5 Things Email Marketers Can Do Right Now To Improve Their Deliverability

In my role here at Oracle running Global Deliverability, I have many chances to talk to customers and prospects at all points on the deliverability life cycle. I speak with prospects coming from the depths of deliverability despair, who are desperately searching for a coherent strategy to improve inbox placement.

I work with our existing Oracle clients, who are generally looking to go to the next level, or examine a specific event. They are interesting conversations, and the thread that ties all of them together, is the desire to improve. Today, I wanted to try and bring some of the most common issues/resolutions together if you are looking for a jump start to deliverability success.

Here are five things that you can do today to improve your deliverability metrics, and push more mail to the actual inbox.

1. Stop Mailing to 9+ Month Inactives

This one is a quick way to see real results. Look, if someone hasn’t engaged with your email in 9 months, it’s a pretty safe bet they aren’t going to do it now. ISP’s turn some of these addresses into honeypots, and it’s an easy way to see who takes care of their list. Sending to these addresses is a very dangerous proposition, yet many marketers just don’t want to give them up. We understand they can be large numbers of addresses, but all they are doing is dragging down your deliverability.

2. Pay Close Attention to New Subscribers

The first three months of a new subscriber are the most critical. Did you send them a welcome message that explained how to interact with your product or site? Do they understand how to change their subscription without unsubscribing or complaining? Did you manage to get them engaged early? If you don’t see engagement in the first three months, the chances of later engagement is reduced drastically. Be sure and send a welcome message (or a series of them) to educate your customers about your product and how you to plan to communicate with them.

3. Check Out Your Sign-up Process

We talk over and over again about how important explicit permission is for your program. People don’t like to be tricked, and deliverability numbers bear this out. Programs that gather explicit permission as a whole, are more successful. By gathering explicit permission, you can eliminate the confused complaints and the person who banishes you to a junk folder, only to sit there and deflate your deliverability reputation in silent.

4. Stop What’s Not Working

This one seems simple, but you would be surprised at how many times this is overlooked. Senders have a campaign they simply “must” send out, even though the stats are awful. We understand that there may be certain campaigns that are unavoidable, but look carefully at your stats, and stop doing the same thing over and over again. Everyone has a couple of campaigns that perform better than the others, and you can learn from those. Take the good and improve on the bad.

5. Understand Your Partner Reputation

Who you hang out with reflects on who you are. You’ve heard that from childhood, but it still applies today. We’ve already established that domain reputation is important, but it isn’t only your own domain reputation that matters. When you partner with another company in email, ISP’s also look up their reputation and it is a part of your deliverability. Think about the company you keep before you include them in your marketing.

If you follow these five steps, you will see an improvement in your deliverability. What are you waiting for, get moving right now!

But Wait There Is Indeed More

Download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers to learn even more on how to achieve email deliverability that really delivers. 

Image source: publicdomainpictures.net

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/2lDhb9w
via IFTTT

Conversion Optimization: How to reduce friction and anxiety in a checkout process you don’t control

Share

Engaging in conversion optimization requires making a modification of some sort to improve conversion. But, what if there are steps in your customers’ buying journey that you can’t control?

For example, we often hear from marketers that they don’t really have the time or resources to change their shopping cart in significant ways to improve conversion. Or, if you’re in affiliate marketing, channel marketing, or simply have a go-to-market partner, you might control the beginning of the funnel but have no control over the final conversion. Perhaps you sell a product through third-party stores and distributors and have no control over that process.

I was recently in this boat myself. Not only am I a student in the University of Florida/MECLABS Institute Communicating Value and Web Conversion graduate certificate program, but I’ve been working on marketing it before the April 1st application deadline as well.

The Optimization Process

The first thing I did with the team was map out the customer journey — starting with not knowing anything about the program all the way to enrolling as a student in the program.

Now, here was the great irony. Session 2 of the MMC5436 Messaging Methodologies and the Practice of Conversion Optimization course in the program walks through the optimization process and the first, second and third steps you should take. The very first step is reducing friction and anxiety.

However, when we looked at the step in the customer buying journey with the most friction and anxiety, there was nothing we could do to reduce those elements because that step was the University of Florida application.

When friction is a good thing

The UF application necessarily has friction and anxiety, of course. After all, this isn’t a simple online training purchase; this is a real university application. It should have friction and anxiety. When you increase friction you increase quality as well. And when you have a complex process, it can induce anxiety. Unlike an online product purchase, where I assume the acceptance rate is 100% (as long as the credit card goes through), the University of Florida rejects more “customers” than it invites in, with an acceptance rate of only 46%.

When a process created for one purpose is used for another

However, our students wouldn’t be undergrads or MBA students trying to attain a complex and long degree. Since our program is a graduate certificate (essentially, an accelerated credential that only requires four master’s-level courses), we wouldn’t be using UF’s application to weed out students. Applicants only need a 3.0 undergraduate GPA and don’t have to take the GRE or GMAT, so no weeding out of students is necessary.

But, they would still be UF students, so we would still have to use the standard application. And, our audience would be working professionals in advertising, marketing and general business — so they are accustomed to a seamless customer experience.

Customer-First Marketing: Empowering customers to interact with your brand in the way that works best for them

In the previous semesters of this program, both UF and MECLABS offered, essentially, a concierge team to add the human touch to the application process to overcome this friction and anxiety.

This works well, but we wanted to add an ecommerce option for anyone who wanted to become a student without feeling like they were becoming a “lead” — these people were marketers after all.

For applicants who wanted the human touch, great. We still offer it.

But we didn’t want to force a complex “sale” for those who weren’t interested in being contacted; we wanted to empower them to apply on their own if they chose to do so.

We changed a few other things about the landing page as well to put the customer first and allow them to interact with us in the way they chose, not the way we forced them to. Originally there was an information packet behind a gate — a common and sensible practice to build a list for nurturing. We improved the packet and made it readily available for download. If you just want the information and don’t want emails from us, we don’t want your email address.

We also changed the opt-in form at the bottom of the page to be about content instead of as a squeeze page for general program information. Because if people do want to regularly receive emails from us with content inspired by the program, we want to give them that option as well.

Back to creating an ecommerce-type experience for visitors who want to apply on their own. Marketers usually think of removing elements of a process (form fields, steps, etc.) to reduce friction, but we couldn’t remove anything — everything on the application was required by the university. And we couldn’t change any wording to reduce anxiety because the application was hosted by the university. We had only one option left.

Adding copy and design to reduce friction and anxiety

We had to figure out a way to get more control over the final step of the funnel — the application —without actually getting control over it or changing anything about it. We couldn’t create our own version asking for the necessary information and sending it to UF through an API due to the university’s security requirements.

We ended up creating an Apply landing page that pulls the UF application into our landing page using an iframe.

Since the application is in an iframe, the information applicants enter into it goes directly to UF and is hosted on their server. However, by embedding the iframe on our landing page, we’ve been able to add copy and design that hopefully helps to reduce friction and anxiety in the process without the applicants ever needing to contact us.
At the top of the page, we include general copy to let potential students know what they need to apply.

And our application developer Christine Risberg created a Javascript slider that walks the user step-by-step through the UF application. This is directly above the application iframe, and the applicant just needs to click forward on the slider each time he or she progresses in the application.

Unlike most of our case studies and experiments, this is something we’re literally working on right now, so I don’t have specific results yet. But feel free to take a look at the application page and the entire landing page, and let me know what you think.

Could an approach like this work for a sales process you don’t have total control over? If you can’t remove or change elements from a conversion process you don’t control (whether your own shopping cart or through an affiliate process, etc.), are there ways you can add copy and design to help reduce the friction and anxiety in the process? Could you also use an iframe? Or perhaps you have a better approach?

Remember, there’s more to reducing friction than removing things. When that option is off the table, see if there’s anything you can add. When using copy and design to reduce friction, sometimes more is less.

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.

You might also like:

Learn more about friction, anxiety and the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic here

The Difference Between Marketing and Advertising (and Why It Matters)

How to Make Yourself More Valuable in Your Profession

from MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas http://ift.tt/2lmj3s4
via IFTTT

Brand relationships: Logo design + email marketing

What does logo design have to do with email marketing? Everything, in fact. Because while your logo is just that – your logo – it’s also so many other things. It’s the cornerstone of your brand, the image by which your customers recognize and remember you, and the guiding light for your design, fonts, and colors. So where does email come in?

When you consider that 72 percent of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via email, that means that nearly three-quarters of your customers would like to hear from you in their inbox. Your brand, and logo, need to be inextricably linked to your email marketing. We took a look at a couple emails in our inboxes to give some inspiration for how you can incorporate your logo into your email marketing.

Consistent elements

Incorporating your logo into your email marketing can be incredibly simple – just include your logo in your header (and footer) to remind readers of your brand before jumping into the campaign message. For this restaurant, their logo is front and center before you get into the body of the email. Before you make any decisions about where to dine, you’ll remember Stones Throw. The colors and fonts of the logo are also incorporated throughout the body of the email; having a consistent color theme and font scheme gives your websites, emails, and landing pages a professional finish. Take note of the horizontal layout of the logo in the header – it makes a great lede image and catches attention.

Bonus: As part of the Hi Neighbor restaurant group, Stones Throw emails include their sibling restaurants’ logos in their email footer. This ties their brand story together, and ensures that all emails from this group have consistent logo placement in all communication. Remember that horizontal logo from the header? For the footer, the restaurant uses a stacked, or vertical, logo to fit with the other group logos. This is a great example of how to use the different variations of your logo, all within one email. 

Colorful creativity

If putting your logo front and center is too obvious or feels like too much of a pitch for your brand, consider incorporating it in more subtle ways. For this fitness studio, their logo is a supporting design element to the overall message of the email. For their Valentine’s email, the message is all about “love,” which the brand cleverly combines with one of their business hashtags “#uforialove.” By playing off this message and constantly reiterating the words, “love” and “uforia,” they can sneak in the business name multiple times, so when you see the logo for uforia studios in the photo, it feels like a cohesive experience.

Bonus: Because uforia studios uses shades of purple for the business’s brand colors, they add an ombre tint to the photograph, and then use those various purples and pinks to create several bold call to action buttons (CTAs). 

Subtle signals

Incorporating your logo into your email marketing can be a fine balancing act. For lifestyle site Well+Good, the neutral colors and clean lines of their logo and brand identity are carried into the body of their email. Ample white space and digestible copy breaks help them keep their emails uncluttered and direct. 

Bonus: Subtle nods, like the logo’s plus symbol are used in the “+ read more” CTA of individual articles reflect the logo and brand throughout the newsletter.

Love your logo

Remember that there are endless options for how you can incorporate your logo into your email marketing. From headers to photos and everywhere in between, there is a space to feature your logo. Every aspect of your marketing tells part of your brand story. Your logo should live on your website, emails, business cards, and anywhere else you can imagine. Don’t be afraid to have some fun and get creative with your logo placement.

Download our Guide to Logo Design Interested in more tips, tools, and insights of logo design? We created an in-depth guide with everything you need to know! Download FREE eBook

© 2017, Tori Tsu. All rights reserved.

The post Brand relationships: Logo design + email marketing appeared first on Vertical Response Blog.

from Vertical Response Blog http://ift.tt/2mP04Tg
via IFTTT

It’s Time to Pump You (and Your Content) Up

So, Copyblogger has been running for about 11 years now. And in all that time, we’ve never written a post about Arnold Schwarzenegger, unless you count that one time I compared long-form sales pages to the Terminator.

Until this week. Entirely independently, Brian Clark and I both used the Governator to illustrate two different points about smart content creation.

On Monday, Brian broke down persuasive analogies — citing a particularly effective analogy Schwarzenegger used to make an environmental point.

On Tuesday, Stefanie brought a little relief by making some excellent points about why you lose business to your competitors … and how you can start to crush them. Like grapes.

And on Wednesday, I explained Jonah Sachs’s idea of “freaks, cheats, and familiars,” using good old Arnold as an example to demonstrate all three.

On Unemployable, Brian talked with Robert Bruce about the difference between good marketing automation and the kind that has skinny little arms like a baby-man.

And on Copyblogger FM, I talked about the power of picking the right frame for your content marketing. Kind of like the way the squat rack at the gym provides the perfect frame to do bicep curls in.

Hear me now and believe me later … catch you next week!

(P.S. If today’s Copyblogger Weekly seems more random than usual … you may need a little Hans and Franz to make sense of things.)

— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Catch up on this week’s content

---

The Persuasive Power of Analogy

by Brian Clark

---

Why a Prospect You Want Chooses Your Competitor

by Stefanie Flaxman

---

How to Craft Timelessly Powerful Stories with Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars

by Sonia Simone

---

Is WordPress the Right Solution for Building Your Online Business?

by Sean Jackson & Jessica Frick

---

Are Automated Marketing Funnels a Fail?

by Brian Clark

---

Choose the Right Frame to Boost the Power of Your Content

by Sonia Simone

---

The Two Keys to Successful Delegation

by Brian Clark

---

How Journalist and Author of ‘The Power of Meaning’ Emily Esfahani Smith Writes: Part Two

by Kelton Reid

---

Are You Spending Enough Time Thinking?

by Jerod Morris & Jon Nastor

---

The post It’s Time to Pump You (and Your Content) Up appeared first on Copyblogger.

from Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2lwydWQ
via IFTTT

The New Customer Service Trend that’s Shaking Up the Marketing Industry (In a Good Way!)

When it comes to customer service trends, most marketers and customer support teams groan and shake their head. Here’s another glimpse into supposedly “what customers want” that’s supposed to make them beat a path to our doors.

Except it rarely works out that way – and customer service suffers as a result of it.

But now, a new trend is catching on that could change all of that. And calling it a trend is really doing a disservice to the notion at all. What it should be called is “the way service should always have been done”.

It’s called customer-first marketing – and it’s changing everything you think you know about how your prospects think, act and react. Let’s take a closer look:

What is Customer-First Marketing?

First, let me ask you a question – as a marketer, how would you describe customer-first marketing if you weren’t sure what it was?

Many will say, “well, we need to build a marketing and sales strategy around convincing users to try our product or service and become customers. Once they’re in the funnel, we advertise to them based on where they are in the buying stage and hope to grow repeat business.”

This is a solid marketing strategy, but it’s not customer-first marketing. When you start with “We need to build…” you’re already discounting the customer and their needs. If anything, they’re more of an after-thought – a mindless object that only comes into play once the funnels are built and the strategies executed.

Let’s take a look at another example. Let’s say a client wants to meet with you to explore your solution further. Your sales people march in like an army under strict orders and pressures to sell. After all, they’ve got quotas to meet!

Customer-first marketing turns both of these examples on their heads. It involves a lot of discussion and back-and-forth with the customer to discover a solution that truly works for both parties. It’s a method where sales are the secondary focus.

Now, don’t panic.

Because although you’re conducting a lot of research and having a lot of discussion and making a lot of choices and getting feedback, all of this may seem like a huge lead weight on the actual marketing process, but in fact with customer-first marketing, it’s the most crucial piece.

What is the Difference Between Customer-Centric Marketing and Customer-First Marketing?

Now, you may hear the phrase “customer-first marketing” and think it’s just another spin on the often-cited “customer-centric marketing” strategy. But here is the main difference:

Customer-centric marketing aims strategies AT the customer. You are looking at the customer as an end-goal. Customer-first marketing revolves AROUND the customer. You are making them an integral part of your marketing, research and development.

In December of 2016, MarketingSherpa released a comprehensive study detailing what measures contributed the most to customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is one of the highest notches to strive for on the customer-first marketing barometer, and these insights demonstrate a very revealing path toward the end goal.

The Big Question: What Do Satisfied Customers Feel versus Unsatisfied Customers?

According to the study, over half of satisfied customers reported having a “good experience” with the company. But what constitutes a good experience? Namely, it makes the customer feel like they are important to, and have a relationship with the company. Perhaps most insightful was answer number 9 on the list: “It puts my needs above their own business goals”.

Contrast that with the number one reason for unsatisfied customers (with over a third of the responses) and you get “The company does not put my needs and wants above their own business goals.”

If you want to see just how vital this idea is to separating the satisfied from the unsatisfied customers, take a closer look at this question:

But simply putting one’s customers ahead of one’s business goals does much more than let businesses give themselves a pat on the back. When customers are genuinely satisfied and feel like their needs are being met, they’ll not only continue to purchase from the company, but also highly recommend it to others, as noted in the chart below:

Making the Shift to Customer-First

So if you get to enjoy all of these benefits when putting a customer-first plan into action, why aren’t more companies doing it? According to Jamie Beckland, VP of Product and Marketing at Janrain, the answer is simple:

“So if it’s generally agreed upon that customer-first marketing is essential to survival, let alone growth, why do companies struggle with it so much? Marketing benchmarks are difficult for many executives to reset. It’s difficult to justify not sending fewer, more targeted emails, and risk programs not delivering against quarterly targets. Unfortunately, the long-term damage caused by this approach is likely to outweigh any short-term gains. Once you forgo tailoring an experience to the customer, you can expect them to cut off communication, or worse, take their money somewhere else.”

So what are some things you can do to help promote more customer-first moments, to gradually but solidly show progress in moving to this new kind of thinking? Here are a few ideas:

Walk Them Through the Process

There’s nothing quite so overwhelming as signing up for a new product or service, only to have a handful of emails (or one really long email) dumped in your lap on how to use it. Instead, take the time to walk them through the process. Offer a free getting started webinar, or let them schedule a date/time to learn the basics of how to use your product or service. Check in with them often to see how they’re progressing and what questions they may have.

Highlight Their Achievements

Have your customers done something awesome with your product or service? Why not work with them to share it with the world! Or simply highlight something about your customers – recognition makes everyone feel great about him or herself.

Some companies even go so far as to hand-write notes to their customers, thanking them for their feedback and providing them with a little something – a t-shirt, a gift card or some other token of appreciation that says “I value what you have to say – and here is something to thank you for taking the time to tell me about it.”

Be Proactive

Not just about support and resolving their issue, but about keeping them up-to-date with news, changes and other things they’d find relevant. Let them reach out to you through multiple, fully-staffed channels using whatever method is most convenient to them. Customer-first marketing involves a great deal of feedback and discussion. Take the time to get to know your customers and work with them, rather than giving them a number and a ticket and hoping for the best.

As you can see, when it comes to putting the customer first in your marketing, it’s surprisingly not that difficult. The hardest part will be to justify the returns in the long run. But not matter how you choose to do it, making the customer your priority, and living up to that statement in everything your company does, will pay off not just in terms of revenues, but happier employees, more loyal customers, and higher recommendations.

And that’s something every business can agree on!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2mLBbaQ
via IFTTT

Get More Value Out of Your MarTech Investments: Balancing People, Processes and Technology

According to Gartner, CMOs will likely spend more on technology than CIOs.  Yet, there are many marketers that feel let down by the promise of marketing technology. Why? Some say it’s not as easy as they thought/were promised it would be.

Others say they don’t have enough resources or support from the business to be successful. Some say they are just scratching the surface of using all of the capabilities. Finally, others say they are so busy working through their to-do lists that they don’t have the time to optimize what they are doing. Sound familiar?

As an Adoption Advisor for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, I talk to a lot of customers about improving and extending their usage of marketing technology. Typically, most adoption and change management challenges are due to one or more of these three essential criteria being out of balance: People, Processes, and Technology. 

The principle of People, Processes, and Technology is not new and aligning these three criteria is essential to the success of every technology deployment. Yet, while it is essential, it can be challenging for many companies.

Let’s look at these in more depth to find out how you can start getting more value out of your martech investments.

People:

• Align Skills & Roles: First, make sure you have the right people in the right roles. Does your marketing team consist of the right people with the right skills/aptitude in place to manage your technology investments? You can’t expect an abstract, creative marketing person to manage the data and infrastructure of your marketing technology. Just like you can’t expect an IT professional to put together a complex, creative multi-channel campaign. It just won’t work. Make sure you align skills and responsibilities appropriately.
• Invest in Training & Development: Next, it’s critical to invest the time and money into training your team and developing their skills and expertise around the platforms you purchased. Think beyond just technical training, professional and strategic training are equally as important. There are countless times I’ve talked with customers who haven’t invested the time in product training and wonder why they are only using a fraction of their system’s capabilities.  
  
  On the other hand, there are some very talented technical people that know the technology inside and out, but don’t have the strategic vision for how the technology can be used to create efficiencies for their company. Implementing and using marketing technology is not like setting up a new iPhone. You have to participate in the training, read the product documentation, understand the overall strategy/vision, and put in the hard work. There are no shortcuts.

Processes

• Define & Document Your Process:  Marketing runs on processes. Or at least, it should. Processes for campaign creation and execution, content creation, reporting and analytics, lead management, data management….you get the idea. These should all be defined, documented, assigned owners, and have built in accountability with service level agreements. Broken and undefined processes result in inefficiencies, wasted time, and ultimately, wasted money. Take the time to audit your processes to see where you can become more efficient as a marketing team.
• A Real World Example: I experienced this first hand: When I was a marketing practitioner at a previous company, we had so many work arounds for how marketing passed leads to sales, and work arounds for those work arounds, which made the entire lead management process incredibly inefficient. Sales cherry picked what leads they wanted to follow up with, good leads with bad data didn’t make it into the queues, and marketing had no idea what was happening to the leads they had spent precious budget in generating.
  
  We spent a year and a half fixing our broken lead management processes. The time, resources, and tremendous effort that were invested paid off in spades in terms of influenced revenue on the business. Leads were now tracked throughout the funnel, the process was monitored with reports and dashboards, and both marketing and sales were held accountable.

Technology:

• It’s Not Always Perfect: Let’s get one thing out of the way upfront – no technology is perfect. [Gasp!] There will usually be bugs, limitations, and frustrations. Marketing technology is not exempt from this. While this isn’t what you should expect, it’s just a given. Make sure you get help from support services and submit requests to the product development team to get issues fixed and new features added. For Oralce Marketing Cloud products, you can always submit product feature requests via Dream It on Topliners. We have often taken these ideas and developed them into the products. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s continue…
• Success Begins with a Successful Implementation: Success with technology starts with a successful implementation. It’s important to hire the right implementation partner, align internal stakeholders, and secure executive sponsorship to achieve a successful implementation. Make sure that your unique business needs are going to be met and supported when implementing a new technology. An unsuccessful implementation inhibits success and results in frustration, setbacks, and the good chance that the technology will not be adopted.
• Crawl, Walk, Run: Finally, utilization of marketing technology can be as easy or as complex as you make it. Take a Marketing Automation Platform as an example. Companies don’t invest in marketing automation platforms to send batch and blast emails. Yet, oftentimes, this is all it is being used for. And it’s usually because either the people or the processes aren’t in place supporting the technology. Use a crawl, walk, run approach to become more sophisticated with your usage. Pick one project to start with and build from there.

As you can see from the Chief MarTech Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, the number marketing technology companies has exploded year over year. The booming and complex marketing technology landscape is reflective of the increasingly important role that marketing plays in business today. Balancing people, process and technology is how you can make your marketing technology work better for you, get return on your investments, and achieve real results.

The Truth And Nothing But

There seems to be no end to the growing number of marketing technologies available today. As I just mentioned the number marketing technology companies has exploded year over year. Download The Truth About the Martech Stack: What You Don't Know May Cost You and learn about the value of choosing an open platform that offers pre-integrated apps, offering an open infrastructure for future innovations.

Featured Image: maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud http://ift.tt/2mFBkgO
via IFTTT

How to Craft Timelessly Powerful Stories with Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars

A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast episode about Jonah Sachs’s book Winning the Story Wars. He had a particularly useful observation about three story elements that pull in audience attention. He calls them Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars.

Sachs explains how these elements can be deployed, like the Hero’s Journey, to make stories much more memorable and engaging.

As I was reading Story Wars, it struck me that there’s a well-known figure who illustrates all three of these elements in one person: legendary bodybuilder, action star, two-term California Governor, and crafter of potent analogies, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Here’s how it works:

Freaks

Remember when we talked about not being so damned boring?

Sameness is boring. Conformity is boring. You break the brutal cycle of boring by being different.

Sachs’s freaks are story characters who compel our attention because they are different. They might be particularly tall or short, particularly handsome or ugly, or physically distinctive in some other way.

They also might be quite normal-looking people who stand out because they’re in a particular context. Normally we wouldn’t call Justin Trudeau a freak, but he’s almost bizarrely good-looking for a head of state. I’m a quite ordinary-looking person, but my pink hair stands out, particularly in a business context — and it becomes a freak element that people remember.

Schwarzenegger, of course, achieved freak status with his remarkable physique. To this day, he’s one of the most influential figures in bodybuilding history, with five Mr. Universe and seven Mr. Olympia wins.

But there are lots of bodybuilders. I’d argue that it’s Schwarzenegger’s strong Austrian accent that helps make him instantly memorable. That combination — the massive physique with the specific accent — creates a kind of “sketch” of him in our minds, even if we haven’t seen him often.

Freaks make great characters because they have good hooks to make them stick in our minds. A voice, a walk, a scar, a costume. Note that “freak” in this case isn’t pejorative and doesn’t imply that there’s something wrong with the person’s appearance.

One way to determine if you have a freak: if you saw them drawn in a graphic novel, with minimal context, would you recognize them?

Other memorable freaks, from both stories and real life, include:

• Darth Vader
• Dennis Rodman
• The Joker
• Charlie Chaplin
• Carrot Top
• David Bowie
• Gollum

Cheats

Sachs’s second engrossing element is the cheat.

These are characters who cheat the system — who violate some social norm. They embody the trickster archetype and are notable in that they can be either a hero or a villain. (A few, like the Norse god Loki, manage to be both.)

Good cheats challenge corrupt social norms and undermine them. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a cheat in this sense. So are all those detectives in novels who just can’t seem to follow the rules.

Bad cheats are the ones who undermine the social rules we value. Liars, thieves, betrayers of trust.

Cheats bring massive energy to a story. When we find out that someone is breaking the rules, we’re almost compelled to find out more … and to figure out if this is a brave visionary or a dangerous crook.

Schwarzenegger’s reputation as a trickster started with the documentary Pumping Iron, which showed him cleverly tricking his opponents into sabotaging themselves. His 2003 run for Governor of California revolved around breaking the “business as usual” political norms that voters found boring and unsatisfying.

Whether he was a “good” or a “bad” cheat in that context depended on your politics — but he did manage to win the governorship for two terms. (His opponent, Gray Davis, was a politician whose name perfectly described his political charisma.)

Schwarzenegger continues to bend the political “rules,” as a prominent Republican voice urging action on climate change.

Other memorable cheats include:

• Han Solo
• Tim Ferriss
• Richard Nixon
• Bernie Madoff
• Iron Man
• Bugs Bunny
• Ulysses

Familiars

So … freaks and cheats are inherently interesting and memorable, but they aren’t inherently trustworthy.

Stories that motivate us to action need another element: familiarity.

If Schwarzenegger hadn’t been a celebrity, it’s hard to envision him as a successful candidate. People knew his name, his accent, and his penchant for thumbing his nose at the establishment. The first person to mimic his famous “Terminator” accent did so about five minutes after the premiere of The Terminator. (Note: I made that up, but you know it has to be true.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger was widely known, so his oddness seemed fairly safe. He helped things along by being willing to play with his own image. He was widely called “The Governator,” by his fans and critics alike. A typical politician couldn’t call the California state assembly “girly men,” but Schwarzenegger, riffing off of the Saturday Night Live parody of characters like him, pulled it off … because everyone understood the reference.

Stories that are populated only by freaks and cheats will feel unnerving. Familiars allow regular people — those who aren’t freaks and cheats — to feel at home in the story being told.

And sometimes, someone like Schwarzenegger with strong “freak and cheat” credentials becomes a familiar simply by virtue of being highly visible over a long period of time.

Familiar characters are relatable. They seem like “real people.” While they may have accomplished amazing things (they could even be freakish in their abilities), they also feel like someone we could know personally.

I’d argue that all of these folks have elements of the familiar:

• Luke Skywalker
• Oprah
• Captain America
• Peyton Manning
• Frodo Baggins
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The Bush family

The trifecta

The strongest stories will often include all three of these elements, but they don’t always come wrapped in the same character.

Schwarzenegger’s not the only one, though, by any means. Neo in The Matrix starts off as a mild-mannered Familiar, becomes an ultra-powerful Freak, and then evolves into the ultimate Cheat who sees through and disrupts the Matrix’s corrupt nature.

Tyrion in Game of Thrones is an obvious “Freak,” whose physical differences cause him untold pain. He’s a Cheat when he scoffs at the norms of his society and manages to talk his way out of situations that would kill off anyone else. And he plays the role of Familiar as one of the few characters who seems to show actual human feelings. (Game of Thrones makes extensive use of the three elements. Notice that two other triple-threat characters, Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow, stand out among a cast of ultra-vivid characters as particularly memorable.)

Most comedians also pull all three elements together. Louis C.K., like many comedians, has a speaking voice that’s immediately recognizable (Freak). He gets laughs by poking at social norms, sometimes brutally (Cheat). And he does it as an average-looking guy — digging deep into the psyche of “regular people” (Familiar).

Jonah Sachs didn’t make up “freaks, cheats, and familiars.” He just noticed how they worked to make many, many stories more memorable.

If you’re looking for ways to tell stories that resonate more deeply, that move your audience to action, and that are just plain interesting, give these a try. Don’t think you have to be a born storyteller. Storytelling is a craft, and it can be learned.

Ever use one (or all) of these elements in your content? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: reza shayestehpour via Unsplash.

The post How to Craft Timelessly Powerful Stories with Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars appeared first on Copyblogger.

from Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2mdAlXJ
via IFTTT