Don’t Let Your Science Email Marketing Campaign End Up in the Trash

Science Email Marketing Success

The December holidays were always fun for me in the lab, because it was a time when life science vendors showed off their more creative side via events and marketing materials (free stuff).

The holidays this past year were no exception – for example, this past December a scientist friend forwarded me this email marketing piece containing an e-card from a life science vendor.

Though the content in DNA 2.0’s e-card may have been interesting, the card itself wasn’t exciting enough for me to want to click on it. Admittedly, I have a severe case of ADDO (ADDOnline), meaning effective marketing must grab my attention, tell me where to click and why in about half a second, or I’m off to the next shiny web page, and this email is in my Trash before you can blink an eye.

Fortunately for DNA 2.0, my friend took the time to say I (and 10 other scientists on her forward list) would enjoy the “holiday geekiness” of the card. She wrote “click on the new research results below” – so I did!

Good thing I clicked, otherwise I would have missed out on the very cool “publication” – a paper titled “Carolome: Functional Imprints of Culture Memes in the Global Genome.” It flows entirely the same way a regular journal publication would, including references and abstract. Super cute and so very clever! This team obviously put a ton of time and effort into it.

But I finished looking at the paper and thought two things -

1. Scientists can be your evangelists
2. You shouldn’t rely on that

Do you have scientist evangelists for your brand? Try connecting with your scientists with great content like this paper!

But one thing about your scientist-evangelist– this may be a one-time thing for her. She may never forward anything. She may forward everything. You just don’t know. Her promotion of your ecard was the only thing that made me click this time – that guarantees nothing for the next round.

Make your science email marketing self-sufficient: clickable in its own right and really friendly to forwarding.

Attention-grabbing headlines or images will help to ensure an increase in clicks from your email and a solidly placed “forward” button will increase odds that you’ll see who’s clicking where, what other pages they visit, popularity of  your content, and all the other goodies that come with fully tracking your email marketing campaigns.

You just can’t rely on that puny little forward link at the very bottom of your email. People (scientists too) will instinctively click their usual Forward button within Outlook, Gmail, etc – unless you subtly prod them to do otherwise.

Ok, I’ve crudely re-made this science email marketing piece, just to make a point.This gem of a Santa image is straight from the Carolome publication itself – perfect!

In addition to the awesome content, a little caption change plus a larger forward suggestion and you’ve made even more progress toward creating a trackable science email marketing campaign that will stand apart in a scientist’s inbox.

So next time you have a science email marketing piece to send to your scientists, remember your’s will be stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder with other vendor emails.

Try jazzing up your email campaign a bit plus give scientist’s an easy way to share with friends (other scientists)- then have fun tracking all those clicks you’ll be racking up! That’s the science email marketing tip of the week!

Learn More About a Scientist Today.

Its a new year. We all made those resolutions we won’t keep. We all got fat over the holidays. I’m challenging you to do something today that will make you better at your job selling to scientists.
 

Go take a bench scientist out for coffee. Don’t say one word about your product. Just get to know how he or she operates in the lab.
 

Do it!

Update on crappy graphs

Seth Godin, one of my favorite writers, essentially echoed my post from a few days back about crappy graphs in marketing material.
 

Check it out! Click Here
 

Its seems bad graphs are everywhere! Please don’t use them, tell your marketing team they make you look bad too.
 

Holiday Short Blog

Holiday Offers from Life Science Companies

Yesterday a rep came through the lab from a rather large antibody company. I was pretty surprised since campus was closed and, the lab was a ghost town (its Christmas week after all). We chatted for a bit about this and that, which was good start. Friendly, good story about working through the holidays when he was in the lab. I’m engaged.
 

The deal his company is running is a 4 for the price of 3 on antibodies from now until the New Year. I almost laughed in his face. Seriously? What marketing person drew that idea up? As far as I know, I have never bought 4 antibodies at one time. I seriously doubt many life scientists have. In fact, after he left, I looked through our online ordering system and only once in our lab’s history has anyone ordered 4 antibodies at one time. ONCE.
 

Opportunity lost. Know your customer. Sure there are some labs that do a lot of FACS and IFA that might buy multiple antibodies at once. The vast majority of us buy 3 to 4 a year.

Please no crappy graphs!

Almost every piece of product literature I picked up at the American Society for Cell Biology Meeting this year has a graph on it. Inevitably, the graph shows how much better the product performed against “random competitor A and B’s” product. Not one of them has error bars.
 

Hello…in case you didn’t notice, I’m a scientist. Every graph in every science paper has error bars because that means the scientists performed the experiment enough times to achieve statistical significance.
 

Life Science Marketers – you are selling products to scientists, go down to the basement where they are building new products and ask them why they buy the product vs. your competition.
 

Answers may include:
 

1. My buddy in another lab/company told me it works great.
 

2. I saw it in a manuscript that other scientists were successfully using the product for my…experiment, cell line, organism, technique, gene, etc.
 

3. I talked with a scientist at a meeting/seminar about the product and they said it worked.
 

I seriously doubt the graph with no error bars will make the list.