Installment #4 of your email campaign focuses on a Great Idea.
David Ogilvy, widely considered the “Father of Advertising” once said:
“Unless Your Campaign Is Built Around a Great Idea, It Will Flop.”
What’s a Great Idea?
- It’s immediately attention-grabbing
- It introduces something a potential customer may not have known or thought about before
- It gets them thinking and may even change the way they think going forward
As an example, consider truck tires. Many of the truck tires sold in the United States are run through X-ray inspection equipment before sale. X-ray equipment is expensive, doesn’t produce additional product, and adds time to the manufacturing process.
So why do truck tire manufacturers buy X-ray inspection equipment?
Because a defective tire can experience a catastrophic failure on the road that seriously injures or kills people. The X-ray process is a cheap way to avoid a terrible accident (and an expensive lawsuit). That’s a Great Idea.
Here’s another example closer to home: Certain companies sell metrology systems and measurement equipment to semiconductor manufacturers. This equipment is expensive, and it doesn’t help their customers produce anything new or additional.
But customers buy metrology and measurement equipment because they fear having defective parts go through extensive and expensive processing only to find in the end that they don’t work—and, even worse, the customer doesn’t know why they don’t work.
The Great Idea here is that buying inspection and measurement equipment saves money by reducing waste and the number of catastrophic failures of critical semiconductor devices.
So how do you go about finding your own Great Idea? You probably have more material than you think you do. Consider:
- An unusual or impressive result you help your customers achieve
- Something unique about the way you do business
- A compelling story about how or why your company was founded
- A new way of looking at an old problem
- An interesting fact that relates to your business, even if it’s not unique to your company (like X-raying tires)
Your Great Idea should strike a spark in your readers’ minds and keep them thinking long after they close their email. It should make them—in the words of one of Steve Jobs’s (many) Great Ideas—Think Different.