One of the speakers at the Boston Direct Marketing conference earlier this month was a man who has been to Australia many times, Alan Rosenspan. Alan is recognised as a top creative in the US and his presentation included these gems:
Do yourself a favour and believe you are creative – that’s an essential (and remember, it is nothing to do with IQ).
To be creative you need to challenge assumptions, take risks and ask questions.
Your creativity won’t be effective unless your primary focus is on your prospects.
From Google, conference delegates heard:
Mobile search has increased 500% in the last 12 months (and by the end of 2011, 50% of Americans will have a smart phone).
Search is increasingly specific: on any day now, 16% of searches are searches that Google has never seen before.
Today, 33% of all searches are local – typically mums and dads no longer search for a garden blower, but modern searches look more like this: ‘a noise reduced, medium force, garden blower in the Camberwell area’.
Business-to-Business marketing: there were a number of reminders promoted at the conference with the first one being that the four keys to B-to-B are:
1. Take it slowly,
2. Use data wisely,
3. Contact people on their terms, and
4. Know when to close the deal.
For B-to-B marketers, we were also given the ‘7 great rules of engagement’:
1. Do not initiate contact without a clear objective
2. Start with the customer, not with your product/service
3. Pick-up where the interaction left-off
4. Don’t ask the prospect for the same thing more than once
5. Make the interaction personal and personalised
6. Deliver information that reflects what you’ve learned about them
7. Learn about the customers/prospects in bits... not all at once
At the conference also, ace copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis shared many hints on making direct mail more successful. Here are five of them:
1. Notes in the margin can be a good idea, but they should be in the same font as the signature and the heading and there should be no more than two per page (one is probably better).
2. The purpose of the envelope is to get opened. Too much text on the envelope is likely to cut response.
3. A play on words may be fun for the writer, but a play on words is rarely effective in selling.
4. A lift letter will usually increase response, but it should be prepared on different letterhead and in a different font.
5. In Direct Mail, examples work better than statistics. Examples are warm-blooded, whereas stats are cold-blooded.
Herschell Gordon Lewis has been writing successful direct mail for more than 40 years. His latest book was released at the conference in Boston and it is a ‘must read’ for anyone serious about writing effective copy. (“On the Art of Writing Copy” 4th edition.)
