A No-Disasters Checklist!

Save this one: forward it to colleagues and your agency

Vol. 6, Issue No. 4 | February 22, 2010 By Denny Hatch

multipage

___Yes ___ No

2. Does your copy contain some or all of the 13 most powerful and evocative words in the English language: You - Save - Money - Guarantee - Love - Results - Proven - Safety - Easy - New - Health - Discovery - Free?

___Yes ___ No

3. Since “you” is the subject of every sales effort, is your promotion about “you”—as opposed to "we," "us" or "our"?

___Yes ___ No

4. "The prospect doesn't give a damn about you, your company or your product. All that matters is, 'What's in it for me?'" —Bob Hacker

Are you emphasizing your product and what it will do for the prospect rather than yourself and your company?

___Yes ___ No

5. “Probably well over half our buying choices are based on emotion.” —Jack Maxson

“When emotion and reason come into conflict, emotion always wins.” —John J. Flieder

Is your sales pitch emotional (rather than analytical and rational)?

___Yes ___ No

6. "People want quarter-inch holes, not quarter-inch drills." —MBA Magazine

Does your sales pitch highlight benefits (e.g., you get quarter-inch holes)—as opposed to features (e.g., buy a drill)?

___Yes ___ No

7. "Your job is to sell, not entertain." —Jack Maxson

"Cute and clever simply don't work." —Nigel Rowe

Is your presentation cute, clever and entertaining?

___Yes ___ No

8. Do you make an offer?

___Yes ___ No

9. "You cannot sell two things at once." —Dick Benson

Are you giving the prospect too many choices?

___Yes ___ No

10. “The right offer should be so attractive that only a lunatic would say, 'No.’" —Claude Hopkins

“If you want to dramatically increase your results, dramatically improve your offer.” —Axel Andersson

Is your offer the very strongest one you can field?

___Yes ___ No

11. Does your company name and address appear somewhere on every piece in the promotion?

___Yes ___ No

12. Do you include a guarantee of satisfaction backed up with the real signature of a real person?

___Yes ___ No

13. Do you have a deadline date that is so far in the future it loses urgency or so near to the drop date that if the mailing is delayed your promotion is chopped liver?

___Yes ___ No

14. Do you include testimonials from happy customers or donors?

___Yes ___ No

15. Is your offer so simple an idiot can understand it?

___Yes ___ No

16. Do you make it easy to respond?

___Yes ___ No

17. Has your paranoid legal department destroyed the flow of the argument with disclaimers and footnotes in gray sans serif mousetype and/or a bunch of the following in superscript: * ^{‡ ™ © 1 2 3} ?

___Yes ___ No

18. Before going live, have you handed your promotion off to a half dozen strangers—who have no skin in the game—to make sure the whole thing makes sense, tracks, and the ordering mechanism is smooth and easy?

___Yes ___ No

19. Can customers respond in the manner most convenient to them: mail, phone, fax, e-mail or via your Web site?

___Yes ___ No

20. Does your response link address take the customer to your general homepage, as opposed to a special satellite page that directly relates to the specific offer?

___Yes ___ No

21. Will the phone be answered no later than the second ring?

___Yes ___ No

22. Will everyone that answers the phone be expecting the call and have a working knowledge of the product so questions can be answered?

___Yes ___ No

23. Do you have a fail-safe system in place that enables you to measure responses by source and determine return on investment?

___Yes ___ No

24. Are you able to fulfill orders immediately?

___Yes ___ No

25. Are absolutely foolproof instructions included with the shipment?

___Yes ___ No

26. “The sale begins when the customer says ‘yes.’” —Bill Christensen

Does your fulfillment material resell the product and reassure the customer that buying it from you was a really smart decision?

___Yes ___ No

27. Does your fulfillment material make the customer feel good about doing business with you? Does it contain a phone number in case the customer has a question?

___Yes ___ No

28. Is the product or service ready to use immediately for instant gratification? In other words, can the customer wear it, eat it, start reading or listening to it, hang it on the wall, sit in it, or plug it in and have it do its thing the moment it's unwrapped?

___Yes ___ No

29. Do you make it easy to return the merchandise?

___Yes ___ No

30. If the promotional effort is successful, can you turn on a dime and roll it out immediately to new prospects?

___Yes ___ No

31. Is 20 percent of your marketing budget allocated for testing?

___Yes ___ No

 

Direct Mail
All of the above plus:

32. “A letter should look and feel like a letter.” —Dick Benson

Does your letter look and feel like a letter?

___Yes ___ No

33. If the letter is personalized, does the typeface in the personalization (date, name, address, salutation) match the typeface in the body of the letter?

___Yes ___ No

34. Does the signature look real (as opposed to a computer-generated font) and printed in blue or black ink (as opposed to red)?

___Yes ___ No

35. Are all the elements in the mailing small enough to fit in the envelope and folded so they're machine-insertable?

___Yes ___ No

36. Have you given the lettershop detailed instructions—and a sample dummy of the mailing—so no question exits about how every element is folded, which order it's inserted and which side faces the envelope flap?

___Yes ___ No

37. Has a USPS expert analyzed your entire mailing to guarantee that you're taking advantage of all possible merge/purge and CASS (Coding Accuracy Support Systems) technology and presort postal discounts down to carrier route sort?

___Yes ___ No

38. Have you checked with your local postmaster to be sure the thing is indeed mailable?

___Yes ___ No

39. Have you cleared the mail date with all the list owners from whom you're renting names?

___Yes ___ No

40. Are the permit numbers on your outgoing indicia and incoming business reply mail correct?

___Yes ___ No

41. Is the address on your business reply mail correct?

___Yes ___ No

42. Do you have postage money for the mailing on deposit with your lettershop or the USPS?

___Yes ___ No

43. Do you have money deposited in your USPS Business Reply account?

___Yes ___ No

 

Space (Off-the-Page) Advertising
All of the above plus:

44. “I’ve never bought an ad at full rate in my life.” —Iris Shokoff

Do you have a professional media buyer negotiating the best rates?

___Yes ___ No

45. Does the publication have a history of success with direct response advertisers, and have your competitors advertised there?

___Yes ___ No

46. If your ad is running in a niche publication (as opposed to general interest), have you versionalized the headline and copy to appeal to that specific readership?

___Yes ___ No

47. Is the order coupon on the lower outside corner of the ad (as opposed to the gutter, the top or worse, in the center?

___Yes ___ No

48. Is the coupon square or rectangular as opposed to a triangle, rhomboid, circle, or some other weird and disconcerting shape?

___Yes ___ No

49. Are the reply address, phone number, e-mail address and Web address on the order coupon as well as in the ad itself?

___Yes ___ No

50. Is there room on the coupon to legibly write a credit card account number?

___Yes ___ No

 

Catalog
All of the above plus:

51: Have you included an order form?

___Yes ___ No

 

E-mail/E-commerce
All of the above plus:

52. Is the subject line of your e-mail a grabber—irresistible?

___Yes ___ No

53. Will your subject line get past spam filters?

___Yes ___ No

54. Remembering that you're one click from oblivion, is your landing page powerful, to the point, easy to navigate, and not wordy or boring?

___Yes ___ No

55. Do distractions exist on your landing page that could take the customer’s mind off the business at hand (e.g., Investor Relations, Press Office, About Us, Site Security, etc.)?

___Yes ___ No

 

Broadcast—DRTV
All of the above plus:

56. Are your 800 number and Web reply address prominently displayed in large type at the bottom of the screen throughout the commercial?

___Yes ___ No

57. Have you alerted your inbound telemarketing operation as to the precise times that your commercials are running and provided a response estimate?

___Yes ___ No

58. Have you made arrangements to handle overflow calls during spike periods?

___Yes ___ No

OK, what have I missed?
Please go to the comment section and fill in any checks I've omitted.

• I will post your suggestions immediately.
• They will be added to the master checklist and posted on my Web site for all to steal.

Or e-mail me directly: dennyhatch@yahoo.com

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55-Word Book Review
**** The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Dr. Atul Gawande. Dazzling descriptions of how checklists are created, save lives in hospitals, help Warren Buffett analyze companies, prevent disasters on crippled airliners, enable skyscrapers to be built, restaurants to run and how Wal-Mart saved New Orleans in Katrina. Checklists keep smart people from screwing up, as well as create teamwork and foster communications. A masterpiece! Metropolitan Books, 224 pp, ISBN-13: 978-0805091748, $24.50 hardcover. —DH 02-17-10
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