As a marketer and a company, you sometimes have to decide that the data won’t guide you. Today, it’s both easier and harder to take a creative leap.

Testing an idea — creating an ad, buying some targeted placements, measuring the results — is relatively easy. It’s never been easier to produce amazing, compelling stories. It’s easy to test them in a controlled metro area.

However, when you make a really big creative leap, it IS harder than ever to keep them quiet. Especially if you’re a big brand. Social media, YouTube, email, whatever. We’re connected like never before. The new NIKE World Cup video got a few hundred thousand hits on YouTube before NIKE launched any other support for it. People found it and shared it.

Groups Suck
What I’ve found is that sending one email and cc’ing multiple people routinely fails at generating anything. They all stare at each other and assume someone else who is less busy than them will take care of it. And after all, it’s just the blog. It’s not like the earth will stop turning if we don’t post something.

Oops, You Made a Committee
Worse, they’ll turn it into a committee. “Should we be talking about this?” or “Shouldn’t we do more research around this?” or “Perhaps we can come to consensus. Let’s call a meeting.”

Bang, your blog post is dead. Get out the shovel and bury it.

Individuals Do Things
The more successful route is to send a very similar email to one person at a time, asking them to weigh in on something. In it, I usually emphasize a few points:

1. Minimal effort: I just need a paragraph response. I’ll handle the rest.
2. No writing: They can swing by my desk and we’ll write it together.
3. Flattery: They said something about this to me earlier that was BRILLIANT, but I can’t get it quite right. What was it again?
4. Secrecy: I’m working with a few other people, but I’m really interested in YOUR opinion.
5. Leverage + Flattery: I talked to your boss, and s/he couldn’t say enough about how much you totally understand this topic.

The problem with this route is when you’re fishing, and the person maybe isn’t the best resource. And they forward the email to someone else you’ve already sent it to.

This is just one of the many ways to get people off their ass to write something. I’m sure I’ll cover a few more.

This is the real world where you’re interviewing CEOs of small businesses. And the reader typically needs to get something out of it — if you’re not thinking ahead about why the reader would bit.ly your link and send it along, you’re dooming yourself to obscurity.

We had a situation like that today, so this is what I shot back to the writer:

Here’s what I’d propose: re-read over this and ask yourself what Laura can teach all of us. Because at the end of the day, Laura is NOT a celebrity. So we need some utility for this article. What, as someone outside this company, will make this article valuable? Why would I forward this article on to someone?

Secondly, make your points AFTER you’ve illustrated them. SHOW our “distinct culture of internal support,” rather than tell me. Give me a story. An anecdote. A quote. Don’t tell me he’s funny. Show me.

“A skeleton walks into a bar,” Kevin said, apropos of nothing, talking to apparently no one. “He says to the bartender, ‘give me a beer and a mop.’” Even camels call Kevin’s humor dry.

I can’t say it’s the best organized writing in the world, but perhaps handy if you’re trying to quickly understand email marketing.

How Marketers Measure Success in Email

1. Numbers of emails successfully sent: Sometimes you get bounces, spams, or bad emails. It’s good to track those numbers and clean the list occasionally.
2. Open rate: Total emails sent out / Emails opened = open rate percentage. The biggest three contributors to whether people open an email are:
   1. Do I know who sent this to me? The name and email address in the from: field.
   2. Is the subject line interesting to me? Words like “Free” usually end up in spam, but knowing that it’s the user’s birthday or that their anniversary is coming up can generate interest. The more relevant personal information you can add in the subject line (in a way that’s not creepy), the higher your open rate.
   3. Is this a good time to talk to me about this? Emails about insurance sent at 5 pm on a Friday? Not going to get opened. Emails about “three fashion tips you already have in your closet” at 4 pm on a Friday might get opened for the “going out” crowd.
3. Click-through rate: Total emails sent / # of clicks in all emails. Typically, just like a web page, the biggest visual will get the most clicks. And the stuff at the top of the page will get the most clicks. Know what your client really wants from their email campaign, and put it up there.
4. Spams and Unsubscribes: A certain number of people will categorize your email as spam and a certain number will unsubscribe. Marking an email as spam is easier than unsubscribing, and many people use it. It kinda sucks, but you’ll get a few. Unsubscribe is fine, because you can  at least offer them incentives for staying in the course of unsubscribing, like a free flashlight or something. Or you can ask why they’re leaving: “Hey wow, bummer. Did we not send you interesting content? Maybe you could choose from one of these three things to help us do better next time.” At least you get a very short exit interview.

Just like online ad campaigns, the email campaigns are tracked on the website to see what people who clicked through did.

• Did they buy? What? How much? Did they abandon?
• How much time did they spend on the site?
• How many pages? Where did they go?
• What was the bounce rate?

Custom Content and Measurement
Email, like every other type of marketing and advertising, is about relevance. And prior behavior tells you a lot about future behavior.

You can start to tell patterns about people based on how they click. Some people are female, but only shop for males. Maybe they’re buying gifts. Other people only click-through when there’s a deep discount. Some people want the newest thing, like “see what Hollywood is wearing this spring.”

Those patterns are important, because you should choose to send emails with dynamic, auto-generated content based on click patterns. This dynamic email content is the backbone of the company’s system. So basically, if the client is offering a 35% coupon, the email system will let you create a group that’s based on prior click patterns (“give me everyone who clicked on a discount link between Q1 2008 and Q1 2009.”)

Plus, you can create a regular email where there’s a bucket of content that’s subject to different rules: if they like discounts, fill it with discount copy. If they like new stuff, fill it with the hot newness content. If they like men’s stuff, fill it with men’s stuff.

Different types of campaigns: awareness vs. sales.

• Awareness: We want people to know about this product or service, and we want them to want it. Typically, there’s a click-through to a product page. Once there, maybe people will even buy. With a campaign like that, you want to try to use as much information as you have about the customer to focus on what they might be interested in. And you want to keep your design and offer language streamlined — don’t try to squash too many options into a single email or people don’t know what to click on.
• Sales: With a sales email, you’re probably offering an incentive to people to buy something. Or at least to check it out. The key is to know what motivates different people in your email database. Some may be motivated by discounts, others free shipping, and others just want the newest and hottest and fastest thing.

List Building
OK, we want to send an email, but where do we get all these people? I’m sure there are other ways, but here’s the four big ones.

1. Email sign up form on the website, perhaps during a purchase.
2. Product registration online or mail-in cards.
3. List rentals or purchases: With these, you can only send the list one email where your call to action is “please subscribe because we have a lot to offer you.” If they don’t actively subscribe, you can’t send them any more emails.
4. Salesforce.com or whatever customer management system the client uses: With this, you have to be careful. Small businesses often get away with importing from their CRM, even though people didn’t explicitly say, “sign me up for this list.” But this company probably has a policy similar to the list rental or purchase policy due to spam issues (see below). It’s not cool, and I always recommend against it.

List Cleaning
List cleaning comes after a mature list has been used for a while, and there are people who simply aren’t opening or clicking. It’s not inherently bad, especially with the economy like this, but it screws up the numbers on which you are judged. It makes you as the project manager look bad.

So maybe once a year with a big account, you might send out an email that says, “Hey, if this email newsletter isn’t right for you, maybe try different content that you WOULD like. If not, this will be your last email. Click here to keep receiving it.”

Techy Stuff
Different email programs (technically, these are called “clients”) have different HTML rendering issues. It’s a giant pain in the ass for the industry. Your programmers will know all the ins and outs of this, but sufficed to say, they need to time to test their HTML in different email programs. And email will not render (look) the same in every email program. It’s the same as testing web pages in different browsers, except instead of four major browsers, there are like 10 major email clients. SWEET!

The good news is that the company’s database will tell you what the lion’s share of recipients use. That lets you focus the team’s time.

One other thing: most email is designed using very old-school HTML with tables and junk. It’s TERRIBLE. Most web designers would hate it. But that’s just the way things go with email due to all the conflicting programs/clients.

Spam
The company probably has a long list of prohibited words that tend to set off spam filters. Stuff like “free” and “discount.” Your writers will need to get creative to work around that. But again, you should be sending content that is relevant to the user, so hopefully there are multiple subject lines depending on the user’s prior click pattern. Content within the email might also set off alarms, so… you know, work with your writers.

This company, like all email service providers, is likely in a constant battle with Internet Service Providers about spam. Being very diligent about having a good list, not renting or buying lists very often, and unsubscribing people quickly are all critical. This lets them avoid being “blacklisted” by email powerhouses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and others.

Text Only
Most emails sent via email service providers are probably HTML based. Some users may choose to have text-only emails sent. Or increasingly, they may have a mobile version sent. Those emails need to be much simpler. Line breaks, ALL CAPS, lines of hyphens, and bullets are all good ways to get people to read text-only email

The King Retail Solutions homepage. Click for a larger view to read. We got a new client in Europe within a week of launching the site, who specifically said it was because of the site.

I fought solutions. A lot. I mean seriously. You want one navigation item to be the word, “solutions” and the other to be the word, “integrated”?

The "integrated" section of the KRS website.

As you can see, I lost that battle.

And yes. Solutions. "Hmm, what should I click on here? How about solutions?"

But the site was a winner.

When I took the job, we’d just started re-designing the website with their agency, DeepPlay. Awesome group. They did the design and I did all the copy.

And interviewing the department heads (so I could actually write the copy) turned out to be a great way to get up to speed on the company and the industry quickly.

I also coordinated several other marketing endeavors: brochure writing and printing, sales sheets, PR, and design contest submissions. I even got some of our photos into a coffee table book about grocery store interiors. (I didn’t know they existed either.)

Side story

It was at King that I first learned about search engine optimization. The day after the new site launched, the CEO called me in. He liked some things, disliked a few others. But the reason that the site “utterly fails” was because when he Googled “King,” we didn’t show up on the first page.

” Wait, did you say, ‘King’? The single word ‘king’? Really, the King of England comes up before us? Martin Luther King Jr. comes up before us? Burger King comes up before us? Wow, you’re right, that is really WEIRD. Hey, what happens if you search for ‘grocery interior design’ or ‘grocery interior manufacturing.’ Oh sweet. Front page? Yay us.”

I can be a defensive and snarky SOB at times. I’m just saying.

There are Two Types of People in the World: Makers and Managers

There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Makers Need Uninterrupted Time

Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.

They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

Managers, however, live and die in increments of an hour. Seeking information, checking in, status updates, reaching consensus, making a decision, delegating are all reasons for managers to call a meeting. Boom!

Interruptions are Relative

If a meeting is advancing the project, it must be a net positive, right? No. Interruptions are relative. An older article on the cost of workplace interruptions (yes, I’m now calling your status update meeting an interruption) qualifies them as such:

• when I interrupt someone (a “good” interruption)
• when someone interrupts me (a “bad” interruption)

Take a look at this list of Top 10 office interruptions: which would be good and which would be bad? When is an interruption really a collaboration?

But Seriously, Your Meetings Are Killing My Productivity

Are the Makers and Creators being overly sensitive? I say no. A News.com article cites “In Praise of Slowness,” saying:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

An even more alarming article from (my favorite) journalist Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine cited a UC Irvine study that puts interruptions in stark terms:

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

OMG: I’m Only Working Two Hours a Day?!?

Leon Ho over at Life Hack did the math on an 8-hour work day:

(8 * 60 / (11+25) * 11)

There are only roughly 2 hours on quality project time. Think about this figure verse [sic] the rest of 6 hours.

And a 2005 study from Basex titled “The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity,” puts the cost at more than half a trillion dollars a year.

Unnecessary interruptions consume about 28 percent of the knowledge worker’s day, which translates to 28 billion lost hours to companies in the United States alone. At an average cost per hour of $21 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2005), that costs U.S. companies $588 billion per annum.

Whoa.

As an Interactive Pro, How Do You Deal with Interruptions?

Makers in an interactive setting face additional pressures — the expectation to participate in interruptive social media like Twitter, instant messaging, Facebook, Yammer, etc.

(Just as I wrote that, for some reason I felt compelled to check Twitter. Weird.)

That pressure requires creative solutions. Microsoft Labs created Scalable Fabric to minimize open windows. Apple created Spaces. A search for the “inbox zero” mantra of “Do it, Delegate it, Delete It” turned up about 1.3 million results.

Beating Interruptions in the Office

Productivity is a huge business in the U.S., and there’s a reason. Productive employees get noticed, get promoted, and retire early to beautiful privately owned islands. I can’t say I’m the master of productivity, but here’s a few tips I’ve been using lately with good success.

1. Turn off IM. This has been a tough one for me, as I thoroughly enjoy chatting about work (and other stuff).
2. Block out work time. If I have to do some serious writing, I put it into my calendar. (I also put my gym time in there.)
3. Go away. People swing by my desk all the time with questions, concerns, ideas, or just to talk. I can minimize these distractions by leaving.
4. Say no. So let’s say I’m working at my desk and have found a groove. Someone drops by and asks, “can I interrupt you?” I’m trying now to say “in an hour?”

My role here is a hybrid manager/maker. Graham’s suggestion of “office hours” seems to me an excellent idea to avoid office interruption, though I have no idea how to make it happen short of blocking out all my time except a few hours a day.

What about you? What are your biggest distractions and interruptions? How do you deal with them?

By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.

In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.

It’s not the perfect solution. The biggest problem is that you’re only looking at the Facebook population, which biases your data. But since Facebook has grown so insanely fast and is becoming such a ubiquitous presence, I think it’s a decent representative sample.

Visit iStrategyLabs.com for more info on Facebook demographics

This cracks me up to no end.

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.

Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.

1. The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
2. At some early point at Pop Art, we moved a lot of the SEO responsibility over to editorial. Here’s why.
3. What good will those brand workshops do if your writing doesn’t reflect it?
4. Viral ideas need support to get them to pandemic mode and beyond the sniffles. One way to do that is to study how wildfires grow.
5. I actually had a client say that they wanted to market their small travel agency to everyone. Bad idea. But here’s a good idea: figure out different elements of your company and let them appeal to different people. Targeting online is a great way to do that.
6. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a recession on. Here’s what I’ve learned about managing people and balancing work demands during lean times.
7. When we set out to re-do the Pop Art site, one concept we considered bringing forward was the people. I did some quick and dirty research into our team. Very interesting.
8. How do you measure creative? Perceived ad spending.
9. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place.
10. When I look back on hiring my most recent intern, Kevin, I’ll remember the experience not so much for finding him, but for having to say “no” to three other insanely qualified people. One continues to work for Babywit.com, and we correspond every so often about interactive marketing. Here’s an interesting conversation about e-commerce and email.
11. Social media and transparency. Duh.
12. Last, but the first blog post I wrote at Pop Art: The nine-point copywriting checklist.

My Two Favorite Slides from WebVisions

1. First day, @bikehugger’s slide about how to be interesting online: “Do Epic Shit.”
2. Each one of @erictpeterson’s slides had his twitter handle and the (wrong) hash tag in the footer. Super convenient.

I’ll keep reading the #wv09 hashtag comments and see what other interesting tidbits I can pull out. I know @texagonian (Kevin Platt) had some good comments and nuggets, as well as at least one laugh-out-loud putdown. As you might expect if you know him.

Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com

Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It

For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.

For example, what’s the best way to transfer a problem to the right person at Qwest? Perhaps when the social media team is small, transferring a customer to another department or to the normal customer service group makes sense. But once everyone in customer service has social media access, transfers should follow the normal problem resolution processes.

Use Your Social Media Team to Teach and Build

Starting small will also allow the social media team at Qwest to help develop the processes and technologies needed to integrate this technology to the Qwest CRM systems (the holy grail of customer service and social media).

The team will also be able to train other customer service reps in the ins-and-outs of Twitter as a medium (in the same way that the phone has ins-and-outs, and email has ins-and-outs, etc).

Social Media is Broadcast Customer Service

In a normal customer service situation, typically your conversation is relatively private (it’s recorded, but no one’s really going to use it unless things go COMPLETELY WRONG). But with social media, every customer interaction is out there in the open. You’re broadcasting your customer service.

Transparency good. Whining bad.

Thus, if I could make one suggestion to Qwest: tweets that say, “10 minutes until we go home for the night!” make a bad impression. Transparency is great. Whining is not.

Have you seen other examples? Is your company considering it? What questions or concerns do you have?

I’d love to hear other case studies of using social media for customer service.