May 22nd, 2009 by Steven Leung

She brought the pile of flyers she got that day to our meeting.  “I get one of these stacks every day”, she said in exasperation.  It wasn’t that she didn’t like having to sort through piles to get to the mail she really wanted to read.  And though I noticed she put her can of Diet Dr. Pepper into the recycling bin, we’d never talked about saving the environment or greener marketing per se.

“The price of postage is going up and it isn’t any cheaper to send my flyers out than it was ten years ago.  What gives with that?  Now I need to send out a more colorful, better quality flyer to get the same attention I got before.  And it’s costing me $1.46 a piece.”

Cost is one thing and I knew she had a Rolodex of over 1,000 strong, but if it was producing good ROI, it wouldn’t be an issue.  “Do you know how many folks are reading your newsletter?” I asked.

“Couldn’t tell you, I know they end up in a pile like this.”  One of the clever things she did was hide a couple random names from her subscription list in the flyer she sent.  If that person called in, they’d win a prize.  Even so, there’d be a few months back-to-back where she didn’t get a call from any of the names she dropped.

“What if you always knew which people were reading your newsletters?” I asked.  Her posture perked up a bit and I followed up, “And that buck-forty-six you spend per shot doesn’t end up in a landfill?”

Like most people, she knew about email marketing and the huge cost differential between sending one email and sending a newsletter.  She’d also heard about the ability to see which people had opened the email, track who clicked through, and send messages automatically.

“You can also choose different follow up messages too.”  We talked about how she wanted to reward people who read her messages and that she could send a better offer by email automatically to people who clicked on a message than ones who didn’t.  Or she could send a gentle reminder message to people who didn’t open her last newsletter email.

“Different offers?”

“Different offers, I have another customer who segments his list by product lines and sends an email to upsell his other products based not only on what they’ve bought in the past but how they’ve responded to other offers.  They use their email to send folks to their website with a special referral code.  That way they can keep their emails short enough to scan quickly, draw interested people to their landing pages for more information, and hone their landing pages to get a higher conversion ratio.”

She calculated the thousand or so greenbacks she’d save by going to greener marketing and how she’d get more tools for better personalizing her marketing towards her Rolodex.

“All this for not sending more flyers to the landfill?” she asked.  “This is just the beginning.  The next step is for you to turn your customers into your evangelists.”

October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Why some websites won’t return your investment
• What a good-looking website can and can’t do
• The 5 C’s for building productive websites

One of the most common issues I hear from clients is that they built a website but aren’t getting any return on their investment.  The complaint is the same from clients who spent a small fortune at an ad agency to ones who tried to cut a few corners: no ROI.

The problem is so pervasive that many businesses not doing e-commerce think of websites purely as cost centers or online brochures and not as a steady source of leads and revenue.  Companies using this type of conventional wisdom are leaving money on the table.
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