Planning to mail or email a survey to your customers or other stakeholders? Want to increase the percentage of recipients who will respond?
The best way to get a longer list of respondents is to start with a shorter survey.
SUCCESS STORY: ATTENTION TOWARD A SECONDARY MARKET
When you operate the largest hotel adjacent one of the nation’s top tourist attractions, you don’t have to do a lot to entice out-of-town travelers to visit. But what do you do during weekends, when the tourist trade isn’t quite so robust?
The Chicago Hilton & Towers Hotel, which sits at the corner of Grant Park, set its sights on the many suburbanites who travel downtown for concerts and other cultural attractions, and Scott Flood created a special tent card to catch their attention.
SUCCESS STORY: EASY EXPLANATIONS
Email marketing is an evolving, powerful tool that is widely misunderstood by many in the marketing community. Those with prejudices against the channel fail to see the opportunities it offers for highly personalized, always trackable marketing efforts.
That means providers of email marketing services must devote much of their effort to educating potential customers, so they understand the value that their services offer. Indianapolis-based email marketing pioneer Delivra takes a very aggressive approach to developing understanding on both a macro level and in how their sophisticated, user-friendly platform puts those opportunities within reach.
SUCCESS STORY: SLINKY SIMPLICITY
Often, the best way to cut through the clutter and communicate a complicated concept is by using a very simple analogy. Over the years, I’ve explained cellular phones by using relay runners and demonstrated what makes molded rubber automotive gaskets effective by suggesting an easy experiment with a rubber band.
That technique works with ordinary consumers, and it’s just as effective with sophisticated professionals. In fact, because the professionals tend to be very busy, simple concepts can be even more effective.
SUCCESS STORY: GAS, NOT HOT AIR
You’re the largest natural gas marketer in the state, and the people you need as clients have never heard of you. What can you do to convince them of your size and expertise?
During the early days of energy deregulation, Proliance Energy — a joint effort of two of Indiana’s largest utilities — quickly established itself by offering purchase expertise to commercial and industrial customers. Their success at keeping a cap on what those customers would have to pay for natural gas ballooned the company into the state’s biggest. But name recognition was still minimal.
SUCCESS STORY: FRIES WITH THAT?
You’re opening your 25th bank branch in a location that isn’t very visible from the road, in an area that’s already saturated with competitors, and far from your other offices.
Still, Cragin Federal Bank wanted its grand opening to be a huge success in terms of traffic and money. The bank set up a cross-promotion agreement with a local McDonald’s franchisee. Using that tie-in, Scott Flood and Ace Art Director Mike Reiser created what became the bank’s most successful promotion, called the “Great Savor Grand Opening.”
SUCCESS STORY: TURNING AMATEURS INTO INVESTORS
How do you make everyday working people feel confident enough about investing that they’re willing to put more of their hard-earned dollars into your mutual funds?
General American Insurance knew that companies have two reasons to encourage 401(k) plan participation: financially secure employees are happy employees, and larger employee contributions mean managers can park a bigger share of their own earnings in the company’s plan.
SUCCESS STORY: PUNCHING PESKY CO-WORKERS
How do you catch the attention of people who spend all their time trying to catch the attention of others?
The pioneer in management information systems for the advertising agency industry, Adman faced aggressive competition from programs that weren’t as comprehensive or targeted, but appeared to be more affordable.
WHAT COLOR IS YOUR PAGE?
Another simple way to gauge your copy’s potential effectiveness is to highlight it in two different colors. Whether you’re developing a letter, a brochure, a web page, or any other channel, take a few moments to highlight all of the sentences that are really about your customer and his or her needs. Let’s do that in pink. Next, highlight all the sentences that are about your company and what it does in yellow.
Now look at the page. What color is your page?
EMAIL QUALITY ALWAYS MEANS MORE THAN QUANTITY
There’s a company from which I’ve been buying products off and on for the better part of three decades. I bought when they were primarily a catalog marketer, and kept buying after they made the move online. I don’t buy a lot from them — maybe something once every three or four years — but enough so they continue to stay in contact.
But I’m about to break off that contact and press the evil unsubscribe button. Why? Because whoever is in charge of their online marketing strategy seems to believe that the best way to maintain my loyalty is to stuff my emailbox with email after email — and the frequency keeps increasing.