March 28, 2008

Desperation Marketing

Posted by Kevin | Print This Article

Got another email today from a group I used to do business with. Subject line: “We want you back!” I only had a brief second to think “Who cares what you want?” before my trigger finger had deleted it.

Tip on marketing to former members: The message should not be about you, it should be about the recipient. (But then, that should always be the case.)

Plaintive appeals like “We miss you” are somehow hard-wired into our genes. I’ve written them before, too; it’s like something we instinctively do, like scratching at a wound even though we know it’s just going to make matters worse. Perhaps we all sat through a class that was so dull we’ve blocked the experience from our memory, except somehow in the back of our minds we remember one ill-informed point the instructor had made. “People like to be wanted,” this otherwise forgettable teacher said. “They especially like to be wanted by faceless membership organizations who can’t take a hint.”

The best return I ever got on a piece of direct mail was perhaps the least sentimental appeal I ever made, and it went to a few thousand companies we like to call “hard-core non-renewers” (companies whose membership had been dropped over the course of many years and who had managed to ignore every appeal and marketing piece sent ever since). Its headline was “Your Competitors Thank You” and it simply listed the names of those companies in the recipients’ area who were still getting leads from our website because they were members. I can’t recall offhand what the final percentage return was, but I know it exceeded 13% and paid for itself many, many times over.

It did cause a little consternation; one member asked why we couldn’t just send a nice letter listing benefits and saying (this is a quote) “We Miss You.” I said, “Because we have, and it didn’t work.” This piece worked because it was true, and it hit on one particularly important benefit that we offer that is objectively valuable.

I’m not saying that every association can try this exact same sort of thing and get away with it (running a series of tests with this same message, we found it definitely doesn’t work with people who have never been members, and won’t work on the same list more than once). But every association can (I hope) find at least one specific thing that former members no longer get which is of sufficient value that you can make a big deal out of it.

Then the message becomes, “Don’t you wish had access to this?” Which makes it about the recipient (and thus of interest), not the association.

(Note, I’m talking about messages sent to former members, not expiring members — often people do forget to renew despite your many notices, and there needs to be a slightly more gentle period of reminders, but even those should be focused on the benefit that the member is either about to, or recently did, lose.)

Finally, if you’ve tested “We Miss You” against different kinds of messages and found it works best for your organization, then knock yourself out with it. Test; find what works; repeat.

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