Published by the Marketing Association (New Zealand). Download the full Direct Marketing Best Practice Guidelines.
Good advice here for:
For a B2B sales team it’s really important to judge correctly the mind of the recipient when sending follow up sales emails.
The path to a sales contract is tortuous and certainly not linear. There are many places where a poorly written sales email can foul your pitch. Marketing and sales need to collaborate with strong Account Based Marketing and Customer Relationship Management strategies to overcome this. Here’s an example from today.
If you have a clear understanding of the prospect’s stage in the sales funnel, your emails can be written to align with the precise needs of the prospect at that exact time. Otherwise you are guessing – like throwing darts in the dark…. all misses.
I went to a conference recently and the sponsor has been hounding me ever since about his software.
Yes I did give them permission to contact me.
Yes I did take a look at the lead magnet they offered.
BUT I’m not taking their sales call. Because I’m not going to be buying…. and they could have found that out earlier in the day and so saved their sales team a lot of effort.
Just because I attended their talk and said they could contact me…. does not mean I’ll become a customer.
A cheeky sales email
I replied to his third message (repeating a link to the landing page and asking to do a demo) to explain my reasons.
And so I sent him this reply.
Here are the reasons I am not an appropriate prospect
I hired a copywriter to do the website home page – but how will I know if what they wrote WORKS?
Great question – I got this from a customer who did not hire me… but had the savvy to ask the right question. It looks nice but is the website home page copy doing its job? Bringing inbound traffic, showing up in SEO, right keywords and key phrases.
Your copywriters job is complete if the keywords match your business products and services – the type of search phrases you would expect someone to use when looking for a business like yours.
Now hand over to the marketing team – they will work out how to get website visitor numbers UP, how to start conversations with prospective customers and how to get customers to return and buy from you over and over again. [Inbound marketing; outbound marketing; loyalty repeat customer marketing; testimonials.]
Website traffic and Key word count
A refresher for on the rules around sending email (and SMS) to prospects.
With regard to the NZ Privacy Act 2017 and updated 2020.
Top level obligations
Deemed consent is what most B2B marketing would be using for email marketing.
[Quote from article linked above]
However, the area of ‘deemed’ consent is still an area open to interpretation in New Zealand. What was Keith’s advice on this?
“In New Zealand, if you deem your service or product is relevant to the person whose data you’ve collected (or whose contact information is publicly available), then you have permission to send them communications as long as this is covered in your Privacy Policy.” However Keith pointed out that this is actually a requirement of the UEM Act, not the Privacy Act.
BUT you first need a strong privacy policy on your business website.
Here’s a sample NZ privacy policy (and one from Australia).
These jurisdictions have different rules – but many of the underlying principles are similar.
Hope that’s useful for everyone.
I am a woman on a mission. To raise the visibility of midlife women in the media.
Why?
We are a sizeable population, we make around 50% of buying decisions and we are IGNORED by mainstream media.
Midlife is the age from 45 to 70 where women are in their prime. We have life experience, we have worked, had relationships, lived life (a bit or a lot) and we still have about half our life to live. And if you just looked at the adverts on TV and print media you’d think we didn’t exist.
Women of this age group are invisible.
Well the media tells a story about women through the advertising produced and presented to the buying public. It runs something like this:
This ageism is hard wired into our society – young kids understand it – and it gets ugly when you realise the amount of airbrushing and photo editing that goes into published advertising and media. It’s dishonest. And although we may crave youthfulness, any decent marketing person will tell you that the advert has to be targeted to the right buyer. Who’s making the decisions?
Midlife women are.
If you have any media budget, if you select images for sharing on social media, if you are a product manager, a buyer or a journalist – try to find images that represent us.
Let’s make midlife women “Uninvisible”.
Hyundai is leading the way
When I first became aware of this trend, I started watching adverts to see how old the women were – and I found two with midlife women who are front and centre characters.
The perennial Briscoes lady (now 59) and still wearing the wig….
And Hyundai.
In May 2021 they released this advert for their new Kona Series II electric car.
How refreshing.
Hooray for Michelle Langdon Marketing Manager at Hyundai NZ. Go tell her how wonderful her work is.
Advocate, challenge when images for media do not line up with the age of your consumer – make it real, New Zealand.
We can make this change happen.
Tell us your story in the comments – we need more examples of brands leading the way to #uninvisible.
Working with a client who needs to develop customer personas, I did some research and found a load of good articles on how to write a customer persona [links all at the bottom of this page].
So far so good.
but on closer reading it’s clear they are all copying each other.
As I read the articles – many by reputable brands like Buffer, Hubspot, Sprout Social – it was clear that when searching for illustrations they had all culled the same images off Google. Over and over.
The authority of the article was not in doubt. They write clearly and the instruction was good quality for beginner marketers who have never created a customer persona before.
More and more blogs and experts are recommending writing fewer articles and making them longer as well as more niche.
The medium evolves [as I shared this week about Instagram videos] and staying alert to new trends is important for B2B Marketers.
But surely brands could actually show some content images which they had created?
The articles looked “bitty” as a result as the templated personas were all laid out differently and were of varying image quality, never mind what the persona description actually was. I thought they were light in quality.
templated personas copied and reproduced
Do real estate agents get good marketing returns (listings and sales) from Instagram?
Great question – and one worth answering before you decide to go all in on social media marketing.
You first have to find out
I’m dubious about Instagram as a way to sell real estate or get listing instructions.
Find out if other real estate agents are just growing a following or are actually getting listings from their social media.
Below are articles about how to get followers…. but before you invest a lot of time and effort into this work, figure out whether people who will hire you to sell their homes are using Instagram as a way to find a real estate agent. Do this by asking the people who DON’T list with you, do this by asking your friends and neighbours, do this by asking other agents in your business and competitors. Form a rounded view from all their information. Remember some will lie to you or exaggerate. Who you pick in your sample will affect the answers – if you only speak to cynics you’ll get answers slanted towards the negative.
And it could be that your type of clients are very different from other agents’ clients – this could be geography or age or ethnicity driven. So assess your answers carefully.
Here’s how to get followers on Instagram for yourself by copying successful practitioners
Above all, beware of buying followers. Just don’t do it.
But you should consider buying social sharing software e.g. Buffer or Hootsuite because they can save you a lot of time especially with scheduling posts (which isn’t allowed on the native Instagram site).
For these links. Read them. Then subscribe to their newsletter, follow them on social (Neil Patel has a great youtube channel too).
And you should research AdFenix – they specialise in guiding your marketing practice for real estate professionals.
Expensive but probably worthwhile. They are a whole-marketing service not just social media.
Now it’s down to persistence and regular hard work. Give yourself 3 months before you decide to quit.
Yes I hate that headline too… but I can’t work out the best way of listing three helpful things which I’m working on without it becoming a silly list headline. Live with it.
If you aren’t working with competent amounts of data insights and analytics yet, this is your year to get going and to go deep-dive.
For the beginners – the new Google Analytics GA 4 is a level above earlier versions. Get it installed (new header code on your website) and find a competent expert to guide you though its features. Well worth while.
After that, update dashboards, check the CRM integrations and get a whole lot smarter in your tracking.
Nobody has got this wholly right, easy or fully connected (if you have you are probably a micro-organisation or a startup). Enter the Customer Data Platform. This is the software you need to bridge above (think umbrella) over all your data silos so that you can move towards customer nirvana.
I’m not being totally rose-tinted-glasses on this – there are serious players who can help build the plumbing which will help you understand and integrate customer data. Go learn about CDP.
If you haven’t heard about “nudges” you need to get on board fast. The new-ish science of behavioural economics is all about how we can get people to do things. A nudge is a way of changing behaviour – like leaving your gym kit by the bed at night as a way to encourage you to do a workout in the morning. Marketers love this.
And the smart folks at Ogilvy UK hosted a whole day event – Nudgestock – to talk about and showcase a lot of real case studies of effective marketing action based on behavioural economics. They called it
a full day of top quality BS (*Behavioural Science) from around the world
Watch it on YouTube. I particularly liked Abigail Dalton’s talk about Nudging to end world poverty.
That’s enough for now. Each of these is worthy of a deep dive research and learning day. Plan it for yourself.
I write and coach B2B marketing – each of these could be used by your business – get in touch.
As a business, you want to make sure you are in your customer’s thoughts when they need to contact you. You want it to be easy for them to remember you, and know about how to get in touch quickly. Check out these memorable customer marketing tips that can help you do just that.
Seek out an online address that is easy for everyone to remember. Usually addresses that end in a dot com are a better choice because it is what springs to mind instantly. But your local country may have a fine alternative like .kiwi for New Zealand or .eu for Europe. If you can have the name of your business in the address, that will make it easier to recall, too. Avoid using a lot of dashes or other alternatives to anything other than your company’s name, since this not only makes it harder to remember but could even lead the customer to the wrong site altogether. [Like the 2 Degrees Mobile Phone business and the 2 Degrees vineyard!]
Besides a website where people can easily reach you, you’ll want a phone number that doesn’t require much forethought when people need to call you. Your prospects will be able to remember your phone number without needing to go online and look you up. You can find toll-free services that allow you to use your name in number format. These services make it possible to get the help you need when setting up your business number.
Alternatively allow calling direct from your website by ensuring your Google Business listing is up to date and that the phone number in your website header has the correct code so people can “click to call”.
Another good way to keep your company present in the minds of your customers is with a catchy jingle. This might be something folks hear on the radio, but it could be used in any type of social media promotion, such as a video you make and promote on social media. If you can incorporate a way to call you or visit your website, people will become curious, and more likely to check out what your business is and what you have to offer. Using jingles and phrases is a good way to increase sales and help potential customers remember you.
After your business name, you can also add a “strap line” or a description to explain what you do. This could be about your product “The athletic greens drink” or it could be geographic “Your Hamilton Plumber”. Familiarity and frequent repetition are key to this tactic working.
No matter what type of company you have, it’s helpful to use different methods to stay in the mind of your potential customers and get them to come to you. Use a website address that is easy to recall, and pick a phone number that doesn’t require looking up for someone to call. A catchy jingle is the icing on the cake that can make it easier for people to remember you when they need someone who offers your services.