1. Use Straightforward Language. Keep it simple and name the email something that lets recipients know what they’re getting. Look for words that clearly convey the benefit you’re offering (the word “coupon” performs well) without being pushy. If it comes across as a sales pitch, it will be deleted immediately. It often makes sense to put the title of the publication at the beginning, as we do with “Idea of the Week”. We’ve also found that descriptive language increases open rates—subjects with words like “sweet” and “local” perform better than those without.

2. Avoid Words Typically Rejected By Spam Filters. Words and phrases like “special,” “offer expires,” and even “all natural” often trigger Spam filters and keep your message from ever reaching a customer’s inbox. Other factors include words in all caps, exclamation marks, and the placement of certain words at the beginning or end of the phrase. For instance, the word “free” is so effective that we often use it in subject lines, but it’s best to keep it in the middle of the subject line, and never in all caps.

3. Track Subject Line Success by the Open Rate. The open rate is the percentage of recipients who click to open the email. You can learn a lot about your customers by testing two different subject lines for each eblast and then contrasting the results.

Feel like sharing?
What trends have you noticed with email subjects?

If you attended our 2009 GPS (Green Positioning Summit) workshop in Phoenix, you heard Melissa McLean Jory, a well respected and nationally known expert in celiac disease and gluten sensitivity, speak on her mission to “increase awareness of celiac disease and help people navigate the gluten-free lifestyle.” If you’re interested in learning more about gluten-free living, view Melissa’s latest blog post.

As Melissa explained during GPS III (click here to view Melissa’s presentation) there are thousands of individuals seeking places to shop that offer gluten-free products merchandised with gluten-free shelf signage.

One of our customers, Sprouts Farmers Markets, is currently running a month long promotion featuring gluten-free items. From April 25th to June 2nd the Sprouts stores are featuring their “Gluten-Free Jubilee” event offering a 25% discount on gluten-free products sold in their stores.

In addition, Sprouts is promoting on their website their Gluten-Free Guide, which provides information and shopping tips for gluten-free shoppers.

What a great promotional idea! Not only does the event clearly promote the fact that Sprouts is aware of the challenges of a gluten-free diet, but they take the extra measures to discount gluten-free items for a month, and offer a comprehensive booklet to help those with Celiac disease find products at Sprouts stores.

Consumers who are suffering from Celiac disease or are challenged with a gluten-free diet are sure to notify friends who share the same concerns, and word will spread that Sprouts is the place to shop for gluten-free items.

If you’re as committed as Sprouts is to helping those looking for gluten-free items, this is a good example of how to take the extra steps to reach out to customers and exceed their expectations.

1. Where does the project originate, and why is it a benefit to the customer?

Be as specific as possible. An item that’s imported is often regarded as a specialty product, rare offering or exclusive one-of-a-kind find, which can help justify the higher price point. Local products are just as enticing as those that come from across the globe. Customers seek out the unparalleled freshness and nutritional benefits that local foods can offer, and value the opportunity to support their community while making environmentally friendly purchasing decisions.

2. How can this product be enjoyed?

What are some helpful tips on how to prep, cook and serve the product? What foods, condiments or wines would complement it? Can the product be enjoyed in a salad, sandwich or dip, or can it be enjoyed as a quick and easy snack or side dish? Get creative and give a detailed description. Cross-merchandise the items you’re recommending, or provide customers with recipe cards or shopping lists for added convenience.

3. What makes this product so unique?

Say why this item is not to be missed! Is it made by a family-owned business? How is it produced? Why do you love it? Use sensory language and attractive, eye-catching signage and merchandising displays to entice customers into discovering a new favorite, or to reaffirm the greatness of the products they already love!

From in-store signage to product packaging, stories are everywhere. What are the best product stories you’ve come across? How do your favorite retailers tell their stories?

In early May the DW Green Company had a two-day website review meeting with a client. As it turned out the individuals representing the client web initiative team had also participated in the same leadership workshop. It was one of the best meetings I have ever participated in. It’s amazing how deep and rewarding a business conversation can be when two companies are grounded in the principles of listening, communication, relatedness, trust, partnership and collaboration.

This same client invests heavily in employee training. Training that goes beyond basic job skills, like checking, bagging, merchandising and safety, with leadership training that improves listening and communication skills. The value and benefit of listening, communication and relatedness knowledge cannot be overstated. After all, relationships are what life is all about, and improving personal relationship skills adds meaning, joy and fullness to our interactions with others.

As a small business owner, I believe that investing in the personal development of my staff is the single most important expenditure I can make for the long-term success of my company. I also understand that controlling expenses is critical. What expenses can be reduced to “free up” resources to advance the personal development of our employees? Many of the things that matter most defy measurement. When we enter the place of human nature and human actions, we are on shaky ground when we require measurable results as a condition of action.

What are your thoughts regarding personal development training for your management team? Have you participated in a business-to-business meeting that was grounded in the principles of trust, collaboration and open communication?

Out-of-home advertising consists of many, many venue choices and provides advertising opportunities that are often overlooked in traditional supermarket marketing. Another format, digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH), is dynamic media distributed across place-based networks in a variety of venues. DOOH advertising engages customers/audiences and extends both the reach, and the effectiveness, of marketing messages. Texting can also play a very effective role in out-of-home advertising campaigns.

Considering the decline of newspaper subscriptions and the high cost of print distribution, out-of-home advertising formats often make perfect economic sense. Billboards, for example, work 24/7! Out-of-home advertising is excellent for building brand awareness, communicating brand attributes, and even promoting specific products. A customer could redeem a movie theatre ticket for a product discount, for example, or send a text message to receive a free product that’s being promoted at a shopping mall. Out-of-home advertising provides a way for brands to communicate with consumers in ways (and places!) they might not expect.

What has been your personal experience with out-of-home advertising? Does it grab your attention? Is there a role for OOH advertising in your marketing mix? What do you think of acronyms? I’m off to an SSA (sign spinner audition.) Wish me luck!

1. Identify the purpose of the activity.

What specific business goal do you plan to address or achieve with the project? Try to limit it to one primary purpose.

2. Agree on the purpose of the activity.

Don’t skip this step. Put the purpose of the piece at the top of every planning document. You will need a strong endorsement of the stated purpose from senior stakeholders in order to stay on course when everyone wants a piece of the action.

3. Understand the purpose of the medium.

A direct mailer has different benefits than an ROP ad, which make it a natural fit for accomplishing particular goals. Make the most of your marketing resources by choosing the vehicle that best fits your project’s purpose.

4. Measure success according to the purpose.

Get agreement on the key performance indicators before the project starts, and make sure they measure the success of the stated purpose. If you decided that the purpose of the mailer was to raise awareness of your new Angus beef program, but your meat category manager thought it was to increase ground beef sales for the week, confusion will spread throughout the company about whether this was a wild success or a complete failure.

5. Be true to the purpose in implementation.

Be rigorous with your team as you try to edit other goals and stay on track. If it’s an ad, let the purpose dictate the distribution details, the item count, the selection of items, the nature of the language and graphics, and the call to action.

These five steps may seem simple, but if you are not already doing them, they have the power to revolutionize your marketing and change your results.

Demanding the fundamental “why?” behind any business practice can alter the activity, eliminate the extraneous, and emphasize the essential. What is the purpose of your website? What is the purpose of your ad? What is the purpose of your brand?

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl contemplated meaning in life. He would go on to write a book on this topic, and concluded that each person has a task. He wrote, “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”

Extraordinary things can happen when profound questions of meaning and purpose are asked of a brand.

Two Questions to Ask About Your Brand

1. Why does your brand exist?

At its core, working on your brand strategy is about defining your brand’s purpose, its reason for existing in the world. It asks the question, “Why does this brand matter?” If a company’s leaders and employees can’t easily articulate this with clarity and passion, customers won’t be able to either. And if customers can’t think of any reasons to believe, their loyalty will be based on surface benefits like convenience and price. In short, if your offering isn’t sent into the world as a brand whose longevity is important, there’s a good chance it will not be long for this world. The market preserves brands that matter. Employees fight for brands that matter. Customers are begging for brands they can feel good about giving their die-hard loyalty to. By knowing and living your purpose, the brand becomes a rock in the midst of a changing culture and marketplace, remaining truly relevant and consistently authentic.

In his book It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Roy Spence, Jr. shares stories of clients discovering their brands’ purposes. Here are a few brand purpose statements that he helped craft:

Wal-mart exists to “save people money so they can live better.”

The Hilton exists to “be hospitable.”

Southwest Airlines exists to “democratize the sky.”

Charles Schwab exists to be a “relentless ally for the individual investor.”

What need are you uniquely positioned to meet? What do your most passionate customers say about the way you make a difference in their lives? At your very best, what does your offering contribute to the world? What would be missing in the world if your brand just went away?

Put another way, what is important about your brand?

1. What are the reasons to believe in your brand?

Brand faith happens when real reasons to believe are tied to a service-oriented purpose. There is an important difference between brands you like and brands you believe in. When we go to work, we all want to be someplace we believe in. When we make a patronage decision, we want to find places and products that actually mean something to us.

What gets you excited about your brand? What specific activities support your purpose? These activities are your most powerful competitive advantages, your most important stories to tell, because they create faith in your purpose. These reasons have the power to make all of us believers in your brand.

Everywhere around us, we see needs and problems. Find a need that you can serve; the deeper the need, the more powerful the purpose. Find, as Frankl said, the “concrete assignment that demands fulfilling.” What do you offer that no one else does? What can you fulfill that no one else can? It should be something you wouldn’t mind spending the rest of your working life fulfilling. Keep it simple, articulate it clearly, and align all of your practices to it. If you believe in it enough to live it, and make the hard decisions accordingly, employees and customers will believe as well. Will energized employees, passionately loyal customers and a relevant, authentic brand position affect the bottom line? You bet.

Will an institutional Memorial Day cover page drive sales and customer counts like a traditional item and price cover page? Maybe, maybe not. The institutional ad will, however, be remembered much longer than the price of ground beef and watermelon. And keep in mind: you still have the remainder of the ad to promote item and price.

Most Americans have had family members or friends serve in the armed forces. Sadly, many have lost a loved one in service of our country. For me, my father served valiantly in WWII, and I lost two good friends in the Vietnam War. With many of our troops currently in harms way in Afghanistan and Iraq, recognizing their service and the United States armed forces is a laudatory decision. I also feel that, in light of the poor economy, the incivility in politics, the stories of corporate greed, the Toyota fiasco and other negative news, a sincere, heartfelt acknowledgment of the meaning of Memorial Day would be well received and much appreciated by consumers. This type of institutional ad also has a greater probability of attracting non-shopper readership.

Whether or not you choose to run an institutional Memorial Day cover page ad, you should consider a 22×28 poster acknowledging the importance of this holiday.

I wish you and your families an enjoyable and safe Memorial Day holiday, and invite you take a moment of silence on Monday, May 31st to honor the servicemen and women who gave up their lives to protect our freedom.

Below we’ve outlined the basics behind four of the most popular outlets for multi-media coupon distribution and redemption.

1. Text Messaging Coupons

What are they?

Text message coupons are virtual coupons sent to a subscriber’s cell phone in the form of an image (barcode) or text message. To redeem the mobile coupon, a customer would need to show their phone to the cashier so that the bar code can be scanned, or show the text messaged coupon at checkout.

The Benefits

• Customers always have their cell phones with them.
• Messages can be sent out instantaneously, and the message is understood immediately.
• Customers who don’t use their email regularly now have another way to receive discounts and deals.
• The price structure for text message marketing is much lower than many other digital and print media.

Potential Drawback

Text messages can quickly become disruptive if the content isn’t consistently credible and useful. A text message-marketing program must earn (and keep) a reputation for being highly beneficial to the customer.

2. E-blasts Coupons

What are they?

E-blast coupons are direct email marketing messages that “blast” out to your database of email subscribers.

The Benefits

• With email marketing, you can easily track coupon redemptions and monitor the open rate (the number of emails that are confirmed to have been opened by the recipient.)
• Increased brand awareness. Customers can spread the word about your brand with the “forward to a friend” feature; the buzz builds exponentially, and you don’t have to lift a finger.

Potential Drawback

Email coupons cost more to send than text messages, and the customer must have a working printer in order to redeem their savings. Also, some customers may not ever receive the messages due to SPAM flitters or other email viewing issues.

3. Groupon.com

Every day, Groupon.com sends out an email featuring one incredible local deal. A subscriber who wants to get the deal must buy it before the offer expires at midnight. If it isn’t purchased by a minimum number of people, the deal for that day is canceled. Because Groupon guarantees the business offering the Groupon deal a minimum number of customers, the discounts that are offered are one of a kind. Groupon can generate a tremendous amount of attention for the featured business of the day and provides an incredible opportunity to tell a very large audience what sets your brand apart.

The Benefits:

• Retailers can set a minimum number of purchases to increase their buying power.
• People will often repost on their Facebook pages and forward the deals along to their friends.
• The Groupon deal of the day is often a popular topic in conversation; it’s a story that people like to pass along.
• A large audience is listening for what you have to offer.
• As everyone must buy the Groupon during the same 24-hour period of time, you’ll know how many Groupons were purchased so that you’re able to anticipate demand.

Potential Drawback

Groupons do not have to be used the same day they are purchased, so it’s important to have a plan in place for controlling and managing the response your Groupon generates. You need to be able to allow for large-scale redemption that won’t hurt your bottom line or the customer experience.

A few ideas for Groupon.com offers:

• Tell a story: use this opportunity to provide current and prospective customers with a powerful reason to believe in your brand. For example, if you want to highlight your catering services, create a Groupon that features your best catering offerings at a great price.
• 50% OFF a holiday dinner for four. Make sure you have margin built-in and enough staff to support a high demand.
• A signature or commonly used product. Buy it by the caseload if enough people signup for your Groupon to help ensure that you maintain a margin

4. Coupon.com

What is it?

Coupons, Inc. is the “leading U.S. provider of consumer-printed coupon marketing and technology solutions.” (couponsinc.com). They provide a web module that can be built into store sites for easy management of vendor coupons.

The Benefits

• Customers who typically base their purchasing decisions on the coupons they clip can now find all the coupons in one place—your website.
• It’s easy to track coupon redemption with the built-in features that coupon.com provides.
• A system for limiting how many coupons a customer can print is included.

Potential Drawback

Customers have to be invested enough to remember to go to the web site and wade through offers to find the ones they care about, rather than having a text or email coupon come to them with just a few really great deals. This is for die-hard coupon-clippers, and won’t attract new store visits from other shoppers.

Interested in developing a multi-media coupon program? Call or email me today.

“Wow, how much did she spend?” I wondered. In twenty-eight years of marriage, I can’t recall a conversation about coupons, excitedly or otherwise.

Is coupon pandemonium commonplace in America today? Well, maybe not pandemonium, but research indicates that both the number of coupons available, and their redemption rates, is rising; from 2008 to 2009, redemption rose 27 percent.

“Without question, coupon usage is undergoing a renaissance,” said Todd Hale, Senior Vice President, Consumer and Shopping Insights for Nielsen. Overall, 1.6 billion coupons were redeemed in the first half of 2009.

“These findings from Nielsen suggest that the increased coupon usage not only helped consumers stretch their budgets but also provided meaningful sales impact to manufacturers and retailers,” said Matthew Tilley, Director of Marketing for Inmar, a company that handles the bulk of coupon processing in the U.S. “Coupons have always been an effective way to encourage trial and repeat purchase and are proving to be a bright spot in an otherwise dreary economic environment.”

We believe that coupon books are extremely relevant in today’s economic environment, and that food retailers should consider including one or two coupon book promotions in their annual marketing budget. COSTCO, for example, has traditionally done an excellent job with quarterly coupon book mailings. Twenty-four, thirty-two or larger page count coupon books allow retailer’s to promote store/department specific benefits, as well as traditional item and price features and manufacturer and private label coupons. Coupon books are a great way to feature signature deli, and bakery items, and showcase meat, seafood and produce departments.

Coupon books can be structured to accommodate multiple weeks of offers to offset distribution costs. There could be four sets of weeklong coupons, coupons with a four-week redemption rate, or a combination of effective dates. Daily deli deals are an effective offering. There are also an array of coupon book sizes and paper stock options that will set your offering apart from competitors. There are no rules with the coupon book “look” or coupon offers—use your imagination and have fun!

This is a short, but sweet Idea of the Week, because I’m off to redeem a Cold Stone Creamery BOGO coupon for some delicious chocolate ice cream!