What I learned from Ogilvy

“Gentlemen, Kindly remember that the obvious is always overlooked.”

It seems to me that some obvious things traditional direct marketers and even marketers generally have known about for well over a century are largely, if not entirely, ignored by people selling online.

How many of the services you subscribe to have ever asked you personally about yourself? About what you are interested in – your ambitions, your problems? I have only seen it done once recently.

As you can see, a firm is trying to learn about their customers, because, as Harvey McKay remarked in Swim with the Sharks without Getting Eaten Alive, “Something you know about your customer may be more important than anything you know about your product.”

Most ad agencies often imagine, clever or funny advertising. It was relevant advertising. But how relevant can your messages be if you know very little about your customers?

All those years ago, those folk knew more about the importance of enriching their database than most do now. Most online marketers have yet to really try to understand their customers. They just make assumptions about them as a whole, not as individuals, and on that basis they do just fine.

You may ask why, so I will tell you.

It is because they have been making so much damn money without having to try hard.

They have been doing what I call “fishmonger marketing” – slap the product on a slab and say “Here it is, everyone, do you like it?” General marketers call this “push marketing,” and you see it at its most irritating and unimaginative in car commercials.

This works just fine when the product or service, the medium or idea are new or unique, or you are a brilliant copywriter or marketer. The first TV commercials got amazing responses. The first personalized direct mail doubled response rates. The first sweepstakes did the same.

And if like me, you are not a genius and you have no new medium or stunning new product, you have to rely on greater knowledge.

And I predict that as e-mail response rates continue to fall, only those who try much harder to learn more about their customers as individuals will succeed in the long run.

So here is a suggestion I made to my creative people around the world at O & M in a newsletter I used to send out called Commonsense Creative: “Don’t just go for a response. Gain knowledge”.

I cannot stress highly enough how important this is. The art of persuasion begins with saying something that the prospect cannot disagree with – getting a “yes” – and often the easiest way to do that is by stating a fact about the reader.

For example, if you are writing to doctors, simply beginning with the highly unimaginative words, “As a doctor” will significantly boost response. Followed by another relevant sentence, I once saw it quadruple response for American Express.

Source: Drayton Bird