you are a completely seasonal business or have a product that is designed to thrive during a recession your strategy should be fairly constant and predictable.

Another important distinction is needed here... Your marketing is NOT your message! does that make sense? Your message better darn well be shifting to address the concerns of your intended audience and most of those in any audience are very aware and concerned about the current economic environment.

So, we have established that your MARKETING PLAN really should be staying the course, but your MESSAGE should be considering a shift. Wait, what was that... I just heard someone shouting, "hey smart guy, my budgets need to shift because my sales are in the tank" and I hear that. My first question would be, did you have a plan to start with? If you did, then certainly let's shift the plan and the message. However, if you did not have a true MARKETING PLAN then you better start coming up with one quick or else you won't have any message out there when this thing turns - AND YES, IT WILL TURN!

So let's say you are out there and really didn't have a plan up until this point - now what do you do? First of all take a deep breath. Next, decide what it is that you want to accomplish. Do you want to actually increase your sales? Do you want to maintain? Do you KNOW that sales maintenance might be a 'pipe dream' and you just want to make sure that when the smoke does clear that your name is top of mind? There are many goals you could have for your business at this time. The important thing is that they are your goals, they need to be measurable, and they kinda need to be realistic and achievable.

One thing that for certain is that you have to find that purpose, the' what is it I want my business to do' -- then communicate that. Is it through email? or direct mail, or broadcast media -- that all depends on your business, your plan and your budgets.

No magic bullets here, sorry... but the message to find your message and get it out there. Make it relevant, find the voice that explains why your product or service is necessary today and in the future.

Corporate Email Rolling Blackouts

Bob Baty-Barr — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:51:22 GMT

I was reading an article on the New York Times websitethe other day about corporate email, productivity and how some companies are encouraging employees not to use email during certain parts of the day. The overall picture painted in the article references the huge amount of money -- $650 billion annually that is lost due to email overload, or whatever fancy term you want to put on it.

I hear your question already, 'Bob, what does this all have to do with me, the email marketer?' These early discussions and some of the solutions are in the very early stages and very experimental, but the fact that they are being discussed at all means that big changes may be coming or that considerations must be made based on your audience. All this folds into a bigger questions that I get asked all the time. 'What time of the day should we send our email blast?' and 'Which day is the best day to send our emails?'

Can you see now why companies experimenting with what I call 'Rolling Email Blackouts' can have a huge impact on how we conduct our direct email marketing. Now we have to know even more about our subscribers - which is a great thing - but can also be a bit of a pain in the posterior.

Do I have the magic bullet answer to cure all your email challenges [notice I did not say problems, woes or ills]? Of course I don't... if I did I would put it in a book and be extremely rich :). My goal here is to expand a dialog about the things we should know about our subscribers and from there discuss how we need to address various segments of our list or tailor our messages based on this new and evolving deliverability challenge.

Email Optimization

Bob Baty-Barr — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:42:47 GMT

I read an article about email optimization the other day and thought I would share with you some of the things i took away from the article. The biggest thing is that we cannot approach email design in the same way we typically approach web design.

Take for example my personal website - http://www.baty-barr.com. I lead off with images of my children and and other images and that takes up most of the 'above the fold' space on my homepage. Even my interior pages have a graphic header. In this day of email image blocking and the like this is just not a great idea. We need to structure out emails with mostly text above the fold - almost like an upside down web page. In fact, if we think about standard webpage footers, what kinds of elements are found way down there? Text based versions of our top navigation, links to our privacy statements, terms and conditions and an a lot of websites a physical contact address and/or phone numbers.

What a crazy idea it would be to lead with that info in our emails!

I know, I can already here some of you out there screaming, "What about branding!, How will people know that the email is coming from me or my company?". My answer to that is why wouldn't we tell them that in the subject line or in the intro sentence to our email?

I propose this:
An html text headline [an h1 tag perhaps :)] that carries your corporate color, which is part of your branding. Perhaps the headline even contains your company name? For example:

ThinktankMail Offers Great Email Plans For Any Size Organization.

In the headline I have identified my company and the main content of the message. I could then follow that up with a brief paragraph that explained what it is that my company does and what the reader can expect to be found in this email.

Then I could entertain a banner type graphic. Yes, I did say graphic :) This graphic could act to reinforce my brand, break up the content or simply be an indicator that my layout scheme is changing from a single column to a two or three column layouts.

Let's change the discussion a bit and talk about what kind of content can be in our emails. It really depends upon what the purpose of the email is, but let's say we are talking about newsletter type emails for this discussion. The main purpose of emails like this is to [yes keep our readers informed but...] drive traffic to our websites. What they do once they are there is another completely different discussion for another day. So, based on the statement that we want to drive traffic to our site, do we want to put complete articles in our emails? I recommend to use teaser content in the email and drive them via a hyperlink to the website for the full article.

This accomplishes several objectives - it allows us to give our readers more, smaller chunks of info and creates more opportunities to have them click through to the website.

If the content of your newsletter articles isn't enough to drive readers to your site, the 'offer' or 'coupon' is another great way to drive traffic. I will touch on these concepts in another post.

List Management is Now Automated

Bob Baty-Barr — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:04:55 GMT

Information about the new upload list feature is here.