Selling to new customers is just so costly

We all know the old adadge that selling to new customers costs a lot more than selling to existing ones, so perhaps we should just stop chasing new ones - in these austere times that might make sense.

However, as I've mentioned here before (Customer Acquisition vs Customer Retention), it does seem that going after these expensive new customers is much more attractive than some boring direct marketing to exisiting ones. However, this blog is not about urging you to spend more time on your existing customer marketing (I'll leave that for another day - as Chad Bauman says, "Want to get into trouble? Concentrate on new audiences" - so we'll come back to that), but about how you should approach your new customer acquisition.

Just marketing to exisiting customers is a non starter - old customers go away or die and if you didn't replenish the existing customer pot, you will soon run out of people to sell to. Remember, your existing customers were new customers once.

Part of the problem is that we think of marketing as a cost, something we have to spend money on and as such something to cut when times get tough. Marketing, done properly, is an investment. You are using some of today's money to generate an income stream in the future. And that is the key and like all investments it needs analysis and decisions.

It is not enough to compare the cost of a sale to an existing customer to one to a new one. On a campaign basis that is always going to lose. What we need to look at is the lifetime value of a customer and use that information to identify the best source of future exsiting customers.and what ongoing activity is going to maximise the return. So get out those spreadsheets and start looking at your best existing customers and where to get more like them.

Lifetime Value is the key to good new customer marketing.
... oh, so I was talking about marketing to existing customers after all

My newsletter's not SPAM!: 5 things to remember

One question we keep getting asked is "how do I stop our newsletter being thrown into the junk mail box?". If you are involved with email marketing, and I include newsletters in that, then this is obviously an important consideration. Avoiding the waste basket has been the goal of direct marketeers since direct mail started and the advice for email marketing to a large extent is very similar.

The easiest way to avoid the junk mail box is to get the recipient to mark your emails as safe/not junk. A lot of this centres around showing the recipient you know them, what they are interested in and in return you are interested in what they have to say.

1. Be personal: first of all address the recipient as an individual. Try to make sure that you know whether they like to be addressed by their first name or more formally. Do they know someone in your organisation? If so, can you send the email from them? Are they members of your friends scheme? Then send it from the membership manager - it just reinforces the relationship.

2. Divide and Conquer: What do you know about your recipients? Do have any purchase history? Have they told you what they like? Do you know what links they have taken previously? You probably have a vast amount of information available so use it to segment your lists and send them information they would be interested in. Do you have a group of large value contributors? Then give them special treatment. Are there people who are just not interested? Then don't email them and try to find out why they aren't interested - quality not quantity counts.

3. Communicate: don't just instruct - "our next performance is on ....", "new products in the shop..." - encourage your recipients to communicate. Ask for their feedback, direct them to places where some feedback has been published already, direct them to your facebook page and twitter account. Let them converse with you in the medium they are most comfortable with.

4. Test, Monitor and Analyse: Email marketing should not be fire and forget. Keep looking at you stats. What do people click on? Which articles have no interest? What is the best time of day to send your newsletter? Which layout works best?

5. Get the technical stuff right: Deliverability and legalities. using a trusted mail server and using a verified sending address is a great help in getting your email to the intended recipient. Make sure that you include a simple way for a recipient to unsubscribe in every email; treat you email as any other communication from your organisation and include your physical address; Don't mislead in your subject line.

If you want to get started then take a look at Masque Mail, our low cost emailing solution or get in touch.

The press is dead, long live the press!

"It's not a good time to be talking about press and public relations" says Heather Maitland in the opening salvo of the latest JAM(1), but then goes on to do just that. And quite rightly too.

The problem it seems is over saturation (read competition) and it has always been thus: proprietors were complaining of an over saturated market in the early eighteenth century when there were 5 newspapers, decades later when there were still only 15, and on through the 60's (when TV was the fall guy).

However, the problem has changed. It so much the quantity of titles that is their problem but the drop in readers of traditional newspapers. In the USA the number of readers fell by 20 million(2) in 20 years.

Do we read the news less? Of course not. We consume more and more of it. It is a while since teh BBC didn't have a news bulletin becuase there was nothing to report! It's just we access it in different ways. The top 20 US newspaper had 13m readers in print but more than 60m online. Sounds good, but no one has yet come up with a business model to make the most of this. One issue here is that we have come to expect that stuff on the web is free (it's not, but it feels as if it is, but that's another blog).

Also, how news is distributed has changed - now everyone is a reporter. But the traditional papers have the edge here in that they are probably more trusted.

A fascinating subject. Get your copy of JAM to read Heather's article and see how leading thinkers and practiioners view the future of the press.

(1)JAM - The Journal of Arts Marketing, published by The Arts Marketing Association, "The end of the newspaper" (issue 40, October 2010)

(2) capcodetoday October 2006

Being much more personal

I just read a short, but great blog from  Adam Thurman on the Mission Paradox and following on from my blog the other day about email marketing seemed very timely.

The one bit that says it all:

"If I say the word "marketing" and all you think about is ads or Facebook you are thinking too small. Marketing is about actively building good, defined, relationships with your audience."

Have you got 5 minutes to spare? Then do some basic SEO.

Just been having a look around some of our friends sites and I am still surprised at how many don't get the basics right when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO).

I think the trouble is most people think that SEO is hard and takes a lot of work. Well, it can be time consuming if you want to go the whole hog, but basic SEO is fairly simple. Don't think of it as just getting up the rankings on Google, think of it as a service to those who want to see what you have to say. What you are trying to do is make it easy for them to find you and decide to pay you a visit - that second element is the oft forgotten part of the process.
So what can you do that doesn't take huge amounts of time? Here's 4 things you can do:

1. Treat every page as a landing page: When you think about it what is the liklihood of a saerch result returning your homepage? If someone searches for your organisation by name, then probably your home page is what they are looking for. But if the are searching for some information (say a play or a ballet or some artefact or other), then the chances are that information is not on your home page - it is going to be deeper into your site. So you need to think of the best way to let people find that page - so treat it as if it is its own home page.

2. Give every page a unique title: You'd be surprised how many websites have the same title for each page - this is not good, although it is easy. Not only important in SEO terms but it is the page title shown in a Google search result. By the way, Google uses the first 69 characters so make them count: it is your way to grab the readers' attention. more on page titles...

3. Give every page a description:  Another metatag that is often missed is the description. This gives you a chance to say what the page is about in a succint way. Google uses the first 156 characters in their search results, so it is this which will bring people to your site - no point of appearing high up the lists if they don't click through. more on descriptions...

4. Give your pages real names: there are differing views on the importance of this in the SEO world, but I think it is good practice and a great help to your visitors. Even outside of search it is much easier to refer someone to a pagename that describes the content than a random stream of numbers and letter. more on page names...

For more SEO ideas take a look at Masque Arts Search Engine Optimisation.

Is Google Priority Mailbox the end for email marketing?

First of all let me say that as a consumer of vast amounts of email this is a great development from the recipients side of the equation - and it will become the norm. Hotmail is following a similar path and I wouldn't be surprised to see it turn up in desktop apps such as Outlook pre-configured and ready to go.

Almost certainly mobile users will start using settings to just download their priority mail - in fact this will probably be the default.

So here's the challenge - what will happen to your email newsletter/marketing campaign? Will it be make it to the priority box or be pushed down the list? Your recipients might be very happy reading your newsletters -and may even enjoy some of it - but is that enough to get them to override any default filters and put it into their priority box?

I think this is a good development for genuine email marketeers - if you are segmenting your lists and sending emails with information that truly interests the recipient, then this can be nothing but beneficial as your emails won't just be lost among the multitude. Email will become less intrusive and be more likely to lead to improved conversions.

So now you have to start putting a bit more effort into your newsletters, no more spray and pray - it is time to apply all those lessons learned with traditional direct marketing to be applied in the email arena.

1. Be more personal. Personalise your emails with the recipient's name; make sure that what you send is relevent to them; show them that you know them.

2. Make them more interactive. Do you use a no reply address to send them out? If so I think you need to think again.  Just like all other social media, the email has to become more interactive (just look at Google Priority rules), so you need to get recipients to reply to them. A lot of email recipients may not be au fait with Facebook and Twitter, so use this as an opportunity give them a method they understand and like using to start a real dialogue.

3. Test and Analyse. Use each emailing as a test bed to improve what you do and get more conversions. Don't just look at opens and click throughs but take it that one step further. I'm afraid it's time to dig out those old statistics text books.
Maybe the Priority In Box is the kick up the butt that email marketing has been waiting for.

Another version of Cinderella from Birmingham Royal Ballet?

Further to my post the other day about David Bintley's incredible new version of Cinderella, we find that BR are actually producing a second version!  The same score, on the same scale and with the same ambitious production values... but with a very different choreographic team.

Following on from the hugely successful Ballet Hoo! project, BRB are working with local youth groups in the exciting project "Ballet, Birmingham and Me" (or BB&Me for short) to create this second version of Cinderella.

Follow the trial and tribulations of this amazing projects at BB&Me.