Yaffe Tidbits

What if you spent $12 million in direct marketing and nobody came?

Imagine you are a $2 billion retailer who’s realized you were wasting 20% of your $60 million direct marketing budget because the mail wasn’t getting to the right customer. They essentially were spending $12 million with no return on that investment. That’s a case study that was presented at the annual CRM Conference I attended in Chicago recently. Another case study focused on a large retailer’s problems with email marketing. In fact, many retailers were complaining about revenues being down. That shouldn't surprise anyone in today's economy. But one presenter talked about revenue from loyal customers actually being up. That's also a trend we’ve been seeing consistently over this last year with our furniture clients.

No matter how big or small the company, we are all victims of flawed business strategies at some time. Success is all about recognizing and correcting them, like the $2 billion retailer I mentioned above did. What’s not surprising, is that it took an outsider to do it. It's sometimes hard to see the faults in your own plan or program when you're too close to it. That’s why consultants like us exist.

The other big topic at CRMC was social media. Guru Jay Dunn from Lane Bryant talked about it as "the end of the freakin' world." Like with most technology-driven media, consumers are ahead of the marketers. And what’s scary is that by the time we think we’re catching up, the consumer’s moved on. One of the basic tenets of social media is people follow people they find interesting. So you’ve got to make it interesting. Look at what Sea World's doing and you’ll know what I mean.

While social media is still a relatively unproven marketing tool, there is an ability to experiment with it rather cheaply. Social media is a tool that augments your marketing, it’s not a strategy. You need a purpose behind it. Some others that are using the medium well are Dell, Comcast and Starbucks. We like it from the direct marketing standpoint, because it’s trackable and measureable. For more on this go to the supergroup ning page

Michael Morin, EVP,Yaffe Direct

 

Keep Your Mind Wide Open: Everything Out There is Fair Game

With everything that’s going on these days, some say the system is broken. Others say it’s going through growing pains to evolve into something else. Whatever your perspective, it may be time to take another look at whatever your current system is. Looking at it from “outside” the system one can observe some very interesting characteristics “in” the system, especially with issues that can really stunt your company’s growth and adaptation to the media revolution that is taking place.   When you operate “outside” the system the perspective is always on solving the problem without being hampered by the old adage, “we’ve always done it this way before.”   Routine can be dangerous and even deadly if strictly followed.  Whatever systems were in place before may not necessarily be the most masterful guides for the present, and valuable opportunities can be overlooked.

Today’s communication is all about “thinking globally and communicating locally”.   National advertisers may need to use different, more localized channels for creating more personalized relationships with their customers.   This means building a local network of national coverage.  You have got to burrow through the blanket of national distribution in order to create the sense of intimacy. 

In this day there should be no general sweeping dictates about how media is used.  Each situation really warrants its own analysis.  With the myriad of tools we have, coupled with endless options of distribution channels available, you won’t keep up if you don’t stay open to everything viable.

What’s viable? Anything works in new media that is informative, engaging, entertaining, respectfully speaks up to your customer or makes your brand look smart,  charitable, honest, cool or just plain fun.  In this brave new world of engagement, the brand becomes organic and that attracts a consumer’s attention. The more nimble you are, the better you hear and respond to what people REALLY want. 

Look for those golden opportunities that set you apart from the crowd.  Keep your ear to the ground and remember, everything is Fair Game

Joan Abraham, Digital Account Executive

What Makes Seth Godin So Smart?

I’ve read 3 or 4 books written by Seth Godin and liked them a lot. I have seen him speak several times and found his speeches witty and captivating. I read his blog almost every day. I’m on the email list. Heck, before he was really famous I even met him and shook his hand. We had a cup of coffee together. Well at least we were both holding coffee cups as we met in passing in a crowded hallway. Way back then (almost 9 years ago) he was preaching from the gospel of permission based marketing. Talk about being ahead of the curve!

He still stands at that pulpit on a regular basis. However, more often than not he seems to be branching out into other topics and areas. I enjoy all of these for several reasons. I think first and foremost he writes about self reliance. A recent post of his titled Graduate school for unemployed college students gave all of those recent college grads who haven’t been able to find a job some really great advice about what to do about their situation now. Rather than bemoaning the current state of the job market and settling for something to just tide them over (which is great as long as you’re doing more than just that).

In another post, Slack, he writes;

“A lot of corporations have seen dramatic decreases in revenue and have cut back projects as well. In many cases, this is accompanied by layoffs, and so everyone is working far harder.

But in other organizations, and for a lot of freelancers, there's more time than work. In other words,slack time.

Assume for a moment you don't have money to develop and launch something new. So, what are you going to do with the slack?”

 

Not to steal the thunder in case you want to read his post the 2 suggestions are; Learn something new and earn a following and reputation.

Whether you are a employed, unemployed or freelance, these are simply invaluable and smart nuggets of wisdom.

Mike Morawski

Chief Development Office

Are you feeding your website enough?

Is your company website saying what you want it to say? Is it different from your competitors? How does your industry as a whole fare in the corporate website realm? The answers probably depend on who you ask and when. Unlike a print ad, a TV spot or even your company's vision statement a website isn't something you make and then you're done. It's a living, breathing organism that needs to adapt to the rapidly changing environment around it. If it's not, it's probably dead in a year tops. Like that sturdy goldfish your kid has had forever, you do need to actually feed it once in awhile or it won't keep on going. And the fact that you've let it die is probably saying something about you that you don't want to be telling potential clients.

What brought this on? Yesterday I saw two completely different takes on agency and marketing websites. First, I saw probably the most innovative and fresh take I've ever seen in an agency web page. It was an agency that put it's whole website on YouTube. It consisted of a series of fun, interactive videos that were pretty edgy compared to the standard "business" fodder you see, even by ad agency standards. My favorite part was their agency vision, which was just a :30 video of a cat playing the keyboard. You can check it out  here.

The second was a blog poston how all agencies are terrible at creating their own websites. It talked about the sea of sameness and lack of understanding of the digital realm. Some of her comments were dead on. Some were a bit off base. I caused a lively discussion in her comments section.

The truth is, in every industry, including ours, there's great websites, awful websites and a whole bunch in between. It's an area that you can't just do it once and forget about it. In our own case, we have multiple websites that accomplish this objective to varying degrees. The corporate websitewas created in the very early 2000's and although the look holds up well, it has many of the sins of websites who haven't been feed often enough. It's built in flash, so you can't find it well through search. It isn't easily updated and needs an overhaul. And we're in the process of taking away the dead body and building one we can sustain better. The microsites we created for Yaffe Directand a Yaffe Groupportal to it fare better. Our news and information site, Yaffe Tidbitswas created to be one we can feed often and fares much better. Our Yaffe/Deutsersite has a new version debuting soon.

How is your website faring? Have you created it so the care and feeding is easy? Do you feed it at all? To get the most out of it, you need to put something into it on a regular basis. I'd like to know how many of you have living, breathing sites and how many are on life support.

Mike McClure, Exec Creative Director