Deployment takes a huge toll on military members and their families. When troops leave their families at home while they travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles away and often into hostile territory, their loved ones often face unanticipated financial demands that can’t be resolved through existing means.

That’s why, for the fifth consecutive year, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Foundation is partnering with participating Burger King® Restaurants to raise funds for the VFW’s Unmet Needs Program. The Unmet Needs Program helps to meet the basic, essential needs of troops and their families such as:

“Burger King® Franchisees continue to do wonderful work for America’s military families,” said VFW Foundation Director John Lowe. “The VFW Unmet Needs program helps military families in their greatest times of financial need, and it is through the support of great companies such as Burger King® and their wonderful patriotic customers, that we are able to provide such great assistance.”

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.

In the ongoing search to find the next big idea to take our marketing performance to new heights, we can be forgiven for occasionally going overboard. This is especially true at a time when CMOs are among the most expendable members of the C-suite.

A study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart reported that CMOs’ tenure has averaged 22.9 months, compared with 53.8 months for CEOs. And just 14% of top-brand CMOs have been with their present company more than three years, vs. 50% who’ve been on the job for less than a year.

Clearly the CMO position is under intense scrutiny and is a volatile post at best. So in that headlong rush to find “the” way to keep business growing, our clawing fingernails may tend to hang on to whatever looks like the best chance to keep the bottom line on the upswing.

Is this the case with the trend to “personalize” everything? Clearly, personalization has shown significant value in a variety of marketing vehicles. But like everything else, it eventually has a saturation point.

Does simply slapping my name on a direct mail piece and referring me to a personalized URL guarantee success? Of course not. Just as with e-mail, which has clearly reached nearly laughable status in terms of over-personalization (“Grant Johnson, Now Get a Full Head of Hair!”), we’re beginning to see the same kind of overuse emerging across the marketing spectrum.

We need to remember that it’s customers — not us — who define what’s relevant and decide the channels through which they want to receive our brilliant marketing messages.

Is the short-term success of personalization sustainable, or are we better off using traditional direct marketing techniques such as face-to-face contacts and telephone calls?

I vote for the latter. Marketers need to use traditional DM methods in prospecting rather than just relying on personalized e-mails to do that essential task in an attempt to shortcut testing.

It can be annoying for consumers to receive mailings from a company or organization they don’t know that acts like it’s known them for years. It’s one thing to buy or rent a list with my name on it, but I’d rather you wait to be my buddy until I’ve purchased something from you, or requested information and defined the relationship parameters. Otherwise it’s just another version of that anonymous person calling on the phone and greeting you with “Grant, how are you doing today?” long before getting around to saying who he or she is, and what they want from me.

Let the target audience define how it wants to be marketed to and via what channels, then test various offers and messaging platforms based on that data to gauge results.

Want examples of marketers that know this to be true, and are the leaders in their respective segments? Look no further than:

•Starbucks : How I want my coffee is different from the way you want yours.

•Harley-Davidson: How I customize my bike is different from the way you do it.

•Apple: The music on my iPod is different from yours.

What makes these three brands the best? Personal relevance. They each seem to understand that their products are that much better because each user can make them their very own.

It might help to recall valuable, hard-earned lessons from marketing’s past whenever we consider using personalization: telemarketing (do-not-call legislation); e-mail (overuse and spam that’s negatively affected response and its use in prospecting); and misguided direct mail that inundates our mailboxes (think quality, not quantity, please!).

Is personalization a bad thing? No. But we need to let our customers and prospects tell us how to proceed.

They may say they love personalization; they might show us that there can be too much of a good thing; or they could decide that the answer is somewhere in between. The important thing is to pay attention and look at customers and prospects as the drivers of our continuing efforts.

Remember “The customer is always right?” It’s never been more true than it is today as we move into the world of new media. Keep testing and keep listening to your customers. Your reward will be long-term success, not just short-term spikes in response.

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

Happy Monday to you!

Today, March 1st, 2010, Johnson Direct turns 11-years-old. We could not have achieved this milestone without great clients like you. So, thank you!

Back on March 1st, 1999 my dream was to build a multi/cross-channel marketing communications agency that focused on results. Real, honest-to-goodness marketing that is measurable, testable and helps boost your bottom-line. One built on the premise of on-going testing and discovery from controlled successes and failures which leads to breakthrough marketing results.

Being strategically creative rather than simply producing “killer creative” really DOES make a huge difference. Testing through our exclusive Direct Branding process is the end result. Because of you we have refined our process and continue to see improved results.

Thank you for allowing me to help you reach your goals and for turning my dream into a reality.

A funny thing does happen when you really partner with clients, strive for continuous improvement and look out for their best interests. You grow. You get referrals and the word gets out that the marketing you are doing is indeed working. Yes, even with the economic downturn we are helping clients get great, measurable results.

It’s an unbelievable feeling when you prove that marketing can still lift sales. The proof is the “thank you” emails, calls and letters and, of course, referrals I continue to receive.

Of course, we are always looking for more client partnerships, so if you know anyone who needs to add measurability to their marketing, please have them call me.

In closing, I am proud of our work together and for the partnership we have created. I look forward to another 11 years of increased marketing ROI with you.

Sincerely,

Grant Johnson

This month’s issue of Inside Direct Mail features Grant Johnson, founder and CEO of Johnson Direct, a multichannel direct marketing agency based in Brookfield, WI.  The article asks an “all star round-table” of direct mail experts what their take is on the future of direct mail.  To see what Grant had to say, read the article here.  For more information on how Johnson Direct can help you deliver measurable results, visit our website at JohnsonDirect.com.

-Anthony Piwarun

I just wrote a piece for Chief Marketer’s e-centric newsletter on testing offers in emerging media channels. Here’s the piece.

As your marketing spend gets scrutinized even more in this economy, this article provides sage advice and affordable tests to conduct using e-communications. I hope it helps lift your ROMI!

Grant A. Johnson

If you haven’t already noticed, www.JohnsonDirect.com and our Marketing That’s Measurable blog have both undergone a make-over. The renovated site and blog both continue to showcase Johnson Direct’s focus on measurable marketing. So … what’s new? Why the change?

To celebrate our 10th anniversary this month, Johnson Direct has introduced a new logo identity. The new site reflects the new identity and provides our visitors the info they most desire (according to web analytics and survey results): 1) About JD, 2) Work (creative samples), 3) Case Studies (detailed success stories), 4) Services and 5) Contact.

We’ve moved all content that requires constant updating – like JD in the News and our monthly eNews archive – to new pages on this blog site.

I personally hope you contact me to let me know what YOU think about the new site and blog in terms of design AND content.

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

A friend asked a good question that is very pertinent in today’s economy: “How do you position your marketing in a recession?” I have some opinions, based upon real world experiences that might be helpful.

Make sure you focus on customer service and retention FIRST. To create raving fans you need to prove that you care about your customers. If you do that, when you go to them and ask for additional business, referrals and testimonials, they will be more than happy to help. I would say that far too many companies, even in this economy, assume that their customers will stick with them. Don’t assume. Actions speak volumes over words.

Do something unexpected for your best customers. Send them a card, coupon or email. Better yet, pick up the handset in the box with the buttons and call to simply say “thanks.” You’ll likely be surprised by the reaction. They will be stunned. Sell Value and Change Positioning

People are looking for deals. How you position them will have a major impact on results. You need to sell VALUE to succeed in these tough times, so do it. *With increased economic pressure comes anxiety. Understand this. Doing so means relying less on emotional creative approaches and more on logical, rational creative executions. Use more numbers, facts, data and the like to appeal to the left brain with your marketing. Watch what happens to results.

Finally, test, test and test some more. It will get you to relevancy faster than anything else. If you read this blog on a semi-regular basis you are likely sick of hearing this. But now is when you can truly gain market share, goodwill and sales. It’s no mistake that two of the companies who are doing well now test a ton: Amazon and Netflix. This should be a lesson to all who think that testing is too expensive, don’t have the time or think that their marketing is doing fine without it. My experience helping companies market through several recessions prove that these tips work. Give me a call at 1-800-710-2750 and let’s talk and see if I can help.

Grant A. Johnson

Johnson Direct LLC

1-800-710-2750