Survive and Thrive After
Your Marketing Campaign Bombs
Dear Business Builder,
You’ve spent months developing your new web marketing campaign. The copy’s been written, reviewed, perfected and proofed. The offer is perfect. The landing pages designed, tweaked, re-tweaked (and if you’re like me) tweaked some more … you’re convinced they can’t miss. The whole promotion is programmed and ready to go … the shopping carts are setup … the thank you and confirmation pages stand at the ready. The lists and media have been selected and scheduled, affiliates and JV partners are on standby and the PPC campaigns are built and waiting to be un-paused.
Best of all, the night before launch you have dreams of dollar signs and happy new customers dancing in your head. In your dream, you hit the proverbial big red send button and the band starts up John Phillip Sousa’s Stars & Stripes Forever as hundred-dollar bills rain from the sky. Wow … what did you eat for dinner last night?!
But the reality isn’t nearly as exciting as the dream, and there’s definitely no heart thumping marching band music in the background. Your promo hits cyberspace to lukewarm response, you generate some orders but nothing like you expected … at the end of the day, you’re not even close to breaking even, and you end up canceling all further promos to cut your loss.
In the words of my favorite cartoon bad boy, Eric Cartman from South Park … Screw you guys! I’m going home!
It would be really easy at this point to kick and scream, pick up your toys and go home. And might I add … get in bed, pull the covers over your head and cry. There’s nothing more deflating to a copywriter or direct marketer than seeing a campaign they poured their heart and soul into fail. But it happens, and unfortunately, more times than not. In direct marketing, for every one smashing success, there will be at minimum of a couple of big, stinking bombs.
The sad reality is not everything you promote will work out of the gate. And you have to know that going into it.
But all is not lost because here’s …
3 Easy ways to pick up the pieces and
turn lemons into lemonade!
- When good copy turns bad … blame the copywriter!
Just kidding, folks. When a promo fails, please don’t put a hit on your copywriters … they’re our friend and we need them. A copywriter’s job is to get inside the heads of our prospects, understand what emotionally motivates them to buy and demonstrate how our product benefits fulfill those emotions … and then put it into words on paper. Perhaps that’s why most seasoned copywriters liken the process to opening a vein and bleeding on the paper. Frankly, I’m not sure what motivates me half the time, let alone some perfect stranger that is 30 years older than me. Copywriting is tough, to say the least.
But copy is king. And when your promo isn’t performing, the first place to look is at the copy. Start with the headline and deck copy. Create headline test panels and run them head to head. A headline alone can give your promotion a dramatic lift. Since the headline is the most read component, it stands to reason the stronger the headline the more people that will ultimately read the promotion. The more prospects that read, the more that will respond.
After you’ve increased response and found a winner through headline testing, then turn to your offer and price to further improve your results. Is your offer clear and is it easy to order? Do you tell prospects exactly what you want them to do, how to do it and give them multiple ways to place an order?
Next start price testing. Test a higher price and a lower price. Don’t always assume that a lower price will get you more orders. Demonstrate value by comparing your price to the price of some other item your prospects may purchase on an ongoing basis … such as “less than a gallon of gas or cheaper than a cup of Starbucks coffee a day.” Test adding bonus reports or other free gifts to bring up the overall perceived value of your offer.
The goal is to methodically test different components of your copy until you get a winner. Word to the wise: don’t try testing a bunch of different things at once – like headline and price together. At the end of the day, you won’t know what truly brought about the lift (or depression) in response.
2. Mr. Web Designer, I’m coming for you next …
After you’ve perfected the copy through testing the various components I’ve recommended, it’s time to have another look at the layout. Page layout can also have a surprisingly dramatic affect on response.
In dealing with various different consultants and marketers that come from outside the direct response industry, the first comment I always hear is about the length of the sales pages. “This page is so long, who reads this stuff?!” I often just chuckle to myself and let them rattle on until I can explain that in direct response and information marketing (vs. e-commerce) long sales landing pages sell product. And lots of navigation and buttons to click and links to follow are a distraction to our main goal … which is the sale.
I have found that long sales letter landing pages with a strong call to action outperform shorter pages with lots of navigation (or mini-sites) more times than not … but that shouldn’t keep you from testing.
But, first you should start by testing various components of your sales letter landing page. It should be easy to read, so start with the page width. The narrower the page width, the easier the copy will be to read. Long line length causes the eye to fatigue and makes the page overwhelming.
Then, look at your page in multiple resolutions. Make sure you see the whole headline and deck in the smaller and larger resolutions. The most widely used screen resolution changes with technology, but it’s currently 1024×768.
Then turn to color. Test headline and subhead colors. Hot attention-grabbing red has proven to out-pull all other colors in multiple tests … but that shouldn’t stop you from testing. Also test order button colors. Depending on whom you ask, blue tends to be the strongest button color. But I’ve also found red and red that turns to green when you hover over the button to be very effective. Another strong order button color is amazon.com yellow … sort of a gold and orange toned yellow.
And don’t forget to test browsers. Oftentimes pages that look great in Internet Explorer will look terrible in Firefox or Safari. Pages may even look different when viewed in different versions of the same browser.
3. Selling ice to Eskimos …
Last but certainly not least, take a look at your keywords, text ads, e-mail lists and media selections. A really targeted list has the power to make okay copy great because the prospect already wants what you’re selling. And although this is often true in direct mail, it isn’t nearly so on the web. Online it is much harder to target your prospect with such precision. It usually isn’t as easy as renting your biggest competitor’s mailing list of product buyers. I suspect most of your competitors consider their e-mail lists their most valuable asset.
Start by testing ad and e-mail copy to previously proven placements only. If possible, perfect your campaigns with your house file first. Then, if it’s working to your own customers, roll it out to your prospect and non-buyer lists. If it’s converting your prospects, then start sending small amounts of paid search traffic. After you have it converting as it should to paid search traffic, then look to roll out to outside paid media placements and to affiliate and JV partners.
The goal is to slowly expand your reach and increase the conversion percentage of your campaign while covering your costs and managing your risk at the same time.
When faced with a big stinking bomb, it’s easy to just throw the baby out with the bath water. But, with a little time and a strategic testing plan, you can quickly turn your bomb into a blockbuster.
Hope that helped and have a great weekend!
Until next week,
Julie McManus
Editor, In the ‘Net Trenches
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™
And Web Media Goddess
P.S. Are you in the ‘net trenches? Do you need help? Send
me an e-mail to AskJulie@MakepeaceTotalPackage.com and
I just might answer your question in an upcoming issue.
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Comment by nvestgrrl — December 19, 2007 @ 3:58 pm
You say when a promo isn\’t working the first place to look is at the copy. Isn\’t that going against everything we\’ve been taught? Offer 40%, list 40%, copy 20% is SOP, right? What gives?
Trackback by precision targeted traffic — May 23, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
precision targeted traffic…
Thanks,…