The Sheep of Things to Come

Photo: Ann Ramsey

I had the honor to sit down and interview England's renowned shepherd and author James Rebanks in his Lake District home in April. Our main topic: the likely impact of Brexit on UK farmers.

The resulting article has just appeared in Sheep Canada.

The Big 5 B2B Email Boo-Boos

Email, despite its shortfalls, is the B2B marketer's drug of choice.

And its shortfalls loom large: inbox rates max out at only 70%; open rates, at only 20%; click-through rates, at only 2.5%.

B2B marketers worsen things by making the same five boo-boos repeatedly.

You can't improve deliverability—much—but you can improve open and click-though rates, by avoiding these five common and colossal blunders:

Recycled Subject Lines. Open rates rely on Subject Lines. Formulas bore readers. Why begin every Subject Line "5 Top Tips for..." or "Last Chance to..."?

TMI. Click-through rates reflect readability, at least in part. Why overwrite? Time is short. Your emails should be, too.

Generic Emails. Your customers don't all share the same interests or pains. Why send them all the same thing? Segmenting customers isn't rocket science: it just takes time. Sure, it's tempting to create and send one email, and be done with it; but that's self-serving.

Impersonal Emails. If your email isn't personalized, it isn't 1:1. If it isn't 1:1, it's sorta spammy.

Unreponsive Emails. Half your emails are read on phones. If your templates aren't "responsive" and your copy bite-sized, you're toast. (This is my Number 1 B2B email bugaboo. My reaction's always the same: What's wrong with these people?)

First Cut

US advertisers last year spent 21 cents of every ad dollar targeting radio and print audiences; 38 targeting cable TV viewers; and 41 targeting mobile phone users, according to Kleiner Perkins.

No surprise here.

Americans over 65 still love their cable TV. In fact, they devote 58% of their waking hours to it, says the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Americans under 65 don't—and they're cutting the cable for the ad-free TV streamed by Netflix and its competitors.

Where ads once enriched many companies, only two—Google and Facebook—are reaping cable cutting's windfall.

And it's Netflix's fault, media reporter Derek Thompson says.

Netflix launched subscription-based TV, robbing large screens of viewers—and advertisers of prospects. As a result, advertisers are targeting viewers under 65 on their phones, where Facebook and Google have a duopoly.

"If the dynamic tech duo could go back in time and design the perfect ally to push advertising from TV to mobile phones," Thompson says, "it would look exactly like Netflix."

The New New Rules of Marketing and PR

Either write something worth reading or
do something worth writing about.

— Benjamin Franklin

David Meerman Scott galvanized marketers a decade ago with The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

The book still makes everyone's list of "all-time favorites."

Scott's advice was premised on a sudden realization: gatekeepers had grown irrelevant.

If marketers only thought and acted like journalists, and exploited the popularity of websites and social media channels, their messages could "go direct" to customers.

Revolutionary thinking in the day.

But times change, the tragedy of the commons is inescapable, and rules wear out.

Content Shock is now Public Enemy Number 1.

The new new rules of marketing and PR are:

1. Don't create content. Create content customers want.
   
   
2. Don't create buzz. Create products that create buzz.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

M&A strategist Denzil Rankine told attendees of UFI's European Conference in April the compound annual growth rate of the "core product of exhibitions"—namely, floor space—is limping along at a mere 2%.

Inflation will eat that—and more—for breakfast.

When you consider how complacent most concrete-peddling association show organizers are, the best you can say is they're "whistling past the graveyard."

The idiom has two meanings, one positive, one negative.

"Whistling past the graveyard" can mean you're displaying nonchalance in the face of danger.

Or it can mean you're clueless.

Whichever's the case, associations need to find new revenue streams to shore up concrete sales.

They can't just hope shows will return to vitality by themselves, the economy will boom, or that "Millennials will attend when they get jobs."