Driving Sales

R U Using SMS 2 Market?

If you sent someone a text message recently, welcome to the club. According the Nielsen Company, 77% of U.S. mobile subscribers used Short Message Service (SMS), otherwise know as "text messaging," by the end of 2007.

As SMS has grown to become a popular mode of personal communication, it is also emerging as an exciting new way for marketers to reach and engage targeted, on-the-go audiences quickly and efficiently. Several studies have found that by using SMS, advertisers are getting recall rates of more than 50% and open rates of 85%. Those are excellent results by any standard, but attaining them requires an understanding of how SMS works and what its strengths and weaknesses are as a marketing platform.

Here are a few "get smart" tips to put your  SMS marketing efforts on the right track.

Take time to target your audience.  Whether by consumer interest, geographical location, or carrier-supplied subscriber demographics, it's essential to the success of your SMS campaign to target your message to your audience. While "one size fits all" marketing is a bad approach in most situations, it's especially ill-suited to the highly personal world of SMS. Delivering a meaningful personal message that's contextually relevant to your audiences' search or opt-in content is the only sure route to SMS acceptance and results.

Choose your words wisely.   In SMS marketing, the visual aspects of your message give way to pure text content with no fonts, sizes or colors to choose from and only 160 characters to get your point across. Under these challenging circumstances, crafting a message that is relevant, direct and with a clear call to action is absolutely critical. (Keep in mind: If you go over the character limit, your intended receiver will get a disjointed communication broken into multiple messages and possibly incure additional costs for more than one text message.)

Sweeten the SMS experience. While SMS starts with text and text only, that can be a "jumping off point" to deepen the customer connection and leverage the initial response to further interaction. By using the text message as a bridge to another medium such as email, voicemail, mobile web, or video, you can engage your customer and lead them to a richer experience that culminates in a sale or other commitment. One SMS platform that works particularly well is to create a short ad with the option to reply with a keyword for additional information that leads the customer to participate in games or quizes and receive coupons or special offers.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Letting Customer Testimonials Do Your Talking

With all the new strategies and techniques for increasing advertising response rates that marketers have at their command, it's often easy to overlook one of the tried-and-true power tools of persuasion: customer testimonials.

Real people saying real nice things about your product or service can have a potent influence on others who wouldn't necessarily be receptive to a polished, calculated message crafted by a professional copywriter.

If you haven't taken the time lately to collect and incorporate customer testimonials in your marketing copy, consider the value-added benefits to be gained.

The ring of truth.  Testimonials draw their "juice" from the true-to-life flavor of real people sharing their opinions and firsthand experiences. Even if the wording is more casual or less precise than what you would write, using as much of the real words of your customer as possible can make a strong connection with other potential customers.

Birds of a feather.  Just as people more easily put themselves in the shoes of someone they find sincere and believable, it's human nature to put more stock in the opinions of people we can relate to. Always go for as direct a match as possible in your testimonials and the audience you want to reach. Motorcycle owners trust other motorcycle owners. Musicians trust other musicians. Seniors trust seniors.

Fresh takes on features and benefits.  You've no doubt spent some serious time fine-tuning how you talk about your product's or service's features and benefits. Nothing wrong with that. But things take on a fresh new feel when a customer speaks openly about what it means to them. Because of the less formal more personal nature of real testimonials, you have a great chance of getting a message to relay to customers that makes the most popular aspects of what you have to offer come alive in a way that jumps off the page.

So how do you begin the process of adding the power of testimonials to your copy? It all starts by simply taking time to call or email your customers to ask them what they think about your product, service or company. Start building your collection of good testimonials and watch how frequently they add just the right dash of humanity and credibility to copy that strikes a more responsive cord.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Taking Your Blog From Wallflower to Life of the Party

You remember what a wallflower is. It's that person who gravitates to the periphery of things, lingers in the shadows, blends in with . . . the walls.

The life of the party, on the other hand, has no such anonymity. They may make you laugh. The may make you cringe. But they get your attention. And on the way home from the party, you will talk about them and you will remember them the next day, the next week, the next month.

Loud and Bold Beats Low Key

If you have a business blog that's not getting noticed by search engines or the people you want to engage and influence the most, you may have a wallflower on your hands.

So how did you get in this situation? How did you wind up with a business blog that has relevant, topical things to say to people who could be your clients, but is as invisible as to them as the wallflower cowering in the corner at the big party? Well, it's a complicated situation, but we can tell you this: At a time where approximately 100,000 new blogs are being created every day, many helpful, intelligent, low key business blogs underestimate the need to be loud, bold, Life of the Party business blogs.

In Copyblogger, one of the most consistently interesting marketing blogs of any kind, editor Jon Morrow points out that people are far more drawn in by "the class clown" than the valedictorian.

Think about that. If you're like most people, you probably don't remember a single word that your high school valedictorian said. On the other hand, you can vividly recall your class clown and how his antics made you laugh in class when that was a dangerous thing to do.

Coming Out of Your Shell

So where does that leave you? There is a fork in the road here, make no mistake. You can continue to be helpful, friendly, intelligent business blogger. But where has that gotten you -- the Express Train to Blog Oblivion?

The other option is that you can reinvent your blog to become the louder, bolder, Life of the Party. How do you do that? The good news is you don't have to sacrifice your integrity or your dignity. We don't have to start from scratch. You don't have to start over. Everything is a work in progress.

Just keep one important thing in mind: Your role as a business blogger isn't to educate the world.

People will buy a book or take a course if they want to learn. If you want to have a blog that generates buzz and brings you new business, you need to deliver an interesting, entertaining diversion with a few valuable lessons.

Grab your reader's attention. Make them curious. Make them smile. Wake them up. Shake them up. Strive for bold simplicity.

If you do all of that with your business blog, you may not always get to be the life of the party, but you will bring more life to all that you say and do. And only good can come of that.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Secrets to Writing Direct Mail Letters That Sell

Read any good direct mail letters lately? Considering the torrent of wordy, boring, clumsily constructed attempts at sales letters floating around, the odds are stacked squarely against it. For those who follow a few simple steps, however, a sales letter can be an extremely efficient tool for reaching and motivating a targeted group of current or prospective customers and generating more sales for your business.

Next time you need to draft a sales letter that gets read and acted on, follow the advice enclosed in these "secrets" of selling through direct mail.

Grab their attention right away. Much like the headline of an ad, the opening of your letter should be relevant, interesting and engaging enough to pull in your reader. Begin with a situation or problem that your reader will likely relate to and present it as simply and provocatively as possible. Opening lines with stopping power can come in many styles, from the "teaser" to the straight-talking problem-solver. A few examples:

• Tired of shoulda, coulda, woulda marketing results?
• When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.
• In a year of diminished economic expectations, planning ahead for a profitable future is more critical than ever.
• Imagine how you could improve your cash flow if all your customers paid you within 24 hours.
• Have you ever stayed awake at night worrying about your investments?

Cut to the chase. You've heard those nasty rumors about people not reading as much as they used to? If you draft a sales pitch that wastes valuable time getting to the point, you've got as much chance of getting read as the 12-page owner's manual of a vacuum cleaner.

Your top priority in drafting a sales letter is to say what you need to say and say it quick. Your audience may not read all the way down to paragraph six to find out they can save hundreds of dollars by ordering within 30 days. Put the primary benefit -- the top reason they should do business with you right now -- in the first paragraph. You may not get a second chance to hook them.

Support your pitch with facts. Why should your prospective customers buy from you? They need reasons and they need them spelled out simply and clearly. As a general rule of thumb, the more facts you tell, the more you sell, and using a bulleted list is one of the most effective ways to spotlight key selling points. For example:

Our new vacuum cleaner . . .

• Cuts your cleaning time in half
• Steers effortlessly
• Stores in a small space
• Has a 10-year warranty
• Doesn't come with a 12-page owner's manual

Include a strong call to action. If your prospect puts down your letter before ordering, chances are you've lost them. Getting them to act immediately is critical. Provide a cut-off date or some imposed limitation to create some urgency to act promptly. If your prospect thinks he or she might miss out on a rare opportunity, they'll be more likely to respond. "Order now before the January 1 price increase . . . " can work well if it's a product of value with a believable deadline and rationale for ordering sooner rather than later.

Say "yes" to P.S. Once you've crafted a concise, compelling direct mail letter with no extra fat or puffery, you may be tempted to quit while you're ahead. But research shows that the familiar "P.S." at the close of a letter is read about three times as often as the body copy. So before you put your draft to bed, consider using the postcript to make your point one more time or add some additional incentive to spur your reader to respond.

For more ideas to drive sales, check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

   

Email Subject Lines that Build Curiousity (and Banish Spam Fears)

When it comes to crafting email subject lines, there's a fine line between catchy and spammy. Capturing your readers' attention is essential, of course, but doing it with clarity, relevance and credibility is the key to inspiring the comfort and curiousity they need to open your email and explore your message further.

With so much riding on your subject line, it pays to follow some best practices that have proven to connect with readers,  increase open rates and avoid the junk file.

Keep it short and sweet. Between 50 and 60 characters is about all the space you have on a typical subject line to grab your reader's attention, entice them to open your email, and take the action you want. With such a limited window of opportunity to make your pitch, keeping your subject line simple and to the point is more important than loading it with details that can be delivered after they open the email. Remember -- the objective of your subject line isn't to sell what's inside, but to tell what's inside. Find those few words that clearly tell your reader what to expect from opening your email or what's in it for them, and your odds of eliciting a positive response can rise significantly.

Be spam filter savvy. With so many people swimming in spam and fed-up with the clutter in their inboxes, spam filters have become more aggressive in heading off unwanted email.  Some of the things spam filters look for include subject lines in all capital letters, inserting more exclamation points than necessary, and using spashy promotional phrases such as "Carnival of Savings" and words like "free" and "bargain" that have become associated with marketing pitches. Even if your email is promotional in nature, keep your message as straightforward, descriptive and professional as possible.

Create a sense of urgency. When done well, urgency in a subject line sparks interest and drives action ("Private Sale: One Day Only," "Last Day to Guarantee Christmas Delivery"). Employing urgency and deadlines as part of a series of emails in a promotional campaign can be very effective. Case in point: "Sale! 5 Days Only, Jan. 17-21," followed a few days later by "Hurry! 5-Day Sale Ends Monday."

For more ideas to drive sales, check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.