The Emperor's New Phone Jack

So fine it's like it's not there

I am a much better marketing and advertising professional for having the experience of being a father.

One of my favorite aspects of that role has been reading to my kids at night, which started, of course, with fairy tales.

My kids like magic. Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, and before that, Zagazoo and The BFG. I always tried not to read the same books over and over again, but some times, you have to. There's only a few things that get to the status of all-time favorite.

If you were to ask either of my daughters what their father's favorite story is, they'd be able to tell you in a heartbeat.

"The Emperor's New Clothes."

Not just because it's funny, easily understood, and that it might also be the only one in the classic canon that relates to my professional role. More so, because it teaches an incredibly important lesson for kids (and maybe girls especially), and also to anyone in a corporate setting -- the importance of being able to go against the prevailing wishes of a crowd and hold to, well, what should be common sense.

Or, at least, what might matter to people outside of the room.

You know. Like your actual customers.

Which leads me to pivot to the new iPhone's move to eliminate the headphone jack from the handset, with users now either having to go to wireless earbuds, or to a corded unit that splits off the power dongle. (A dongle that is also, well, easily lost. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

The money quote from this is that Apple considers themselves to be courageous for making the move, in an exceptionally tone-deaf PR moment. But independent of that, we need to just speak to the obvious point which is that ear buds should never cost something like the $159 that the "airBuds" are said to cost... because, well, just about everyone has lost a pair of ear buds or ten over the course of their lives, and that's the only thing that's going through the minds of the people I've talked to about this.

Sure, something has to give to get more power, longer battery life, faster speeds, and the other obvious gains from the new handset. But the plain and simple of the new model is that if the unit came in two flavors -- with and without analog jack -- the vast majority of younger (and most churning) consumers, who operate their units with buds all the time, wouldn't give it up.

They've learned to live with the current speed and battery life. They aren't buying what you are selling as anything more than a price hike, and one that's not exactly, well, courageous.

Especially for a company with growing PR nightmares of tax fraud, child labor, and slowing innovation. Who are sitting on more cash than just about anyone in the world.

A more outward-thinking group, especially one that understands that competitors in the space are ravenous, would get closer to VR, holograms, more customization in voice recognition, etc. Even the simple act of pitching more secure over the ear exercise bud options, or a locator app for lost hardware, would have helped.

Instead, Apple just strips away the headphone jack and tells the world that they are courageous for going naked.

Well, I suppose. The marketplace, as always, will decide. Maybe there's just so many people in the iPhone Empire that naked will be just fine.

But what they call courage?

Might not be quite so echoed by the more direct in the audience.

* * * * *

Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Leave of Absence

Vegasy

If writing is a muscle -- and, well, it is -- it's something of an understatement to say that I am pretty well developed.

This blog now has over 200 posts to its credit. My music blog (what, you didn't know I have a music blog? It's about my old rock band, which just might play again one of these days) has another 30 posts, just in the past few months. The sports blog has another (gulp) 5,825 in the past decade, and counting

Before I made those blogs, I've written four books, wrote for dozens of clients and start-ups, and have pretty much paid the bills with words for my adult life. There's also four different social media feeds.

Way too many words, really.

Writing isn't just what I do for a living. It's how I define myself. The process is how I unwind at the end of most days, how I share and remember what I've learned, and how I give meaning to it all.

And, well, I've got to give it up.

Not all of it, of course. You might not even notice the drop in output, or might even be happy for less. But personal circumstances (an injury to my spouse that is going to require surgery and several months of rehab. a sudden outbreak of a summer cold that's completely knocked me sideways), combined with professional and personal commitments, are going to make certain sacrifices in terms of time served inevitable.

Besides, the clients (always) come first. And if you are really in the market for more of my words, you are more than welcome to go read more of them. They just won't all be about marketing and advertising.

Back in a bit!

* * * * *

Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Four Indispensable Strategies to Increase E-mail Open Rates

Let's Get Open

(Wrote this one for the day gig, folks. You can see it live in the corporate wild here.)

Raising your open rates is a constant concern for many marketing managers in pharma and a prime focus of what we do at MNG Direct. Here are four abiding strategies that help us deliver results.

1) To go three steps forward, you might need to take one step back.

 Here’s a quick hypothetical scenario. You are running a simple A/B creative test for an e-mail campaign, which means you are splitting the list in half and making a single change so you can measure the impact of that decision. Rank the three outcomes below in order of preference.

a) Creative A performs 8% better than average, Creative B performs 4% worse

b) Creative A performs 28% worse than average, Creative B performs 15% better

c) Creative A performs 22% better than average, and Creative B performs 21% better

The answer is (drumroll please!)…B, then A, and then C.

That may seem counterintuitive, because we all want winners, and we’re leaving the two biggest ones on the sideline…but the problem with the results from Group C is that there’s no variation in the performance that you can use to inform future creative. When your work all performs the same, or is within a range where confidence from statistical significance is low, you do not have the information you need to make optimal choices for the next execution.

So, to sum up – when testing, go for bold single changes in test cells, made without fear. Learn from every test, and test whenever possible. It’s vital.

2) Counterpunch the clock with data.

 One of the most common questions in this industry is, when is the optimal time and day of the week to send e-mail? The problem is the question does not have a simple answer, because your e-mail does not hit the in-box in a vacuum.

Let’s imagine that you get a concrete answer – Monday at 8:30 am – and that it actually is the best time to send. This finding most likely came from data or a test and will become known by other e-mail professionals. Keep in mind that your healthcare professionals (HCPs) probably also subscribe to content newsletters, get notification e-mails from e-commerce vendors, and likely sift through dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails in a day. So how many of these communications will wind up showing up in their in-boxes on Monday at 8:30 am? Probably too many for yours to really stand out.

At MNG Direct, we’ve seen consistent wins from dayparting in a more varied and granular approach, by category, click-through destination, frequency, and so on. This lets us generate a personalized plan for our flights and creates an atmosphere where we are continually learning. As a bonus, it also means that we are never overly dependent on a single time and day slot.

3) Mobile is more of a mindset than a platform. It’s also dominant.

 Many design professionals go for responsive coding in their e-mails to ensure smooth deployment in mobile handsets, and then they consider the job done. This leaves a lot of engagement on the table.

When an HCP is viewing your e-mail on a handset, it’s more than just a smaller screen that you have to worry about, more scrolling than on a desktop or laptop, or a different direction in panning. Dayparting is also a major consideration, since many HCPs are smartphone users who extend their accessibility beyond traditional business hours, and they may also not be willing or able to spend mobile bandwidth on high data transfers. With up to three out of every four people filtering for later or accessing e-mail content directly through mobile, your mindset needs to be mobile first, not mobile friendly. (As a final point on this, you also should be looking at your work on a variety of screens and monitoring how that display mix changes over time.)

4) Prioritize your testing levers.

 In every e-mail campaign, there are a number of variable choices that can have an impact on open rates. Sender names, subject lines, dayparting, preheaders, and preview pane creative elements are all in play, and that’s independent of more technical aspects like in-boxing to avoid the junk folder, hard and soft bounces, list hygiene, ISP white-listing, avoiding spam “honeypots,” and so on. Stay in the space long enough and you’ll wind up with winning and losing practices in all of the above, along with a sense of optimal practices, hopefully through test cell data.

But while all of these tactics have the ability to spike engagement metrics in different ways, they don’t have the same impact. Subject lines and sender names appear to all users, and dayparting also has universal impact. Getting deeper, preheaders and preview pane elements only have impact to the subset of users that are in a consideration path, but they can make all of the difference in the right placement, especially if you are looking to optimize beyond opens. As always, the data should drive your decision-making process.

Next Steps

While open rates may be the primary point of concern for most e-mail professionals, at MNG Direct, we take a more nuanced view, and we monitor a host of other metrics. That’s because any single e-mail metric, even one as important as open rate, will not give you the full indication of a campaign’s performance.

For instance…if your campaign has high opens but poor deliverability and high unsubscribes, that’s not a successful campaign. Similarly, a high click rate e-mail might sound great, but not if the opens are low, or if there are very few conversions on a landing page. Seasonality will also have an impact, and seeing how all of these metrics perform in relation to each other, over multiple flights, is also important.

Increasing your open rate is a laudable goal. But it shouldn’t be your only goal.

* * * * *

Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.