Email Marketing vs. Direct Mail

It is usually suggested that businesses dedicate 15% of their annual turnover towards marketing their products or services, which can be a large portion of your business budget. This makes it vitally important to research and select the most effective methods to give you the best possible return on your investment. Sending out promotional information to prospective clients can dominate a large portion of your budget, especially if you decide to post it out. However, email marketing is not only more cost effective, but also more effective at reaching the right people and allowing you to see who’s responsive to you and your company.

Unlike direct mail, email marketing can be turned around very quickly. From design, to copy writing and coding, all can be done in just a couple of days, possibly less, whereas direct mail needs to be printed, loaded into envolopes, franked and posted. Emails can also be tracked, allowing you to see who opens them, whether they click on any links, and who unsubscribes. If you choose direct mail, obviously once you’ve sent the information out you have no possible method of tracking what people do with it. The industry standard for email open rates of high volume mailings is around 10%. The key to ensuring good open rates is in the strength of the data you use and the value of your content.

Capturing email addresses for your customers is a good way to find out more about the people using your products or services, and can be as easy as adding a sign up form to your website or social media pages. Once you have this information, you can use it to keep in contact with customers, informing them of promotions, industry news, announcements and special events. As long as your content is engaging and interesting people should be happy enough to stay on your data lists, as long as you aren’t bombarding them with information on too regular a basis. Corporate emails should be sent out no more than once a month, and the best time to send them is the beginning of the week when people are more likely to read them. Send your email out on a Friday and it’s almost guaranteed to end up straight in the trash folder.

Email marketing has a number of benefits over direct mail, primarily that’s it’s easier to put together, can be tracked and is much more cost effective than its snail mail counterpart. And in an age of recession, that is sure to help any business succeed. 

Love It or Hate It

Every day there’s stories in the media of companies who are getting their marketing wrong, but very little credit is given to those who are getting their marketing spot on. Strange as it may seem, one of the companies who are consistently getting their advertising and marketing right is Marmite. Probably not one of the easiest products to market, but nevertheless they are constantly producing new and original ideas to market themselves.

The company traditionally only had one product to work with, one kind of spread. To remedy this, and create some buzz, the company has introduced a Marmite chocolate bar, Marmite cheese, Marmite flavored crisps and biscuits, and even an extra-strong version called Marmite XO. Some of these products have faired better than others with consumers, but all have created buzz and garnered the company a lot of media coverage.

Marmite also successfully jumped on the back of the general election, creating their own campaigns and voting system based on their two parties, The Love Party vs. The Hate Party, tying in with their strap line of “you either love it or hate it.” They launched a dedicated website, press and advertising campaign, and social media profiles for the two party leaders. They then encouraged people to vote and announced the winner online.

Marmite succeeds where others fail because they clearly never stop thinking about their next move. Every campaign they run has an original idea at its core, but is backed up with advertising, social media, and PR. And everything ties in with their now traditional line “you either love it or hate it.” For the lovers there’s an ever increasing range of Marmite flavored products, and for the haters there’s a hate group on Facebook (started by Marmite themselves.) Marmite is even engaging with people who confess to hate their products, and how many other companies are doing that?   

The Best of Adland

I stumbled across this advert for WD-40 on twitter today, and just had to post it. It ran in Spain, although you don't need a firm grasp of the spanish language to get the meaning.
I think it's just such a fantastic piece of advertising. WD-40 is not the most thrilling product in the world, but this advert has a great visual story which has brought a smile to the face of everyone I've shown it to.

The Cult of Celebrity

There’s no denying that celebrities have a huge influence on our culture, more so now than ever before. Magazines like OK and Hello, websites like Perez Hilton, and television channels like E! keep us constantly informed of what they’re wearing, who they’re with, what they’re driving, eating, drinking, and there is no doubt that for certain brands this can lead to some fantastic promotion opportunities. Fashion brands in particular are very conscious of this influence, and are forever giving clothes, bags and jewelry to celebrities for free in return for them being photographed wearing them, and there’s very few celebrities these days who aren’t the “face” of some product or brand. But has this reliance on celebrity spokespeople gone too far? Whereas it used to be the biggest movie stars who advertised for certain brands, this trend has now trickled down to the lower ranks of celebrity, something which has been very evident throughout 2010, and has lead to some of advertisings biggest blunders.

Fresh pasta brand Giovanni Rana slipped up big time in its advertising for 2010, which lead to it topping multiple reviews of the years worst adverts. They chose Tim Lovejoy for their television advertising, presumably because he hosts a Sunday morning programme that has a cooking segment. However, this is a formula that certainly didn’t work, as Lovejoy, cast as the stereotypical football-loving lad, came across as desperately unfunny, and an appalling actor, which even his attractive Italian neighbour couldn’t distract from.

Number two on most marketing people’s countdown was those widely ridiculed Thomas Cook adverts with Jamie and Louise Redknapp. Although both are quite likeable people, the advert was incredibly cheesy, not to mention a stretch to believe that these two millionaires would ever actually go on a Thomas Cook holiday.

Special mention should also go out to Barbara Windsor advertising online bingo, and John Cleese for the AA. So has the influence of celebrity lost some of its power? I don’t think so, but the whole point is to have a celebrity people would actually want to emulate, advertising a product you can believe that they actually use. We know the Redknapp’s don’t go on mid-priced package holidays, just as we know Barbara Windsor doesn’t play bingo on her laptop at home. But when played right celebrity endorsement can be a powerful marketing tool. Louise Vuitton, the luxury goods label best known for their high end handbags, played it right when they took on director Sophia Coppola to design and model a range for them. The campaign worked because Coppola is widely regarded as a fashion icon, so it was relevant for her to advertise a luxury fashion house. The campaign paid off for Vuitton, and Coppola’s bags sold out upon their initial release.

So can a celebrity spokesperson be good for your brand? Only if it’s believable and relevant to your product.

A New Page

Hello, and happy 2011 to everyone!
It feels good to be back, I know it's been a while. I originally started this blog as a way to document my job search when I left university. I felt very frustrated by, what I viewed at the time as an endless search for that first marketing or PR job. There didn't seem to be any help available to graduates once they left university.
Looking back, I realise that my job search actually wasn't that long, and I was in a full time marketing position three months after graduation. I was lucky in a way because some of my classmates still don't have jobs, and some have had to move away to get one. But it wasn't just luck on my side, I worked really hard to enhance my skills and find that first position, and now I'm there it's proven very worthwhile.
I had stopped blogging once I found my job, but I've been thinking increasingly about it the last few weeks, so I decided today to start it up again. Hopefully I'll be able to pass on some of my experiences to other graduates, as well as writing some more opinion pieces.
I appreciate every single person that takes the time to read this blog, so please feel free to comment either on here, or you can find me on twitter (see the column on the left side of the page).
So here's to 2011!