Headline that captures attention
There’s a story in The Age today about a fire that has damaged an adult cinema in Melbourne’s CBD.
And the crafty headline for this brief story? It’s hilarious:
Premature evacuation as Club X burns
It certainly got my attention in the list of the newspaper’s Top 10 articles for the day. Most amusing.
Outer Envelopes
I was just listening/watching Mal Emery’s superconference from back in 2005, and one of the things Mal says often is that “there are lots of ways to be right.”
That statement is especially true in terms of direct mail, and how you can go about creating the outer envelope.
There are many competing theories on how to create a winner with the outer envelope. From the “sneak up” approach to blatant full-on promos, there are certainly differing opinions. Whether to hand-write the address and use a “live” stamp, or print on in a hand-writing or regular typeface. Or whether to use window or non-window envelopes. Size. Colour. Feel/texture. Shape. Lots of options, lots of opinions.
However, I think there are two keys to nail with envelopes, and they should be really obvious:
- To find out what works, TEST!
- Create the envelope from the market’s/customer’s point of view (POV).
The envelope really has two simple purposes:
- To get opened!
- To get the contents safely to your customer.
Keeping the customer POV foremost in your mind helps determine the best approach to use.
You can test things like urgent-looking envelopes and satchels, hand-written personal-looking envelopes, promo envelopes with blatant offers of interest to your market, lumpy/bulky envelopes to envoke curiosity… but of course that all depends on what, from the customer’s POV, will it take to get the envelope opened.
One very helpful tip: if you change business names (eg, change of franchise), DO NOT write to your existing customers announcing the change using the NEW business name on the outer envelope!
Here’s a story to demonstrate how powerful this advice can be.
My wife Mel’s optometrist changed to a different trading brand name (still in the same location), and wrote to her, announcing the new trading name and including a special offer.
However, when she got the mail, it looked like typical advertising/marketing: a glossy orange envelope, clearly commercially printed, with a window face — and, from the customer POV, it didn’t look like it was from her existing optometrist. The envelope had the new business name splashed all over it, not the existing one!
Can you guess what happened?
Mel didn’t even open the envelope (the only reason she kept it at was for my swipe file), even with mention of an offer on the outside… because it looked to her like it was from a competitor of her existing optometrist, and she wasn’t interested in changing her existing relationship/arrangement!
A couple of months went by until it was time for Mel to contact her optometrist again. But when she looked up their details online from home, the business name no longer existed!
So Mel went and found another optometrist (the one I use) and they now have her as their customer as well as me.
Had she had visited the optometrist (at Highpoint Shopping Centre, where we only go to visit perhaps every 1 or 2 months), there would have been some chance of her staying with the re-branded optometrist, because they were in the location. And the probably have the same phone number (which Mel didn’t have in her records). All that needed happen then was for a staff member to let her know they’re the same people, just with a new name.
But … by assuming customers would open a single glossy direct mail piece, the optometrist put in danger the chance of keeping their customers.
Later on, we ended up opening that envelope, and realised what it was (otherwise, how could I tell you this story?!) — but by then it was too late: the customer was gone.
So, from the customer’s POV, the approach used didn’t make any sense.
What could have been a better approach?
Relying on a single direct mail piece (that is branded in a name unfamiliar to existing customers) to make your announcement might be cost effective, but could clearly (and did here) lose you your customers. A better idea, write to your customers using the brand they know — at least TWICE. Use a small sequence with an offer and perhaps an “opening special” invitation to drinks/see your new season’s range. Even better again: use telephone (broadcast or personal calls), SMS or email (with permission), as well as direct mail, to help get the message through.
We don’t know if the optometrist used local advertising to announce the change, but if they did, it went un-noticed. Again, if the direct mail piece is something to go by, the ad was probably highly branded in the new name, not the old one.
This was a great “learning experience” to observe. A few months later, when one of our clients bought out a competitor and wrote to the customer list they’d just purchased… we made sure they used the OLD business name on the outer envelope, to help make sure it was opened!
A Proof-Reading Tale
I read with interest tonight a brief story caption under the main image on the Herald Sun homepage:
One up: Daniel Giansiracusa celebrates a first-term goal as the Bulldogs notch their first win of the AFL season with a 32-point win over Richmond at the MCG tonight.
There’s a link there to the AFL Footy home page, which has a brief lead article:
Dogs seal second win
THE Western Bulldogs returned to the winning list tonight with a 32-point victory over Richmond at the MCG.
Then, in the article itself, in the 3rd paragraph:
But five quick goals sealed the Bulldogs’ third win of the season, 20.12 (132) to 14.16 (100) and condemned Richmond to a fourth straight defeat.
So, the initial reference is to “first win” the next reference is to a “second win” and then in the article itself, it says “third win“… you’d be confused if you read all three bits of text!
If you’re wondering, the Bulldogs won in Round 1 against the Cats, lost to Adelaide in Round 2 and St Kilda in Round 3, and then have won their Round 4 game against the Tigers. So it was actually the second win of the 2007 season for the Western Bulldogs. The articles have probably now been corrected to fix the errors.
So let’s get to the business “point” to this article.
It’s about proof-reading.
Here’s two things I’ve learned about proof-reading over the years, and three good proof-reading tips…
2 things I’ve learned about proofing…
- Work created in a hurry can easily lead to errors. When the deadline is short (like the footy article posted within an hour or so from the end of the game), some of the good proof-reading steps aren’t used. It’s easy for something to slip through inadvertently (happened to me this week for creating a flyer: I had put the date in as Friday, 21st April 2007 — I’ll tell you about that in a minute!).
- It can be difficult for the person who wrote the content to spot any obvious errors, especially within minutes or hours of creating it — because what they read silently to themselves in their minds is not always what they’ve written!
Has that happened to you? It certainly happens to me — sometimes the most obvious or simple typo error creeps through! It relates to a phenomenon that probably has a number of descriptions, but one that has been psychologically described as a “mental scotoma”: a figurative mental “blind spot” — a lack of awareness about the actual words you’re reading.
Here’s an example: you silently proof read “the cat sat on the mat” when in fact you might have actually written “the cat sat of the mat”. Your mental blind spot means you can easily miss a simple error, as you’re really proof-reading your thoughts, not the actual words written down or typed on the screen!
So here’s 3 good quick proof-reading tips:
- Have someone else proof-read your work. Because they didn’t write it, chances are they will spot any errors quickly. They’re not likely to suffer the same mental scotoma as you, the author! The less urgency there is for a deadline, the more relaxed the reader will be… so the more chance they will spot errors, rather than skim in a hurry to meet your deadline.Like the footy example above, I can quickly spot errors in other people’s work. I KNOW I make errors too — but they’re harder for me to spot sometimes!
- Make sure you leave the work aside for at least 24 hours if you’re proof-reading it yourself. Chances are, you’ll see what’s written, not what you thought you wrote, because you’ve forgotten in your mind exactly what the content was!
Haven’t got 24 hours or someone else to assist? Here’s one great tip in that case: read your work BACKWARDS, from end to start. That way, you’re much more likely to be looking at the actual words, not what you think you’ve written, because the wording doesn’t flow in a normal sentence, so you can see individual words more clearly.
However, this might help pick up spelling errors, but your mind still might miss on having a correctly spelled word, but the wrong one. So ideally, you really want to either have enough time pass before you proof-read (and your work is again “fresh” in your mind) — or have someone else proof-read for you.
- If it’s really important, have someone else read aloud to you the work. If you read it to them, you might skip over errors for the reasons described. But if they read it to you, you’re forcing them to verbalise the actual written words, and you can both listen for errors.
Back to the flyer example I mentioned.
I’d written the date incorrectly as “Friday, 21st April 2007″ — when it should have been the 20th. And I wrote the flyer on the 18th, so only 2 days before the actual date! (And in only 1 of 2 months in 2007 with a “Friday the 13th” which should make Friday 20th more mentally obvious!).
I didn’t see the error straight away (in a hurry, VERY short deadline). My client (both her and a staff member) also missed on this error — again, proofing in a hurry to give us approval to print the flyer. It wasn’t until the next morning, when another person read the flyer (not in a hurry), and they spotted the date error almost instantly, because a family member’s birthday was on Saturday 21st April — so they knew instantly the date was wrong and pointed it out.
Thankfully, we caught the error in time and the flyer was given to our client to send out to her database with the correct date.
Usually, I check dates and matching weekdays during artwork creation. I have a little business card size calendar next to my monitor. However, in a hurry, racing to a deadline, it was easy to overlook the typo. Actually, our client said she wasn’t too worried (the flyer made it clear in other places that the sale started on the Friday, not the Saturday) — and she would have sent out the incorrect version anyway (better to get the flyer out to clients for an urgent retail sale than to miss out altogether) — however, to help protect her business reputation (and to avoid confusion) we’d rather get it right and not have the error!
Having said that — I read a very interesting section this week in Kevin Hogan’s book The Science of Influence: How to Get Anyone to Say “Yes” in 8 Minutes or Less!