Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Is Your Marketing Putting Lipstick on a Pig?

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My wife Rona owns a small real estate agency. The people who try to market to her continually amaze her–and not in a good way.  I told you before about the phone solicitor who lied to her and the email marketer who never told her the truth.  Here’s the story of a bank that failed to earn her interest.

piggy_bank

“We just lowered our rates and are now offering a special discount for purchases and New Clients,” the bank’s email said.  “Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you or your clients.”

Now, Rona had never done business with this bank before. This was the bank’s first contact with her: its equivalent of a cold call.

Rona gets twenty of these marketing emails a week. Most of them, she  deletes unread.  This one, she sent to me as an example of poor communications...and then deleted it.  Why?

  1. The message wasn’t personal.  The bank could have sent the very same message to a hundred realtors (and probably did).
  2. They hadn’t done their homework.  A buyer’s agent like Rona prides herself on service.  She wants to recommend banks who do the same, not necessarily the ones with the lowest rates that day.
  3. They hadn’t built a relationship with her and didn’t try to. The email was quick offer, in and out, wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  (And the person who sent it was supposedly a Senior Relationship Manager!)

Sure, the tone of the email was polite, and it expressed an offer to help…but the “help” would benefit the bank more than it did Rona or her clients.  You can’t put lipstick on a pig, even if the pig is a bank.

Whether you’re a bank, a business, or a nonprofit, if you’re sending out email like this to people and expect them to respond, it’s a waste of  time.  What should you do instead?

  • Personalize it.  At minimum, use the name of the person you’re supposed to be speaking to!  But it’s much better if you can tailor your message to that person’s interests.  And that means…
  • Know your audience.  At very least, segment your list into groups that have something in common and write a message that will appeal specifically to them.  And even better…
  • Take the time to build trust.  Anybody can blast emails.  Only a few will make themselves stand out.  Take the time to be one of those.

Marketing: Don’t Set It and Forget It

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When my wife Rona Fischman, a buyer’s broker in real estate, sees bad marketing, she shares it with me. And she sees a lot of bad marketing.

Last week–June 4, 2015, to be precise–a mortgage company sent Rona an email that began “Not only does June bring nice, warm weather and weekend vacations, homebuyers are out en masse as well.”

cold in June

The problem? The first few days of June in Boston were the coldest in recorded history. The temperature didn’t top 50 Fahrenheit, and it rained every day!

I’m sure that the mortgage company wrote that email ahead of time–just like many of us schedule our social media ahead of time, using services like Hootsuite or Buffer. But writing ahead doesn’t mean you can just “set it and forget it.”

Make sure that someone at your agency checks each message shortly before it goes out. Or Rona may put you on the bad marketing list!

 

How NOT to Survey Your Readers

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Enough about me, what do you think of meIt’s a good idea to get to know the people who read you. But there are ways of doing it that make them feel welcomed…and ways that make them feel used.

Here’s an example of the wrong way.

My dear wife Rona Fischman received an email that said:

“Rona,

When I started ___ 3 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined how much we would achieve together. ____has grown from a small community to a global one of over 5.5 million members, in nearly every country in the world. It’s hard to believe we’ve come so far, so fast.”

“But what’s next for ___? What will the next few years look like? As we start to think about those questions as a community, it’s critical to hear from as many voices as possible. It’s important to know what we think about what our community does, how we can be better and what we should work on together.”

“Our surveys are put together by a crack team of survey expurrts [picture of  cat at keyboard] and they don’t take very long to fill out. We’d love to find out what you think.”

Here’s what Rona thinks:

I don’t know who you are, and you want to trick me into doing your marketing for you??? Share on X

Here’s the right way:

If you want to know what people think, start out by listening. Continue by giving them something they’ll consider valuable. Get them to know, like, and trust you.

Only then will they be willing to answer your surveys. And only then will the information they give you be valuable to you.

 

 

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