When you really get down to it the one absolute quality that makes spam SPAM! is the fact that it is unsolicited. The people receiving it did not ask to receive it; they did not consciously enter into a relationship with the company or marketers who sent it. Conservative estimates say that at any given time 22% of active e-mails are spam, while other estimates rank it at 87% or higher. With all this unsolicited mail clogging up people’s in boxes, how can other marketers get their messages through?
Once again, the value proposition is the critical point. If a marketer can offer value to the customer that prompts the customer to initiate a permission-based relationship then the door has been opened. As Seth Godin writes: “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them”. Godin goes on to say that permission marketing is based on receiving actual permission to send messages, not based on some form of legal permission that a marketer scooped by being sneaky with the opt-out box. So how does one receive this consent?
Lyris E-mailLabs offer a list of 28 ways to start building a permission-based (double opt-in) e-mail marketing list. The gist of the list is to use any and all opportunities to invite people to sign up. Every interaction you have with a customer is an opportunity to move that relationship along to the next level on the continuum of building loyal customers. About.com has also compiled a long list of e-mail marketing tips. Ensuring that one’s landing page matches both in content and context with the e-mail message is a point that stands out for me, as it continues to support the story I have been weaving with my recent blogs; specifically, that the story you tell potential customers about your product or service and the value it has in their life is the basis for their relationship with you, and so it is important to pay attention to the narrative that the content and cotext of your messages are creating to ensure that they are actually telling the story you want them to.
Why is this on-going story so important to your e-mail marketing campaign. Well, as the writers at E-mail Marketing Reports put it: “We don’t (actually) get permission, we borrow it”. When someone double opts-in to our marketing e-mail newsletter, we form a social contract with them in addition to the initial permission granted. This unspoken contract on the part of the customer says: “You can keep sending me messages as long as they are relevant, valuable, and come at times when I want to receive them”. As soon as a marketer’s messages break one of these agreements, the customer can rescind permission and end the relationship.
Getting permission and keeping permission are all a part of the customer/company relationship that only lasts if it is built on real value and trust communicated consistently through a clear and coordinated story.
As I related in previous weeks, humans love narrative. We search for it continually when weeding through information or learning, and when it is missing we fill it in. This is a powerful and important realization for marketers, web-based or otherwise, because it reminds us of the need to ensure that our website, banner ad, or pre-roll for example are telling the story we want them to.
Affiliate marketing provides new opportunities to continue our stories with new publishers, potentially reaching new markets. Affiliate marketing is essentially a process by which Company A pays Business B to market for them on Business B’s site. The hitch with affiliate marketing is that Company A only pays Business B when a customer clicks through the ads on Business B’s site and actually completes a purchase. Think of it as “risk-free” advertising for Company A. This is a very simplified explanation of affiliate marketing (and embedded below is a quick 2 minute tutorial), but the process can actually become quite complex, with complicated networks of affiliates intertwining and optimizing the entire process with SEO and other traditional internet marketing tools.
But is affiliate marketing really “risk-free”? Once again narrative and filling in the gaps comes onto the scene. Through the development of affiliate networks multiple Company A’s make marketing deals with the same Business B, and so now when a user opens up Business B’s site they may see ads for competing products. A very simplified example of the risk involved in this scenario is such: If you work hard in all your messaging to tell a story about low cost, specifically how your product is the best value for the lowest price, you can see how quickly that comes undone if it is placed next to a competing product that is shown as comparable quality but cheaper. Though your story may work outside of the context of the affiliates website, within the context of other ads viewed immediately beside or directly after a flaw in the narrative will lead consumers to fill in their own conclusions.
Not entirely affiliate marketing related, but widening the examples and tools we have to work with (and interesting to consder in terms of the power of context), is the video below demonstrating the Kuleshov Effect. Lev Kuleshov was a film maker and researcher working in the early 1920′s. He shot a series of short film pieces as part of an experiment to demonstrate the power of context in film making. Essentially, he took a shot of a man’s expressionless face and placed it after a series of other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a child’s toy, a woman reclining in a couch) and showed the match ups to participants, The participants resoundingly noted different emotions on the man’s face even though it was the same expressionless face every time. The results demonstrate that we make sense of things by putting them in context with other things.
And so we might ask ourselves what is my affiliate’s site saying (consciously or not) about my product?
I feel in some ways that I am beating the same drum in recent weeks, and in other ways I am defining my opinions through layers and layers of related realizations. The message that comes bubbling to the surface time and time again is: Regardless of how slick or sophisticated your ad campaign is, no matter how SEOed your site, no matter how high your CPM keyword bid, or contagious your viral video, if you do not have value for your target market waiting at the next click, then you are wasting your time and (perhaps worse) your money.
And so geo-targeting enters the scene to make your marketing efforts even more efficient, and, if you have a good value proposition, effective. Geo-targeting, according to AdWords who offer it as part of their search engine marketing service “lets you target your ads to specific locations and languages. For each campaign, you can select the countries or regions and the language(s) for your ad. That campaign’s ads will appear only to users located in those areas and who have selected one of those languages as their preference”. Most major search engines offer geo-targeting as an option when designing your SEM campaign. Yahoo, for example offers targeting via postal-code. Facebook is also offering geo-targeting combined with other demographic and sociographic filters. One can easily imagine the benefits of this type of targeting, especially for small businesses with a limited ad budget.
How exactly does geo-targeting work? Watch this video by marketing guru Bob Nicholson for a complete explanation:
For a moment, let`s examine geo-targeting from a consumer or net user`s point of view. On the one side I can really appreciate the reduction in clutter. When I search for peanut sauce recipes, I really do not care to see ads for Thai restaurants in Minesota. This product offer has no value to me. I likely would not click on the ad and even if I did, it is highly unlikely that I would follow through and patronize the business. On the other hand, as a consumer with privacy and free-access to web content concerns, the idea of my search results being filtered based on my geographic location is disconcerting. As marketers it is important to be mindful of consumer privacy concerns whenever we are launching new campaigns or taking advantage of new technologies. (Not to is folly as Facebook learned.)
Putting on the marketers hat once again, the value of geo-targeting extends beyond simple not bothering those who have little or no interest in our value-proposition. As Bob Nicholson points out in the video, geo-targeting prevents marketers from having to pay for clicks from customers that cannot access their products or service anyways. This in turn will increase the ROI on ad campaigns as it decreases dead end hits.
Geo-targeting is but another tool for getting your message to the right people, and taking the first step in building lasting customer-relationships. Of course, as with any tool, it will only be effective when used as part of a larger plan that promises and delivers value at the end. Because really, it does not matter how fancy your hammer is, if you drew your blueprints on the back of a napkin.
