Digital Solid: Marketing Technology ROI

As I write this I’m looking at a sample of a mailing I developed for a client in the mid-1990s. Designed for a major college textbook publisher, it promoted five psychology texts with titles such as Lifespan Development; Fifth Edition, and Human Development Across the Lifespan; Second Edition. The technique used in this piece is proven to boost response. It relies on a thoroughly researched phenomenon that these same psychology texts might have even mentioned in a chapter on the subconscious.

So you’d think the recipients of this mailing – all heads of psychology departments — would be immune to the ploy. They weren’t. This mailing, like the one produced before it for another text, broke sales records for the client.

This reminds me that we are all human. Which means poets still understand us better than scientists. We may think we know what makes us tick, but the fact is, our full operating instructions are yet to be published. We’re still discovering our secrets, and some of them are real corkers.

Marketers, for better or worse, are watching each new chapter of these psychology texts as they are written. We’re following this research with rapt attention. At least I – for one – can barely tear myself away.

Although the technique I’m about to describe has been well-documented, I’m going to posit a theory for why it works that I’ve not read elsewhere, and it could blow your mind. It certainly did mine, when I “connected the dots” and realized the clinical research that has been done on consciousness since the ’60s may have accidentally collided head on with a direct response trick-of-the-trade.

Direct Response Is Darwinian

Whether or not you subscribe to Darwin’s Origin of Species, you have to agree that in matters of both bacteriology and direct response, natural selection is real. Direct marketers “kill off” test mailings that don’t do as well — in fair competitions – as existing (”control”) mailings. In a similar manner, mutations of bacteria don’t get the resources that they need to reproduce when competing against existing, superior strains within a shared host. Both are examples of survival of the fittest.

I can’t speak for bacteria with authority, but I can about direct marketing, and this mailbox meritocracy means pieces you would guess should be as extinct as the dodo bird remain to sell another day. They survive because they are oddly, inscrutably effective in the return on investment they generate.

I’m thinking specifically of mailings that have such things as stickers that the reader must remove and affix, or cards that must be pulled from their perforated moorings and returned, or those clear, tinted plastic windows that must held to the eye to unscramble a message. All of these techniques require reader participation. Why do they survive? All of them use up valuable resources. None of these gimmicks are cheap to produce and distribute.

What if typical response rates for your offer are 2 percent? That means the response-boosting technique you test must get an incremental ”lift” that pays fifty-fold its overall cost just to break even.

Do you remember the Publishers Clearinghouse mailings? Tightening sweepstakes laws and changing demographic trends have made these mailings less common — and some would say those that remain are a public scourge. But these mailings used the same technique that I used with that textbook mailing, and are still used for many other mailing categories.

My wife used to call the Publishers Clearinghouse mailings “grown-up busy boxes” — they required the tearing off of stamps, the moistening of them, and the affixing of them. Sometimes there were dozens of stamps. There were also other enclosures that readers needed to get a pen to fill out, for “another chance to win.”

It was all so much work! And so much expense!

In direct marketing there is a constant imperative to “cheapen the package” with every new version of a mailing you produce and mail. But the expensive complexity of tactile involvement (as I’ll call this henceforth) remains, because response rates always outweighed the cost. Why?

The Subconscious As Unruly Child

Some theorized, even before there was research to back it up, that our hands have a closer connection to our subconscious than to our conscious mind. It kind of makes sense. It’s not our “thinking” brain that allows us to win tennis games, or public debates. In most cases, the person who over-thinks — or insists on using conscious thought at all — loses.

So could the tactile communication used in many direct mail pieces be seducing our subconscious minds? Could this technique be sweet-talking our subconscious, at our mind’s “back door,” while our conscious mind is blithely keeping vigil out front?

Experiments that began 40 years ago suggested this very theory, when they discovered that signals from our brains to our hands to consciously move them actually showed up after the movement had been accomplished. Here is how the groundbreaking research, spearheaded by Benjamin Libet, was boiled down in a review of his book Mind Time: The temporal factor in consciousness by Steven Rose of New Scientist Magazine:

The core of Libet’s findings can be simply summarised. If I sit on the edge of my bed and decide to wiggle my toes, the brain processes necessary for the wiggling to occur begin about half a second before I am aware that I have made the decision. Libet finds this troubling; if the brain processes precede my sense of having made a decision, what part does my conscious decision making play? Who indeed is the “me” that does the “deciding”?

This is a classic research finding, but one that remains unchallenged — and unnerving! Where is free will in this equation? That question was posed anew by neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran MD, PhD in an episode of RadioLab, an outstanding science podcast series by National Public Radio.

When I’d first read about this work, I wondered why direct marketers weren’t jumping up and down with glee. They knew that their tactile engagement technique often worked against all odds, like ungainly bumblebees that aerodynamics engineers insist cannot fly but persist in doing so.

Here was our explanation!

Our subconscious minds reach the mailbox milliseconds before our conscious minds do. Once there, they tear into the mail and pretend to do our bidding. Until, perhaps one or two times out of a hundred, they pull a minor mutiny. They respond.

What happens when the conscious mind catches on? Interestingly, in research where subjects are actually watching their own brain scans, as their hands act unbidden, they invent reasons for doing what their hands just did. ”I meant to do that all along!” they announce with a certainly that is belied by the timing of their actions. If anything, they simply invented a plausible rationalization.

Mr. Grabby In Room 415

Those who have brain injuries sometimes experience this more explicitly. I had read of these stories, but six years ago saw it for myself. Days after a dear friend had a stroke, his numb arm and hand rebelled. “He” grabbed objects (and passing nurses!) to his conscious mind’s horror.

Is it possible that the conscious mind – even in a perfectly healthy person —  is like a parent who wheels his child through a grocery store? With the parent oblivious to the child, the pair wend their way through the aisles. It is only when they arrive at the check-out that the embarrassed father sees the items in the basket that he never dropped in there, and rationalizes to the clerk why he’s purchasing them. “You can never have too many Animal Crackers!” he says as he stacks them nervously on the check-out belt.

The difference is we’ve been living with this unruly child our whole life, and our bodies have set some limits on what the kid can get away with (or thus goes Libet’s theory). This half-second-later override avoids a world of anarchy, where far too many nurses are groped. But this audacious behaviour of the subconscious is permitted — and instantly rationalized into something actually “intended” – enough times to boost the response rates of mailings that invite tactile improvisation.

Do we all have a Mr. Grabby waiting to help us open our mail? I invite those of you in the direct response industry to pipe in. Do you have an alternate suggestion?

Playwrights listen to the way people talk. The best of them turn this spoken music into something more than the merely authentic. They use it to convey a higher truth (even if the play simply makes us laugh; or maybe especially if it does). So what about ad copy — be it online, on a printed page or whatever?

Must jarring authenticity go out the window as the “polish” of professionalism is applied to an ad? This week, Roy Williams made an eloquent case for sparing some of the polish that can water down an ad and sap its power.

Williams even makes reference to a wonderful statement in the first chapter of a book of his — a book I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for a fresh perspective on advertising and marketing. Right there on Page 12 of The Wizard of Ads are these “Nine Secret Words”:

The risk of insult is the price of clarity.

Think of this the next time you review a proposed ad that is a little too jarring for your comfort. It could be bad, or unwise. This is always possible. BUT, it might instead be the most effective marketing investment you make this year.

Advertising legend David Oglivy once wrote that the ideal copywriter is “half killer and half poet.” I don’t know any professional killers, but I do have my favorite poets. Most of them, from what I’ve read about them, would be about as welcome in “polite company” as a paid assassin. Or a brilliant playwright, for that matter.

Could it be that this untamed, feral quality in art is something you should be looking for in commerce — in your next online ad, perhaps?

It was announced on Wednesday that a new type of digital billboard, Spectacolor HD, will be capable of presenting dazzling video and graphics. But eye candy is as cheap and ephemeral as the name implies. Where is the power to really engage a consumer? I got my answer in the fleeting, fifth paragraph of this BrandWeek article:

The Spectacolor HD board also promises to take the transformation of the outdoor medium one step further to engage the consumer through interactive features. Using mobile phones, passersby will be able to listen to audio for the board, play games on the screen, send text messages or download audio and video files.

Those who visit DigitalSolid regularly know that I get particularly excited by the prospect of ads with a mobile phone component. In prior posts I’ve discussed the direct marketing implications of standard digital ads, as well as the print-to-mobile promise of ShopText.

So you know my priorities.

I believe the news about Spectacolor HD that will have the biggest impact on us marketing technology types is the ability to push content to consumers for them to keep and share. As with the other examples I’ve discussed, this will truly use all of the marketing power of a digital ad.

How would it harness this marketing power? Well, what if, from this billboard, you could download a podcast to your cell phone — for instance, a song with a branding element or offer presented at the end, or a walking tour narrative? Or even a “treasure hunt” set of instructions? (Think Geocaching — a fast growing hobby for the GPS enabled.)

This would give your brand a tremendous amount of bang for the buck. It could be listened to multiple times and shared with others who haven’t seen the digital billboard. This is huge if the campaign is properly crafted.

But the billboard being discussed in the BrandWeek article is an exotic, rarefied animal. It will go up in New York City’s Times Square, at 47th Street and Broadway.

Most digital billboards will be on the sides of teeming freeways, where viewing time is brief, and the opportunity to download something, based on the range that Bluetooth grants you, is minimal indeed. Too bad there isn’t a way to pass information to a more far-flung group — a group of people who must stand still long enough to receive it.

Yours Free To Download (Just Wash Your Hands First, Please)

Should the meme of downloading from digital ads become more commonplace, I know of just such an audience. They are standing as I type this, gazing at digital ads all over America. I’m referring to the men in public restrooms equipped with digital, ad-serving monitors.

These units have always struck me as too clever by half. For one thing, they are positioned on the wall above a urinal mere inches from the viewer’s nose (I hope!). That makes ignoring the ads it flashes all but impossible, but it makes focusing on said ads just as difficult. And these ads have never promised me anything of value.

What if these same monitors were equipped to send the people in the restroom (hopefully after they’ve washed up!) the same goodies that were heretofore only available to New York tourists? 

Once you’ve stopped chuckling, think about the valuable mobile marketing you could accomplish by designing and executing a campaign that people receive by using any cellphone equipped with both Bluetooth and an MP3 player. It’s not so farfetched a future to imagine.

Ironically, these audio media may be delivered by a digital display ad. In an odd way this makes perfect sense.

And hopefully, by the time all the other moving parts are in place to make this advertising feasible, there will be more types of public spaces available where digital ads are displayed.

In the future, I would hope these campaigns wouldn’t be relegated to the type of room polite people excuse themselves to visit.

Landing pages are expansions of ads. Every banner, email offer or sponsored listing worth its salt points to a single, hard working page. What sort of work do these pages perform? Selling, plain and simple. But to succeed, the approach to designing these pages is neither plain nor simple. Tools like Google Website Optimizer allow you to test for yourself. These automated systems help you discover exactly what combination of components works best at converting your page’s visitors into customers or qualified leads.

But what components do you start testing? And what factors should you be paying attention to as you get started?

Luckily, a lot of testing has already been done, and their findings tell you a lot about the complexities of the human mind. Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful report from Marketing Experiments:

Landing Page Performance Elements

Through extensive research, Marketing Experiments has identified six essential elements that affect landing page performance:

Friction — [This is] caused by elements of the page that require a prospect to do extra work and increase the likelihood of abandoning the page due to fatigue or irritation. Incentives such as bonus gifts or special offers can make the offer feel more worthwhile and encourage the visitor to continue.

Visitor Motivation Level and Type– [These] are factors that influence how many will remain on the site or bounce off. The nature and level of visitor motivation is essential to what landing page attributes will prove to be the “stickiest.” If people really want something, they’ll put up with more friction.

Value Proposition — How quickly, clearly, and effectively the landing page conveys the site’s value affects its ability to move visitors to the next step and not abandon the site. [The authors call this level of abandonment the "bounce rate."]

Anxiety — All visitors arrive at a site with an initial level of anxiety caused by their perceptions of the relative risks associated with the site, the company, and the product.

Credibility Indicators — You can improve click-through and conversion by including page elements that convey trustworthiness through credibility indicators such as awards, privacy policies, certifications, testimonials, and longevity statements such as “serving the needs of ___ for more than 15 years.”

This report also has an excellent exploration of when to use short versus long copy. Happy testing!

The promise is scintillating: You’re paging through a magazine or newspaper, or you encounter an out-of-home ad (even, perhaps, a digital billboard), and you decide you simply must have that product. You type a six-digit short code into your cell phone, send the number a text message with a keyword, and after a verifying second text is received and replied to, your product has been ordered.

The consumer wins by getting the product, and the marketer wins by fulfilling what may have been a passing whim. It’s the QVC network without ever going near a television or talking to an operator.

That is the promise of ShopText, as described in a recent New York Times article.

This technology’s potential audience is substantial. Everyone is aware of how ubiquitous the cell phone has become in our society. But what may be surprising to many is the fact that two out of every five users has sent a text message from their phone. According to recent M:Metrics statistics, 39.2% of cell phone owners send a text message at least once a month.

Now imagine that you are paging through a newspaper and you see something about the latest Harry Potter book — the one that is being pre-sold now, and will be delivered in the early summer. And then let’s just say that you’re a huge fan of the series, and want to see if Harry dies in this concluding volume. And finally, let’s say for the sake of example that once you’ve pre-registered with the ShopText site, all you need to do is send out a text message, directed to the short code “467467″ (think of short codes as cell-phone-specific mini phone numbers). The actual text message would be easy to type because it contains only one word – ”Potter.” Done! That’s all you need to do to lock in your pre-release book and have it mailed to you when the official release date arrives.

As you may have already surmised, this is no idle example. It’s exactly what I did, about four hours ago. The purchase took less than a minute. Time will tell if I become a satisfied customer, and even a repeat user. But since I really did want to lock in a copy for this new book, but kept forgetting to do so, this service fulfilled a real need that I had.

What are the implications if this mobile purchasing system fulfills lots of other people’s needs, and truly catches on?

Well, imagine trade shows where you can have samples and brochures sent back to your home or office (on the vendor’s dime of course). Or you could “buy” free or nearly free samples that you read about in display ads. These samples could be of just about anything – from cosmetics to pet supplies.

I find this incredibly exciting.

Watch this space to find out how this new consumer experience turns out for me. In return, I promise you I will be as objective as possible. Oh, and I won’t blab about Harry’s fate, if my copy arrives before you have a chance to read it yourself.

I am boldly going on record now, though, to make two predictions about future purchases:

1. If this quick, convenient way to purchase on impulse lives up to its promise, I definitely will be buying lots of other things this way 
2. Regardless of the above, Harry will be buying the farm

You read it here first.

Until this week, the options for marketers who wish to test landing pages were unappetizing. You could create home-grown A/B tests, or you could turn to an online testing system offered by companies such as Offermatica or Vertster. The first option was slow and cumbersome, while the latter was yet another layer of campaign management. Google changed all that with the release on Tuesday of their Google Website Optimizer.

The Eisenberg brothers, authors of the web marketing bible Call To Action, define a landing page as “a specialized page designed to induce the shopper who responds to an ad to make the purchase.” Once you’ve paid for a click that brings someone to this page, you’d better be sure to maximize the odds of a conversion. That’s where A/B split testing comes in. Using the original page as your control, you create a statistically reliable test with a second, similar page.

The test’s hypothesis is this: That the test page, which has slightly altered  content such as headline, body copy, offer or pricing, will not improve response.

Running both pages in equal numbers proves or disproves that hypothesis. If the test page does out-pull the control, it then becomes the control, and you pit something else against that. And so it goes until you’ve explored all combinations of variables or the campaign is over.

Life was simpler for direct mail  and direct response print marketers, simply because of the time and cost restraints of that medium. You needed to test, but the number of test variables was limited by the slow feedback loop and the cost of split testing using ink and paper.

But if you’re running an online ad — one that generates hundreds of clicks a day — you’d be crazy not to be continually testing something. All the time.

Online marketing shifts the constraint away from the medium itself and squarely onto campaign management. In my experience, a majority of marketing organizations simply cannot manage the level of testing that they could or should be doing for a given campaign. Those who are loathe to test are spending more for every conversion they generate.

Google has stepped in to help. Although their new tool doesn’t address the “expertise void” in testing (and they recognize that, as you’ll read in a moment), the Optimizer does promise to make the automation of testing within reach of just about any marketing organization.

According to product manager Tom Leung, it enables advertisers to “receive up to 10,000 versions of a web page.

“This tool lets you have one page, add a few Java scripts and
then when visitors hit the page, there are different combinations served.”

If the Optimizer is anything like Google’s other recent web marketing game-changer, Google Analytics (which is the refined suite formerly known as Urchin), this will be a direct response marketer’s dream.

The Website Optimizer is free to marketers using Google Adwords. Because A/B tests require experienced content professionals to get right, it is no surprise that Google has created a legion of Optimizer Authorized Consultants. The list of consultants will be growing (hey, Google, you have my information — call me, babe!), but now includes Optimost, EpikOne and Future Now, the company that published Call To Action. Now why doesn’t that surprise me?

The most successful business-to-business mailing I ever produced was early in my career, for a company called Acro Automation (http://www.acro.com*). It was a lead generation letter, mailed in a standard window envelope. But the envelope was stuffed with a wad of real shredded money. I bought the tangled remains of one-, five-, ten- and twenty-dollar bills direct from the U.S. Treasury, in eleven pound boxes. Each was enough to fill approximately 2,500 envelopes. Showing money fragments through the window of the envelope, along with a printed teaser that explained their relevance, was enough to trigger an 11% response rate from a notoriously non-responsive audience of production engineers.

Shortly after that mailing the government called an abrupt halt to the sale of this byproduct of monetary obsolescence. They apparently didn’t appreciate my use of ex-money to generate more of the real stuff. But the lesson had been duly noted. I had learned how to reach out and grab the reader by the imagination: Be unique and outrageous.

I was reminded of this lesson when I read Seth Godin’s account of marketing one of his books. Read his story and take heed. Reconsider that me-too mailing you were planning for your next promotion. Why settle for average when you can break records — and in the process, accumulate great stories, such as mine about the Treasury, and Seth’s about his similar, bureaucratic battle with International Paper?

*I had nothing to do with their current web site, by the way, but I was involved in the acquisition of their four-letter domain name. At the time I had no idea how rare these would become. I was also responsible for another one of those: www.sofa.com. If I only knew then what I know now, I would have treated these as the valuable client assets that they are!

Memes are ideas that spread like viruses. Some are more contagious than others. What makes an idea contagious is a quality that makes people want to share it. Memes must also be memorable — they have to stay with their “host” long enough to spread. A common cold wouldn’t be nearly so common if it didn’t last long enough in our bodies for us to sneeze or cough. It’s the same with memes. They don’t have to live in us forever in order to be successful, but they do have to find a host and take it for a ride.

In order to be memes, ideas have to be sticky.

An example of a sticky idea that has come and gone is that Elvis Presley is still alive — that his death was faked. Another, which is leaving our consciousness in half lives, is that Halloween trick-or-treating is dangerous because of rampant poisoning of the candy being given out. Did you realize that this was an urban legend? This meme — or sticky idea — reached its apex in the 1980s and drained Halloween of a lot of its fun for subsequent generations of kids.

Sticky ideas are the tools of the trade for marketers. They are of particular importance to interactive marketers, since email and other online communcation can spread a meme like wildfire. Stickiness can make selling a product that much easier. Here are two ideas, one sticky, one not-so-much. They both deal with our immune system:

• Zinc in lozenge form can help our immune system by interrupting the virus that causes a cold, thus preventing it or lessening its severity
• Probiotics in foods like yogurt can strengthen the immune system and fight things like upper respiratory infections, since healthy bacteria in the gut are part of our body’s natural system for fighting disease

These are two ideas about staying healthy. Both have the support (in terms of communicating the idea and selling products) by major food and drug companies. But only one of them was sticky enough to be the topic of conversation yesterday, when I was walking to lunch with a couple of business associates.

I don’t think it’s an accident that we were talking about lozenges and not yogurt. The idea that a lozenge can help you feel better — especially with a new, exotic ingredient (zinc) — resonates.

On the other hand, eating yogurt, or taking a pill, with live bacteria in it? As a way to stave off illness? Yuck. It may be true, but it doesn’t stick. I’ve heard this concept for years, but I still don’t think it’s going to catch hold in a big way. Probiotics may continue to grow in sales, but I’m putting my money on zinc.

Those ideas were built into the product. You can’t do much to change their stickiness. But many can be altered, like an engineered microbe, to better connect with an audience. This is the theme of a book by the Brothers Heath (not to be confused with be-bop jazz greats The Heath Brothers). The book is called Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

They contend there are six aspects to a sticky idea:

1. Simplicity — Is it easy to grasp? (”A mineral we don’t get enough of in our foods can cure our cold …”)
2. Unexpectedness — Like a joke, does it have a punch? (”… and it’s zinc!”)
3. Concreteness — Does it draw a clear picture? (”… which you can buy in lozenge form.”)
4. Credibility — Can you believe it? (”I’ve heard it’s based on clinical trials …”)
5. Emotions — Does it make you feel something? (”Even if it doesn’t work, it’s just good to feel like I’m doing something about colds …”)
6. Stories — Can it be verbalized? (”… and I think it does work. I started taking zinc just when I was starting to feel a cold come on, and it lasted just three days!”)

Probiotics don’t stack up nearly as well on the stickiness meter. I give the yogurt wheeze high marks for #2 and 4, but medium or low marks for the rest. Especially #5, Emotions, which I think is a key to a sticky idea.

The fact is, no one likes to think much about their lower digestive tract. A finely tuned gut may make you healthier and happier, but please, keep it to yourself, buddy. I’m trying to eat.

The next time you face a marketing challenge, use this checklist to ensure your marketing proposition has what it takes to spread virally. Although I find the Brothers’ Heath list one that was designed as much to fill a book as it is to exhaustively explore stickiness, your idea cannot go wrong if it scores high for all six criteria. It will become sticky, and earn the right to be called a meme.

Two of my favorite sites use a technique to make their short, punchy web copy even stronger.

• 37signals is a smart, irreverent Web 2.0 developer of web-based collaboration and development solutions. I’ve praised one of their products in this blog: Basecamp, an ASP alternative to MS Project. They market their products through a web site and attached blog that aren’t afraid to break with convention. That includes the way they draw your attention to important sales copy.
• Very Short List (VSL) does the same. It’s a fun, free subscription email and web site that delivers a list of exactly one interesting product, service or web site every single day. The copy they employ to describe each “VSL” is always short and clever. To further aid in scanning, VSL highlights important points in their message.

Both use the technique you see in the sample graphic (click to enlarge). They use a text highlighting technique that any web site could adopt but few do. It’s a clean if somewhat “cute” alternative to bold and italics.

Is this new formatting based on science? In other words, do metrics exist to show that this technique improves readership, or helps convert readers into customers?

No. Josh Fried of 37signals admits in Copyblogger.com, “We don’t have metrics [to support our design changes]. It’s all gut.” (I agree wholeheartedly by the way, with Brian Clark, author of Copyblogger.com. He cautions in this post that listening to designers and one’s instincts can be a dangerous practice when the outcome could be a major decline in the bottom line of your business.)

So right now web marketers appear to be flying blind when they are using this technique to showcase important copy. This could be remedied.

I’ve made a point to talk to anyone I know who conducts eye tracking heatmaps to see if they’ve ever seen any evidence that this hinders or helps a reader through the thicket of online copy. And if they haven’t, would they like to give it a try?

In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts on whether this hip spin on copy formatting will prove to be more than a novelty.

Years ago a mentor told me that in consumer advertising, there are many motivations for someone to act. But when you’re talking to someone about a product or service for their business, the motivations are less varied. In fact, they boil down to two:

• Fear
• Greed

Period.

That was nearly 20 years ago. A lot has changed, but I cannot see any evidence that this has changed at all. Your thoughts?