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Signs are up for McDonald’s Shamrock Shakes, telling me to buy one of the frosty green treats. The calendar marketing tie-ins increase response.

Use meaningful times in any month to market based on 2 points:

1. Holidays nearly everyone celebrates
2. Life events for customers or prospects

Look first at general calendar entries for most readers: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and July 4th, for instance.

The second type includes specific milestone events for individuals: Birthdays, anniversaries, graduation (high school and college), first purchases (new car, first home).

Consider anything that can trigger a consumer or business event.

You can get creative—and very specific. Chase’s Calendar of Events and Amazon.com chart 42 festivities for April alone.

April is Car Care Month and May is National Photo Month. If your B2B buyers are auto dealers, detailers or service shops, offer them a special in April; if your direct marketing is to professional photographers, consider a mailing to them for May.

Shamrock Shakes have their own Wikipedia entry, and McDonald’s sells millions. They’d sell zero if they didn’t do marketing tie-ins.

St. Patrick’s Day gives them a reason, just as the calendar gives you permission to market, justifying the communication and reminding people to do something.

It’s a rationale to offer an incentive—a premium, discount or both.

Bonus: Consider other calendars, such as for churches or schools, how some names on your list are, say, sports fans (e.g.,MLB Opening Day) and that some demographics overlap—like a sports fan in college.

What do you think? Email me at craig@cdmginc.com

Holidays · Life events

Retail sales are suffering, while online and direct marketing sales grow.

Why?

Because direct marketing strategies and tactics work—and we can see this powerful fact at work in these retail trends:

1. Bankrupt. Borders Books & Music filed bankruptcy and is closing hundreds of stores, while its smaller Borders Express stores are untouched:
   (Note: Borders plans 150 “Express” stores in 2012, vs. 6-8 of their big stores.)
2. Smaller. Best Buy has opened 157 Best Buy Mobile locations. They run 1,400 square feet, vs. 38,000 in their main stores.
3. Tenants. Sears leases space in its iconic (and huge!) department stores. You can browse for space…online, of course.
4. Parking. Home Depot sells parts of their (emptier) parking lots to fast food franchises and auto repair shops, raising cash.
5. Reversal. Gap Inc. reverts to a strategy of putting Gap Kids and Gap Body inside their main stores, rather than opening new ones.

Step into the opening left by these changes. It’s not, “Build it and they will come.” It’s “Make it easy, direct and online, and they’ll shop.”

Your customers won’t fight crowds.

But they’ll surf the Internet from home.

They don’t want to shop—but they do want to buy.

What do you think? Let me know at craig@cdmginc.com.

retail · retail trends

This is a valuable but often overlooked component to good marketing. If the reader does not have trust in you, the reader will not respond to you. Build assurances. Let the reader know that you have been in his or her shoes. Create copy that is essentially like you putting your arm over the reader’s shoulder and saying, “I understand.”

The biggest hurdle to overcome in achieving response and making the sale is skepticism. Trust breaks through skepticism. And at every level, a prospect is skeptical.

So, how do you break down the skeptics?

One way is a system I developed 25 years ago called VIVA™. It stands for for “Valuable Information, Value-Added.”

One major study showed the top reason prospects did not respond to an offer was because it lacked benefits showing why they should respond. Their skepticism was too great.

But what if you give away valuable information on topics of interest to your prospects? Response dramatically goes up.

The VIVA system uses valuable information—such as trends, forecasts, new findings, facts and secrets—that you can just give to your prospects to help educate them and motivate them to order. Informational marketing is especially effective in promoting more complex products or services that need detailed explanations.

Here are some more strategies for building trust:

• Have a strong guarantee. If your product or service can use a guarantee, use a strong one. Money-back guarantees—especially double money-back guarantees—will open the response floodgates. Many marketers are afraid to offer a strong guarantee because they think customers will take advantage of it. What they don’t understand is that the greater response from customers who would have normally never responded will more than pay for any losses for backing the guarantee.
• Strong customer service. Provide phone numbers, feedback email access and other ways for customers to notify you when there is a problem. Make sure you keep your promises and have your staff treat your customers with respect when they do call. A problem well handled at the customer service level can either kill a relationship or strengthen it. So, make sure your team is well trained.
• Employ social media. Engage your customers in a conversation on Facebook or Twitter so they continue to shop at your e-commerce site (or brick-and-mortar store) and recommend it to friends and family. Use social media to make news announcements or provide exclusive deals to Facebook friends. Keep the conversation going.
• Testimonials. Trust is built when a prospect or customer knows other people put their trust in your product or service. Make sure your website, mailings and other communications include glowing statements about you. Include a picture and a name with the testimonials to build even more credibility. NOTE: Call me at 310-212-5727 and I’ll show you how you can easily get testimonials from your satisfied customers.

Need some help with building relationships based on trust and credibility with your prospects and customers? Drop me an email at craig@cdmginc.com or call me at 310-212-5727. My team and I would like to discuss how we can help you start building profitable relationships.

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Imagine you had the opportunity to have a 30-second ad for your product or service shown to over 60 million households—an average of 111 million viewers watched Super Bowl XLV.

You would want to get the most out of it right? Especially if that ad cost $100,000 for every second. What would you do to make every dollar count?

Here is what I recommend…

• Have a call to action (CTA)
• Have a way to measure response
• Have a prominent Toll-Free number that’s specific to the campaign
• Have a landing page URL onscreen and keep it there long enough
  
  for the audience to see it
• Even consider a text response

How many big-spending advertisers actually did that? Almost none.

Sunday’s big game set a new record for U.S. television viewership. But every 30 seconds of commercial time—every funny animal, special effect and talking baby—was like watching $3 million go down the drain.

Many ads did manage to insert their company URL at the end…for the last second…usually in unreadable white…and not linked to a specific campaign. It seemed the advertisers considered the URL as just “housekeeping.”

• Budweiser ads, known for their humor, did provide a Facebook URL. But it was virtually invisible. It wasn’t tied to a specific campaign. And it was only on the screen for a second. Most people missed it.
  
• RITZ Crackers also included a Facebook page for viewers to view RITZ game day recipes by Chef Guy Fieri. But again the URL sped by too fast. I doubt anyone could have seen it.
• Apparently, Coke was just too cool to even put up a URL.

One of the biggest mistakes was made by movie companies. Films can create an entire world that can be supported by a website to build interest, provide free online premiums, like ring tones, and even offer a way to order tickets early.

Yet, Transformers III, Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides, Rango, Rio, Limitless and Mars Needs Moms didn’t even provide a URL in their commercials. Because there was no call to action, they’ll see no increase in their databases. What a waste!

Were there any winners? Yes!

LookUp316.com. Would you believe that a commercial first rejected by FOX Sports and then, to everyone’s suprise, only played in a couple of small media markets was the big winner? See the commercial here.

This 30-second commercial did 2 things right:

1. During the commercial, the actors sent a strong and clear message for the audience to use their smart phones.
2. The message created curiosity to further force the call to action (CTA) with the URL prominently displayed—“LookUp316.com. A message of hope.” It clearly dominated the screen.

Even though it played in just a few small markets, the response was overwhelming, creating problems for the server.

Between excellent direct response strategies and perhaps some pre-Super Bowl buzz due to the initial rejection of broadcast, the video experienced a viral effect. When I last looked, the YouTube posting of LookUp316 had almost 300,000 hits.

Now here’s another winner on the opposite end of the taste scale….

GoDaddy.com: This is a tacky approach and certainly an inappropriate ad for a family-themed sporting event. Still, GoDaddy’s commercials got a few things right. In “The Contract” it looks like Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels are totally naked. This commercial created a sense of curiosity, which was punctuated at the end with a visual call to action in big letters and a narrator saying, “See more now at GoDaddy.com.” And the URL was displayed throughout the entire commercial.

And what was the result using these direct response strategies?

According to GoDaddy.com Founder and CEO Bob Parsons, their fourth-quarter commercial spiked Internet traffic higher than any Super Bowl ad they had ever done before. What’s more, calls, conversion and cash were off the charts! In fewer than 15 minutes after GoDaddy.com’s first Super Bowl commercial aired, their domain registrations shot up more than 466% over the entire previous year.

My friend, direct response strategies work, and GoDaddy.com is using them to their advantage.

A few honorable mentions include…

Jack in the Box: Their commercial showed a campaign-specific URL, which was left up long enough for the viewer to read it—AllAmericanSpringBreak.com.

Ford: The Ford Motor Company sponsored the pregame show and included a “join the team” challenge commercial for the rally race of their Ford Focus. This included viewer involvement and interactivity at their website FocusRally.com

Chevrolet/Glee tie-in: Chevrolet partnered with FOX’s Glee to create a commercial that not only promoted the new Chevy Cruze, but encouraged viewers to stick around for a special Sunday broadcast after the Super Bowl to see what the talented kids at McKinley High School created for their Cruze commercial. Glee normally airs on Tuesdays and was a way to introduce fans to the Cruze featuring the kids from Glee.

In the end, the only big winner of the night was the Packers. Very little was done to get advertisers to use their $3 million beyond “brand awareness.”

Again, another year of wasted advertising dollars.

What do you think? Do you have another commercial you liked? Email me at craig@cdmginc.com.

If you want spots that are direct response oriented, where people take action based on the product or service you’re selling, just email me at craig@cdmginc.com or call me at 310-212-5727. My team and I would be glad to help you maximize your ad budget by showing you how your advertising budget can work for you!

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Integrating a variety of direct marketing media into a single marketing effort with powerful direct response copy can have a dramatic effect on response. Let me show you how I used a fully integrated campaign to increase response more than five-fold.

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copywriting · Direct Marketing · email · landing page · Social Media

Marketers use the term “autoresponder series” a few different ways. You may also have heard it called a conversion series, retention series or renewal series.

Here is an interesting recent test that demonstrates how we as marketers need to be constantly rethinking how we use the various channels available to us.

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Direct Marketing · Direct Response · Testing corner

Direct mail principles apply to a variety of marketing challenges. For example, direct mail can be used to make a trade show exhibit a success. If you are unknown to your attendees, you must give prospects a compelling reason to visit your booth. Let me show you how I helped one company—IPRO­—use direct mail to drive prospects to their booth.

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3-d · Direct Mail · Direct Marketing · Direct Response

You may remember in your last issue, I told you about embedding links in copy, the first of three key Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies that often get overlooked when developing websites and landing pages.

In this issue, we are going to talk about a second of these key strategies…

Commonly overlooked SEO strategy #2: Formatting your key words

Whenever possible, consider making your keywords and keyword phrases bold or italic.

By adding this extra formatting, you will help search engines like Google understand that the word in bold or italic is one of your key words.

However, be careful to do this while at the same time keeping your content editorially sound. In other words, don’t make it blatantly obvious to your readers that you are highlighting keywords or they may be turned off to it.

Formatting your key words may seem like a pretty simple idea, but it can make a major difference in where your site gets placed in the listings.

In your next full issue, I’ll share another highly successful but regularly unused SEO strategy.

My team and I have extensive experience creating SEO strategies that garner the maximum results. If you want to boost your response, email me at craig@cdmginc.com or give me a call at 310-212-5727.

Direct Marketing · key word · Search engine optimization · SEO · Web strategy

If you are like many readers, you haven’t read every word of this email. Instead you scanned it until something interesting caught your eye.

It works the same way for prospects reading your website. They don’t read your web pages word by word. They scan them and focus on individual words, phrases or sentences.

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Copy tip · copywriters · copywriting · Direct Marketing · primacy · saliency