One Old Dog, Three New Tricks: How Direct Marketing Changes Online
I was looking at Nat G. Bodian’s Direct Marketing Rules of Thumb the other day. A terrific compendium of received wisdom on what works and what doesn’t in direct marketing, this book helps us avoid the mistakes of others before us, and using it can cut testing budgets dramatically. But it got me thinking.
Here’s the Internet. Do the time-honored rules of thumb still hold? I can think of at least three ways the Web has altered the direct marketing landscape.
Opt-in versus opt-out
The Web turned our views about lists upside down. For decades, we have assumed that we can contact customers and prospects at will, as long as we have their address or phone number. As responsible marketers, we’ve regularly offered them the chance to opt out of receiving communications from us. To be sure, we usually make the offer in the smallest possible type. The DMA spends considerable bucks managing a suppression file of consumer requests to be “taken off the list.” But the overall attitude in our industry is: contact till forbid.
Having applied these rules successfully to direct mail and telemarketing, we sensibly assumed they would apply to email, too. I was an early supporter of opt-out policies for email. But I’ve changed my mind, as I’ve observed the growth of a loud and sustained cry from consumers and pundits alike that advertising email is not acceptable without a positive indication of permission.
The battle rages on. The DMA still supports an opt-out position for email, probably because they fear that the opt-out line in the sand, once crossed, will drift over to include other media. And even the opt-in supporters are still arguing over definitions and standards–is it “double” opt-in? Can the box be pre-checked? Many issues remain to be decided before we have a set of rules we can all live by.
Parenthetically, the opt-in/opt-out controversy seems to apply only to addressable media, meaning one-to-one contacts. One-to-many media, like print and broadcast, appear to be immune. One is tempted to pose a follow-up question: in a permission marketing world, is broadcast advertising spam? Let’s not go there.
What’s fascinating to me is that the Internet has allowed us to learn an important lesson: as marketers, we operate at the by-your-leave of customers, and of society as a whole. When our zeal takes us into territory that society won’t abide, we hear about it. And we adjust. Opt-in standards for email marketing is one of these areas that consumers are telling us we must do. One rule of thumb–gone.
Privacy
Another area where the Web has forced us to change is how we handle consumer information. This is a thorny one. My view is that the Web has simply accelerated an already growing concern among consumers about marketing use of data. Something was going to happen anyway. Remember Polly Klaas? Remember Ram Avrahami? The Internet, as usual, sped things up.
Some kind of privacy legislation is going to become law this year. The DMA is doing a Herculean job to shape it for the best interest of responsible marketers. Consumer privacy concerns are most acute in the areas of personal finance, health, and children–no one can argue with the legitimacy of a desire for protection in these areas. We marketers must respond to people’s concerns while protecting our right to collect and analyze data that allows us to deliver relevant commercial messages.
Again, what’s interesting to me is how our own attitudes as direct marketers have changed. Personally, I was pretty dismissive of privacy concerns a few years back. I smiled when Sun Microsystems’s Scott McNealy said “You already have zero privacy. Get over it.” But the tone of society has changed, and we marketers must change along with it.
The Web has not only speeded up the whole privacy thing, but it’s also provided us with some excellent tools to cope with consumer demands. Posting a privacy policy is a fairly straightforward exercise. The DMA even offers a web-based template so you can create one instantly. Visit www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml.
So does this mean there aren’t going to be any rules of thumb for us Internet marketers? Nope. It’s just going to take a bit more time before they to emerge.
Short copy
But I already know one “new new” rule of thumb, and here it is: short copy beats long copy in email. I’ll admit, when I first approached the email medium my early instinct favored the rambling, colorful, evocative copy that works so well in direct mail letters. But I was proven wrong (fast). Short is better. Bullets are good. Get to the point in the first sentence.
That said, many of the “old old” rules still apply in email. You do want an offer and a strong call to action. And you want to ask for the action frequently, with multiple links to the response page, sprinkled throughout the message.
This last item about short copy might sound frivolous next to a discussion of privacy and societal constraints on marketers. Nevertheless, it’s true: the Web has changed our understanding of the direct marketing business. It has changed me.