Ever wondered why a friend doesn’t return a call, and seems too busy to see you? In the end you may either ask them if you have done anything to offend them, or let the friendship quietly fade away.

As marketers we work hard to acquire, and keep customers but sometimes fail to notice those that are getting a bit quiet or inactive. With all the opportunities open to today’s marketers, there are more statistics and opportunities than ever seemed possible even a decade ago, but much effort can be stacked up at the early and intermediate stages of the customer relationship.

With direct mail, it would not have been financially viable to target dormant customers. However, with the sometimes perceived low or no value of email communications it can be all too easy to bat out messages to a base of mixed customers. The good ones will respond, so what’s the problem?

I think the problems of ignoring unresponsive customers can be manifest. They can range from an inability to be able to read statistics correctly as volumes are swollen with unresponsive segments to a communication problem of ignoring the clues these customers are giving you. It can be the marketing equivalent of bad manners, and bad manners in this environment could mean the dreaded scurge of someone hitting the ‘spam’ button.

Senior management like to hear that there is a 6 or 7 figure email list and it can often be seen as a panacea – in the pressure for more sales, the cry of ‘Email everyone’ can be heard in many companies.  It takes a brave and robust marketer to assess and attempt to address poor email responders.

What signs are there for poor performance and how do you identify them?

As with creating targeting segmentation, it is worth creating email specific segmentation. Look at the overall performance of your list and then look at the pattern of the worst 5% – initially looking at open rates; identifying how much of the file have never opened, never opened in a month etc.

Start talking to these people differently. If you mail them twice a week, reduce it to once. Throw in a special offer, prize draw or survey as alternative subject lines. If this doesn’t work, humour can sometimes re-engage the shy ones. I have seen subject lines such as ‘We haven’t heard from you’, We still haven’t heard from you’ , ‘Was it something we said’ generating open rates from dormant recipients.

Remind them in the creative – they have a choice. Offer them the opportunity to reduce or change their preferences. For those who have indications of profitability send them a direct mail or call them – it could be they have just changed email accounts.

If you have tried a variety of approaches, then relax and put them with all the other sleeping partners – group the dormants together and keep them in the loop at a low frequency. Exclude them from all other activities, and do not include their number when asked for list size. Your list will grow again, and meantime sit back and take the credit for the higher levels of open and clickthrough rates in your results.

Top tips

• Define dormant email behaviour based on customers not opening
• Aim to re-engage
• Reward the responders
• Reduce the frequency of emails to poor performers
• Exclude poor performers from mass emails and compile their results separately

Good luck!

Lucy Conlan, Jan 2012

Specialist Associate, Digital Comms

As many organisations attempt to juggle diminishing communications budgets around increasingly ambitious goals, we share some simple tips for re-shaping content to create more impact.

1. Create a talking point
The more you can identify what your audiences are interested in, and how this relates to your work, the easier it will become to develop content that will engage them, make them think and provide them with something to talk about. No media strategy, however well executed, will succeed if your content has the ‘so what?’ factor. This applies as much to social media as it does to the Today programme. Once your content is online, use Google Analytics to track how your audiences are responding.

2. Never overlook the power of a good story
The power of a story to communicate a message is a timeless phenomenon. A good story is believable, simple, concrete and sometimes surprising. See http://www.madetostick.com
 
Keep your stories personal. The charity Rethink evaluated an information programme designed to raise awareness among junior doctors about the needs of mental health patients. They found that six months later those doctors still remembered the first-hand accounts of mental health patients, over and above all other information from the programme. In http://www.badscience.net  Ben Goldacre has reported on fascinating research that shows we become less emotionally affected by a story, the more people it involves.

3. Less is definitely more
A pressure on resources may force you to cut the amount of content you can develop, but therein lies an opportunity. Ditch lengthy newsletters and reports in favour of succinct content that drives home one simple message. Attention spans are shorter, and film enables you to tell stories much faster. Save the Children is increasingly producing films between only one and three minutes in length.

Of course, the more concise the content, the sharper your messaging must be. A visit to www.wateraid.org.uk will tell you at first glance: ‘Today, 4000 children will die because of dirty water and poor sanitation’.  What else in 12 words would you need to know?

4. Make your images work for you
The images of David Cameron on a bike and David Miliband with a banana provide just two examples of how instrumental a single image can be in creating a narrative.

Use images that communicate the essence of what you do, and which depict your people in hands-on situations, rather than head and shoulders shots. And exploit low-cost ways of capturing the images of your work, equipping staff and volunteers so that they can provide reportage that bring the people you feature to life. Your audience no longer automatically expects high production values.

That said, you should protect at all costs your budget for professional photographers who can capture those lead images that will run on your home page, front covers and events displays.

5. Invest in good internal processes to support content development

When developing content do not ignore the most powerful resource you have – the frontline staff and volunteers who deliver your programmes and services. Every day they are exposed to the highs, lows and spine tingling moments that are going to inspire your audiences so help them to help you capture amazing stories. With guidance they will understand what information and stories your supporters and the media respond to and become your eyes and ears.

Our associate Catherine Raynor has been working with a development charity to produce a communications handbook for their field staff. It is packed full of simple explanations like what we actually mean by human interest story, tips on interview and photography techniques, and handy templates. And once you have secured your pipeline of content there are plenty of cost effective ways to store the information, such as Microsoft SharePoint and story hub sites like Zahmoo.

See our earlier blog for advice on how to target your audiences on a tight budget. Folllow us on Twitter @Randall_Fox to hear about the next in our series: ‘Communications with impact on a tighter budget’.

Posted by: Susannah Randall

Our job involves dipping in and out of lots of different organisations but there are always common themes. None more so than the challenges charity comms people are facing right now.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen in-house teams having to:

         ·            Do more with less (and prove their impact)

         ·            Keep up-to-date with a proliferation of new media channels

         ·            Run so hard to deliver the day job that the ability to take a step back and look at strategy, priorities, where best to put budget and resources, is constantly frustrated

All this while having to compete in a tougher funding environment; which can lead to charities being in a constant state of reinvention.  Clearly, consultants like us can help with all of this but budgets are tighter than ever.

This got us thinking … what if we could create a ‘toolkit’; a means of packaging the knowledge and techniques that we use in a way that can be applied by in-house teams to achieve higher impact communications? Simple, stream-lined, systematic. Using tried and tested methodology that helps demystify the strategic communications process.

The toolkit we’ve developed guides in-house teams through three key stages:

1.        Objective and clear-eyed analysis and review. What is working in your communications, what isn’t and why?

2.        How to focus and prioritise: objectives, your core proposition, audience-mapping, channels

3.        Turning strategic plans into practical implementation: resources, phasing, milestones, action plans, evaluation

The toolkit comes with nine days support from the RandallFox team of consultants. So although the in-house team leads the process there is a boost in resource and the expertise on hand to give momentum and ensure everything stays on track.

However, before we launch the toolkit we need to pilot it. We’re looking for organisations that will be willing - for a 40% discount on the normal price - to work with us. Ideally we’re looking for a small-to-medium size charity with some in-house comms capacity and a senior management team that is keen to improve its profile and who are willing to complete the process in a maximum of six months.

If you are interested in finding out more please contact us on info@randallfox.co.uk.  No obligation to any chats and we’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Selina and Susannah

It is budget planning time again and I am sensing that the ‘achieve more with less’ line is starting to wear a bit thin. But success in communications is not always about splashing your budget.

Here, in the first of a series of monthly blogs on how to get more from a tighter communications budget, we offer some tips on how audience focus can help cash-strapped organisations.

Pressures on budgets can and should force you to focus on the people who really matter to you. Yet we still often come across organisations that simply do not know enough about their audiences, or who fail to apply the knowledge they do have.

Ask yourself whether your organisation has really got to grips with the questions below – knowing the answers may revolutionise your approach.

Step 1: Have you agreed who you are talking to?

It is unusual for us to encounter an organisation that has fully mapped its key audiences, and taken a collective view about who to prioritise. Such discussions must be organisation-wide, but the communications function plays a key role in facilitating them. It is the comms function that also stands to gain the most: a clearer brief and the opportunity to focus their efforts where they will make most impact.

Step 2: Can you define them precisely?

Once you have begun to map and prioritise your audiences, the next step is to segment them: what do your priority audiences have in common? This can be done using demographic (age, class, gender) and psychographic (attitudes, interests) factors. Feel free to ban anyone referring to the ‘general public’ as an audience (cue: internal shudder). The more precise you can be, the more likely you are to succeed.

Step 3: Do you know enough about how to communicate to them?

You may not have the budget to carry out comprehensive market research, but do not underestimate the degree of anecdotal knowledge you already have about the characteristics, needs and interests of your core audiences. Gather this information from as wide a pool of people as possible (those in the field as well as head office). Supplement this with analysis of your databases, research published by others in your sector, and low cost audience research techniques.

Step 4: Do you plan your spend around their needs and preferences?

This is where you get to save some money and time, as you become clearer about who you should focus on and the best ways to reach them.

Fragmentation of media channels allows for increasing precision in targeting consumer audiences. www.gransnet.com is a great example of a new channel capturing a very clear audience demographic.

Greater clarity also enables you to go direct to those who matter most. Many organisations still blow their public affairs budget at party conferences, yet research has suggested that politicians far prefer to be communicated with directly through their Westminster and Constituency offices.

http://www.nfpsynergy.net/includes/documents/cm_docs/2009/b/briefing_party_conferences_sept09_2.pdf

Bravo to British Waterways for turning MP briefings into an experience to be remembered: taking selected MPs on tours of the Olympic park on James Bond style rib boats, embarking from the Terrace at the Houses of Parliament.

Step 5: Do you review and build on your knowledge?

As your intelligence improves about your audiences, the picture will shift. Build in annual review points and continue to involve staff across your organisation in the analysis and discussion.

The good news is that you do not always have to spend money to improve the way you target your audiences. In fact the biggest investment is time. But if time is the one thing you do not have, we can help. www.randallfox.co.uk/services.html

Folllow us on Twitter Randall_Fox to hear about the next in our blog series: ‘Re-shape your content on a tighter budget’. 

Posted by: Susannah Randall

I have a confession. I regularly get so cross listening to the Today programme I have to turn it off. Is it the breadth of subjects covered, John Humphreys’ interview technique or even the odd ‘unfortunate’ slip of the tongue when naming the Secretary of State for Culture that gets me hitting the standby button?

No, of course not. It’s the increasingly robotic and overly trained spokespeople who plunge my morning coffee into momentary silence (I do always turn it back on again after a minute or two!). There I’ve said it. I think us communications types have created a fair few monsters with our media training techniques.

Of course, when you have spent months working on a new report or campaign, the last thing you want to do is send your CEO into the studio without a sniff of a briefing. But do you really want to ply them with so many statistics and crowbar so many key messages into every over-rehearsed answer that frankly they are a bit boring. No wonder John Humphreys is getting crosser with each passing week!

Yes, the key messages are important, as is the “I recently met…” example to add a bit of human interest and the ABC technique has its uses. But increasingly I am hearing spokespeople who are so obviously working through a long list of “you must get this in” they cease to be having a conversation.

Have you ever considered that over preparing your spokespeople could be doing as much harm to your campaign as not preparing them at all? Yes, make sure they know what the ask is and have some killer facts up their sleeve, but make sure they can nail the delivery. Don’t just give them reams of briefing notes, sit down with them, practice the answers and give them tips on sounding more relaxed and, dare I say, passionate. A chatty enthusiastic spokesperson is so much more interesting to listen to and much more likely to inspire potential supporters and advocates.