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Relationship Marketing Series #6, Connect With One Person

By Sonia Simone

Even though (with any luck) you're marketing to lots and lots of people, no one wants to be a faceless speck in a crowd.

Maybe it's a result of the industrial age. Yes, we like to be in tribes, but tribes are small, intimate things. A tribe might be 8 people or 80, but it's not 80,000. The greater the scale we have to deal with in our jobs, our commutes, our grocery stores, or even our churches, the more we look for one-to-one relationships.

We're born alone. (Even twins can't manage that one side-by-side.) And we all secretly think we have problems that no one else has. We want someone who really gets us. Someone who speaks to us, and just to us. Someone who listens to our problems and fears, and then makes those go away.

Know Who You're Talking To

Marketing 101 tells you to know your market. Too many marketers confuse that with demographics. "My customers are married women 26-40 with one or two children, who subscribe to Redbook and Parenting, and carry a MasterCard."

Demographics are collections of traits. They come in real handy if you're buying a mailing list or deciding where to advertise, but demographics aren't people. They're just a collection of patterns.

If you have something to sell to that demographic, you need to be thinking about Cynthia (who hates to be called Cindy), who's 33 and a little bored at work, has a four-year-old named Ben and a six-year-old named Ruby, reads Parenting even though it makes her feel guilty and her mom got her a subscription to Redbook but all she reads are the dessert recipes and articles about dieting, and yes she knows that makes no sense but she does it anyway, and yeah she has a MasterCard, because she got mad at the bank that issued her Visa so she cut it up.

Talk to One Person

Whether you're writing a blog or an email newsletter or a set of postcards or a yellow pages ad, you need to be thinking about Cynthia.

What can you help her out with? Why is your stuff the perfect match for her problems? Does your gym offer really great childcare, so she doesn't feel like a rat for parking her kids there for an hour? Does your product respect the fact that she's pulled in 20 directions as a working mother, and help clarify her choices so she can focus on what she needs to do? Does your carpet-cleaning service use nontoxic solvents, so she can quit worrying about poisoning her kids and the dog just so her mother-in-law will quit making that face when she comes over?

What's not working for Cynthia right now? How can you make that work better?

To get started on that conversation, I found a nice resource on a copywriters' forum called the 60-minute naked truth sales letter. Even if you never intend to use any kind of sales letter, the things you'll discover with this exercise will help you find the right messages for Cynthia. You'll get a good, high-level grasp on what you really need to let her know about.

How Do You Find Cynthia?

You'll be able to find Cynthia by paying attention. First, make sure Cynthia loves your stuff. She's your perfect customer. She'll buy anything and everything you have, because your solutions line up exactly with her problems.

If you realized you've imagined a Cynthia who's just not that into you, start from scratch. Your Cynthia needs to be the person who loves what you do and how you do it, can afford your products and services, and is someone you can figure out how to reach. (In other words, you could buy a mailing list of Cynthias, or you can find a joint venture partner who's got an email list of Cynthias.)

Talk to the customers you have, especially the ones who love you. (You also want to pay close attention to the ones who hate you, but that's another exercise.) What's going on with them? What's freaking them out right now? How do they feel about the economic situation? What's going on in their personal relationships? Is this election a big deal for them? Do they think it's going to change things, and if so, is that good or bad, from their point of view?

If you've got a bricks and mortar operation, spend a lot of time on the floor hanging out with customers. Watch them. Listen to them talk to one another. Ask them questions.

If you're online, go to forums where your customers hang out, and listen to what they gripe about. Set up Google alerts about the kinds of problems you solve. Send out surveys, to both existing customers and potential customers.

Make it very easy to give you feedback, and pay close attention. Look for patterns. Try to figure out the underlying problems and worries that are beneath people's words.

Speak Her Language

One great thing about all this paying attention is that it lets you discover the language of your customers. Maybe they talk like Katharine Hepburn, and maybe they talk like Roseanne Barr. You've got to listen before you can find that out.

Use the phrases, metaphors and examples that your customers use. Describe their problems the way they do. When they give you testimonials, don't clean up little grammar errors or odd turns of phrase. Keep as much of the original language as you can. A little imperfection shows that it's real.

Obviously, to make this work, you have to get to a point where that language is natural to you. Parody makes for lousy advertising. If you're Roseanne and your customer is Katharine, find someone who's more like your customer to read through your stuff and help with the tone. You can't make a real connection in a language that's utterly foreign to you.

One giant advantage you have over Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson is that you can create a true sense of personal connection with your customers. Not every customer wants that, but you can find the ones who do.

The worst mistake small-business marketers make is thinking their market is anyone with a pulse. Find your Cynthia, and just write for her. (Even the non-Cynthias will respond to this, because your tone will be personal and genuinely friendly.) Have a cup of coffee with Cynthia when you sit down to write a blog post or an email newsletter article. Let her know what you can help her with today.

When you spend your time thinking about what else you could be doing to make Cynthia's life better, you'll start to see some very exciting things happen in your marketing.

So who's your Cynthia? Let us know in the comments . . .

Related Reading

• The Remarkable Communication Relationship Marketing Series

If you found this post useful, subscribe to my free email class on creating better content!

Flickr Creative Commons image by geeknerd99

Email Marketing: How Not to Be a Dirty Rotten Spammer

By Sonia Simone

Do you remember when you were a kid and crossed the street without looking? Remember how mad your mom got? Even if you were within your legal rights and crossing in a crosswalk, it just takes one oncoming car that doesn't see you and you're flatter than Wile E. Coyote.

The "official" definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email with a commercial and/or malicious intent. The U.S. 2004 CAN-SPAM law makes it illegal to send commercial email with a misleading header, without a postal address, without a way to unsubscribe, or if the addresses were harvested in various nefarious ways.

The definitions vary somewhat. But theoretically, if you're sending email marketing to someone who asked for it and you're not defrauding them, it's not spam.

The Aunt Frances guide to spam

Now go ask your Aunt Frances what spam is. "Oh good lord, those annoying messages they send me from . . . . "

You can finish that sentence with any one of a hundred companies. Amazon, eBay, GoDaddy, the Thanksgiving turkey farm, the list goes on and on. Companies that may have legal permission to send her email, because she agreed to it once upon a time, or because she's already a customer.

Aunt Frances might be hip enough to have registered CrazyAuntFrances.com with GoDaddy, but she doesn't know or care about official definitions. If it's getting on her nerves, it's spam.

She won't unsubscribe (because someone told her she'll get more spam if she does), but she will triumphantly mark it as spam. Email providers will start to look darkly on the sender. If a high enough percentage of subscribers mark messages as spam, messages start to go automatically to junk folders even when there are raving fans waiting breathlessly for the latest message.

And some email providers will just throw your messages away.

Sure, the senders are following the letter of the law, but they're still road kill.

If you're GoDaddy, this is a manageable problem. If you're a small business and you just want to send nice stuff to your customers, it is not.

You've got to keep Aunt Frances happy

There are two definitions of "spam." One involves a complex set of legal regulations and loopholes that apply to email marketing. The other is "crappy email I don't want."

If you want to send out email to more than a handful of customers, you need to live up to both standards. Not only do you have to follow the letter of the law (if you don't and you're emailing from the U.S., the fine is $11,000), you have to be better than the law. Just like white hat SEO, there are best practices for white hat email marketing.

Here are a couple of tips for being the Gary Cooper of email.

Make yourself useful

You're already working toward this in all of your communication, right? If everything you send out benefits your readers, they're a lot less likely to get pissed at you and click the dreaded spam button.

Every email you send needs to have something valuable for readers. Otherwise, why are you sending it? Just to pitch your stuff and benefit yourself? That's not going to work, now is it?

(On the other hand, you don't have to be afraid to sell. Unless you're running a list that has a purely philanthropic intent, if you want readers to buy, go ahead and ask them to. Just don't be an ass about it.)

Honor what you were originally given permission to do

Email marketing is permission marketing. The idea is, you convince someone to say, "yes, please market to me." Then you go ahead and do that.

You don't ask permission to send information about auto maintenance, then use that permission to send marketing messages about escort services. Uncool.

And if you promise useful tips and tricks, you've got to make about 80% of your content tips and tricks. Yes, you can sell, but there have to be enough goodies to make the sales message palatable.

Make sure they remember you exist

Just this week I had three promotional emails sent to my Gmail account. If I was a normal customer, I would just have marked them as spam, because I can't for the life of me remember signing up for this list.

The first antidote to this is to mail your list often enough so that they won't forget about you. You must email new subscribers immediately after they sign up, and make enough of an impression that they'll still remember who you are two months from now.

Use your emailer's autoresponder function to get a prompt string of useful messages into every email box on your list. I'd suggest a sequence of at least four or five useful messages to make a real impression. I'm partial to a ten-message sequence, myself.

(This happens to be why I prefer HTML to plain text email--you can use colors and a simple but distinct graphic style to help fix your identity in your readers' consciousness. You can also include your photo, which helps an awful lot. These don't take the place of useful content, but they do help people remember you later.)

If you're still getting marked as a spammer

If you're still having trouble with folks mistakenly marking you as a spammer, go ahead and jog their memory about when and why they signed up for your list in the first place. The king of bulk email providers, Aweber, has a great tip. Create an automatic signature that reminds the person when they signed up, what the list is about, and what to do if they don't want to get it any more. It would look something like this:

You're getting this email because you subscribed on June 17, 2007 to Sonia Simone's marketing tool kit. If you don't want to get these messages any more, just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page and you'll be immediately removed from my list.

Aweber has an automatic field with that sign-up date, which makes it simple. If your email provider doesn't, the technique still works fine without the date.

If you're getting a lot of false spam clicks, put that at the top of each message. If you're just getting a few, put it at the bottom under your signature.

That little reminder is often enough to jog Aunt Frances's memory that she did, at one time, want to receive your 101 Meatball Recipes newsletter. And it helps her feel reassured that gangs of email marauders will not come down on her if she goes ahead and unsubscribes.

Lots more free info on email marketing

As it happens, I've been cooking something up for you. I'm putting together a ten-part free email class on creating great content for e-newsletters. (Virtually every lesson applies to blog content as well, so even if email marketing isn't your thing, feel free to sign up.)

I won't clog your email box up with crap, and of course I will never rent or sell your information to anyone. (And neither should you. It's a terrible business practice.)

One more thing: if you've already signed up for my ten-part marketing tool kit, this is a whole new class. There's no duplicated content, so feel free to sign up for both!

Enter your name and email address below to get started. See you there!

(Important note: You'll have to confirm that you want to get the email class or you won't receive it. Once you submit your information, you'll get an email very quickly asking you to confirm.)

Flickr Creative Commons image by uberculture

The Toddler's Guide to Salesmanship

By Sonia Simone

They wreck our stuff, kill our sleep and chase away our non-parenting friends. But we still love 'em and want to take care of them. I've learned a lot about effective persuasive communication from my three-year-old.

And it only makes sense. Toddlers are too small to do much, and lack their own credit cards, but they need the same food, shelter, love and amusements that anyone else does. All they have are their powers of persuasion.

These suggestions aren't (just) tongue-in-cheek. Try them out in your own communication to make some stronger connections.

Don't be afraid to repeat yourself

Parents of young children are typically broke, frustrated, chronically anxious, time-crunched and sleep-deprived. In this, they strongly resemble customers.

Toddlers know that when you're speaking to a distracted audience, you might have to repeat your message 6 or 7 (or 60 or 70) times to get heard.

Repetition at toddler levels will drive your customers out of their minds. But you can repeat your message a lot more often than you think you can. Just like exhausted parents, your customers are only listening to you with half an ear. Be sure you've made your point enough times for them to get it.

Grown-up tip: Look for varied ways to convey the same message, or you'll run into Are We There Yet Syndrome.

Look for ways to surprise and delight

My boy imperiously demanded some animal crackers the other day. "Animal crackers!"

"Hmm, what could you say that would make me want to give you animal crackers?" I said, in that mom way I have.

"Animal crackers, darling?" he said.

Darling bought him a lot more animal crackers than please would have. Their ability to surprise us and make us laugh is a big part of what keeps toddlers alive on those difficult parenting days.

Grown-up tip: It's not always easy for us to reproduce the sideways logic of a toddler. Start by capturing all your ideas, including (especially) goofy ones. Set aside some time regularly to noodle on communication ideas that are "too silly" or "can't work for me."

When you come up with something both simple and surprising, you may just have a winner.

Use the language of your audience

The other day, my always-entertaining small person looked me in the eye and asked soberly, "Mama, is Papa maybe not a morning person?"

One of the vastly amusing things about toddlers is the way they repeat our phrasing exactly. This gets kind of stressful when we start worrying about the kid getting kicked out of Montessori school for R-rated language. But mostly it's one of the great joys of hanging out with little kids.

Toddlers know that we hear best when we get a message that uses our own words.

Grown-up tip: One of the less-known uses of surveys and testimonials is to find the language of your customers. Look through everything your customers send you for wording you can mirror back to them. Artful, "writerly" language isn't nearly as important as using the words and phrases that your customers do themselves.

Added 6/21: Don't miss Bob Hoffman's brilliant observation in the comments below that "clients are just toddlers with money."

If you found this post useful, subscribe to my free email class on creating better content!

Flickr Creative Commons image by Kah_Zanon

The Three Bears of Social Media Marketing: Part 3 (Baby Bear)

By Sonia Simone

OK, if Mama Bear is about conversation and connection, and Papa Bear is about listening more than you talk (sometimes known as lurking), what's Baby Bear?

Baby Bear makes friends easily, and he always has a lot to say. He can be awfully cute—even adorable, if you do it right. So I hope you'll forgive him for not really being a bear at all.

Baby Bear makes himself useful

One of the smartest things you can do with social media tools is to make yourself useful. Take information, which we all have too much of, and turn it into something people can use.

Compile a bunch of good advice into a simple, readable format, or come up with a great framing metaphor to make a complex subject easier to understand. Take complicated stuff and make it easy. Take overwhelming stuff and make it manageable.

In other words, create a Baby Bear strategy: put together a whole bunch of killer content that solves a real problem or fulfills a real need.

A lot of folks mistakenly think that great content is the same thing as great writing. It's not, at all. Great content is useful. Great content does something to make people's lives better. It might save time, frustration, money or brain damage. There's lots of great content that just makes people giggle.

Great writing is nice, but completely optional. The audience for great writing is small (and shrinking), and there's an overabundance of great writing out there to consume. There are more brilliant novels than any of us can ever read in a lifetime, and that's not counting all the stellar nonfiction plus weekly doses of The New Yorker.

Please understand, I'm no fan of crummy writing. If good writing matters to you, by all means, learn to write well, and take pleasure from that. But great content is a lot easier to create than great writing, and has a much wider audience.

Baby Bear is friendly, whether or not he's social

There are true "social media" uses of a content strategy (like blogs) and then there are not-so-social uses (like email newsletters). But whether or not you have a mechanism for your readers to engage you in a true conversation isn't actually very important. Either way, having lots of useful, relevant content makes you look friendly.

The smartest content providers make their stuff feel like a conversation even when it isn't. Most good content uses a friendly, accessible voice and feels more like a letter from a pal than a textbook.

Most of us are influenced by our friends and by authority figures. A solid content strategy turns you into both. Every piece of useful content you create is like doing a small favor for your readers. It also establishes you as a smart, thoughtful authority on your subject.

Your content might suggest a rather chilly personality, like Jakob Nielsen's, or you may come across as a lovable train wreck like Dooce. It doesn't matter. Either way, readers who tune into your stream of regular content develop a connection with you over time. That connection translates into trust, which can be translated directly into dollars.

Baby Bear can't shut up

The tricky part about Baby Bear is you have to keep it going. It's work--enjoyable work most of the time, but it's still work.

A blog falls on the time-intensive end of things. The whole point of a blog is to provide lots of fresh content. Even blogs with good search tools (I'm working on getting that for you guys!) don't really invite dipping into your most compelling past content.

You also have no control over how readers work their way through your stuff. Which means if your great article on LOLcats requires a whole bunch of set-up, you don't have any way of making sure your readers have the right context.

Lately I've been falling hard for my email autoresponder. These are email programs that send a predefined sequence for you (like my 10-part marketing tool kit), which you can expand, move around, and generally evolve and refine to your heart's content. You can create a sequence of 3 messages or 3,000, the system doesn't care.

If you're already sending out an email newsletter and you don't use the autoresponder feature (you may have to dig, I didn't realize for months that Emma had one), you need to start now. You can create a sequence of your brainiest, most useful content and put it in front of every fresh reader.

And if you flake on getting your newsletter out in a timely way (like I do every month), you'll at least make a great first impression. Plus your readers stand some chance of remembering who the hell you are when you send something later.

If you've never thought about doing broadcast email but you think you want to start, in my opinion there is exactly one vendor to consider: Aweber. Their deliverability (percentage of messages that reach readers vs. spam filters) is just better than anyone else I've seen, their system is extremely easy to use, and they just added a whole bunch of gigantically useful analytics tools. Plus they're cheap.

Tell them Baby Bear sent you.

Why Being A Dork is a Wonderful Thing

I had a ton of fun with the Copyblogger post last week. And just for the remarkable communication readers, here's the line I cut out because it seemed unseemly for Brian's blog:

Fake enthusiasm is as easy to spot as a pair of fake DDs, and even less appealing.

Unleash Your Inner Dork to Become a Better Copywriter

8 Ways to Use Numbers in Headlines

By Sonia Simone

I sympathize with blog readers who hate numbers in post titles. "10 Ways to X" is a classic headline formula, but it's being worked to death online.

Up to 86% of the time, it's a lazy way to drum up a post without putting too much thought into it.

64% of sophisticated blog readers believe that using a number in a post title is so pathetically obvious that it couldn't possibly still work.

I recently got a big rush of new readers from a post called 50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew.

Now I didn't have a way to run a split test against a headline "Things Your Customers Wish You Knew" (wouldn't that be a cool WordPress plugin?), but a quick look through my stats shows that posts with numbers consistently bring in between 2.5-8 times more traffic (and more referrals from sites like Digg or Stumble) than posts without.

Numbers are a time-honored trigger to get us to pay attention. When you use a number in a headline, whether it's in a blog post, an email subject header, an ad or even in a face-to-face conversation*, you immediately hook the other person's interest.

Numbers reach directly into our unconscious and say, "this message is important."

(By the way, according to Jakob Nielson, numbers as figures work better on the Web than numbers as words.)

How to write a "numbers post" without being cheesy
First, tempting though it may be, don't put a number into every headline. (Unless you're using the convention of Stuff White People Like, which actually would work beautifully for a lot of serious topics.)

Second, realize that number posts are inherently likely to pull in more traffic--so capitalize on that. Make them meaty. Make them relevant. Put your best thinking and writing into them. These are the posts that will bring you new readers, so put your best foot forward.

It doesn't seem logical that a simple (and overused) trick could be so effective in conveying authority and reliability, but generations of advertising and headline writers can confirm that it works. So don't fall into the trap of avoiding number posts because they're overdone. Use them intelligently and on posts that deserve the extra attention numbers can bring.

* Of course face-to-face conversations can have headlines. In fact, I just bought a brilliant audio workshop on this very subject--more on that later.

(P.S. Did I make up all the boldface statistics in this post? Of course I did. But don't make up numbers in your own stuff--it makes the FTC cranky, and only Dilbert ever really gets away with it.)

(P.P.S. Yes, putting "8 Ways" in the title was a pathetically transparent attempt to get you to read this post. A little sad, isn't it?)

(P.P.P.S. Got a "numbers post" you're proud of? Post a link in the comments and we'll all come admire it.)

Related reading:

• How to Supercharge Your Content With Concrete Details

Flickr Creative Commons image by hownowdesign

What Romance Novels Can Teach You About Copywriting

By Sonia Simone

The latest Copyblogger post! It's been getting some very nice comments, which always makes me feel warm & fuzzy.

http://www.copyblogger.com/romance-novels/

Top-Secret Copywriting Trick

For those who don't read Copyblogger, I have a post there today on a super top-secret, "if we told you we'd have to shoot you" copywriter's trick. I hope you'll go check it out!

How to Be a Copywriting Genius: The Brilliantly Sneaky Trick You Must Learn