Online educational service has a great direct marketing opportunity but doesn’t seem to realize it
GIVING A RECENT TALK before a direct marketing audience, I was startled to get applause from a line where I hadn’t expected any. The line was, “We are all direct marketers now.”
I suppose the audience was happy to hear that the rest of the world is finally catching up with what we’ve always known.
I didn’t mean that everything is now going to be sold direct (although I did read the other day that a tobacco company will start selling cigarettes directly over the Internet). Nor did I mean that there’s no longer a place and a need for non-rational image-building brand advertising.
But in this new era, all advertisers are increasingly dependent on getting a measurable direct response, even if that response is only to log on to the advertiser’s Web site. And along with this development have come such familiar direct marketing tools as advertising cost per response, cost per follow-up, and sometimes cost per sale. You’re seeing these terms discussed more and more, although sometimes they’ll be disguised as something like “cost per click.”
The trouble is, many Web merchants are running a direct marketing business and still don’t realize it. So they fail to take advantage of the hard-won knowledge and experience that can be gleaned from the successes and failures of earlier direct marketers.
Take the Element K ad that’s the subject of this month’s makeover. It has run widely, and I’d seen it several times without realizing exactly what was being sold.
Know what it is? It’s what used to be called a correspondence school. But today, thanks to the magic of instant communication via Internet, “correspondence” is no longer necessary. You can “send in” your interactive course work by computer and chat with your instructor online.
What else has changed is that job skills have become vastly more complex, and many companies are starved for qualified knowledge workers. So the market for distance learning has shifted from individuals looking to advance to companies seeking to upgrade their work force.
None of this is conveyed in the ad’s dull, flat headline, “Knowledge” – a headline that would have been laughed out of the room by correspondence school marketing directors. I find it very puzzling. Even if the creators thought they were doing brand-image advertising, what kind of image is being created by that headline? And how can you create a brand image for a product if the readers don’t fully understand what the product is in the first place?
In terms of winning readership, just picture if all the stories in your daily newspaper had headlines like “Knowledge.” Some fun, huh?
Viewing it as direct marketing advertising, I shudder to think what kind of horrendous advertising cost per response the creators are getting with this approach. They can live with it only because, I suspect, they have a huge order margin to work with.
I’ve always been a great believer in what I like to call the “instant orientation” approach to developing print ads. That is, at first glance, a reader should get some idea of what’s going on, what’s being sold, and whether it’s anything he or she should be interested in.
So in my makeover, I’ve tried to convey the ad’s intent instantly: “We are selling knowledge. We have over 400 distance-learning courses. We can help you and/or your company make more money.”
Although the main sales objective appears to be bulk sales to companies, Element K also sells to individuals. So I included a secondary appeal to that market.
Frankly, I think my makeover would produce at least three times as many clicks or phone calls and yield three times as many sales per dollar. But with my necessarily limited knowledge of the product and market, I don’t consider my ad the last word by any means. If I were the company, I would test and test and test different approaches by top-notch direct marketing professionals (A-B split runs, of course) and whittle that advertising cost per click and per sale down and down and down while the net profits went up and up and up.
