Marketing Misfires are Maddening

Old-line retailers are deluging holiday shoppers with irrelevant emails this season, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Among other misfires, retailers have been promoting luxury underwear to broke college kids and women's clothing to men.

"Retailers have their work cut out for them when it comes to customizing and personalizing their email offers," the paper says.

So do many event marketers.

They're swamping attendees' in-boxes with vague offers of "must-attend" conferences.

Attendees are growing angrier and more resistant by the day.

The counter-move is targeting, and you shouldn't be surprised if 2018 turns out to be the year event marketers mastered it. 

The stakes are too high to do anything less.

Targeting demands not only that you segment your lists, but that you think hard about the relevance of your value proposition, and its expression. Can you:

• Distill your value proposition? Can you convey is a few short, simple sentences why anyone attends your event? Can you make the sentences memorable?
  
  
• Capture the message in a Subject line? Can you convey that value in 10 characters?
  
  
• Personalize the email? Can you avoid sending generic emails? Simply including the reader's name in the Subject line boosts open rates 26%.
  
  
• Assure readability? Can you design emails that encourage speed-reading and comprehension (especially on a mobile phone)?
  
  
• Leverage your content? Can you put content and speakers center stage? Will attendees meet celebrities, thought leaders, and influencers at your event?
  
  
• Provide social proof? Can you persuade readers they'll miss opportunities others enjoy by attending your event? Dropping names and including testimonials do this.

Not Our People

Hidebound execs often don't grasp why you'd recommend multichannel marketing.

They project their own media habits onto customers.

"Our people don't watch videos. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't watch videos.")

"Our people don't attend webinars. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't don't attend webinars.") 

"Our people don't read newsletters. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't read newsletters.")

Foreclosing the use of entire channels based on your own media habits is foolery. A diversified marketing spend is a smart one.

And yet execs do it all the time. At their own peril.

A new study by IEEE reveals, for example, that many engineers like videos, webinars, and  newsletters. They also like many other channels:

• 67% routinely watch videos on YouTube
• 64% routinely read online catalogs (and 40% read printed ones)
• 36% routinely attend webinars
• 33% routinely read free newsletters
• 30% routinely visit online communities
• 22% routinely attend trade shows and conferences

No matter who they are—doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—you need a firm grasp of your customers' media habits, to counter the recalcitrant exec who says, "Not our people."

If you don't have that data, get it now. A simple online survey will do.

Games People Play

Customers are sick of being sold to, and grow more resistant to sales and marketing tactics every day.

Enter gamification.

"It sounds Machiavellian, but technology is transforming the incentive industry," says Rob Danna, SVP of sales and marketing, ITA Group, in Forbes.

Game technology doesn't merely entertain, but motivates. "It’s a holistic way of approaching motivation in business to advance value," Danna says.

To take advantage of game technology, marketers need to think like game designers, who easily "get inside the heads" of customers knowing customers innately prefer the familiar.

Game designers understand that customers "focus on what they want to see, rather than all there is to see"―and use the understanding to design games that motivate behaviors.

But what's the difference between a game that gets played, and one that's ignored? Game designers point to five factors:

The game must feel good. Players go along for the ride provided the game matches their self-image ("I'm skillful and competent.") Designers exploit that bias by tweaking a game's difficulty through subroutines. They allow players, for example, to recover from errors, even when they're fatal; or dumb down the questions after a string of wrong answers.

The game must challenge. While it can't bruise fragile egos, the game's no fun if it's too easy. To become addictive, the game must be one that seems to challenge.

The rules must be simple. Players must be able to get on board within moments.

The game must update. Players won't return unless the game changes randomly between rounds. It must also stay fresh (new content, levels, characters, etc.), or players won't engage more than a few times.

The idea must be original. No one want to play a game that's merely a clone.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Increasingly I believe that coming to terms with death
is the beginning of wisdom.

— Mary Catherine Bateson

The incivility rampant today in our politics, public spaces, schools and workplaces stems from the remoteness of death. 

We have postponed, sanitized and hidden death sufficiently to ignore it completely; as a result, we behave toward one another like petulant gods on Olympus.

People in earlier centuries behaved with a grace and humility unknown to us, because they were rooted by constant loss.

A case in point. 

The land where my home sits in Washington, DC, was owned in the early 19th century by a then-famous winemaker named John Adlum. 

Despite his mastery of farming and business, Adlum couldn't prevent disease from thinning his household every few years.

Just around the corner from me is his daughter's Georgian country manor house, where five of Adlum's grandchildren died from cholera.

Widespread cholera epidemics in fact broke out five times in 19th century America: in 1817, 1826, 1832, 1849 and 1866.

The symptoms would onset suddenly: nausea and vomiting, followed by a high fever and explosive diarrhea. Within only hours, the victim's face, hands and feet would turn cold and blue, and she'd die suddenly from dehydration. Medical records of the time frequently reported victims' dead bodies "twitching" for hours, so families usually forbade burial sooner than a day. In cities like Washington, daily wagons were dispatched during epidemics to collect the corpses. The drivers would pass by homes shouting, “Bring out your dead," and haul them to mass grave sites.

The 1832 cholera epidemic alone killed 459 Washingtonians.

And cholera wasn't the only deadly household guest at the time; there was also typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, yellow fever, smallpox, malaria, influenza, diphtheria, dysentery and measles to remind you the Grim Reaper never slept.

In contrast, death in our day is a secret hospital procedure concluded by the quiet cessation of care.

And we behave without dignity and timor mortis. We act with civility only when there's a a videotaped incident like 9/11—and then only for a handful of days.

Tough All Over

A campus tour of the University of Arizona in Tucson this week convinced me middle-class Americans' quality of life and ambitions are unprecedented in history. I felt like I'd sailed to New Atlantis.

So as I read No Recovery, Gallup's bleak analysis of America's future, I wonder whether economic statistics distort a rosy reality.

But I doubt they do.

According to the report, America is heading into a long night of deprivation, at least for the majority.

Gallup points the finger at two causes:

• Lack of innovation (breakthrough inventions—like the movie projector, airplane and computer—that spawn entire new industries and high-wage jobs); and

• Protectionist policies (barriers—imposed by special interest groups—that raise the cost and lower the quality of products produced by old industries like construction, medicine and education).

Protectionism is especially harmful, Gallup says, because prosperity dips when costs rise faster than quality. And protectionism is in full swing—with no sign of abating.

POSTSCRIPT: Americans' income-growth per capita today is half what it was in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, according to No Recovery. That's better than no growth, but not much, when you consider the inflationary costs of housing, healthcare and education. My takeaway from the analysis: downsize; don't get sick; and save for college.