According to the Harvard Business Review, only 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed the benchmarks set for a successful launch. Lack of a successful launch strategy for a technology company can reduce your profitability by as much as 35%.
From an outbound or downstream marketing perspective, the biggest problem with a new product launch is education (sometimes referred to as enablement). Of course, I’m assuming you’ve already done the important inbound/upstream marketing:
Makasha Dorsey over at Solo PR Pro quoted me for a recent article on how to get PR clients up and running quickly. If you haven’t read her posts, you should. There are a ton of great posts for both consulting pros and internal teams.
Would you like to almost double your ROI on your next mail campaign without having to make a single call?
Messaging sweeping is a successful tactic for increasing response rates as our message sweeping team recently reported for a leading manufacturer. This manufacturer sends quarterly product mailers with an average 3.1% response rate. After working on ways to boost that response rate, the company decided to run split-run test using message sweeping for part of their mail drop tested against the control group with no message sweeping added. The group with message sweeping saw a response rate increase of 145%.
Matt Wilson over at PRDaily.com (also Ragan.com) quoted me in an article about email vs. social media. Thanks Matt.
Matthew Turner of consultancy Boston Turner Group says email wins the sales race, at least for now, because communicators can target emails more effectively. A tweet about a sale or an offer on a certain type of shirt appeals only to the fraction of the audience looking for that shirt.
Are you intimate with your prospects?
Once you’ve segmented your data, scrubbed it and grouped your prospects in your database, your work is not even close to being done. The next step is to personalize your messages to add relevance and engagement.
You never want to make your prospect work to figure out how to do business with you.
How are you optimizing your landing pages? Have you ever gone to a website that featured something you were ready to download or even buy only to have to search around for their contact us page or order form or whatever random page you thought would help? Then when you finally found that page, they wanted to collect field after field of information from you just to send you their brochure? That kind of frustration can end the relationship with your prospects before it starts; however, if your landing pages are customized and have the appropriate number of fields, you will greatly increase the odds that a prospect will complete the form and begin engaging with you.
Your customers and prospects are as individually different as the colors in a rainbow. If you understand how to target and communicate to them based on those differences, your response rates will be just as beautiful. If you try to mix your messages for the masses, the colors will run together and you’ll have a less-than-beautiful muddy mess.
Last week I fired off a post suggestion that we should all be looking at data segmentation in our lists to improve response rates. I had some great feedback on the post from readers wanting more detail, including this email from a friend:
I completely agree that segmentation will improve response rates. What do you suggest we look at as segments?
So here are some thoughts to get you going.