There is an old marketing adage, originally written in a New York Herald Tribune column in 1956, that goes, “doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
Advertising mediums have changed dramatically since then, but advertising precepts and concepts have not. No matter what, we still have to find our audience, and we still have to find a way to not only sit in the spotlight, but get the audience to look when we wink.
I recently worked with a team to re-brand Jump Management Coaching. We did a complete overhaul of the brand, updating the name, the tag line, the website and blog, e-newsletter, business cards, you name it. But when we started the transformation, we started by talking about the client’s audience. Who are they? What do they need? What do they want? From that conversation we were able to both build a brand and build a re-brand launch strategy that would work for the company and it’s client base.
Jump has a very loyal e-newsletter readership. While most businesses are satisfied with open rates in the 10-20% range, we routinely see open rates that are two to three times higher than that. Beyond open rates, we can demonstrate a high level of reader engagement by looking at the high click throughs (as readers click from the e-newsletter to more information on the web site), and extraordinarily high response rates to reader surveys.
Because we had demonstrated success using the e-newsletter to shine a light on the business and make the target audience turn their heads, and because of the nature of the business and the needs/wants of the clients, we opted to use the e-newsletter as the primary tool to launch the new brand.
But how could we up our game? How could we get even more opens than usual? We used the good old fashioned tease.
Instead of sending out the branded email on its usual day, we sent a text only email that looked more like a personal email between the company owner and the readers. It was short, a little funny, and most importantly it teased everyone that big changes were ahead and that they would need to open the next e-newsletter to get the scoop.
Interestingly, this tease email inspired people to reply with personal messages of congratulations on the launch before we launched. They felt connected and involved. Good. When we launched a week later, we saw very satisfying open rates for the launch e-newsletter and received more personal messages of congratulations. People specifically commented to me and to my client that they liked the tease and it made them really curious, which they remembered. Excellent.
I should say this launch effort was supported via Twitter and to a lesser extent LinkedIn, but the piece of advertising that did the most heavy lifting was the one 3-line email, which drove more potential clients to the launch e-newsletter, which drove more potential clients to Jump Management Coaching’s newly rebranded blog and website.
Kim Lear Communications 