Stephen Ng from Cubic Design (www.cubic-design.co.uk) Motherwell, Scotland, gives practical advice on how to create effective email marketing campaigns. You can view a video version on YouTube (www.youtube.com/6degreesnetworking).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: AIDA, design, email marketing, Marketing, podcast, spam filters

Does your marketing sell? by Ian Moore

Introduction
This book is essential reading for anyone who works in the marketing industry or anyone in business who wishes to maximise their company’s marketing efforts. This book is also recommend for any entrepreneur who doesn’t have a marketing background and is looking to work with a marketing or advertising agency for the first time.

This book provides a good grounding in what to be aware of in creating effective marketing materials. Whether it’s a brochure, leaflet, mailer, website or Yellow Pages advert. Even if you are not actually producing the materials yourself, it will give guidance to ensure that you don’t buy poorly conceived materials from a so called ‘expert’.

Extracts of this book are available on Google Books, so there is no excuse for not reading at least some of it to see if you like it. The author Ian Moore is a excellent authority of the subject of marketing. Having originally started as salesman in seventies, then working as copywriter for top London marketing agencies, then starting his own successful agency Blue-Chip Marketing in the nineties. Over the decades Mr Moore has worked for household names such as: Kimberly-Clark, Cadbury, Lloyds TSB, Reebok, Scottish and Newcastle, Walkers Crisps and Warburtons.

The author has a strong affinity with advertising legend David Ogilvy (who also worked as a salesman before entering the advertising industry). Both men are copywriters and believe in benefit driven headlines and copy. Ultimately, they believe that salesmanship will create a higher response and sales compared to marketing that is simply showmanship, or showing off.

The book is structured around Mr Moore’s personal take on the famous selling technique AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). This has been developed from his decades of experience. NEWAIDA is Mr Moore’s trademark for courses and workshops that takes the AIDA concept a stage further and more relevant for business today.

While it would be unfair and unethical of me to simply reveal all the concepts in the book on this blog, I will give an overview to whet you appetite. Let’s start with what this book can help you achieve (taken from the back cover).

Get four times as many customers to ready your adverts
Double the response rates to your mailers
Triple the uptake of your promotional offers
Employ the seven most powerful ways to gain attention
Write with the 100 most persuasive selling words

The missing ingredient
So why does one piece of marketing succeed where another fails? What is it that causes almost 20 times as many people to respond to one message than to another? Just how do you make your marketing sell?
It seems there’s a paradox. What well-intentioned marketers think they should do to make their marketing sell often doesn’t work. And that’s because they get salesmanship confused with showmanship.

Salesmanship is the missing ingredient in making your marketing sell. Salesmanship is the quiet skills of empathy and perception. These skills are often abandoned in modern marketing communications.

Very often advertising for big brands is arty or creative and doesn’t engage the majority of the audience. You might find an TV advert funny, but won’t remember the product. Very often the reader will be confused by the advert and not bother to read it, or solve the ‘riddle’. Adverts that capture the readers attention and appeal to them on the desired level, will resonate and be more successful.

I’ve always made it a golden rule never to propose anything – ranging from a rough idea for single advert to a complex multifaceted campaign – unless we could justify why we believed it would sell. If we couldn’t explain how it would engage the customer to achieve the desired outcome, it didn’t get presented. When you apply this discipline to your proposals, you find – magically – that the words of explanation come out in the simple language of salesmanship.

Navigation
Navigation is the first step in NEWAIDA. This chapter sets out principles in helping your customer to know what to think about and to create the desired reaction. If a customer doesn’t know what to do or think about within a few seconds they won’t engage with the marketing material and won’t go any further.

Ease
If the customer perceives your marketing to have too many hurdles they will fail to respond. This is very relevant where success of the campaign is dependant on the number of responses received. Making your marketing easy to use and engage will increase the number of responses. Supermarkets are filled with promotions, discount vouchers or competitions. Their success will depend on how easy it is for the customer to firstly participate, and secondly, if they perceive it as a good deal. If the promotion fails to do this, the response will be poor.

Wording
Since Mr Moore is a copywriter, it’s understandable why he has added this third topic to the AIDA concept. This is perhaps the most important subject of all. The key thing here is to write in your customer’s language.

Good salespeople are taught to speak the language of their customers. This is known as matching is used to build pace and rapport, by mirroring and complementing aspects of the other person. When you match, you show that you are willing to enter the other person’s model of the world – intuitively, they feel more at easy with you.

Seven deadly sins of marketing communications:
1. Hyperbole (exaggerated and bold claims that over promise and usually under deliver).
2. Cliches (example “The sky’s the limit!” any business can make these claims and they are usually meaningless).
3. Platitudes (meaningless headlines posing a something significant. Also, a competitor could also claim eg, ‘We’re the fastest)
4. Word play
5. Riddles
6. Writer’s fog (a formula to ensure the copy is not too dense with jargon, impersonal and verbose).
7. Designeritis (the design of the marketing taking priority of message and content. Gratuitous use of graphics).

Trade press advertising is viewed as rather unglamorous, and I assume that it was assigned to the agency’s most junior and inexperienced copywriters. Maybe these guys had never done a sales call in a corner shop, or been to a presentation at the likes of Asda head office. Whatever their excuse, it showed in their soapbox style presumptuously aimed at some great unseen yet miraculously enthralled crowd.

More practical copywriting advice
Write to a person and not to a crowd. Try to find the right tone. Make it businesslike yet friendly in tone. Keep it to the point. Make it fit consumption at any level, managing director to office junior.

When writing copy use two ‘you’s for every ‘we’

The reading age of the average supermarket shopper is 11.

Use the language of the people, avoid words with Latin or Old French origins. Avoid jargon also.

The brain is designed to hear language. We train our brains to convert it back into sounds when we read. Writing should be treated not as the written word, but as the spoken word. And surely this means a simple, conversational style.

Don’t use full points on headlines, magazines and newspapers don’t.

Imagery
The author does offer some advice on any images used in marketing by explaining that the visuals should do something useful: to enhance and dramatize recognition for your customer – of their need, or the category, or your product. Use it to dramatize the proposition.

Avoid what the author calls the ‘irrelevant simile’ – they prove nothing. For example, a blue-chip company wants to communicate ‘flexibility’ and uses an image a gymnast. Avoid this, people think it’s the analogous item that is being advertised.

From here on in the author gives insights and advice on approaching the classic AIDA selling concept. Below I have quoted key points from these chapters.

Attention
Adverts with benefits in their headlines are read by four times as many people as ads with no benefits in their headlines. For profitable attention, you need a benefit.

Make your advert newsworthy eg. ‘new improved’, ‘new advanced formula’. Use sensory language to engage the mind, such as the ‘The Inch War’ for Ryvita.

Interest
Key tips:
1. Write for the interested customer.
2. Seek out first-time buyers.
3. Key question: “Am I treating my customer as if they’re already interested?”

Content always beats form. A company newsletter can sometimes appear boastful and selfish. An internal staff one packed with stories and pics about them will be a success – because it’s about its customers (the staff).

Desire
You can’t make your customers need your product, but you find out whether they want it. The communication task, then, is to help them realize that they do.

Use layered delivery. In sales letter you should be able to just read the sub heads to understand the content of the letter.

There’s no such thing as long or short copy only enough copy. Give the customer a stream of relevant, interesting facts and benefits and they’ll stay with you.

The book ‘Positioning’ by Ries and Trout supports the theory that if you can’t get into your customer’s mind first, your best bet is to do it by reference to something they already understand and believe.

Action
1. Help your customer to say ‘yes’
2. Offer ‘carrots’ and incentives to encourage customers to respond to your marketing
3. Set a two dates for an offer deadline, date one big prize, date two smaller prize
4. Use the ‘mop-up’ technique to prompt lasped subscribers or customers who have failed to respond

Finally
I should add that this book is a pleasure to read, as it’s well-written and packed with real life examples and anecdotes to back up the author’s points. The review above is just some of the highlights, there is obviously more content in the book. I would recommend reading it once through, then dipping into chapters every now an then to refresh your memory and inspire you to create or ‘buy’ more effective marketing materials for your company. Read reviews on Amazon.

Tags: AIDA, David Ogilvy, effective, Ian Moore, Marketing, NEWAIDA, salesmanship, selling