ou have received a number of Michael Leander’s Marketing Tips. The program will discontinue. Once you have received message number 13, you will not receive anymore tips this time around.

Let me explain why …
The idea for Michael Leander’s Marketing Tips was conceived at a time when I was quite ill with a vicious influenza. During three weeks, I couldn’t concentrate on anything “serious”. Frustrated about cancelled meetings and money generating trips abroad, I desperately needed something to do.

Luckily I found something.

You see, I had long been wanting to test the effectiveness of sequential auto-responders. I have seen many attempting to deploy this email marketing tactic, but my assumption was that only few worked really well. Of course that does not apply to the highly valuable direct marketing tips from the “bloke” whom indirectly got me started in direct marketing. His name is Drayton Bird. He dislikes the word guru, and refers to himself as a writer - or copywriter.

Never the less, this Englishman is so experienced, that you are bound to learn something whenever he opens his mouth. In fact, last September - just before I were to begin my “lecture” at  EADIM - Drayton asked me “Michael, how do I introduce you? You are the only teacher at EADIM whom I don’t know personally. In one sentence, what do I call you?”.

I was totally taken by surprise by his question. Primarily because - at the time - I had so many different roles, titles and focus areas in different companies, that - as I recall it - I asked Drayton, “well - what do you call yourself?”.

I don’t remember how Drayton Bird ended up introducing me, but I do know, that I am still thinking about how to refer to myself when people ask me what I do. Am I a CEO, a marketing consultant, a marketing speaker, innovator, educator, an entrepreneur, a business man, what? In May I expect to be speaking/teaching at EADIM again, and by then, I will know what to call myself - promise.

I have a way of getting sidetracked - so let’s get back to the discontinuation of Michael Leander’s Marketing Tips.

Having decided to experiment with a sequential auto-responder program, I needed to setup a compelling reason for people to subscribe. But before doing that, I had to decide on my objectives; what did I want to accomplish?

This is what I wanted to accomplish
Apart from generally testing sequential autoresponders, I had a few other objectives in mind;

- brand myself as a knowledgeable marketing person (yeah - I know), but without being perceived as an info-marketer (most of whom are charlatans, at best)
- test the conversion from the Meemoo2 blog to sign-up for the Marketing Tips by applying different subscription techniques
- test the open rate, click through rate and opt-out rate over time
- accomplish a certain level of virality by seeding the videos to different video-channels

So that all worked out well.

By the way, I did consider charging money for my tips. First and foremost to attract a qualified group of people, but then I decided not to do that in phase 1, but save that option for later.

Why?

Well, I have been a firm beliver in the old direct marketing saying “any good relationship starts by one of two parties giving away something for f-ree”.

Here is what went wrong
In terms of content I decided - as you know - on sharing marketing tips. And since I am no copywriter and my written English is hardly fluent, I decided to share tips using video, power point and what not. And there is nothing wrong with video. On the contrary, I suppose, many people are likely to watch and listen to a video rather than reading the same materiale in an article. I was  indeed aware that my spoken English isn’t fluent either, but I assumed that a large proportion of subscribers would not be native English speakers either.

The first 8 or 9 videos I produced within 5 or 6 days. The rest in the beginning of January 09. The first videos are outright horrible, but I’d like to think that they improved after I started using a different “technique” allowing me to focus on certain areas of the screen or slide.

But the real problems I encountered were these;

1.  It requires some 7-10 hours of work to produce a quality video with a maximum lenght of 5 minutes
If one is to ensure a great viewing and listening experience, that is. It involves deciding on a topic, research, testing the solution talked about, preparing the power point or similar, shooting the video, editing the video, publishing the video, writing the accompanying blog post and publishing the email)

2. Keeping the marketing tips to less than 5 minutes proved more than difficult to me.