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Article: 8 tips to improve your newsletter marketing

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We all know that commercial strength in a tough economy largely depends on maintaining a close relationship with your prospects and customers. In this context, email marketing remains a reliable and effective way for b2b marketers to communicate with their audiences. But for many of us, getting our newsletters to stand out is an on-going challenge. “My newsletters aren’t performing well. What am I doing wrong?” This is what we recently heard from one of our clients... Here are 8 rules to follow to improve the impact of your newsletters.

Create an engaging subject line
Subject lines should always be relatively short and most importantly, descriptive of the newsletter content. Trying to trick the reader into opening your newsletter will ultimately do no good. Avoid all tacky subject lines, which can easily be perceived as spam.

The “above the fold” content matters most
Above the fold content is the content that can be seen in the email preview window. Considering that a reader decides within a split second whether the content appearing in this window is valuable or not, make sure you that your “above the fold” content really counts. So don’t waste this space on excessive branding, instead, ensure it incorporates content that the reader can immediately “validate”, in other words, judge your newsletter as “likely to be relevant”. Avoid being perceived as spam at all costs and ensure that the reader can see your call to action straight away.

Make sure your newsletter top banner isn’t too big.
That is, if you use one. Collings & Monney’s own newsletters, like the one that probably brought you here, are strategically “un-designed”. That’s because the “regular email” look will improve proximity with the contact and avoid being perceived as spam. If you do use a top banner, make sure that it is small enough so that you don’t lose precious space for actual content and carefully consider the fact that up to 80% of Microsoft Outlook systems default to email images turned off!

Build and maintain a clean database of contacts
If you can, build a home-grown database. You can build it progressively by getting a central system, in which all new contacts will be added. You can grow your database in multiple ways, for instance by inserting contacts from in-person meetings, business cards lottery contests on your stand, website contact forms and white-papers and webinars registrations. It’s a long term effort that requires discipline as well as the collaboration of your colleagues. But it will definitely pay off.

Make sure you email can be read on smart phones
You don’t want to miss out on this increasing mobile readership. The basic rules to follow are to keep the design simple, mind the font size, display your text in one single column, and test your email using one of the numerous free online preview tools, such as MobilePhoneEmulator.com.

Avoid tacky and chaotic formatting
Don’t use excessive bolding and wild use of colours and font sizes. It turns a lot of readers off, and doesn’t help convey a reliable company image, quite the contrary. This is not advertising, you already have the reader’s attention, albeit initially for a very short time. At this stage, content quality will be the key driver of engagement.

Relevance is more important than periodicity
If you don’t have anything of value to communicate at a point in time, hold your e-shot. Un-relevant content can cause your audience to dismiss all your sub-sequent newsletters, relevant or not. Sticking to periodicity at the detriment of quality is one of the most common mistakes among marketers. That also applies to social media communication.

Newsletters are not about selling
Avoid salesy content, it will get you nowhere. Newsletters are your shot at establishing a positive relationship with your audience. Remember the saying: “Ask not what your customers can do for you – ask what you can do for your customers.”, and the goodness will come back to you.

Article: Bridging the digital divide

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Originally published in Recharge News By Jonathan Collings

In this day and age, staying on top of the marketing game can be a daunting ambition. The rise of digital media has created a brave new world of almost unlimited marketing options.

But for renewables companies, getting to grips with digital media will become increasingly instrumental in delivering their messages effectively. In our industry, sales cycles tend to be long, and customers cautious. Marketers aiming to promote larger-cost products and win sizeable contracts know that potential customers have to understand the often elaborate features of their offerings in order to make informed investment decisions.

Fortunately for us, digital media offers us innovative possibilities to demonstrate expertise and explain a product’s value in a meaningful way.

Indeed, digital platforms have favoured the emergence of what is known as content marketing, which is essentially a technique based on the digital distribution of content-rich communications with a high degree of utility. Content marketing allows marketers to take the potential client on an ever-deepening learning path, supported by heavily content-driven strategies using videos, infographics, webcasts, podcasts or white papers. And all of those can be promoted digitally in multiple ways, such as augmented reality.
So how do you get started?
Squeeze your company’s intellectual capital. Get your key people to participate in a webcast. Compile the same content into a white paper. Promote the white paper through social media and online banners. Turn the white paper into a video, integrate it into your print adverts through augmented reality, post it on YouTube and on your website. Split the white paper into blogs and post them on your website and on social media… and on and on it goes.
That’s the way content marketing works.
The development of a rich and engaging online presence will boost website visitor acquisition, lead capture and brand awareness.
So what does our modern renewable-energy marketer look like? He will exploit digital channels and dynamic content. He will be fully committed to keeping up with the evolution of marketing technology. And because 21st-century marketing teams need professionally qualified marketing people who are experts in their niche technological areas, they will make sure to have geeks on their team.

In this ever-changing digital environment, the ability to understand and exploit technology developments will place smart marketers resolutely ahead of the pack.

Article: Making social media work for us

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Originally published on Recharge News by Collings & Monney

When it comes to the public debate on energy, there is an information war going on in social media. With traditional media no longer having a monopoly on shaping public opinion, social media has become a critical tool to interact with the public and influence their perception of renewables. It is now of such strategic importance that our industry should stop treating it as a second-rate, dispensible form of communication.
In renewables circles, the attitude towards social media is still generally one of procrastination. Too many companies are diligently setting up Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages but have little understanding of how to approach social media as a whole.
Because of the sprawling, diluted and ever-evolving nature of social networks, meaningful social-media strategies can be daunting endeavours. But who says strategy is always needed? The nature of social media is chaos, and individual engagement is its rule.
It is also worth remembering that social media will remain online and be searchable indefinitely — and that in recent years, Google has updated its algorithms to increasingly favour social content in its search results.
And let us not forget that social media is much more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. There’s also the multitude of blogs, forums and websites where individuals can publish their own opinions. Everyone is becoming a publisher with the potential to reach an audience of interested readers.
And because most people are not experts on energy issues, and do not follow the basic rules of journalistic due diligence, renewables-related social content is plagued by misinformation. The renewables sector must fight this — and it can do so without spending a single penny.
Whether we like it or not, social media has turned each employee into a potential online industry advocate. Yet, rather alarmingly, many energy organisations exercise strict editorial control over their workforce, or worse, forbid employees to engage in social media. This is not a clever move.
Employees need to be given the freedom to engage as individuals, and the freedom to respond to the factual errors or misleading information they encounter online. The social-media information battle can only be fought mano a mano.
If we do not embrace this reality quickly, our industry may wake up one day and realise that it has lost the energy debate.

Article: Time to set the record straight – Public campaigns and renewables

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Originally published on Recharge News by Jonathan Collings

Raising public support is going to be a major driver for the sustained growth of renewables this year.
We need public opinion on our side, because 2013 will be marked by tough market conditions for wind and solar, as well as intense national and international energy-policy negotiations.
Support for green energy is starting to fade due to the financial pressures on governments. That has caused a dramatic shake-out, especially in the PV industry. For many companies, the share of the pie has been trimmed to the point of bankruptcy.
So the market needs to grow faster, and increasing public support for renewables is one way to help do this. Bolder, broader public-awareness campaigns, co-ordinated by our industry associations, are needed to make a real impact.
Campaigns that aim to change public perception must be ambitious, and have significant budgets if we want to play the game seriously.
These campaigns can feature traditional marketing activities such as advertising, editorial contributions, digital content and sponsoring.
But for the smart marketer, the sky is the limit. Out-of-the-box thinking and creativity are the best weapons.
One striking example is the tremendous success of the Algerian government’s Environment Train. An exhibition about environmental issues was fitted in a painted train that travelled across Algeria. This raised awareness of green issues and generated lots of media attention.
Renewables campaigns need to offer something beyond the basic slogans if they want to maintain credibility. Most renewables messages have focused on creating a sense of urgency about climate change.
However, we can no longer count on global warming to fire up the engine of renewables growth — maybe because the human brain doesn’t seem to respond to such distant threats.
More alarmingly, our industry is still perceived by too many people as an infant whose survival depends on being regularly fed subsidies.
And don’t think we can rely on the sceptical mainstream media to get our message across. It’s time to talk directly to the public and set the record straight.
Changing people’s perceptions, attitude and behaviour takes considerable know-how, time and investment. Only broad, long-lasting, professionally crafted campaigns can reach into and across societies.
The challenge is great. The rewards will be greater.

Collings & Monney welcomes Avent in its portfolio of clients

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Fighting back against bad press

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Article originally published on Recharge News by Jonathan Collings

Mainstream media have a very strong tendency to publish negative stories concerning renewables.

That’s true for newspapers, but also for most international and national business and policy magazines.

Constant and repeated attacks on the prohibitive cost and even negative environmental impact of renewables seem designed to cast doubt on the viability of green technologies.

No-one needs to be reminded that the press has a huge impact on people’s mind. So it’s clear that recurrent bad press is a major problem for our industry. And yet, it increasingly looks like we have almost accepted this unfavourable PR situation. It doesn’t have to be so.

Why are the media biased against renewables? This is indeed strange considering that, unlike the oil and gas industry, all the good stories are on our side. Renewable power is the future, the route to energy independence, the solution to impending environmental disaster, it creates good manufacturing and installation jobs, and in many places, is already reaching grid parity.

The bottom line is that the renewables industry has a value proposition that is ten times stronger than our fossil-fuel rivals. In all honesty, it should be an easy sell. And yet, we have failed to exploit the opportunities. In my opinion, that is because we have underestimated the importance of investing in communication.

First of all, we need to capitalise on the good stories we have to tell — in other words, seize every PR chance available. There is no shortage of good stories to exploit. We need to proactively engage with journalists to get those messages across and get positive stories published. There are plenty of opportunities for opinion pieces, interviews that are there to be taken.

But it’s not only about pushing good stories through, it is also about not letting factual errors go unchallenged. We need to engage in systematic rectification of false information using all the tools available to us.

One specific challenge is the “grey zones” surrounding renewables. There are a lot of facts around renewables, and depending on how a journalist decides to interpret them, he can come up with two totally different stories, one in favour of renewables and one against, and both stories will have the appearance of the truth.

It is therefore important to engage with the journalists proactively, as individuals, on an on-going basis, in order to become their sources of information. By increasing our engagement and helping the media see more clearly through the “grey zones”, we will greatly improve the chances of getting positive press.

Jonathan Collings is operations director at renewable-energy marketing agency Collings & Monney

 

 

Cut marketing at your peril

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Article by Jonathan Collings, originally published on Recharge News

When times are difficult, firms want to conserve cash, and are often tempted to reduce or even abandon promotional activities.

Like governments throughout the world, many businesses choose a policy of austerity over growth. This is a false debate: companies need both an austerity and a growth approach to marketing investment. There is no situation that would require one and not the other.

Promotional spend is the investment needed to reach new customers — and to maintain an existing customer base. Customers are at the core of any business, so don’t think of your marketing as a non-essential overhead; that could be a costly mistake.

When looking at marketing budgets, management sometimes considers only the numbers, ignoring the specific nature of marketing. Some executives assume that their company will maintain its position in the marketplace and keep a stable level of sales and revenue over time. Not so.

Without marketing investment, companies cannot hang on to their market position for long. They will keep losing existing customers, and increasingly struggle to win new ones. It’s a bit like turning off the engines of an aeroplane and expecting it to stay aloft indefinitely. That same principle of gravity applies in the boardroom. The value of marketing must be assessed against the likely decline in revenue as a result of inaction.

Austerity is of a different order. To follow the metaphor, the baggage hold should not be so loaded that the plane can no longer fly. So businesses must assess each element of their marketing budget, and determine whether it is part of the solution or an unnecessary cost.  Economic pressures mean most marketing teams now have to operate with a reduced budget. Good management requires traceability of the marketing spend and a reliable measurement of the return on investment (ROI).

Many marketers cannot calculate ROI, or don’t do it for fear of getting poor results that are interpreted as underperformance. But ignoring marketing ROI is not sensible for businesses under financial pressure. Measuring ROI gives you the facts to determine which activities should be dropped and which are worth pursuing. It will enable companies to optimise and ultimately reduce their marketing spend without damaging results.

Businesses live and die by cash flow. Conserving cash is necessary, but investing in customer demand drives sales and brings in money. The bottom line? Marketing is about investment, not accounting.

Jonathan Collings is the lead consultant at renewable-energy marketing agency Collings & Monney

Collings & Monney becomes regular contributors to Recharge News Magazine

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