What does Cracker Jack and email marketing have in common. I’ll tell you.
There is one single marketing principle I see email marketers break all the time. More on that in a second.
Did you know Cracker Jack has been giving away a “Toy Surprise Inside!” for over 100 years?
Cracker Jack had been started years before THAT by two brothers and introduced at Chicago’s first World Fair in 1893! It remained a family business until 1964 when Borden bought the company and later sold it to FritoLay.
All prizes have been made in America for over 100 years and over 23 billion prizes have been given away.
Early prizes were baseball cards or toys made from metal.
For those of you who don’t know Cracker Jack, this is what I’m talking about.
Now, what’s the marketing lesson?
When you have a marketing campaign that works… don’t change it.
This simple concept is easy to say and in practice really hard to follow through on.
In the past 100 years, Cracker Jack sales have probably increased or decreased. The pressure to change the “Toy Surprise Inside!” must have been intense.
I can hear the executives now. “If it’s not working change it!” But somehow Cracker Jack held on. In over 100 years their Bonus offer did not change.
How do you apply this principle to email marketing?
I have a client that sells their main product via a marketing webinar. They have used the same marketing webinar for years now.
We send an email each week to their prospect list inviting them to attend their free webinar. How many weeks would you be comfortable sending an invitation to the same webinar?
3, 10, 50?
So far we have sent an invitation over 77 weeks in a row. Don’t get me wrong, each week we send a different email with a different angle or approach but the webinar, landing page and offer is the same each time.
We’ve been watching the email statistics carefully and there have been peaks and valleys but just this past month we’ve had some of our highest click and attendance rates.
Just as an aside over 94% of the list have looked at the email offer at least once and an astounding 34% of the list have registered for the webinar.
Now it’s possible a new webinar and new offer may perform better and there will come a time when we test an alternate but 77 weeks in a row we’ve invited their prospects to the same webinar and it continues to work.
So next time you have found a marketing campaign that works, don’t be too anxious to change it. I assure you, you will become tired of the offer long before your prospects do and today a new prospect will see your offer for the very first time–and be excited by it.
And kids, if you haven’t tried a Cracker Jack, go get some and tell your Grandparents. They’ll tell you all about convincing their parents to buy the treat just because of the “Toy Surprise INSIDE!”
