Marketing
March 28, 2008
Desperation Marketing
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | 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.
January 18, 2008
You Are Not In the [Insert Product Here] Business
Posted by Kevin | (6) Comments | Print This Article
So, you have this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core members love it. It makes money. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. Other people will think it’s great, too. Certainly the other people in your industry or profession (maybe non-members, maybe non-participants who have similar demographics as participants) will think it’s great. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who are sure to think it’s great. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. The members and core market love it. But it’s kind of tapped out and there are people on the top floor who want to see growth. So … there are other sorts of people — outside your core market — who will think it’s great, too, right? People who work in fields that are similar but not the same, or are on the outskirts of your industry, or are customers of your core members, or are somehow someway maybe possibly interested in similar sorts of things. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who surely must agree that it’s great … even though you don’t really know them … and they don’t really know you … but, hey it’s a great product … so you just know they’re going to love it, right? … so, um … terrific. I think.
Wait. Let’s start again.
So, you have this great market. And you come up with this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core market loves it. It makes money. And then you come up with another great product — maybe related to the first great product, maybe completely different — but also aimed at this same great market that you know so well, and which knows you. And they love it.
And then you come up with another one, and then another one, and then another one … and then maybe that first great product starts being not-so-great, maybe a little long in the tooth, maybe no longer relevant … but that’s okay, because you’ve already created so many other great products and have lots more on the way, and retiring not-so-great products is just second nature to you now …
Terrific!
Associations have a market. Not a product.
January 18, 2008
Behavior, Data and Experiences
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
In a comment here, Scott Briscoe writes:
“I advocate taking a variety of inputs–data, expert opinion, nonexpert opinion, advice from whatever sources seem salient–and mixing it all together with your own experience and thought to make a decision. It’s more risky, because if it fails you don’t have the crutch to say ‘but the data showed…’ or ‘but the committee recommended…’ — you own the decision. You live by it. You try to make it work, you adjust based on environment and input and then you try to make that work, etc.”
I don’t think Scott and I are necessarily disagreeing except that we are ascribing different weights to different things. Scott seems to think (and I may be misreading) that all things are equal; I think that “experience and thought” only come into play when one has solid data around which to wrap them. Behavioral data, in my opinion, is the most important foundation for any organizational decision-making.
I’ve been focusing on online behavior in these posts because, well, I love it. It’s real-time! It’s a treasure trove of information. But it’s not the only behavioral data that counts. You should know a lot about your members’ behavior, including what programs they participate in, what products they purchase, what types of questions they ask, what meetings they attend, what training they register for, etc.
An example: In our organization, we represent small businesses. They range from 1 employee to more than 1,000 (actually, not many of those). A few months ago, for the first time, we compiled mounds of data in an effort to determine which of our programs and content areas appeal to which size segments, because there is a real difference between a company with, say, 3 employees, and a company with 30 employees, and a real difference between a company with 30 employees and a company with 125 employees.
We first broke our membership down into six “size ranges” and then figured out which percentage of our membership came from each range. Then we took everything we do that is measurable in terms of participation — from participation in online areas, to participation in partner programs, to purchases of specific products, to participation in different types of education, to types of questions asked (we have an online q&a submission system that allows us to track different categories of inquiry), to lots of other things. Then we broke the participants in each area down by size type.
And then we brought it all together and compared to overall membership percentages. The idea was to gauge which programs/services have the most appeal to differing segments based on their participation. If a particular size range was OVER-represented in a particular program relative to their percentage of our overall membership, then we learned something. If a particular size range was UNDER-represented in a particular program, then we learned something. And if a particular program saw participation fall along roughly the same percentages as our overall membership, then we learned something.
I’m simplifying our process here and am limited in what I can share. Once we got all this together, we had much more than a pretty table with lots of nice colors. We clearly knew which areas the very small companies (which comprise a large part of our target market base) were willing/able/interested in participating. We clearly knew which areas pulled mostly larger companies, who are a smaller segment of our market base but clearly have different interests/time/resources. And we immediately knew exactly what our “sweet spot” was in terms of a specific size business that provides both maximum participation and resources for the association.
I’m sure you can imagine how such data can be used, both in creating new products and in marketing both membership and products. There are certainly other ways one could do similar analyses for different types of organizations based on different structuring criteria. Some of what we learned from this process was exactly what we expected to learn (based on, yes, our own “experience”), but some of it was a complete surprise.
In any event, once you have access to solid behavioral data that you can keep updated on a regular basis, THAT’s when you take “experiences and thoughts” and begin figuring out how to apply what you’ve learned.
A simplistic example:
If you know a particular type of member likes to travel to events while another type of member never signs up for any event, you have some choices: figure out how to give the non-attending member type some other kind of educational service that doesn’t involve events, figure out how to give the attending member type more events they can take advantage of, or both (or neither, if you have some other agenda). Or, even better, you can use the demographics of your attending member types to go after similar people who aren’t attending because now that you know that people just like them are attending, you can target your materials much more closely. (The wrong solution, in my opinion, would be to decide that what the non-attending member type needs is better marketing. They’re not going to attend. You can kill yourself trying to “market” to them, or create new products/services they might like better — the latter is easier, though for some reason many people think it’s harder.)
Based on various data, you could even decide that a particular member type is so non-engaged that they may not be worth pursuing at all.
But I heartily agree that experiences and thoughts play a major role in deciding what your association is “going to do” once you actually know how your members react in real life to various things. If your association is going to be truly innovative (and I argue that it should) then you should be launching things that your customers would not necessarily think that they need if you asked them (which is why asking them is not necessarily a good use of your time). But I would argue with Scott that basing such risks merely on your own gut (or that of your senior staff or a committee member) is dangerous territory. How many times have associations had to respond to one influential member who complained about a particular program which led to a complete re-evaluation of said program without any attempt to determine if other people had the same opinion? How many “pet projects” have associations launched for various leaders (both staff and volunteer) that ultimately went nowhere?
Gut is good. I trust my instincts, too. But I’ve learned over the years (often the hard way) that the best instincts are well-informed instincts.
September 20, 2007
If I’m Not Good At It, It Must Be Wrong
Posted by Kevin | (4) Comments | Print This Article
So now people are talking about marketing in the tiny little association blogging world. Jason Della Rocca posted something that sounds a lot like my last couple of posts (except I don’t think “marketing” is a line item). Scott decides “traditional marketing” doesn’t work because apparently somebody is mailing out 500-page brochures to hundreds of thousands of helpless people. Tony says only an idiot would send out 500-page brochures without testing them against postcards. (I’m paraphrasing here.)
Well, they all raise good points and I don’t really want to get into too many details because frankly I’ve had a long week. However, I have to point out that the problem with Scott’s post is a problem I see all the time on ASAE listserve discussions: “If I’m not good at something, it must be inherently wrong.”
Scott says that traditional marketing = things like big brochures = isn’t there a better way? But Tony gets it right when he says marketing = figure out what works = do it = repeat.
(Of course, Scott has already said he’s not a big fan of data, so I guess we’re supposed to … I’m not sure … give in to whoever is the most sure of their convictions?)
Since I don’t really have any convictions, I’m stuck with data. And I’m willing to concede that just because I tried one thing once — and it didn’t work — doesn’t mean the thing itself is wrong. Maybe I just did it wrong. I see this all the time with email marketing, as I’ve written before. So many people think “email marketing” doesn’t work, which is absurd — they’re just not doing it right.
Scott is right on one thing — if you’re sending out 500-page brochures, whoever you are, for god’s sake stop it. That is, if you’re only doing it because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do, or it’s what you’ve always done, then you should stop it. But if you’re doing it because you’ve actually tested it and have data that your audience responds much stronger to 500-page brochures than anything else, then you go right ahead and kill all the trees you want. You sure as heck don’t want to stop because some random bloggers think “WOM” sounds so much cooler.
(I feel like I’ve been picking on Scott the last few posts. Since he was the one who dragged me from the abyss, I promise to try and go easier in the future.)
September 14, 2007
The Growth Thing Keeps Growing
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
Not to belabor any further this discussion, but reading through my last post and Tony Rossell’s comments I’m afraid I may have given the impression that I am somehow anti-marketing, which could not be further from the truth. One problem with blogging is that its format lends itself to oversimplification. So here is a more direct statement — a “clarification” if you will, that I’ve tried to scrub of my usual flippancy:
The purpose of an association is NOT to grow its membership. The purpose of an association is to serve its membership. If it serves its membership well, and markets its efforts correctly, the association will grow, within the boundaries of whatever industry segment or membership it serves.
That’s it. Really. (How’s that for oversimplification?)
But of course I have to keep talking:
Associations that have “room for growth” often view membership growth as a measurement of how well the association is serving its members. Unfortunately, some associations lose sight of what those numbers really mean, and instead become blinded by the formula “Growth = Success.” They forget that it is only one measurement among many designed to help the association understand if it is meeting its goals — probably because in many cases it is the only metric they have bothered to track, since it is the easiest of any possible measurement other than P&L.
These are the organizations that become Membership Obsessed. They stop selling membership and start selling discounts. Meeting artificial number goals becomes more important than serving their existing customer base. They offer cut-rate or even free membership dues with no thought as to what impact it might have down the road, because that is something to worry about later. (For those who think associations have little in common with public corporations, there is a striking similarity between Membership Obsession and Quarterly Numbers Obsession.)
Ironically, volunteer leaders are far more likely to be Membership Obsessed than professional staff. I say ironically because metrics that cover such things as customer satisfaction and, yes, even “engagement”, sound as though they would matter more to volunteer leaders who are, of course, already customers, and should benefit from such a focus. Yet most staff afflicted with Membership Obsession find themselves in their predicament ultimately because of pressure, somehow or some way, from volunteer leadership.
The question is, why do so many association leaders focus so intensely on membership growth? Again, I think it may be because membership is usually the only measurement we give them other than financials. Especially in business organizations, leaders tend to be a little more comfortable talking about tangible things like numbers than intangible things, and since it’s considered somehow unseemly to stand up in front of an association meeting and talk about black ink, the focus turns to membership.
The solution is for the organization to provide other metrics in addition to membership numbers that are meaningful and useful. This of course leads back to Scott Briscoe’s original post on this topic; the only disagreement I have with Scott is that I believe membership growth and retention figures are not “of tertiary interest”, they are of primary interest, but should be viewed in context. To put it in personal terms, the organization I work for has grown very significantly over the last few years. That’s a fact we’re very proud of. It is not of tertiary interest — but it’s not necessarily the most interesting thing we’ve accomplished.
What should the “other metrics” be? That’s where the rubber meets the road. In his very first post on this topic back in January, Scott had some specific ideas. Ultimately I think that many of these metrics, if they are to be truly meaningful, will have to be unique to individual associations and depend on their commitment and capabilities for necessary data collection, tracking, and analysis.
(As to Ben’s thoughts on want vs. need, that’s something I’ve thought a lot about over the last few years, and will be hopefully writing about soon in a post tentatively titled “The View from the Ivory Tower.”)
September 12, 2007
Bad Subject Lines
Posted by Kevin | (0) Comments | Print This Article
You’d think by now people would know at least a little something about how to send an email campaign. But tonight I received a piece of unsolicited email (aka spam) with the breathless subject line: “Are You Planning to Enhance Your Member Communications in 2008?”
My itchy trigger finger could not hit “delete” fast enough (though my Outlook preview pane was open just long enough to reveal that this marketing masterpiece was actually being sent by a company that sells email newsletter services … for how much longer, I don’t know.)
Three quick tips on email subject lines you can take to the bank (and one cranky bonus tip that I’m probably wrong about, but feel strongly about just the same):
1) Your goal is to get the email opened, not to make people roll their eyes.
2) Make your email subject lines read like a sentence that someone might actually send to someone else. Avoid Email Subject Lines That Capitalize the Initial First Letter of Each Word Like a Book Title.
3) Keep subject lines short and, as Strunk & White so famously advised, “omit needless words.” Short subject lines don’t just read better … many people have various screen configurations that will only display a certain number of characters under “Subject” in their inbox.
Bonus subject line tip that is much more a personal opinion than the others: Almost never do regular people send emails to other regular people with subject lines that start with the recipient’s first name (as in, “Kevin, Did You Eat All the Cookies?”). I’m sure there’s probably all sorts of data showing that email subject lines that do this sort of thing get opened, but it won’t last long, trust me. You can start the email body with “Dear Kevin” all you want, but avoid temptation to personalize the subject line. It screams “This Is an Ad.”