Every year, journalists around the world write about how dumb and annoying this practice is. And it is. The fact they write about it every year (for the past 20 years at least) also says that many agencies and corporate PR teams still aren’t getting the message.

If you sent a media release:

a) the journalist is going to assume (rightly usually) that all of their competitors were sent pretty much the exact same story. So it’s not really news any more. (There are exceptions of course).

b) unless their or your email was actually down – then they did receive it. So asking them if they got it is pretty silly. We don’t ring anyone else usually to ask if they got the email we just sent them.

And asking, ‘Are you going to use it?’ is an equally annoying question.

However, for some reason many companies and agencies do insist on calling the media and asking these two questions.

When you’re talking about business to business communication, first up, if your news is important, ring or email the journalist first and explain the story and what you can specifically offer them in terms of content, spokespeople and supporting resources. Every news outlet is different – so customise what you offer to suit their readership.

If it’s run of the mill content then a media release can work to some extent and may get some coverage.

Anyway – how to manage basic PR processes is not the point of this blog!

It’s to draw attention to the fact that many agencies and some company PR teams are using interns to make the ‘Did you get the media release? Are you going to use it?’ calls.

This is bad news on several fronts (apart from the fact that’s it’s a pet hate of the media). Here’s my list.

1. For most companies and agencies, the relationships they have with the media have taken years to develop and are highly valued. Why on earth would you ask the most junior people in an organisation to get on the phone and speak with the media at all – ever?

2. Interns don’t know anything usually about the client, their business strategy or the content in the media release. So if they get asked a tough question by a journalist, they can’t answer it. It might not even be a tough question. It’s annoying to journalists who’s time is wasted and belittling to interns who suddenly realise they’re out of their depth and their own name and reputation, right at the start of their career, is taking a beating. Not a nice place to be for anyone really.

3. Companies are entrusting agencies to represent their brand and build media relationships on their behalf. They must be horrified to learn of agencies that deploy interns – who, through no fault of their own, manage to do the exact opposite of what was intended.

4. Interns can’t pick up on media feedback and adapt their pitch content or come up with fresh ideas to take to the journalists that might make the story fit better with the news agenda of the day. They will follow directions as best as they can – and plough on regardless in many cases.

5. Interns get yelled at, hung up on, receive crushing emails and, unfortunately for the entire PR industry (and probably the media to some extent as well), can emerge from their few months of internship in a state of shock and disappointment. And let’s remember, most Communications courses these days need a near perfect leaving exam mark to get into. So these are some of the brightest people in the country who, thanks to a very ordinary internship experience, swear off the sector all together – and rethink their entire career path.

I can’t tell you how mad this makes me, particularly after conducting many interviews already this year with recent graduates who relayed horror story after horror story about how they told to ‘follow up media releases’ during their internship and got an entirely predictable response from the media.

We have a chronic staff shortage in the PR industry yet too many agencies and companies are tossing interns into terrible situations to get themselves out of a short-term bind (or they honestly think that doing media follow up is ‘good work for an intern’).

As agency owners at least, we owe our future super stars a lot more than this.

When your business focuses on creating and then moving millions of units into market, the stakes are high if you get it wrong.  Not only can your brand take a very visible hit, your bottom line can take a beating too.  A warehouse full of products no-one wants is a financial disaster by any measure.

So what do these companies do before going to market?  They research.  They do their utmost to understand exactly how products are going to be received before they start the marketing engine.

How does this translate into B2B marketing exactly?  In my experience companies don’t research events well enough before they go to market.

B2B marketers constantly lament the high drop out rates, poor attendance numbers or general lack of interest in their events – but often there has been very little research done with the target audience prior to the event being launched.

The usual response to a poor showing to an event is to work backwards trying to analyse what went wrong and identify lessons for next time. Was it timing, topic, data base, marketing execution, attendance driving, design and graphics, location, time of day, city, speaker or something else?

What’s the problem with doing retrospective analysis on events?  It’s really hard to know exactly why it didn’t go well.  There’s usually feedback from the call centre doing the attendance driving and, if the sales team has been engaged, some anecdotal feedback based on the conversations they had with customers. Overall it’s mostly hearsay. It also comes down to the experience of different marketers. Some just have a natural instinct (and the experience usually) for putting on great events and can judge the topics and tone that will bring in the punters. Others really don’t.

So here’s one quick idea that might be worth trying before launching an event – test the market first.  The simplest way to do this is to ring a sample of the people you were planning to invite and run the concept by them.  The larger your sample, the greater the confidence you can have in what your research tells you.  The cost to run a small pilot will be nothing compared to the expense (in time and production) of putting on an event.

And if you can’t reach most of your target market when making your pilot calls – then that’s probably telling you something too. Your selected market may be harder to pin down when it comes to engaging them in your event marketing.   If calls aren’t working – try some targeted, personal emails and see if that works.  Same deal, if you can’t get a response that way either – then it’s likely they aren’t going to respond to a less personalised event invitation either.

Marketing events isn’t a perfect science – but there is some science we can apply to predict the likely appeal of B2B events before they are launched into the market.

Read more in my blog about events  http://www.outsource.com.au/blog/2011/10/why-events-based-marketing-is-still-one-of-the-best-sales-programs-you-can-run/

They do sound more compelling when you say it like that, and of course many companies do try to run events as part of their marketing program, but often with mixed results.

Hopefully this post will help you think a little differently about using events in your marketing strategy.

First up, does event-based marketing work for every one?  The short answer is absolutely not. 

For starters consumer-based companies really don’t need their mass audiences to be attending events prior to a sales engagement.  Their products and brands speak directly to the buyer.  The purchase process is simple and the decision making is low-involvement/low risk.  

At the other end of the spectrum, business-to-business sellers have a much more complex challenge.  They have to build awareness, create interest, demonstrate competency and develop trust in the minds of potential buyers.  And that’s why events, done properly, can work so well.  They achieve all of those things in one go.

Here are a few things to consider when it comes to making events a success and some of the things I find attractive about having them in the marketing mix.

- There are many kinds of events so let me be a bit more specific.  For the sake of this discussion lets remove user group and major expos or exhibitions.  I’m really talking about small seminars or boardroom briefings aimed at no more than thirty people in a room.  Any more than that and you really can’t be flexible with your presentation and stimulate discussion.  It’s also hard to meet and speak to everyone in the room – and you don’t want a one-for-one ratio of sales people to delegates.  It can intimidate the audience and work against you.

- Marketing an event is often as good as running the event itself.  Your event invitation can do a lot to position your company in the correct category, raise awareness about an issue or approach to solving a problem and because it’s an invitation, is not so quickly sent to the email recycling bin.  In addition, if your invitation (online or offline) is well designed, looks professional and looks like it comes from a good-sized, confident organisation then you’re helping to build your brand.  So, make sure your invitations look as good as the companies you sell to and what you aspire your business to be.

- Create once, run many times.  Offer a continuous event series not just a one-off.  You’ve done all the hard work in deciding on your content.  In many cases the venue will be your own boardroom and catering is pretty simple too.  So offer a number of dates for that event topic when you market it.  Offering one date means you miss a whole bunch of people who can’t make it purely because of a date clash.  You also restrict the opportunity for no-shows to simply re-register a new date which many will.  Our own experience is that it’s not uncommon for some people to cancel and re-register up to three or more times.  They’re still a good prospect and it would be a shame to end the dialogue just because your event was a one-chance-only.  You’ve done all the work – leverage it and get some scale with your marketing.

- Re-invite attendees.  This sounds counter-intuitive but it works.  People who have attended good events will pass on the invitation when they get it again (make sure a refer a friend link is included in your invitation) and now your event is actually being sold by word of mouth converts.  We have had entire teams of companies add themselves to our database and work through our event series over time as a result of this simple strategy.  Very rarely do people who really enjoyed your event and got value from it unsubscribe because you’ve invited them again.  One of our event series runs every fortnight and has done for more than 18 months.

- Make your event a ‘must attend’.  I could write a few essays on how to create compelling events but the rules, based on our experience anyway, are these. 

Don’t offer prospects the opportunity to learn about a new product or service unless the only people you are inviting are people who you know are explicitly interested in this.  Who in their right mind would put themselves in an enclosed space with a sales team unless they asked for it?  (Answer – those who are much further down the sales process and actually want a sales presentation).

If your event sounds like it’s going to be a sales presentation then registrations from prospects who are new to your organisation are likely to be low.  Instead, provide agnostic insight and quality ‘must-have’ information that achieves the following:  a) positions you as experts with experience because you are explaining best practice and sharing your knowledge in a way that would be hard to find elsewhere and  b) shows you are confident about your ability to add value to a client.

- In your event give your prospects a preview of what it might be like to work with you if they were to become a client.  Are you demonstrating thought leadership, presenting truly new ideas, being altruistic in what you share, being consultative as you present, being friendly and engaging?  Is your boardroom clean and tidy, was the welcome at reception organised and pleasant, are your back office staff wandering around in jeans or in suits? (Whichever is appropriate depending on what you sell and who you sell to) it’s the whole package. 

- Invite people who are interacting with your other marketing channels and telling you their interest areas.  Email marketing which involves downloading content can provide some good insights into what your target audience finds interesting.  Build events that map to the sort of feedback you’re getting from the market.  Often people who are engaged in some of your other marketing programs are more likely to come to an event.

- Use personal, emotive language in your event invitation subject line.  You’re asking an individual to give up their time so make your topic appeal at an individual level. 

For example, ‘Everything IT managers need to know about planning their career in the era of cloud computing’ will probably do better than ‘Introducing our company’s new career advisory service for IT managers’

One topic is offering to deliver a personal benefit, the other is talking about the company putting on the event. 

- Use good integrated event marketing tools to give you control and scale over your marketing.  Ideally one software application should be responsible for email invitation distribution (and analytics), pre-registration survey tracking, event registration, confirmation email distribution, telemarketing management, post-event surveys, lead status scoring and opportunity identification.  We use StrategyMix (www.strategymix.com.au) for ourselves and many of our clients but there are other platforms out there in the lead automation software sector which are also worth considering.  Having the right tools will link your event marketing together intelligently rather than forcing you to create activities from scratch each time – which can be a lot of heavy lifting.

- get your database right.  It’s unreasonable to think that 20 people out of 100 are going to come to your event.  The statistics just don’t support that sort of response rate unless it’s an amazing event that is very well targeted.  Check that your data is up to date, add to it by using defined commercial lists so you have a good prospecting base, opt them in to receive your content and market to them regularly.  The number one issue with poorly performing events (aside from poor topic choice) is the database it is being marketed to.  Time spent on cleaning or validating data will be time well spent (and it will improve the response rates from your other marketing channels as well).

In all, there’s plenty of evidence that a good event series can attract prospects to your firm and help position you in the market.  They don’t need to be top-of-the-line productions to be well received, just make sure the content truly delivers value and is delivered thoughtfully.

The most common of the traditional internal communications tools is a newsletter distributed either hard copy or via email.  More often than not internal newsletters miss the mark and at worst, give your team another job to do – read the newsletter.  In an age where we are inundated with communication there has to be a better way to communicate business strategy and ensure a workforce, particularly one with remote workers.

One of the things I am passionate about is engaging an eager, enthusiastic, results driven team.  Personally I’ve found my team respond better to a different style of communication and I know lots of other high performing teams are the same.

I’ve found one of the tools that works best for me is quarterly focus areas, or themes.  The idea is that you assess the things that really matter to your business and look for ways to clearly articulate those things on a consistent and meaningful basis.  By focusing on one concept per quarter you have time to get everyone on the same page and understanding what it is you are trying to achieve.

The best starting place is determining your business strategy.  What is it that needs focus, a goal you are working to or a core principle for the business?  Ideally you then ‘jazz’ the concept up with a launch activity.  For us it’s a quarterly meeting and usually the office is ‘themed’ for this event.  For example, last year one of our themes was CSI – or client satisfaction information.  For the launch meeting our office was decked out as a crime scene with police tape etc.  This helps to make the theme memorable while reinforcing the key message.

We also reinforce the quarterly focus and support professional development by holding a book club session (a text relating to the core concept behind the theme) during the quarter.  This way the team is focused on one management text and they get to discuss the ideas in a group environment.  It’s a great opportunity to think about how we can apply what we’re learning and thinking about to our businesses and our clients too.  The outcome is an informed team, bonded and moving in the same direction – on strategy.

There’s so much more to internal communications than the humble newsletter.  I’ll be writing more on this topic!  Please let me know if there are any areas you’d particularly like to hear more about.

We define it as ‘polices and procedures created and enforced to govern the use of social media by people who are directly employed, officially affiliated or otherwise authorised to represent an organisation.’  

It’s about making sure the people who are paid to represent your company (staff, contractors, some strategic suppliers etc) don’t create legal, brand or commercial problems by misusing social media, either deliberately or accidentally.

In the same way that companies have employment agreements and computer usage and mobile phone use agreements to ensure they protect their business and the welfare of their staff, there is a very small (but fast-growing) trend of also implementing social media usage policies to improve social media governance.

Why?

Clearly it’s to stop people wrecking the place.  But is it that simple?  At one level yes, at another no. 

Obviously if you Tweet that your company’s biggest client is run by a nincompoop, and your client reads that Tweet … well you can join the dots.  Your firm may be issued with a ‘please explain’ note and you may receive a ‘pack your belongings in a card board box’ memo.  Don’t laugh, it’s happened. 

What if you post a few friendly Facebook pics of you and the rest of your work team doing tequila shots at a local bar after a sales kickoff event?   Not so bad?  What if one of your work team is not happy about the invasion of privacy and takes it to HR? 

What if you use FourSquare to check in to a cafe every day for a week?  What if it is where you’re meeting a major prospect to close a deal?  What if a former colleague, now a competitor, is connected to you in LinkedIn and works out what’s going on at the cafe (which happens to be next door to a very well known and kind of obvious potential customer)?

What if you get a new job and the first thing you do is update your LinkedIn profile – before your new employer has time to position your appointment with their own team and clients?

I could go on.  Let’s not even start on harassment, confidentiality breaches and calling in sick when your Tweets would indicate you’re actually enjoying a day at the races.

Well, common sense would say that in the most serious cases, there are grounds for instant dismissal or at least major reprimands.  And certainly some of the things I have mentioned would constitute violations of the law and the choice of media really has no bearing on the procedures for dealing with it. 

The problem comes from the many grey areas, some of which I’ve highlighted. 

And it gets more complicated if those breaches occur when people are using online identities which are not work related (ie their personal Twitter account, their Facebook accounts (and they don’t disclose where they work).   The argument, (and I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know how these defences are going to stack up in various state and territories) is basically that what people do on their own time, in their own social networks, with their own equipment, provided they don’t say where they work, is pretty much up them.  Or is it?  Ask most people and opinion is evenly split at the moment.  It’s the blurring of ‘private’ and ‘company’.

The problem is, as I see it, this.  How hard is it to work out where someone works?  And if you can make that connection with just the most basic of forensic searching then is the person now actually breaching their various work obligations.  

Well clearly you can’t set up a personal email account and start posting sensitive documents you stole from your company without breaking the law or your employment agreement.  But what if you’re a voracious blogger and are commenting negatively about an issue that would seem to be quite clearly related to where you work?  Even if you removed the name to protect the guilty?

What if your company doesn’t know that your co-worker keeps posting pictures on their personal Facebook site of you at work-sponsored events, along with disparaging comments?

You can see how messy it’s getting.  So of course the answer is to kill off social media use in the workplace altogether.  Which I guess would work fine if people didn’t have smart phones and computers at home and thought that their personal social networks had nothing to do with where they worked …

Trust me, lawyers around the world are girding their loins (always wanted to use that in a sentence) and preparing the way for a new era of litigation and law making.  And we’d all better be ready for what’s coming.  HR managers are scrambling for advice, compliance and risk teams are trying to understand the possible impacts and how to mitigate them and everyone else is waiting for the legal precedents to be made – and hoping it’s not going to be them who are the test cases.

What’s our advice?

Well, as best as we can figure (now anyway), it would seem prudent to create a social media policy that outlines what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to how your representatives use social media.  Clearly you can’t over-ride workplace laws and other regulations, but you can still explain how people’s existing commitments in their employment agreements or other contracts extend to the use of social media.  Just joining the dots for people is sometimes an eye opener. 

Second, make sure people are given the policy to read and sign  Don’t add it to the HR portal and hope people notice it.

Third, train people in best-practice use of social media, particularly tools like LinkedIn.  Most employees and contractors want to use social media properly and will value training on how to get the most out of the tools they already use.  Equally, most people also want to know what NOT to do when it comes to using social media networks. 

If you have a policy, offer training and support, then not only will you reduce your organisation’s exposure generally to misguided postings and poor online behaviour, you will empower your teams to start using social media to support your marketing, sales and customer relations objectives. 

The reality is, many employees are already doing this ‘under the radar’ (and often quite well), but it’s critical that organisations start grabbing this by the horns and not the tail and implement informed social media governance programs.

If you’d like some more information about the kind of work that Recognition PR does around social media governance audits, program and policy development and training, you can contact us at:
Adam Benson
Director
02 9252 2266
adam_benson@recognition.com.au

While marketing brochures are effective tools to communicate your services, they often lack the appeal of a success story. Case studies can reach out to your client in a more personal and relevant way than other marketing materials.

Even with all of these factors going for them, the importance of case studies is often underestimated – why? First, they often rely on sales people identifying clients to participate – requiring the sales persons time, attention and willingness to discuss it with clients. They are also time consuming to produce, rely on your customer’s response times, and need to go through approval processes internally in their company as well as your own.

However, it’s well worth the effort, a well written case study can provide your business with an effective way to communicate ‘real life’ situations, identify problems and solutions and highlight achievements of how the implementation of your product or service has reflected in the client’s success.

If you would like some extra tips on how to leverage customers as marketing assets (beyond just the case study) you may find our 12 page guide a good starting point http://bit.ly/lujurB

However, like most things that are hard work, the pay off is worth it.  It’s a job that’s just got to be done.  The cost of planning, creating and executing marketing campaigns to databases that are in a bad state of repair is too high to ignore.  It’s not just the cost of running a campaign, it’s the opportunity cost of failing to reach the people who could or should be interested in what you have to tell them.

If, right now, your foot is kicking a box of ‘return-to-sender’ direct mail pieces that lives under your desk – then you know what I’m talking about.

If you look into any database you’d find at least one ‘enquiry@’ email address linked to a reasonably important prospect company.  How long have email campaigns being going to this perfectly valid and entirely useless email address?  Is this the only contact for that company?  You can see the problem.

The fact is data ages to the point of being useless at a rate of up to 30 per cent per year (based in our and many of our client’s experience).

You know that economic crisis we had not all that long ago?  How many people can you think of that you personally know – your colleagues, friends, family – changed workplaces, roles, responsibilities?

Now think about how many companies are in your database.  If you applied the same logic – how much of your database is probably out of date?

What if you only have one contact for an entire company in your database?  If that person is now just a ‘return to sender’ or ‘failed email’ record then you have basically lost all possible traction with that firm.  (TIP: do a gap analysis and see how many of the relevant job titles you have per company).

There’s no need to panic just yet.  There are many ways to audit and update your database. Here’s a just a couple of the more common ones we recommend.

One is to send out a direct mail piece or an email to your database using registration forms with mandatory fields.  Good mailers that address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ issue will get surprisingly good results.   Competitions and events are excellent, as they often grow your database when prospects send the invitation on to colleagues or peers.  We get this every time we send out invitations for our fortnightly Social media orientation for B2B marketers and managers event.

For big email databases, an innocuous, one-off email to everyone will give you starting point for a data clean (just don’t make it something that’s going to result in mass unsubscribes).

The hard work comes when you sit down to read all of the bounce, fail and out-of-office emails you get back. Yes, you need to read every single one.

Painful, yes, but many companies make it standard procedure to tell you that employees have left the company, or to provide alternative contacts while on leave, through out of offices. Target smaller batches, either by importance, company or lead potential, which can make keeping on top of responses easier.  Automated responses are a rich source of new valid email addresses – just make sure you continue to comply with relevant Anti-Spam legislation.

Telemarketing is a good option for data cleaning and validation once you’ve tested your existing database.  Telemarketing will let you achieve things that email alone can’t.  First, you speak to real people, so you can often add in multiple contacts on the one call.  Second, you clean your existing records more accurately by finding out that “Bob hasn’t been here for three years. Mary runs that department now.”  Last, if you speak to the person who’s record you’re cleaning, you may be able to include a lead generation or marketing qualification conversation as well and get an immediate return on your investment.  Why not? They’re on the phone anyway.

What should you do if your database appears to be in very shabby shape, like most key contacts are no longer valid?

It might be that the best course of action is purchasing a new list and starting again.  Keep the records are still active and send the rest to the glue factory.  It will probably cost you more to remedy old data than to buy a sparkling new list.

Most list companies are constantly calling, updating and validating their data, so you can be assured of the quality.  The good data firms will offer a 99% accuracy rate and credit your account if you strike bad data.

These are just a couple of common approaches as I said.  There are some blended activities you can get into which are multi-step and involve a mixture of processes – but it’s a bit too technical to go into here.

Overall, my advice when it comes to marketing data management is to be objective in your assessment.  If you are getting bounce rates for email campaigns that seem high – then draw a line in the sand to make a start to clean them up.  Even if you just do it in batches each month it will instantly improve your campaign return on investment and give your more confidence in your campaign planning.

If you would like further insights on how to maintain your database(s), or think you might need some strategic guidance or help, our team is always more than happy to help.

More than a year ago I began running orientation to social media sessions for B2B companies as I found (and still find) that many businesses don’t understand the benefits of social media or how to use them.

More recently I’ve been engaged by a number of clients to run LinkedIn specific training sessions.  Many businesses now realise that significant benefits can be realised by better harnessing the professional contacts and networks that already exist within the business.

Some of the very simple suggestions I recommend to people when it comes to professional social networking are:
- keep your professional social networking professional – I keep friends on Facebook and my LinkedIn contacts professional only
- provide status updates on LinkedIn that add value to those contacts
            o for example – business related blogs (like this one)
            o news articles
            o industry updates.

A couple of things to keep in mind:
- don’t spam your network by updating too frequently (personally I find that once a week is a good consistency – provided you have that much content)
- personal updates are better suited to more social forums, like my personal favourites Facebook and Twitter.

One area many people seem to overlook on LinkedIn is Groups.  While I find that individuals join a group most don’t understand the benefits from active engagement.  While LinkedIn is great to help you maintain contacts it is also ideal to extend this networking to include people you should know, but don’t yet.

There are lots of business benefits for social networking and while some, such as networking with people can be obvious, some of the less obvious benefits are also significant.  The top three I often hear are:
- SEO
- attracting (and retaining) staff
- creating an environment for lead generation.

If your business isn’t engaging with social networking, and at the very least, if your sales team isn’t actively using LinkedIn on a daily basis then I encourage you to explore the opportunities.

Monday, 14 March, 2011

Recognition PR and Outsource are owned by Adam Benson and Elizabeth Marchant.

Write Away Communication + Events was established in 1986 and today represents brands including Boral, Breville, HPM Legrand, Ricoh, Uniden, Wormald, Fujitsu General and Villeroy & Boch.

Under the terms of the deal Write Away will move to Recognition PR’s Circular Quay office from March 28, 2011 with the final elements of the acquisition to be executed on July 01 , 2011.  Write Away will continue to operate under the same name.

Write Away principal, Jody Hammond, will take on a new role as General Manager for Write Away from July 01 and will continue to work in the business for the next three years.

Recognition PR, Write Away and Outsource will together employ 19 full-time staff and up to 17 telemarketers.

Jody Hammond, said, “This purchase is ideal for us.  It lets us realise the equity and goodwill we have created in the firm while giving Write Away the opportunity to continue to grow and develop as a business into the future.”

Adam Benson, Director of Recognition PR and Outsource said, “Our medium term goal was to add a complementary PR firm to our group.  We’ve been looking for a way to gain exposure to more markets without going down the organic growth path and Write Away Communication + Events is a perfect fit. 

“Write Away’s client-base includes consumer technology, lifestyle, building and not for profit – all areas we want to expand into.  It also has several B2B accounts.  Write Away’s cultural fit is also very close to ours.  We have a lot of the same ideas about client service, team management, marketing and new business development.”

“All three firms started more than 15 years ago and bring a lot of experience to our clients,” said Benson.

-ends
About Recognition PR
Recognition PR is an Australian-owned public relations and marketing communication consultancy with 25 years experience in the Australian and New Zealand IT and B2B markets.  Its clients include Hostworks, Kelly Services, Quest Software, RSM Bird Cameron, Wavelink and Westcon.

www.recognition.com.au

About Outsource
Outsource has more than 18 years experience providing B2B marketing services to a range of sectors including IT and corporate.  It offers consulting, lead generation, telemarketing, event management, data cleaning and control, online marketing and design services.  Its clients include Distribution Central, F5 Networks, Fronde, Konica Minolta, Newlease, Objective Corporation, SAS and Tibco.

www.outsource.com.au

About Write Away Communication + Events
Write Away Communication + Events has more than 25 years experience as a full service communications firm with a focus on industrial, lifestyle, consumer electronics, not-for-profit and technology sectors.  Its clients include Boral, Breville, HPM, Ricoh, Uniden and Villeroy and Boch.

www.writeaway.com.au

The trouble is, many invitations I receive seem to forget what they’re trying to achieve (asking me to attend an activity).

One common problem is invitations start by introducing a topic and then lead into explaining why it’s something I should know about.  It’s not until I get towards the bottom of the screen, if I last that long, that I see that I’m actually being invited to something.

So here’s one rule.  Be really clear right up front that you’re inviting the reader to attend something.  Maybe start with “You’re invited to … “.  That way you instantly address the big reader question, “Why are these people talking to me?”.

Next, move into a short description about the event and why the reader should turn up.  Sure free food or alcohol could be an enticement (particularly if it’s an exclusive venue) but don’t get too hung up on that.  You want people who are interested in your event content, not a good cheese platter to attend.  So answer the “What’s in it for me?” question.  You answer that by explaining as clearly as possible the benefits they will they receive by attending.  The venue and food choices just make it easier for readers to say yes once they’re on the hook.

Lines like “In this one hour presentation you will learn xxx” is a lot better than “meet our global leader of XYZ or attend a demonstration of our latest product range.”

In these latter scenarios you’re hoping the reader will make the connection between what you’re talking about and what’s going in their world.  If you’re not sure if you’ve got the message right, test it by taking the ‘so what?’ test. Simply read the invitation copy you’ve written, for example, “Get up close and personal to our new super-awesome product range.”

Now answer the question “So what?”  (in this case why is it great to get up close and personal with your product range exactly?)

If the answer you come up is a really clear benefit then maybe that’s the copy you should lead with.

In terms of the language you use, try to be as specific as you can.  Relevancy is key if you want to motivate people.  Readers need to feel that you’re going to address issues that are relevant to people just like them.  Refer to job titles, industries or behaviours that the people you want to attract are likely to have in common.

Once you’ve got the benefits laid out clearly (and keep it to two or three key bullet points or short sentences, move onto the rest of the critical information. When, where, start, finish) and other relevant details.  Again, don’t forget simple things like:

a) the name of the room or suite number in your venue.  No-one wants to get lost inside a hotel or function centre trying to find an event.

b) date and day of the event, double check that the day is right– how often do you see Wed 4th Feb (or something like that), only to find that Wed is actually the 5th.  Which one is correct?

c) registration start time and event finish time.  People want to know how long to book their diaries for.

d) an rsvp email address or phone number and an RSVP date.  (Don’t have the RSVP date too close to the event day – you may need time to ring around and drive attendance and ringing with two days notice is not going to be well received).

e) the organiser’s contact number on the day (people get lost or run late and may want to ring you to ask for help or to check something on the day)

f) advice about transport or parking to the event.

g) if you’ve set up a registration system, double, double check that the links in the email work properly.

h) test the email outside your domain.  You’d be amazed how often emails get distributed but the graphics don’t display because they’re being hosted internally.  The email will look fine when you view it on your own network, but not from the internet.

i) if you have space, consider an agenda so people have an idea of the topics that will be covered.  This is useful for longer events, not as much so for one or two-hour activities.

j) view the email using a few different mail clients.  There are free and low-cost tools available that will provide previews of how your email is going to look in a range of email clients such as Lotus Notes, gmail, Outlook and others.  HTML is not rendered the same way in all mail clients, unlike web browsers.

k) make sure you include an unsubscribe function (and manage unsubscribes properly).  It is unlawful, except in a handful of cases, not to do this.

l) consider whether graphic, HTML or plain text emails are best suited for your audience.  There seems to be a whole range of opinions on which has the best response rate and I’m not foolish enough to recommend one over the other.

m) make the ‘from’ address a real person, not a company.

n) monitor for email bounces or fails and decide what to do about them.

o) check for spam compliance.  There are low-cost tools around which let you ‘test’ your email for its likelihood of being picked up by spam filters.  The good tools will highlight key words or phrases that may be causing your email problems.

Once the critical information is dispensed with (and this should all be on the first screen) you can offer more detail for those who want to keep reading.  You might want to provide presenter bios, pertinent host company information or go into more detail about the topic.

Last, be wary of including links to anything except an event registration page in your invitation email.  Once people click off the email to other sites or locations you may lose them.

The next time you get a great email invitation, stop and think about why it has appealed to you and see if there are some lessons you can apply.  I’ve found this to be one of the best exercises of all.