June 26, 2006

Too Slick for Slick

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

I can’t help it, I love to produce marketing and communications pieces that look good — and by look good, I mean look expensive. There’s just something about a really well-designed, attractive brochure/flyer/email/etc.

Except the problem is slick sometimes doesn’t pull as well as not-so-slick. Markets vary, of course, but we’ve found that for some of the things we sell — books, meetings, membership — we get more pull from relatively simple, black-and-white, text-focused, well-written pieces. (The key is that last one — well-written copy that sells tangible benefits.)

I thought of this today when I read on an ASAE listserver someone reference a marketing tactic his organization uses they call an “ugly letter” — a two-piece black and white mailing they use to promote seminars, which pull well. (I deleted this email and don’t recall who wrote it, so if it’s you, feel free to chime in on the comments.) We’ve found the same thing. In a price-conscious market, something that looks expensive can make the recipient immediately think of the price (expensive) instead of the value (the benefits). Which can cause them to move on to the next thing in their in-box.

Remember, our first goal is to get stuff read. And:

– A black-and-white piece stands out in a stack of mail these days, since color is cheap and everyone uses it.
– A thick four-page letter is more noticeable than a glossy one-page flyer. Obviously, you need to have good direct mail copy, but paying a graphic designer to produce a flashy flyer is actually the easy way out — and not necessarily as cost-effective as paying a good writer to come up with a meaty message that sells.
– HTML email usually means “advertisement” while text email that’s written like a personal email to someone doesn’t. (If you want an email to sound like it’s really coming personally to someone, then write it like most people write emails — with the occasional grammatical error and run-on sentence.)

We all love to pass around the nice award-winning piece that makes everyone at the staff meeting go, “Ooh, that looks nice.” But personally I’d rather pass around the results that show the highest possible return on our investment.

(Oh, and one other sneaky little trick about emails that you should use sparingly if at all. I’ve subscribed to a particular Internet marketing newsletter for years now, one that I almost never read but have never bothered to unsubscribe. But I have noticed every couple of months or so he sends a follow-up email with the subject line, “Corrected link for [whatever he was pushing in the last newsletter]“. He didn’t have to do this more than twice for me to realize that there was something going on here besides an itchy email trigger finger. Manipulative, you say? Well, I opened them …)

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