The AFP Congress: A Treat for Fundraisers and Marketers

December 7th, 2011 by Jamie Lehman

Do Fundraisers have a hunger for knowledge? The answer is an unequivocal yes if the AFP Congress, held on November 28th and 29th is any indication.

Many of Cornerstone’s Clients and friends in the fundraising industry stopped by our booth to discuss some of their challenges, share their (many) success stories from the past year and chat with us about how we can help them do more to engage new and existing donors, such as employing online fundraising services. One of the highlights of the show for Cornerstone was the presentation of our annual Canadian Fundraiser File Audit, a comprehensive review of donation trends in Canada.  If you are a Fundraiser who missed the opportunity to chat with us about this valuable piece of research please send your contact information to jlehman@cstonecanada.com and we will be pleased to send you an electronic copy. Our Audit is a valuable benchmarking tool for charities, providing vital statistics for marketing to Canadian donors.

Many of our staff also attended AFP Congress seminars as part of our commitment to continuous learning to help us maximize our value to our Clients.  Cornerstone’s Group Account Director, Ines Morcillo, commented AFP Congress was a hit this year but I believe the best was saved for last.  The closing plenary was given by Tony Elischer from THINK Consulting Solutions (www.thinkcs.org).  His session called “Futurology 2011:  Time to Reprogram Your Brain!” was a high energy, thought provoking session that definitely made us think about what we can do to change the way Canadian not-for-profits are marketing.  He believes that we should change what we know, listen to what our donors want and find creative ways to give them what they want. Reprogram our brain!  There were so many great ideas on how to market in a new way. Tony was extremely passionate in what he believes in and he encourages us all to think and find creative new solutions to raise more money.  An excellent presentation!”

Email Marketing Do’s and Don’t – B2C Subject Lines

November 21st, 2011 by Michelle Petricone

I can’t stress enough how imperative the subject line is to the success of your email campaign. Similar to a first date, a subject line needs to make a first impression that will be strong enough to open the gateway of further communication. It is the factor that decides whether the recipient opens or disregards your message altogether. It must be compelling and interesting in order to prompt the viewer to want to know more.

Don’t fall for common clichés such as “free” or “first time offered” but instead trigger an emotional reaction. A subject line that reads “I have the solution” is infinitely better than “Bad credit?”; “Bring Eyeballs to Your Blog” appears to be more interesting than “Blog Tips”. Likewise, Chicken Soup for the Soul wouldn’t have sold as many copies had it been called Great Short Stories.

There’s a simple solution to identify whether you are obtaining that emotional reaction: you must test a variety of subject lines. Testing has always been the key to direct response success, and in email its significance is amplified. For example, which subject line had the highest response, “Fortunes being made with this new invention” or “Cashing in on fortune-making trend”? Only by testing would it be possible to confirm.

Crayola Crayons tested 17 email greetings, all of which had the goal of getting people to fill out their survey. Some individuals received generic subject lines such as, “Help us help you”, other subject lines revealed an incentive, such as the possibility of a gift certificate, and then there was the simplest of simple, the subject line, “Crayola Survey”. The results were shocking.

“Crayola Survey” had the highest response rate; it nearly tripled the email marketing industry average response rate of 10 – 15%. “Crayola Survey” was such a successful subject line because Crayola included their company name in the greeting, and they had already formed a high rapport with their recipients. However, no marketer can be certain that this factor would be more influential than an offer without first putting it to the test.

Verbs, nouns, adverbs or adjectives, which part of speech increases the likelihood that emails will be read? Verbs initiate actions and reflect importance. Verbs have a greater power than nouns. Some general marketing examples are: “visit your nearest store”, “drop in at your nearest store”, and “hurry to your nearest store”. Many options exist, so your verb choice is crucial for an effective subject line.

Does safety lie in plainness? Not for email. Telling the recipient what to do helps convince that person to read beyond the subject line. For instance: “Information you should have about internet hacking schemes.”; the subject line begins with a dull, neutral noun. Consider the same message when beginning with a power verb: “Beware of internet hacking schemes”. The message doesn’t suffer with the word information missing, as beware is much more motivational.

Concentrating on verbs is usually a sound marketing decision, but even though well-chosen verbs have strength, other parts of speech are valuable as well. The typical, “How to…” catch phrase can be effective, but only if “How to…” is followed by a power verb such as win, beat or grab. Following “How to…” with be or go, can’t compete with a power-verb as a first word that demands attention.

So in closing, make a statement with your subject line that can’t be avoided and make it a priority to test them out, as you’ll never know what you might discover.

Canadian Holiday Marketing Strategies

November 8th, 2011 by Jamie Lehman

It may only be November, but for Marketers in Canada the holiday acquisition season is in full swing.

Holiday marketing strategies need to be aggressive because so many companies ramp up their spending. Here are a few things to think about when planning to market to the holiday shopper in Canada:

1) How …Think about how you plan on marketing. By combining offline and online messages, your target markets are exposed to your brand in more places. There are many media channels available to use,  including:

  1. Direct Mail - those mail boxes are not as crowded as they once were,  so use that opportunity to reach your prospects where your competitors are less likely to be.
  2. Email Marketing – many direct mail lists also have corresponding email lists. Sending a reinforcing email just before or just after your direct mail campaign has worked very well for marketers.
  3. Search Engine Marketing – make sure that your Google and Bing campaigns are updated to include holiday messaging, and landing pages are “decorated” for the season.
  4. Web Advertising – you can get your brand on the most popular sites in the world (and still target geographically) on a cost per click basis. Sites such as Facebook and YouTube have huge audiences and can be targeted by interest categories.

2) Where … If your brand spans across Canada you will want to target your market carefully based on where prospects live. Create different messaging for provinces that are experiencing higher growth such as Saskatchewan, PEI and Alberta; and for provinces that are not experiencing the same level of growth, base your message on value.

3) Who … Never miss the opportunity to learn about your prospects – make sure that your web site is equipped with Web Analytics, allowing you to measure such key indicators as:

  1. Where they were sourced (direct, pay per click, emails, etc.).
  2. How much they spent (make sure you set up Goals and Ecommerce tracking if you’re selling online).
  3. Where are you losing prospects that start and then abandon the purchase process?

Also, ask your prospects for their mobile phone number. Mobile commerce will be the next big thing.

The time for Holiday planning is now. Cornerstone is standing by with our team of marketing experts to help you execute any of your direct mail, email, web or search marketing plans!

A Night to Celebrate The Net

October 27th, 2011 by Jamie Lehman

There was no shortage of web-writing buffs at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel Monday night, all present for the third annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPA awards). The awards, celebrating the best in editorial-based online and digital publishing, were a grand finale to the first annual COPA + Digital publishing conference.

The house was packed to see host Nora Young of CBC Radio 1 and some guest presenters hand out Silver and Gold awards for a variety of categories. Among the awards was the best Consumer E-Newsletter, a gold award which went to St Joseph Media for their exciting 20 Minute Supper Club, a scrumptious dinner go-to. 20 Minute Supper Club is deployed through Cornerstone’s Email Deployment Solution. For the best Business 2 Business E-Newsletter, gold went to The Globe and Mail for ‘Wine Newsletter’ its simple, yet full bodied wine reviews.

Other big winners included, Sparksheet with seven Gold Medals, Torontoist with three Gold medals and the Toronto Star, National Post and CBC among others.

Cornerstone congratulates all of the winners and looks forward to next year!

Email Prospecting: The Anatomy of an Email Campaign

September 16th, 2011 by Michelle Petricone

Renting an email list is a simple and quick process, which can typically be executed from initial list research to email deployment within a couple of weeks.  Also, as the initial list recommendation process is similar to that of renting a direct mail list, most traditional direct mail marketers will find themselves on fairly familiar ground with email.

There are however some differences with email prospecting.  Most significantly, email privacy policies do not allow the list owners to actually release the databases to the advertiser or a third party. Instead list owners broadcast the emails on the advertiser’s behalf.  To give you a better understanding, the following will take you through the process of renting an email list and executing a campaign.

To begin, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your objectives, offer and target audience prior to contacting a list broker who can prepare a recommendation for your campaign.  If you know who you hope to reach, but are unsure of how to define your audience using the criteria available within most email databases, your broker should be able to provide insight or suggestions on how this can be done.  Once you’ve confirmed your desired target, your broker will research available lists and prepare a list recommendation for your campaign that contains a summary of suitable email lists, available quantities within your target market, and general pricing information.

Upon receipt of your feedback on the initial recommendation, the broker can then prepare a complete cost estimate based on the desired lists and budget, as well as any optional services that may be required for the campaign.  As the list owners deploy the emails on an advertiser’s behalf, it should also be noted that any test segments, personalization of the email, or other specific creative requirements should be discussed with your broker prior to obtaining an estimate, as additional fees may be incurred.

Once the estimate has been approved and your creative materials have been submitted, your broker will then arrange for the list owner to setup and send out tests for your approval.  Should the tests be approved, the list owner will proceed with the deployment on the scheduled deployment date.  However, should any changes be required, a final revised test will be sent out for approval.  Once the deployment has gone out, your broker will typically follow up several days later and submit a tracking report that summarizes the Sent and Successfully Delivered quantities, as well as Opens, Clicks, and the Clicks per Link that were obtained during your campaign.

In a nut shell, that’s all it takes to rent and deploy to an email prospecting list; although should you have any questions, your email list broker would certainly be happy to further discuss.

Online Methods to Surround your Prospects

September 8th, 2011 by Don Lange

Online Methods to Surround your Prospects

In this 2-part series Don Lange looks at one of the most successful online strategies to build your brand and generate quality leads and sales.

How do you build your brand online (and generate sales) without spending a fortune? One of the best tactics is to take advantage of a strategy that we like to call “surrounding your prospects”.

Surrounding your prospects is fundamentally a strategy that allows your messaging to be where your prospects hang out. The first step is in understanding what your prospects look like. What age range do they fall into? What are their interests? Where do they live, etc? Armed with that information you can target the demographics of your prospects in some key areas.

It starts with Google. Stats tell us that Google is the number one visited site in Canada so you need a strong presence on Google’s search engine results page. You can achieve this in 2 distinct ways. The first is by running search engine marketing campaigns that focus on keyword searches on variations of your brand name and the most important keyword phrases relevant to your product or service offerings. The second way is to ensure that your web site is optimized. Search engine optimization is an ongoing strategy that fundamentally is all about three things:

1. Ensuring that search engines truly understand what the content on each of your web pages is all about.
2. Following some established technical techniques that are considered best practice.
3. Communicating your content and message to your community in the hope that relevant web sites will link to your site – something that can be helped in a technique called SEO link building

Google also offers another unique web advertising feature called Placement Targeting. Placement Targeting leverages the fact that most web sites that accepts display advertising also includes ads that are placed through the Google AdWords platform. This means that you can easily show display ads to web sites targeted to the demographics of your prospects on a cost per click basis. The reality is that click through rates are just 0.02%. However the up-side is you can get your ads showing millions of times per month to targeted prospects at a very low cost. The exposure of your brand usually results in a very interesting phenomenon – your ads may not get clicks, however people will begin to search more for your brand name on Google!

As you can see you are already beginning to surround your prospects wherever they go! Next time we will look at how this technique can be extended to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn and to your email marketing campaigns.

Google Analytics

August 22nd, 2011 by Don Lange

Many companies have embraced Google Analytics because it is available at no cost. However because it is free a lot of companies have not invested the time to truly understand how to properly install and leverage Google Analytics.

As part of the search engine optimization process SEO’s will audit a web site’s source code. It is almost universal that we find that companies are not setting up their Google Analytics properly. Some of the most common mistakes we see include:

• Not setting up objectives and thus not measuring the success of web visits.
• Not tracking across domains properly (especially in ecommerce sites).
• Inadequate tagging.
• Poor understanding of reporting capabilities.

Google Analytics can offer a wealth of knowledge. However it is worth the investment to have it properly set up with professional Google Analytics experts.

The Importance of Link Building

July 18th, 2011 by Don Lange

Link building has a bad rap because there are so many sketchy companies offering hundreds or thousands of links at some ridiculously low rate. I wrote in an earlier blog entry how SEO has become like the new Viagra spam.

 The reality is that link building is a slow and labourious process that really is all about offering such good quality content and information on your web site that other sites will want to link to you. How do you do that? Well there are several methods that are used by reputable search engine optimization (SEO) agencies including:

  • Sending out relevant Press Releases that clearly detail any news of interest. You should hyperlink text within the press release and link back to the particular page on your web site to which it pertains.
  • Keeping the content on your site up-to-date, relevant and topical. Content should never be too static. If content on your site doesn’t change often enough then search engines won’t feel the need to index your site frequently and people won’t find your site interesting to visit (and link to).
  • Asking other sites or blogs to link to you. Not all sites will want to link to you; however if a particular affinity exists between your site and another site then by all means make contact and ask. Social media sites are good places to reach out to other web publishers.
  • Listing your site in authoritative Directories. Not all online directories are created equal. You need to research those that are credible and provide value if you have to pay for a listing.
  • Blogging. If you mention services or products that you provide within your company blog then linking contextual phrases to the proper pages on your web site provides link building. 

These are somewhat simplified. However any web site that does not currently have a search engine marketing strategy for link building could ultimately lose valuable ranking position on Google, Bing and other search engines.

Email Marketing: Do you loathe Spam? You should, as your customers certainly do.

June 23rd, 2011 by Jeff Morin

Wikipedia defines spam as sending unsolicited bulk email or electronic messages indiscriminately.  Although many consumers may not recite this definition, they would likely convey similar themes of irrelevant, impersonal and unwanted.

Although email marketing can be extremely successful for an organization, a principal question that must be asked is how to make your emails relevant and desirable to your recipients and therefore overcome any potential of your email being incorrectly perceived as spam. 

To increase the relevancy of your emails, it is recommended that you consistently segment your database to ensure that recipients only receive emails for offers that they qualify for and are likely to have an interest in.  For instance, a national retailer promoting an in-store sale at its Toronto locations should ensure that only those that reside within a reasonable driving radius from the participating locations be included within the mailing, as the offer is irrelevant to all others.  The same principal holds true for segmenting your lists by other identifiable fields, such as gender or interest areas.  Creating sub-lists and sending offers exclusively to those who have an identified or perceived interest in a specific offer will reduce the number of emails you send, but it should also result in higher conversion rates as well as a reduction in the opt-out rate of your list.

Although it’s nearly impossible to actually write a personalized email for each of your subscribers, it isn’t impossible to provide your recipients with a perceived personalized experience.  Not only can you increase the relevancy of your emails by using sub-lists, but by leveraging dynamic content you can also automatically insert specific email content based on a recipients previous purchase history, their geographic location, or any other information that exists within your database.  Including personalized content of this nature provides the opportunity to customize your offers to sell accessories and related products, or simply highlight individual products or services that are of likely interest based on a customer’s attributes or previous behaviour.  Furthermore, including basic personalization such as a greeting using the recipient’s name, including the current number/value of loyalty points that they have accumulated with your company or other similar, relevant information should increase a recipient’s engagement with and perceived value of your emails as well.

Unfortunately, despite your best efforts, some recipients may still find your emails unwanted.  There are various reasons why a recipient may choose to unsubscribe and regardless of their reason, opt-out requests must be respected.  However, there are practices that can be put in place to try and minimize the number of opt-outs you obtain.  For instance, if a recipient clicks on an opt-out link, instead of directing them to a landing page where they could only click on a “Yes” or “No” link to confirm their preference to unsubscribe, you should instead direct them to a preference page.  This preference page should allow the recipient to simply opt-out of specific types of emails or newsletters, or all of your future emails.  Also, it could permit recipients to identify their preferred time of day to receive your emails and the preferred format (HTML vs. plain text vs. mobile) that they receive.  This in turn should make the recipients more receptive to your email marketing offers and further strengthen your brand image as a respectful and conscientious e-marketer.

Email Prospecting: Don’t let appearances fool you, this is one cool tool!

May 31st, 2011 by Jeff Morin

With the immense popularity of social media and new opportunities available through mobile and other technologies, email may no longer be seen as the coolest or sexiest form of advertising available.  However, appearances aside, email still remains an extremely valuable and effective tool within an organization’s prospecting strategy.

Similar to direct mail, email prospecting allows an organization to target recipients based on various identified and often self-reported criteria.  B2B email lists can effectively target recipients based on their geography, job function, industry, or company size.  The fact that many business lists are also able to omit any generic email accounts helps to ensure that the emails are effectively being delivered to the inbox of your desired recipients and not to a general inbox.  When advertising to consumers, many lists are able to target based on a vast array of demographic and lifestyle information, such as age, income, marital status, specific interest areas, and in some cases, product usage information.  This enables you to ensure that your recipients are not only qualified and potential (or confirmed) users of your product category/service but that they will be more receptive to receiving your email as well.

The ability to easily integrate other online and offline initiatives with an email campaign is one of email marketing’s true strengths.  Not only is a recipient able to conveniently complete your desired action online – such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter – but they can also easily access your organization’s other online forums by including a link to your social media pages within the email.  You can also help to expand the reach of your campaign by encouraging the recipients to post the content of your email to their Facebook Wall, tweet a link to an online version of the email, or forward the email to their friends.  In addition, email can strengthen your direct mail or telemarketing efforts by using the campaign as a precursor of, or a follow up to, a direct mail/telemarketing campaign.  This thereby allows for multiple touch points with the same recipients while using unique and complimentary media.

Although conversion metrics are available for most forms of direct response marketing, email prospecting provides additional insight as to how the entire audience has responded to your message.  For instance, being able to measure the percentage of emails opened allows you to determine whether your subject line was effective or failed to illicit sufficient initial interest in your offer.  Tracking not only the total number of clicks, but the clicks per individual link enables you to measure which links within the email generated the strongest call to action among your recipients.  Furthermore, by including Google Analytics (or similar) tracking codes within your email, you may be able to obtain a detailed understanding of how your recipients behaved on, and navigated through, your website after having clicked on a link within the email.  Having this type of information available will allow you to have a far greater understanding as to how your prospects actually responded to your offer and will also enable you to effectively build on the success of your campaigns, address any identified issues, and increase the relevancy of your emails in the future. 

And that, I’d say, is pretty cool indeed.