Fear is one of our most primal emotions, instilled from infancy. When my dad said I better stop crying or he’d give me something to cry about, do you know what I did?

 

I shut the hell up.
 

Yes, our natural instinct to avoid danger or harm is a powerful motivator and influencer of behavior. Always has been, always will be.

 

Not surprisingly, marketers caught on to this fact decades ago, whether they were selling financial services or personal hygiene products. And while many marketers took a respectable approach, others went straight for the gutter.

 

For example, in this 1932 advertorial, Listerine tried to make women feel like they would end up with a dog instead of a husband because of bad breath. (Image courtesy of Duke University Libraries)


 

On the other hand, you’ll probably remember this legendary and hugely influential anti-drug message, which also spawned its fair share of spoofs:


 

The Three Basic Steps of Fear-Based Marketing

Scientific studies have been done to evaluate various approaches to fear-based marketing, but appealing to someone’s fear typically involves three steps.

 

1) Present a risk or threat that arouses fear. The risk or threat has to be realistic and severe enough to motivate your audience to act. This is why you need to do your research and know your audience instead of making assumptions.

 

2) Show how vulnerable your audience is. If you try to scare someone with sensationalistic claims, you’re being manipulative. Instead, discuss the real consequences of not acting.

 

3) Explain how you can protect your audience. Convince your audience that the risk reduction or threat removal is worth the effort and cost involved with using your product or service.

 

This is when most marketers screw up. They revert to marketing-speak, going on and on about how wonderful their product is.

A critical part of the third step is building up your audience’s self-efficacy – the belief that they’re physically, mentally and emotionally strong enough to take action. If someone feels they can’t control their fear, they won’t act.

In other words, you’re not just selling your product as the solution. You’re empowering your audience to face and overcome their fear.

Helping People Overcome Fear to Make Positive Changes

In a previous post, I discussed the power of pain point marketing. Like pain point marketing, fear-based marketing doesn’t exploit people’s desperation. It also doesn’t have to involve a life or death situation.

 

Are financial advisors being evil if they warn people of the consequences of failing to save for retirement?

Is a doctor being evil by telling people that drinking one can of soda per day can dramatically increase their chance of chronic illness? True, by the way, according to a recent study.

 

There’s a big difference between persuasion and manipulation. Fear-based marketing can be a perfectly acceptable and ethical approach to marketing, as long as it’s based in reality, and especially when you use marketing to build trust and establish yourself or your company as an authority.

 

When delivered powerfully yet respectfully, fear-based marketing does more than motivate people to buy products and services. It can motivate people make positive changes in their lives.

Many people tend to bury their fears and pretend they don’t exist. They allow their emotions to cloud the cold, hard facts and refuse to admit they’re afraid of anything. A fear-based marketing message can help people accept reality and face their fears.

 

The Verdict

Some marketers believe any negativity is poison in marketing, and tapping into someone’s fear is the equivalent of emotional blackmail.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t all pretty flowers and rainbows. Marketing should reflect real life, complete with real fears and real problems. Imagine the sense of relief someone would feel if you empower them to overcome their fear and neutralize a genuine risk or threat.

 

As marketers, we’re not being evil. We’re doing our job.

by Scott McKelvey
 

 

Regular website maintenance is non-negotiable and should be an ongoing affair. Over and above adding new pages, your website maintenance should also link to the performance of your website; it’s imperative that you continuously maintain your site to ensure it’s performing at its optimum.

The infographic below was created by Smartbear, a company that specialises in software testing. The infographic shows how small things like enhancing the page load speed can improve the revenue you can generate from your website.

1. Site loading speed is paramount
Do you know how long your site takes to load? You may have initially factored in loading times when your website was first designed, but through your regular website maintenance you could have changed something that adversely affects your loading speed, a huge factor in loss of visitors.

Factors that influence the speed of your site include: your server, content on your site and widgets used on your site that are hosted by a third party. A massive 57% of people will leave a site within the first three seconds if the site is perceived to be too slow. Shockingly, most major retail sites take ten or more seconds to load – a whole seven seconds too long.

2. One second is a long time

Let’s look at what a mere one second added to your loading time will do:

• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversion

  In monetary terms, if you use Amazon as an example, a one second decrease would result in the loss of $1.6 billion annually. If you want to make sure you aren’t losing revenue due to slow page loading time, regular website maintenance based on page speed optimisation cannot be ignored.

  3. More money is moving online
  The research company Forrester recently predicted that by 2016, 9% off all global retail sales will be conducted online. Retailers spend a huge amount of money optimising the flow of their stores in malls, increasingly though if you want to secure business through your online engagement with customers, regular website maintenance is the first step in making their user experience as enjoyable as possible.

  4. Don’t ignore your conversion forms
  Most people are familiar with the generic HTML contact form employed on numerous websites. These forms fulfil the important task of letting your audience make contact, enquire about your product or services or request a quote. While these forms are useful, they’re often also a source of irritation and therefore loss of revenue. These are the most common things that’ll put people off using your HTML contact form.

  Too many fields: Make filling in the form as quick and easy as possible by minimising the number of required fields.

  Form validation is too strict: Don’t make people jump through hoops in order to make contact. Again, simplicity and ease of use is key.

  The much hated re-typing of some obscure word or phrase: Find another way to ward off spam – this is probably one of the most annoying things encountered on the web today.

  Making someone re-type information: Don’t put people off by making this a laborious task. If they’ve already entered certain information such as their address or shirt size, have a system in place that’ll automatically repeat it when necessary.

  Regularly analysing and maintaining all of the forms on your site will keep your user’s experience pleasant. This goes a long way towards converting them into clients. Remember that these forms are the lifeline of your online business. The cost of not maintaining your online forms is potentially massive – even more so than your loading speed.

  Website maintenance impacts your communication
  A large portion of your communication will entail the building of landing pages for specific campaigns, competitions or a destination they’re directed to upon replying to one of your emails. If you don’t have a marketing automation system or an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) to do this for you, you’ll have to go through the costly exercise of hiring a designer and programmer every single time you need a new page.

  An automated marketing system will not only allow you to easily to maintain your website but should also do things such as automatically personalising each email you send, or personalising a website based on an individual’s preference
  By Gareth Slaven
  
  

Are you getting the results you want from your email marketing campaigns? Email marketing has been around for a while now, and there’s a reason it’s such a popular channel in most marketers’ toolboxes. Savvy interactions can deepen customer relationships, inspire new ones, nurture and convert leads, and strengthen brand awareness. By delivering compelling messages tailored to specific customer triggers, marketers can take leads from engagement to purchase.

That said, not every marketer is getting the maximum results possible from their email marketing initiatives.  In fact, some are completely missing the boat. To learn more about how to maximize your email marketing initiatives, be sure to download our new ebook, A Decade into Email Marketing: Where Are We Now?

The Evolution of Email Marketing

It’s true that we’ve come a long way from the early days of blast campaigns that usually hit the wrong customers, ended up in the spam filter, or simply created feelings of annoyance and intrusion. In fact, the time has never been better to be a marketer. Technologies like marketing automation allow companies to design polished messages that deliver the most relevant conversations to the right prospect at the perfect time. Lets face it, email has always been a cheap medium as well, with no printing and shipping costs to worry about, email helps mid-market and emerging businesses compete with the big leagues.  Consider the cost of executing a digital campaign these days vs. the postage driven campaigns of just a few decades ago and you can see how powerful email is not only in terms of engagement but also as a cost cutting measure.

These days we use email for all kinds of initiatives. Whether we want to reenergize fading leads, deepen engagement with existing customers or launch irresistible upsell and cross-sell offers, we’ve got the tools to tailor our messaging with unprecedented precision. And as mobile rises in popularity with countless users, leads are more connected to their email than ever before.

Creating a Seamless Cross-Channel Experience

So what’s the problem? The truth is that there are so many strategies and channels to consider that many marketers feel overwhelmed. Some are uncertain of which tactics they should be using; some are pursuing unproductive initiatives; some are jumping from strategy to strategy without sticking to one long enough to see results. Still others are applying one overarching plan across all channels, without considering the specific parameters for social and mobile campaigns or the role of smartphones and tablets. To create a seamless cross-channel user experience, email strategies must align with the appropriate platforms.

Authenticity Through Relevance

The rapid evolution of marketing technologies has left many marketers with a skill gap, and others completely in the dust. Even businesses that have invested in good marketing platforms often lack the training to fully understand how segmentation, testing and analytic tools can help them drive ROI and measure campaign performance. Another common issue: the failure to understand the necessity of tailored and engaging content. The days of predictable promotional emails are over, and marketers must create relevant emails that foster an authentic connection with customers. Not only can such relevance make the difference between a delete and a transaction, but techniques such as initiating transactional emails or driving readers to dynamic landing pages on marketing platforms can boost conversions, revenue and brand visibility.

So let me ask you again: are you getting the most you can out of your email marketing campaigns? Are you using the right strategies for the right channels? To help you decide – and learn some new tricks – we’ve put together a new ebook, A Decade into Email Marketing: Where are We Now?, which focuses on deft marketing strategies to help you maximize the potential of this rich marketing tool. We’ll share the 5 pathways to high-impact campaigns that attract, convert and close. Take a look and discover how you can design emails that turn leads into customers and engagement into sales.

Want to learn even more about email marketing? Be sure to pre-register for Marketo’s upcoming Definitive Guide to Engaging Email Marketing available on August 7th!
Author: Justin Gray

DealerNet Services
 

When you think of sales, do you think of pejoratives such as pushy, sleazy and dishonest? Most people do.

Yet in “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others,” Daniel H. Pink contends that most of us, regardless of job title or salary structure, are salespeople.

What?

Sales, broadly defined, means moving people to action, which people must do well to be successful.

This “non-sales selling” doesn’t involve a purchase—it simply means persuading, influencing and convincing others. Not only does this comprise 41 percent of total work time, according to an international study with 9,057 respondents that Pink paid for, but people say it’s the most productive use of their time.

While only one in nine Americans works in sales per se, the other eight are selling others on learning chemistry, on using new media for marketing, or on exercising more.

What Pink calls “EdMed”—healthcare and education—has a large sales component. This is the biggest job sector in the U.S., with more workers than manufacturing, retail and professional and business services, and projected to grow the most.

Pink, following up bestsellers “A Whole New Mind” and “Drive,” wants to clean up its bad reputation and recast sales not as a way to get the best of others, but to improve the world. As he explains the book’s title, “Moving others doesn’t require that we neglect these nobler aspects [idealism and artistry] of our nature . . . Today it demands that we embrace them.”

Pink’s ABCs Of Sales

Some of Pink’s advice is supported by conventional wisdom but not all; Pink draws heavily upon sometimes surprising social science research.

“Attunement” is the first thing we should learn. If we don’t understand others, how can we hope to persuade them?

It’s about getting into their heads with perspective as well as hearts  through empathy. Powerful people are prone to losing touch with others’ perspectives. So paradoxically, reducing one’s power or becoming humble is a must.

Mimicry helps. If you subtly mirror another’s gestures, you will seem more in tune, but if the other person senses your mirroring is staged, he or she will be turned off.

What works best is being an “ambivert,” which is most of us in the middle of the bell curve. Extreme extroverts are often awful listeners and can be pushy, while an extreme introvert can lack initiative and the ability to close a deal. Ambiverts who can tack back and forth between extroversion and introversion do better at attunement.

If you think your failures are “permanent, pervasive and personal,” you lack “buoyancy.” Those who bounce back, says Pink, attribute rejection to circumstances: it’s a slow economy, he’s having a bad day.

Positive emotions are contagious, so when negotiating, taking a friendly tone and smiling works better than being adversarial, despite what’s portrayed in movies. Your positive emotions (gratitude, interest, contentment) should outnumber negative (anger, shame, sadness) by at least 3-1 but not going over 11-1. Too much risks detachment from reality—not taking responsibility for what one can control and learning from failures is important.

It’s less important to motivate yourself with clichés like “I’m the best” than to simply ask, “Can I do it?” A question opens you up to problem solving and boosts confidence.

The final attribute, “clarity,” means the “capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.”

Today people often have all the facts at hand—they just need help applying information. For example, maybe you thinks you need a better presence on Facebook when you’ll find more leads elsewhere, or maybe a bad website is actually holding you back more than your social media strategy—redefining the problem to better meet goals is what standout salespeople excel at.

In this paradigm brainstorming trumps quick fixes and the successful sellers are the ones who take the time to develop relationships and understand their clients.

Putting It All Together

“Pitching,” “improvising” and “serving” are three tactics Pink highlights for putting your skills to work.

He identifies six “successors to the elevator pitch” including:

• the one-word pitch: President Obama’s re-election pitch, “forward”
• Reagan’s question pitch: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
• the memorable rhyming pitch: “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”
• the email subject line pitch: pithy and specific, “10 Selling Tips”
• the Twitter pitch: don’ts include complaints and “here’s what I had for dinner” (does anyone like hearing that?)
• the Pixar pitch, a six-sentence structure, part of which often introduces a movie’s trailer: “Once upon a time _____. Every day, _____. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.”

Every sales pitch, Pink shows, can be put into each of these formats.

Pink then visits an improvisational acting coach to understand how improv can expand the repertoire of business people. In her hilarious memoir “Bossypants,” Tina Fey also elaborates on how improv comedy works. Here’s the basics, per Pink:

• Say “yes and,” not “yes but”
• Make your partner look good
• Hear offers

The final suggestion, in what I consider the takeaway of this book, is to be a server, not a taker. Don’t “upsell,” which is a “detestable” word; “upserve,” he exhorts. Treat everyone as you’d treat your grandmother. Rethink the idea of sales commissions.

 

 

By Linda Rastelli

DealerNet Services

 

 

 

One of the most important elements of any marketing plan is the ability to track the effectiveness of new initiatives.  

• Long-term results—Automotive closed loop analytics can provide
    results throughout the lifetime of your company.  Once you have
  implemented an  analytics system that integrates your email or direct mail
  campaigns with your  CRM system,  you can
  continuously receive insights.  As your needs or objectives evolve, you
    can modify the resolution of your analytics to help identify the most lucrative
    consumer markets.


• Agile system—Most closed loop systems are easily modified to allow 
  virtually immediate results from an email campaign.  If you would like to
  know  how many people clicked on a Call-to-Action (CTA) in the latest batch of
  emails,  then you only need to click a button.  This type of responsiveness
  may require  additional investment up front, but the data available can help
  make your  dealership a success for years to come.


• Identify key marketing ideas—One of the most elusive objectives in
    any marketing strategy is identifying the marketing message that is most
    effective. Automotive closed loop analytics can instantly identify those
    components and help you understand why they are so successful.  For
  example you  may find lifetime service options are a key to maintaining customer
    relationships which bolster sales.


• Unique metrics—Measuring ROI on direct mail has been difficult in the
    past, but with the use of new techniques like showroom controls or dedicated
    phone lines, you can accurately measure how effective your new initiative
  is.   Using a phone number exclusively for direct mail responses and
  coupons with RFID  tags can indicate the precise number of reactions with a
  relatively low  cost.

• 
  
• Long-term results—Automotive closed loop analytics can provide
    results throughout the lifetime of your company.  Once you have
  implemented an  analytics system that integrates your email or direct mail
  campaigns with your  CRM system,  you can
  continuously receive insights.  As your needs or objectives evolve, you
    can modify the resolution of your analytics to help identify the most lucrative
    consumer markets.
• 
  
• Agile system—Most closed loop systems are easily modified to allow 
  virtually immediate results from an email campaign.  If you would like to
  know  how many people clicked on a Call-to-Action (CTA) in the latest batch of
  emails,  then you only need to click a button.  This type of responsiveness
  may require  additional investment up front, but the data available can help
  make your  dealership a success for years to come.
• 
  
• Identify key marketing ideas—One of the most elusive objectives in
    any marketing strategy is identifying the marketing message that is most
    effective. Automotive closed loop analytics can instantly identify those
    components and help you understand why they are so successful.  For
  example you  may find lifetime service options are a key to maintaining customer
    relationships which bolster sales.
• 
  
• Unique metrics—Measuring ROI on direct mail has been difficult in the
    past, but with the use of new techniques like showroom controls or dedicated
    phone lines, you can accurately measure how effective your new initiative
  is.   Using a phone number exclusively for direct mail responses and
  coupons with RFID  tags can indicate the precise number of reactions with a
  relatively low  cost.