Want to get better results from your email campaigns? Why not try telling a compelling story?

Yes, the list and offers you make are important to your success, but so are copy platforms and how you present the information you want to convey. But why test a story?

Marketers may not always put the topic of storytelling at the top of their to-do list, but they should. Storytelling, in this context, is the art of telling an emotional and compelling story in e-mail, or other advertising medium, to effectively convey a call to action that sells a product or service, or gains a donation from the recipient.

Stories engage people because they are entertaining, allow the recipient to relate and connect with the characters, draw on emotion and can lead the reader to a conclusion and often do a better job of being genuine and relevant. And in today’s over-communicated media landscape, when consumers tend to be more entertainment-oriented than ever, stories might be just what your email correspondence needs to lift your ROMI.

Psychologically, we also tend to remember stories. The Bible is based on stories. So are fairytales, most children’s books, many great songs, movies, plays and TV plots. “What’s the storyline” in news and sports? If it’s compelling we tend to migrate to it, or at least pay more attention. A story helps you break through the clutter.

Storytelling is more commonly used in long form, one-step emails where the products or services have a high price point, but even these marketers could benefit by telling different, more compelling stories to move their wares.

By incorporating storytelling in your efforts, you are really taking a back to the basics approach to your marketing. For centuries, the world’s greatest teachers and leaders have used stories to more successfully communicate with people and motivate them to take action. In direct mail, e-mail’s marketing cousin, you may have seen some of the top-performing storytelling direct mail packages, including those from The Wall Street Journal, Time-Life, Rodale Inc., Covenant House, Greenpeace, Nightingale-Conant and National Wildlife Federation, among many others. You continue to see them for one very simple reason: they work. That’s another reason to test this approach in e-mail.

A good story is something the recipient can read easily and which effectively touches that something inside of them that urges them to take action. We can relate better to stories.

Let me give you an example. Imagine turning the this Omaha Steaks email into a story.

The sender might say, “How I saved 67% and used the savings to make my party even better…”

Look at another example here.

In this case, some compelling, credible stories could be featured on how the books above helped changed a mindset and were critical to the reader’s newfound success. It will be relevant to many of the recipients and will likely work better than shouting savings. Heck, you could even keep the savings and tell the stories.

A few guidelines to follow include not fabricating a story – the more real and true-to-life the better the results typically are, the more detail you provide, the more credible the story will be,  and be on the lookout for new stories all the time. They are like testimonials on steroids for your marketing.

Go ahead, pump up your e-mail marketing with storytelling starting today. Then, share your story with me and all of us at Johnson Direct.

You may be among the many businesses and organizations that completely ignore the enormous opportunity to connect with its customers and most viable prospects via email. When executed professionally, a relevant and regular email program will keep your brand and solutions front-of-mind among key influencers and decision makers, making it easier than ever for your company to be in the right place at the right time.

Here’s the rub …
A professional, proactive and well-planned email program requires time and resources, and that’s where many organizations can’t make a commitment. With so many marketing channels to manage and fewer resources to work with, marketing and sales departments are in REACTIVE mode, dealing with the most urgent promotional requests and opportunities first and setting everything else on the backburner.

Here’s the solution …
Johnson Direct’s Interactive Team has all the resources and expertise required to build an ongoing email marketing program AND execute it for you. That means we’ll create the proactive plan, we’ll develop the on-brand creative and templates, we’ll develop the editorial schedule and write each issue’s content, we’ll produce the monthly or quarterly issues, we’ll manage the subscriber databases (and help you build them up or build them from scratch), we’ll distribute each issue, and we’ll track and analyze each issue’s results.

It’s really that simple. But don’t just take our word for it! Johnson Direct provides full-service email marketing for VFW and its She Serves outreach. Here’s what they have to say about the program we built for them from scratch:

“From day one, we’ve been very impressed with the email marketing campaign Johnson Direct has created for our She Serves outreach and has been maintaining for us for over 18 months. The outstanding results have enlightened us and continue to fuel our investment in additional online marketing efforts. The Johnson Direct team has put forth the highest level of strategic counsel, creativity and dedication.”

Matt Claussen, National Director for Membership, Veterans of Foreign Wars

An ExactTarget Partner
While Johnson Direct’s team is able to employ any email marketing platform our clients’ prefer (we’re well-versed in many tools like Silverpop, Benchmark and Vertical Response), ExactTarget is Johnson Direct’s preferred emarketing platform.Named “leader of the pack” by Forrester Research against the top 14 email marketing service providers, ExactTarget is the tool we use to power our full-service email marketing clients’ campaigns with personalized, targeted messages that drive engagement and ROI. Even at peak sending times, your mission-critical messages will always reach your subscribers. And with an average system up-time of 99.99%, you’ll never have to worry about lost revenue or productivity. ExactTarget’s prestigious deliverability reputation truly sets them apart in the industry, and there’s no message we can’t deliver.

Don’t Ignore this Tremendous Marketing Channel
If you could effortlessly reach out to your target audiences on a monthly basis with ultra-relevant messages and a strong call-to-action, would you? And, how much value would you assign to that high-quality ongoing communication? If you’re like the marketers we know, the answers to these questions are “YES!” and “PRICELESS!”

Together, you and your Johnson Direct team can plan, build and manage an ongoing email marketing program to build relationships, loyalty and trust among your customers and most viable prospects. Here’s what you need to know:

• Johnson Direct can typically have a new campaign hitting your subscribers’ inbox within a few weeks of our kick-off meeting.
• For a brand-new, build-it-from-scratch, FULL-SERVICE 12-month enewsletter campaign, the average client budgets $6,500 to $15,000 per month.
• You provide the subject matter and experts and our interactive strategists, data specialists, copywriters, designers and producers do the rest.

Don’t wait another minute to get your messages in front of your most valuable target audiences on a regular basis. Contact Johnson Direct now: 800.710.2750 or info@johnsondirect.com.

There’s an electrifying feeling of excitement here at Johnson Direct today. That’s because we’ve launched a brand new website for the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ female veteran outreach initiative, www.JoinSheServes.org.

We partnered with the VFW in 2008 to develop the She Serves program, and this is actually a second generation web presence for She Serves. The makeover is significant. In fact, anyone who’s been to the original site, may not recognize it at first.

Primarily a recruitment tool, the new She Serves website makes it easy for prospective female veteran members to grasp the real benefits of VFW membership. Not only that, it guides veterans through the application process showing them exactly how to sign up online as a member-at-large. With sisterhood and camaraderie at its core, the website speaks to female veterans of every generation, urging them to become an active member in the nation’s largest combat veterans’ organization.  Furthermore, the site is easy to navigate and gives visitors swift access to the news that matters most to female veterans.

The level of research, strategy and planning that went into the 2010-2011 She Serves marketing program and this website is off the charts. We can’t wait to report on the results of our collaboration with the VFW! Stay tuned …

Denise B. Hearden
eMarketing Director
denise.hearden@johnsondirect.com

Over the years, Facebook has evolved from a “yearbook” of sorts for college students to a full-fledged, 400 million user strong social networking site. As any marketing and advertising professional would tell you, the possibility of members from your target market having a Facebook account is relatively high. Luckily for you, Facebook’s advertising platform is easy to use and offers an analytics dashboard to help you track and measure your investment. If you are interested in advertising your brand on Facebook, then this guide is for you. Follow these easy steps and you will be advertising your brand on Facebook and seeing results in no time.

Identify Your Goals

Before creating your ad, targeting you should first think about what you want to accomplish. Some goals we’ve seen in the past include generating revenue, increasing cost per sale, or simply promoting your brand by maximizing visibility. It’s important to think about what you hope to gain so you can accurately measure your return and decide if it’s worth the time and resources.

Design and Develop

Ad Copy and Creative- After you think about what you’d like to accomplish by advertising on Facebook, it’s time to create the ad itself. Facebook advertisements are located in the far right hand column of the screen after navigating away from the newsfeed. Ads are composed of a headline, copy and imagery to go with your theme. Imagery should be compelling and on-topic. It’s strongly suggested that in any type of online advertising, you use a creative featuring a person’s headshot- they tend to perform better than an object or lesser-known brand logo. In terms of copy, the titles can be 25 characters in length and the body copy of the ad can be 135 characters. It’s best to keep your copy short and to the point – let the imagery you choose do the talking.

Landing Page- After clicking on your compelling, well-written advertisement, the user is taken to a landing page where they will decide whether or not they will buy your product. Facebook ads can link to either a Fan Page or an external website. After managing the online ad campaigns for numerous clients, we’ve found that an external, campaign-specific landing page outperforms linking to your brand’s Fan Page. Taking that into consideration, it’s important to keep brand messaging consistent between the creative and the landing page. If your ad uses a logo or object as imagery, add it to your landing page so the user doesn’t feels confident that they clicked on the right advertisement.

Target Your Audience

One of the many useful features of the Facebook advertising platform is the ability to target your advertising to specific segments. On Facebook, it’s possible to target:

The ability to target your audience using this much detail makes advertising as effective, or even more effective, than PPC or traditional online display advertising. With a well thought out goal (remember step one?) and proper targeting, you’ve already qualified traffic to your landing page.

Define Cost Structure

Defining goals, developing effective creative, and targeting your audience is nothing new. It’s been done since the beginning of advertising and is a standard procedure when launching any new campaign. Where advertising on Facebook, or anywhere online for that matter, differs from traditional media buying, however, is in the cost structure. There are two ways to manage your ad spend when running media on Facebook:

• Cost Per Click- You pay every time a user clicks on your advertisement. It doesn’t matter whether your ad was served 100 times or 1 million times, you only pay for every click.
• Cost Per Impression- You pay for a set number of impressions, or, ad views. This is measured in multiples of 1,000 and is called a CPM or “cost per million” ad spend.

Choosing a price structure that’s right for you is critical to the success of your campaign. If your goal is to increase brand recognition and don’t have any commercially-tied reason to drive traffic to your landing page other than to promote your name, choosing a CPM model would be the most cost effective. If, however, your success is measured by the number of sales you get via the landing page, starting off with CPC and calculating return would be well-advised.

Launch, Measure, and Repeat

After deciding which cost structure is best suited to your goal, it’s time to launch. Run your ad and regularly monitor it using the dashboard under the “Ads and Pages” tab. Here, you’ll get detailed information on metrics such as bid cost, the number of clicks, average cost-per-click, and more. Narrow down your dashboard by selecting monthly, weekly, or even daily statistics, and dig deeper by exporting reports into csv format and analyzing historical trends.

After running your ad for a few days, tweak the copy or swap the image and run both ads to find a winner. Running split tests will enable you to find out what works, and what doesn’t work for your audience. If you notice a positive return with advertising on Facebook, keep in mind the fact that users may get used to your ads after several impressions. Remember, marketing is an iterative process, and creativity is king so we always urge our clients to be constantly tweaking their advertisements even after they’ve found one that works.

Lisa Robbins
Multichannel/Direct Marketing
lisa.robbins@johnsondirect.com

Feeding the continuous improvement process is the key to search and content marketing success.

Writing and distributing content on the web is as much a science as it is a form of art. Back in high school, we all learned the importance of having a methodology – a series of steps or processes – to follow in order to ensure what we were doing was logical and most importantly, repeatable. Whether you’re looking to increase online sales, generate leads, increase customer retention, or simply create a presence for your company or brand, following a set of steps will help you create compelling content to meet or exceed your goals.

At Johnson Direct, Direct Branding™ is the approach we’ve created to deliver Marketing that’s Measurable. This proven process drives our strategic recommendations and plans — energizing the work we do, from advertising to website development and everything in between. Applying Direct Branding to our clients’ search engine optimization efforts is no exception.

THE FACTS: Search engine optimization is the process of developing and optimizing content to rank and perform better on searches via Google, Yahoo! and Bing. A recent Forester Research study showed that 93% of all web traffic is generated through search engines. Furthermore, a 2010 B2B Online survey showed a projected 57% increase in budgets for “content marketing” making now the best time to throw your hat in the ring and compete on search.

Direct Branding + Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Direct Branding™ is at the core of any traditional or interactive marketing solution offered by Johnson Direct. Whether your organization decides to work with us to improve organic search rankings or not, we advise anyone looking to boost web traffic to take a closer look at our approach.

The process in planning search engine optimization and content marketing differs little from that of other marketing strategies and tactics – it deserves a strong, persistent commitment in time, resources and energy to produce results.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of the 5-step process, inspired by Direct Branding, brought to you by the interactive team at Johnson Direct.

1. Fact-based Analysis

SEO / Content Audit: The first step in finding a solution should always be to first define the problem. Whether your issue is stagnant or decreased search traffic, page four rankings, or the inability to track and measure your investment in online marketing, it’s necessary to pop the hood and take a look at what you’re currently doing. Take a look at everything from your sites architecture and navigational structure to the copy on your pages to make sure everything is up to par.

Keyword Analysis: More often than not, we find that our clients don’t have a grasp of their target market. Sure, they may think they know what their users are searching for and where they go to search but unless you look at past results and go through the process of research it’s a shot in the dark. The key is to use a variety of resources, not just one, from keyword research tools to market intelligence. Using a variety research tools will limit the chance of error and give you a better idea of who is visiting your site.

Competitive Analysis: Equally as important as defining your problem and a path of improvement is knowing what you’re up against. Often times, your traditional competitors are not the same as your online competition. Using keyword research and analysis, it’s easy to find out what strategies your top competitors are employing to outperform you in search. Strategic competitive analysis levels the playing field and allows you to compete – even if they have a bigger budget.

2. Branding / Marketing Strategies

The heart of a search engine optimization and content marketing strategy lies in strategy development. When working with our clients, everything is pulled together – SEO best practices, content development suggestions, keyword placement, link building techniques and viral marketing strategy – and rolled up into an easy to understand report so you can be well on your way to improving your visibility in search.

3. Build Program Components

If you read any interactive marketing, SEO, or copywriting blogs, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “content is king” thousands of times. To be honest, it is. Having the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is one thing but actually developing copy that plays to both your audience AND the search engines is another. Careful planning and cross-departmental collaboration is vital to the success of your content. It doesn’t make sense to have your web developer write your call-to-action or for your PR rep to set up Google Analytics, right? Play to your team members’ strengths and collaborate to produce end results that drive traffic (and revenue) through the roof.

4. Execute Tests & Campaigns

Whether you decide to implement your search engine optimization strategies in-house or utilize our experienced professionals to do it for you, the execution phase is where the magic happens.  By following the step by step process outlined in the recommendations report, you will be able to improve the efficiency of your current content and build a foundation of knowledge for future development.

5. Track & Measure

Everything done up to this point is useless without a method of measuring the results. To do this, we’ll optimize your web analytics and implement conversion tracking and goal funnels if you already have an analytics platform. If you don’t already have one, there are both free and premium solutions so you can track performance and assign value to your investment.

Continuous Improvement

We consider search engine optimization an interactive and ongoing process. A lot of marketers go through the steps of improving a process, see positive results, and call it a day. SEO, and any interactive marketing initiative for that matter, requires constant monitoring so you can see improvements as they happen and tweak for further improvements.

Why Johnson Direct?

Johnson Direct is not an interactive shop. We are an experienced, results-oriented full service marketing agency providing our clients with solutions that are proven to increase ROI. By working with a full service agency to deliver interactive solutions, you are choosing to partner with a firm that has a complete grasp of your goals and objectives to form a holistic marketing strategy, be it via interactive or traditional means.

Like anything else in marketing, search engine optimization is an “all-hands-on-deck” process. Involvement is required from all departments – marketing, copywriting, design, web development, and even public relations. Partnering with a multi-channel marketing leader like Johnson Direct will ensure that your search strategy is seamlessly integrated with your other campaigns and organizational goals.

If you’re interested in learning more about our experience in search engine optimization and content marketing, contact us today and speak with one of our interactive marketing pros to learn more about how we can help.

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Early last week Facebook changed the ever-popular “Become a Fan” button to “Like”. According to social networking giant, the change was made to “improve your experience and promote consistency across the site.” The “consistency” they’re referring to is the ability to “like” a friend’s status update, uploaded picture, comment on another friend’s wall, or advertisement on the site.

This is what the changes look like now, using the Johnson Direct “Like” page as an example:

While promoting consistency is almost always a good thing, Facebook’s change to their fan system has caused a great deal of headaches to agencies and end-users alike. Here are some reasons why the change may be a bad thing for business:

1. Loss of a Branded Term- Prior to launching the Fan Box last July, nobody associated “Become a Fan” with an online entity. Being a fan was simply liking an artist, team, actor, etc. and being actively interested in what they were doing. When Facebook launched the Fan Box, they essentially branded the term and every television, radio, print, and online advertiser with a Fan page added that slogan to their copy.  Changing “Become a Fan” to “like” took away that everyday term from association with the social network.
2. Frenzied Ad Agencies- Working on the ad agency side, I can only tell you in so many ways, without using NSFW terms, how it negatively impacts client campaigns. First there’s the past collateral- what happens to everything out there now that our clients paid good money for? This could be problematic; especially for the small company that doesn’t have money budgeted for print in Q1 or Q2. Ads that are currently in production need to be put on hold, and both the creative and the marketing teams need to go back to the drawing board increasing the amount of time and resources used by both parties.
3. Confused End Users- People don’t like change, especially when it comes to how they use the internet. Every time a client comes to Johnson Direct for a redesign of their website, SEO consultation or anything dealing business-to-consumer marketing, we take a look at how it affects user experience. Having a product or website that brings value to the user is great, but if they get confused about how to use it you have a huge problem. In this case, changing “Become a Fan” to “like” may associate “liking” a status, photo or advertisement to “liking” a company, band or product when they are, according to Facebook, entirely different. For an example, take a look at this post about how a top-ranked ReadWriteWeb article confused users Googling “Facebook login”. I think I’ve made my point!

As time passes we’ll know for sure if this was a good or bad move on the part of Facebook. In the short term it will hurt the ad agencies and small companies with ads in the works but who knows- maybe we’ll make up for it with increased conversions from users mistakenly clicking on our Facebook ads because they thought they were “liking” the company!

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com

Recent media coverage about how healthcare reform is encouraging marketers in the health insurance industry to shift their way of marketing begs the question … Why now?  If an insurer hasn’t recognized the need to become consumer-friendly in the past, is it realistic to think it would now just because the legislation is creating greater demand? Will those insurers that have already been consumer-minded in their marketing have a leg-up on the competition post-reform?

Here are several health insurance industry trends prompted by healthcare reform reported recently by DMNews in “Reform spurs changes in health marketing”:

• People are usually uninsured because of their economic situation, so (insurers) are going to have to be sympathetic and targeted about how we message these consumers.
• Health insurance plans need to become much more like retail products …
• (Health insurance plans) need to be more targeted when they are released in the marketplace.
• (Health insurance companies) will be marketing (complicated plans with diverse options) in easier-to-understand ways.
• Health insurance companies will also emphasize retaining existing customers.
• (Insurers) should take time to educate consumers through online channels, that is where consumers are going to get information.
• Healthcare companies will also have to understand their customers better than they have in the past.
• (Healthcare companies) need to recognize (consumers) to start to understand what motivates them …
• It is going to become much more about word-of-mouth and digital …

Doesn’t it strike you as curious that these are trends being reported just now as becoming en vogue?

It seems logical that if health insurers had been thinking about the consumer before healthcare reform, they’d be in great shape post-reform. As a full service marketing agency, we work with a lot of health insurance companies here at Johnson Direct. For more than a decade, we’ve been advising on and delivering campaigns that address the consumers’ needs, breaking-down the complicated options and convoluted jargon in a way that leaves them with a clear path to the right decision for their personal situation.

No, it’s not always an easy pill for our insurance clients to swallow. “Doing it right” can require a bit more time and budget than “just doing it.” And yes, often, to fight for our targeted consumer audiences we have to prove our case in front of our fiscally-minded clients. To do this, we use fact-based research and best practices in presenting our strategies … rationale that convinces our client to educate and guide the consumer toward his/her decision through multiple touch points and channels that make him/her comfortable and confident with his/her choice.

CASE IN POINT: A client recently asked Johnson Direct to produce a website for a new individual health insurance product. The site would enable consumers with no coverage or sub-par coverage to enroll online. The site was to include up to 5 pages of product information and an online enrollment process. However, Johnson Direct’s proven approach to creating insurance marketing that’s truly consumer friendly and direct response driven, the website ultimately grew to 12 pages all guiding qualified consumers toward the simple, 3-step enrollment engine.

While gently walking visitors through a well-lit decision making path, we offered two distinct ways for our visitors to enroll: 1) for those who understand what they need, the ability to go directly to the product page where options are illustrated and compared in plain layman’s terms; and 2) an easy-to-navigate course that educates the consumer who is not sure where to start, leading visitors toward their options and empowering them to make the right choice for their personal situation.

Experience and dozens of case studies dictates that the additional cost to building a more consumer-friendly, robust website will pay for itself in the end. That’s because they’ll become well-educated buyers of your product; enjoy the process of confidently buying a product that can be confusing and intimidating; and perceive your brand as one that is looking out for the little guy within an industry that can be viewed as self-serving and greedy.

Ultimately I expect healthcare reform will mean much more than more customers for insurance providers. I anticipate it will mean those insurers who’ve been consumer-minded as well as those who have not will be seeking marketing counsel from agencies that are experienced in standing in the consumers’ shoes. That’ll lead them straight to Johnson Direct, and we’re happy to help.

Denise B. Hearden
eMarketing Director
denise.hearden@johnsondirect.com

*Image c/o http://org.law.rutgers.edu

Johnson Direct turned 11 yesterday and as part of our celebration we launched a landing page to showcase our expertise in one of the many services we offer: branding.

Branding is as much – if not more – a strategic and methodical process as it is a creative service. In fact, if you embark on a branding, or rebranding, initiative without the proper investment in Fact-Based Research and Strategic Planning, you’ll eventually learn that your focus on creativity and design has been wasted. And we all realize, in a down economy, a company’s shrinking marketing budget should be put to work – with measurable results and a positive ROI.

Our process, Direct Branding™, is an in-depth approach that guides organizations through “brand discovery” — taking your brand promise, products and services, values and methods under consideration. Over the past 11 years we’ve taken many clients through this process and the results have been tremendous. To view our brand identity showcase, visit DirectBrandIt.com.

Denise B. Hearden
eMarketing Director
denise.hearden@johnsondirect.com

This afternoon I was working with @denisebhearden on compiling results from a recent social media campaign we did on behalf of one of our long-standing clients when I noticed a link from a blog post in 2008 floating around the “twittersphere”. The article, originally posted on Ad Week in 2008, described how a TNS Media Intelligence/Cymphony poll showed that “agencies don’t get it”. Among the chief complaints was the agency treatment of outlets like blogs and social networks as traditional media. I hope that since social media has come such a long way in the past couple of years more agencies have come around to understanding the dynamics and power of social media. Has yours?

Johnson Direct has. We’ve produced measurable results over multiple channels for our clients, and that includes social media. If your in house team or agency is still struggling to define social media ROI , then it’s time to take control and realize that you are already behind. Playing catch-up with your competition is never an easy task and it’s about time to start looking into ways to increase your market share and in turn improve your bottom line. Johnson Direct has helped both B2B and B2C clients navigate the murky waters and make sense of social media so you can focus your resources on things that matter most to you: building and maintaining a dominant presence in your industry. After all, isn’t that why you hired an ad agency in the first place?

Anthony Piwarun
eMarketing
anthony.piwarun@johnsondirect.com