News: More < Less 📀

Thursday, November 19, 2020

More < Less 📀

Marketing and Sales are different things. But make no mistake:

Marketing has to sell.

Trouble is, most marketers don't know how to sell.

Because marketing involves so many skills, we escape by specializing.
We get detached from the essential persuading we're all here to do.

So let's go back to basics.

theCLIKK's founder, Russ Henneberry, has been a marketer since the Clinton administration and he's sold almost everything under the sun since then.

As a gentleman, he'll resist a boast. But to borrow a reference he likes:

We love choice and options, except it turns out we actually don't.

For a long time, marketers have operated on the assumption that consumer choice is an inherently good thing, that it's always better to offer more options. This idea stuck (and continues to stick) because there is some truth in it; for instance, it is theoretically true that a customer is likelier to want something the more options there are.

Might as well add: this idea was incubated in a booming, mid-20th-century free-market economy where new options were welcome to come live or die by their own merits (and many of them lived).

But the idea that "more consumer choice is always better" falls apart when you take the consumer's point of view. Perhaps more importantly, the idea falls apart when you examine what research has found over and over again across all different verticals in the shopping economy.

Two things happen as consumer choice increases:

Analysis Paralysis 😰 The buying decision gets harder. Let's all admit that our capacities for analytical thinking go into the toilet when we're shopping. Businesses think they're adding possibilities when they increase consumer choice—but what winds up happening is that, instead of neatly ranking all of the options in a single group, each possible pair of options gets its own internal debate in our brains. Like a neverending, disorganized round-robin tournament, but for buying pants.

Buyer's Remorse 😕 Consumers are less satisfied with any option they pick. The more options available, the more opportunity costs there are for making a decision at all. In other words: more choice just makes it easier to wonder if you'd have been happier with something else (which also says something about the state of modern romance).

So you think you're helping your customers by giving them more options... but a lot of times, you're just (A) making it harder for them to buy something in the first place and (B) diluting their satisfaction with having bought anything at all. That's probably not what you were going for!

For a canonical (but quick) read on the subject, here's HBR's take. 🤓

the OKR FRAMEWORK for AGENCIES: This guest article in Search Engine Journal does a couple of nifty things. The first (necessary but not sufficient) piece is to define a framework for readers, in this case OKR for 'Objectives and Key Results'. Nothing groundbreaking there, but this is a good entrance to the subject if you're not familiar. The second piece is what made the article a bit more noteworthy, and that's suggesting to digital-marketing agencies a few different ways they can make use of this framework. Without spoiling anything: the more obvious application here is to set Objectives and Key Results (also known as 'KPIs' for 'Key Performance Indicators') for each of the agency's clients, but some agencies have also found it useful to treat the agency itself as a client and apply the same principles from the inside out.

APPLE SLASHES their APP STORE CUT: We'll illuminate one major theme emerging from the antitrust action against the Big Four, and that theme is Fear Of Being Next. Because the spotlights are currently shining on Google, you can expect the other three companies—Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—to desperately cling to the darkness. The price of doing so: throwing the public all kinds of bones, including many they would (in all cynical probability) have never had a reason to throw.

You'll see this in the headlines for a while, but today it's Apple throwing a bone: they're cutting their App Store revenue share in half, down to 15%, for any businesses making less than a million dollars a year on their platform. That's not a cheap move to make—especially because, PR-wise, the rate cannot go back up in the future—but Apple has hedged smartly by applying it to businesses below seven figures. It's smart because that covers roughly 97% of App Store sellers (doing a lot to appease the general public), and yet those sellers account for way less than 97% of the App Store's revenue.

Subscribers (especially email subscribers) are critical assets for marketers... yet we don't pay much attention to the people who are unsubscribing.

It's true: some people are gonna drop off, and that's just a fact of marketing life. You can't fully prevent unsubs. What you can do is look closer at the data and separate the parts you control from the parts you don't control. After that, you'll have a clearer understanding of how well you're engaging with subscribers and where you can improve.

Yesterday, we mentioned four big reasons people unsubscribe from lists, and we'll repeat them here:

Attrition ⛏ They got worn down. Whether it took two years or two days, you were hammering their inbox just a little too much for their liking.

Demotion 👎 They're no longer interested because hopes and expectations haven't been met. They've been disappointed by some part of the experience or, conversely, more impressed elsewhere.

Expiration ⌛️ They've lost their reason for being on your list in the first place and so they're moving on.

Inflammation 🔥 They're leaving because you pissed them off. These are the rarest in our experience, but they can leave strong impressions.

Today's complication: any of the unsub reasons above could be compelled by numerous possible factors, some you can control and some you can't. Your next task is to eliminate the unsubs you couldn't have prevented and then focus on the ones you (theoretically) could have prevented.

So let's first look at the Unpreventable Versions of all four reasons:

Attrition ⛏ Some people will be overwhelmed by a reasonable number of emails. Fortunately, this is a shrinking minority of people in 2020.

Demotion 👎 Again, "unmet expectations" can mean a ton of different things, but (agreements excepted) you're not directly responsible for the expectations of others. Sometimes, people will have expectations that are irrational or just plain wrong, and you should NOT be compelled to rise and meet those expectations.

If they're on the wrong bus, let them get off.

Expiration ⌛️ Sometimes, people turn a page or start a new chapter in life. These are the unsubs we're happiest for, in a way, because it's so totally not personal. If one of y'all stopped being a marketer—which we'd argue you never do, but never mind—then it'd make sense why you don't need theCLIKK anymore, and we'd wish you well chasing whatever's next.

Inflammation 🔥 This will happen whenever you take a controversial stance—and the bigger your audience, the wider "controversy" will be defined. There's a sensitive group no matter the subject. But as long as they're reading the room, marketers can do quite well by courting controversy, and these unsubs will just be one of the predictable effects.

And now the Preventable Versions:

Attrition ⛏ As we discussed back in July, this is the single biggest reason people unsubscribe from stuff—especially if they're getting multiple mails in a single day. Quite simply, a lot of marketers send too many messages and need to streamline and condense things.

Demotion 👎 This is the second biggest reason people unsubscribe, and its most common form is people who felt the messages were spammy or too heavy on promotions. Broadly speaking, Demotion comes from a disconnect between expectations and reality—but to narrow that question, what did they think they would get out of subscribing and did you really try to deliver that? Or, if you're being honest with yourself, did you focus more on what you wanted to get?

Customers like promos and sales, but they like brand content very nearly as much! Take the effort to share with them, not just sell to them.

Expiration ⌛️ Whatever value you offer has to stay on the table for subscribers. If people subscribe because they got a taste and liked it and wanted more, you have to give them more. That's the ongoing trade.

Inflammation 🔥 Talk s**t, get quit. This is an Asshole Tax for marketers.

In Part 3, we'll line all of this up with the data points you might have available so that you can get to splicing and dicing for yourself!

Whether or not you like her music, Taylor Swift is certainly an influential public figure by now; take, for instance, her symbolic $1 countersuit in 2017 against the DJ who had groped her several years before.

Her latest chapter is set somewhere between legal battles and her music. Long story short: the manager of her former label, Big Machine, has sold the masters to her first six studio albums, making it impossible for her to acquire them herself despite having tried for years.

The whole situation is kind of a mess and Scooter sounds like a not-good person. And no offense to anyone, but the name Scooter doesn't help him.

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Thursday, November 19, 2020

More < Less 📀

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