guitar hero + bike

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Also I wonder if my feeling about wanting to chase fans is because I'm selling primarily entertainment products, and if people are going to respond to a solicitation it's going to be because they're entertained by it, not because I'm offering the best price in town on mufflers or something that they'd have to buy anyway.

Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2008 3:37 pm

sam goddammit

look what you did

Joined: 14 Dec 2007 Posts: 782 Location: USA

Sam, I hope you know that I am personally holding you responsible for this mess, even though you couldn't possible have known posting a video here would lead to this argument beforehand.

Joined: 14 Dec 2007 Posts: 782 Location: USA

Seriously tho Boorishly and DKL you should totally kiss and make-up by now.

Shame on you two.

Fightin' over something as silly as marketing.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

uh i don't think anyone's arguing

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 16347 Location: TaBB Graveyard

i was enjoying it plz continue

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

waitin on boor

Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 11:41 am

Sorry for not responding while I was at my grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner. While we were there, my mother untangled her phone cord and rewound a cassette tape for her, so you can see how it would be difficult to get Internet access in such a place.

Anyway I guess first of all, it's not really appropriate to sell everything through direct marketing. And direct marketing is usually pretty soulless. (Not always, but often.) The objective is usually something like, "We have a list of 10,000 people and our last email got a 2% response rate. How do we turn 2% into 3% with this one?" So already I don't care about 97% of the people on my list. It doesn't matter if those people think my email is cheesy and lame, because I am just trying to get 100 more people to respond. (Though it is a problem if they think my marketing is offensive or blatantly manipulative -- you don't want to piss people off or make them dislike you.)

But that's where the selling words and things like that come into play. We found that when we changed one piece from a blue/yellow color scheme to red/black, we got a 30% lift in our response rate. Is that manipulative? Are we exploiting some primal human emotion that favors red and black over yellow and blue? Beats me. I can't explain the difference, but we'd be dumb not to take advantage of it. Another example is that we avoided using the word "FREE" for a long time in email subject lines, even though we have a legitimate free trial offer that doesn't require you to provide any purchasing information. (In other words, it's not a trick. It's actually free.) We were afraid that "free" would be blocked by spam filters, but when we tested it out we found that the lift in response more than compensated for any decrease in deliverability. "Free" is one of the selling words they tell you to use -- so is that manipulative? It's not misleading or deceptive. It's just that people like to get stuff for free, and they're more likely to spend ten seconds looking at your email if you tell them that they can get something they want for free.

I mean, if you want to get philosophical about it, a joke is manipulative. Every time you write a comic, you're trying to get a specific response out of a person (a laugh) and you use particular words and phrasing and pacing to make it more likely that people will laugh. The difference is that a laugh doesn't cost you anything. But look -- an email or a piece of mail cannot force a person to buy something. If your marketing is honest and straightforward and if you believe your product is something that is high quality that people will actually like, then I don't see why you'd feel bad about doing everything you can to convince folks that they should check it out. You shouldn't deceive or mislead people -- but if "free" is more effective than "complimentary", then why not use it? It's no different than acknowledging that "Timbuktu" is funnier than "Chicago".

Anyway I have no clue if the kind of stuff you want to sell would work through direct marketing. (What are you even trying to sell?) And I think it's very likely that if your marketing is funny then not only will more people read it, but you will be giving people a sense of what they might be getting. If the product you sell is supposed to be funny, then it makes sense to make the marketing funny too.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Well here is how my thinking went. I saw a book at the library called "How to Build a Mail-Order Business" and I thought, hmm, I have a mail-order business. The book was written 10 years ago, so it doesn't have much to say about the internet, but that's okay because I was most interested in the stuff I didn't know much about: how to use direct-mailers, magazine ads etc. Actually it was mainly about mailers and back-of-the-magazine ads.

Obviously these are not marketing techniques that many webcomics use. So I had to think, why? Is it because these types of techniques are inappropriate for webcomics, or just because nobody's thought of it before?

I've stated before that I consider "Wondermark" a brand more than just a comic strip. My greeting cards share an aesthetic and an sensibility with the comic, but they're not directly related in the way that, say, Garfield greeting cards would be. So I'm not concerned that something like direct-mail isn't a "webcomics" thing to do.

I mean, it certainly may be that the web-native nature of webcomics is such that advertising, social media, blogs etc. -- in other words, the way that most webcomics are promoted -- are the superior methods of marketing and promotion. But there may also be an underserved market out there that can be reached with a different sort of approach.

As I said earlier, if I'm going to be serious and say that this needs to be my primary source of income, I have to treat the store as a store and not just as a comic. Presently, my main business is selling entertainment and gift items. Clearly that's a viable industry -- at our house we get catalogs every month filled with entertainment and gift items, usually trinkets, cheap gadgets, and "humorous" products like semi-cheeky T-shirts. These are catalogs like Signals, What on Earth, ThinkGeek, & XtremeGeek.

If I had enough products to fill a catalog, I could probably do worse than trying the same approach; I mean, clearly it works well enough for them. I don't have that many products, but I could certainly fill a flyer or brochure, or maybe talk to some other people and fill an "independent artists" catalog with webcomic products (emphasizing the products as much or more than the comics themselves).

Still, plenty of people do just fine sticking to web-based promotion -- this is where webcomics have an advantage over catalog shops like ThinkGeek. Nobody goes to ThinkGeek unless they want to look at products, whereas webcomics give people active reasons to visit (to be entertained) and some of those visitors can then be converted to sales. And the entertainment nature of comics allows us to not only attract repeat visitors who check in every day (a quantity of traffic, similar in a way to the numbers you'd reach with something like a mailer) but also to develop relationships with fans who become personally invested in us and want to support us (a quality of traffic that's hard to cultivate via other means).

tl;dr I'm just trying to figure out if there's a reason to explore marketing approaches that are not traditionally used for webcomics.

Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 11:22 am

Well the first question then is: Who are your ideal target audiences? And the second question is: What can you offer them that they want? Like, literally, just sit down and make a list with two columns that answers those questions.

Then once you have that, you can start trying to figure out which targets are the best opportunities (and which ones you can even reach), and then how to phrase your offer to make it even more compelling based on whatever is unique about your products. Like it's not just, "Funny holiday gifts!" it's "Funny holiday gifts your family won't stop talking about!" (This is also probably the point where you decide how icky this makes you feel and whether you can live with that.)

Anyway, direct marketing doens't HAVE to be lame. But it does have to stand out from everything else people are getting (pretty easy for you, since few folks outside of Trader Joe's uses Victorian imagery in marketing), have a headline compelling enough to make them want to read more, and have an offer that they think is valuable. I suspect the compelling headline would be the tough part for an entertainment product -- most folks are not sitting around thinking, "Gee I need to find a new webcomic to read." (Though at certain times of the year, there probably are folks who are saying, "Gee I don't want to send out lame Christmas cards again this year.")

Finally, the cheapest and most effective marketing you can do is to your past customers. They are the people most likely to enjoy getting something Wondermark related in the mail, and are the people most likely to buy more Wondermark merchandise. If you really want to think of yourself as a mail order business, this is a good place to start.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Yeah I've thought about sending out a flyer to past customers. Achewood automatically signs you up for a quarterly store newsletter when you buy something, and when I set up my new store I figured I'd do the same -- make a quarterly newsletter for discount codes, product announcements etc, and I said as much on the site. I decided I would try making the newsletter opt-in, at least at first, so if nothing else I could be sure that my efforts were going to the audience who were maximally interested. So far I've had about 250 orders through the new store and 0 opt-ins. It'd probably be smarter to make the box checked by default, and let people uncheck it if they don't want it -- but since nobody opted in when that was the option, is it safe to assume that the only people who would leave the box checked are people who don't notice it? I have to get past a certain shyness in terms of brazen self-promotion, because I honestly don't think it's a big deal -- when I first got the Achewood quarterly thing, my initial thought was "Oh geez now I'm on the mailing list," but my second thought was "Hey actually this is kind of cool, a special thing that others aren't getting."

How much does a direct-mail campaign cost, Boor? Maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse. The costs are what -- the list, right, then the printing and the mailing?

Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 7:26 pm

Boorishly P. Foundry wrote:

Anyway, you can take comfort in the fact that most marketers have reported they are cutting back on direct mail in favor of increased online spending (mostly PPC and web 2.0 stuff).

This is a large part of what we do at my company. I've been considering using PPC to sell my shirts, but currently I don't know if it would be worth the cost. Dave, you might look into doing this though before doing mail-based paper marketing. The costs can be very low if you're savvy and bid on a lot of low-competition search terms (long tail stuff) and get a little traffic from a lot of places, or else you can go all in on the big terms ("funny t-shirt" or whatever) and get yourself in the top spot -- it'll cost a lot but you'll get tons of traffic. I know we see 2-300% ROI on a lot of stuff we do this way. You'd definitely want to point people at items in the store rather than the comic itself though. Anyway, this is what Mack does for a living so he could probably help you out if you were looking into it and had questions.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Yeah I've been thinking of that stuff too! Rich Stevens has some PPC campaigns (I see his ads on Google for particular shirts, for example) and I think I could do okay with that if I had the time to make, like, more targeted landing pages and stuff.

Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 7:42 pm

Well, landing pages is a lot of what I specifically do at my company. Would you be able to make a page that people can buy from? Like it looks like shirt buyers, for example, would have to end up getting dumped on the TopatoCo page anyway, which means a landing page would be more of an extra step between them and the purchase, so you might be better off just linking to the TopatoCo page anyway.

Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 7:47 pm

I just checked out your store, and it looks like the opt-in box is defaulting as checked. Either you just changed it (if so, good idea) or something is screwed up in your database. If you're going to send marketing emails, just make sure you understand and comply with the CAN-SPAM laws.

If you want to do a direct mailer, the costs are what you listed. If you use a house list of past customers, obviously that costs nothing. When we do campaigns, they typically cost between $0.30 and $0.70 per piece, depending on whether it's a postcard or catalog or what. But that doesn't include list rental and we get some cost savings from running large campaigns (usually in the neighborhood of 100K pieces), so per-piece costs may be higher for you.

Anyway, if you want to get into details, drop me a line sometime.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Quote:

Would you be able to make a page that people can buy from? Like it looks like shirt buyers, for example, would have to end up getting dumped on the TopatoCo page anyway, which means a landing page would be more of an extra step between them and the purchase, so you might be better off just linking to the TopatoCo page anyway.

When I was thinking about doing CPC ads for, for example, the Dispatches novels, at first I figured I'd link to http://wondermark.com/dispatches/ , which could explain what the books were and also link to the audiobook (this was when I thought I'd have the audiobook and the printed third volume done by Christmas). But then when I set up my new store, I realized it would be just as easy to make the Dispatches product page the landing page, and there's no reason I couldn't put all that same information there. So yeah any ads I buy would link directly to the relevant product, but I'd want to have enough info on that page to explain what's going on for people coming directly to that page with no familiarity with the site, which I don't think I quite do. In the case of Dispatches, for example, I wanted to do the advertising after I had the audiobook and the third volume, and since I have neither, I held off on the advertising, which may be a dumb tactic.

Quote:

I just checked out your store, and it looks like the opt-in box is defaulting as checked. Either you just changed it (if so, good idea) or something is screwed up in your database. If you're going to send marketing emails, just make sure you understand and comply with the CAN-SPAM laws.

Yeah I just changed it. I didn't want to at first, since I had told people that it's unchecked by default, but I should stop being so wimpy about that kind of stuff.

Quote:

If you want to do a direct mailer, the costs are what you listed. If you use a house list of past customers, obviously that costs nothing. When we do campaigns, they typically cost between $0.30 and $0.70 per piece, depending on whether it's a postcard or catalog or what.

And at that cost, a response rate of 2% is enough to pay for the campaign?

Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 6:22 pm

Ha I should be so lucky to see a 2% response on direct mail. It's usually in the tenths of a percent. But our break even point is irrelevant to you because there is no comparison at all between the average value of our customers and yours. It's possible (though very unlikely) that we could send out 100K postcards and make back the entire cost of the campaign on a single sale.

So you're going to have to do the math. What's the probable cost of your campaign? What's the average value of a new customer? Based on that, how many new customers do you need to bring in to break even? What percentage of people who visit your store actually buy something? So how many store visits (i.e., "responses") do you need to generate to ensure you'll get enough customers to break even?

My guess is that you have almost no chance of making money on direct mail to pure prospects (people who have never heard of you before). Like Miles says, it's much more economical to bring in new customers using PPC and web advertising. But if you can offer them something of value in exchange for their contact information, then you can start to build a database of qualified prospects (in addition to past customers) who may actually give you a good enough response rate to justify direct mail. But email is probably a much better direct marketing vehicle for you because it's extremely cheap, it's less complicated to develop, it's easier to track and to weed out bogus information, and it can link people directly to things in your store.

Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 5828 Location: Los Angeles, CA

Okay since it is Black Monday and there's no sense dithering about any longer, plus I have a little money to reinvest thanks to the store kicking into gear last week, I'm trying some Google CPC ads for the greeting cards (probably a tougher market, but easier to make money on) and the Dispatches books (the inverse). I am excited to see what kind of results they yield!

I have long been opposed to spending money on advertising since I've done okay getting by for free on word-of-mouth and the like, plus a few early (& ill-conceived) ventures turned out to be big wastes. But since this is the season when people are spending money, I would like to see if I can get a piece -- and of course if it does well, I will probably expand the experiment. I will report results!