KNOWLEDGE GRIND NOTES

How You Can Get Your Customers to Pay Attention to Your Ads

Applying insights from Cashvertising to understanding how you can get your customers to pay attention to your ads

I read pages 167–177 of Cashvertising (Chapter 3) today and found insights on how to visually construct and position your ads to get your customers to pay attention.

Photo by Proxyclick Visitor Management System on Unsplash

A SUMMARY OF PAGES 167–176

Whitman continues with his outline of the 41 techniques used by ad-agency professionals to drive sales. He covers five more secrets.

Ad-Agency Secret #31–7 Online Response Boosters

1. Best Frequency for Emailing? Once a week.
2. Expect the click-through rate for your emails to range from 1–20%.
3. Make your emails visual. Do an A/B test and compare the response rate you get from your visual emails versus that from your plain text emails. See which one outperforms the other.
4. Best Way to Get Your Emails Opened — Have a familiar sender (your name if your customers will recognize it), a personal subject line, and offer of interest.
5. Ad Size and Readership — Vertically tall ads and large banners tend to be more effective than regular-sized banner ads. This applies to both print advertising as well as online advertising.
6. Animation Click-Through Booster — Animated ads have higher click-through rates. According to Whitman, that’s because movement attracts attention. But not too much movement or you risk irritating your customers.
7. Mystery Ads Score High Click-Through Rates — Your ad can have a high click-through rate through an attention-grabbing hook that might have nothing to do with your product. Those clicks, however, may not necessarily convert into sales, especially if your ad attracts people who aren’t your target customers to click. So use the right words to attract the right audience and don’t confuse clicks for sales.

Photo by Cleo Vermij on Unsplash

Click!

COMMENTARY

You can still apply the majority of Whitman’s online response boosters.

1. Try to email your customers at least one month. One a week if you have something important to share.
2. Click-through rates are still around 15–25%.
3. Visual emails. Don’t do plain text.
4. A familiar sender is a nice touch. It doesn’t make much of a difference for me, but I have started associating names with brands.
5. I personally haven’t consciously noticed a difference in my responsiveness to banner ads of different orientation and size. I would perform an A/B test with a range of ads of different orientations and sizes to see which kinds of banner ads are most effective.
6. This booster has definitely gotten some validation as seen in the rise of YouTube ads.
7. Be clickbait to the right customers — that’s a happy middle ground.

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Ad-Agency Secret #32–Multi-page Your Way to Success

Try to show your ads multiple times to your target customer.

The 10 Most Effective Multi-ad Formations:

1. Three single-page ads in sequence on the right side.
2. Two-single page ads in different sections of the same issue on the right side.
3. Double-page spread.
4. Single-page ads on the right.
5. Single-page ads on the left with strip ad on the right.
6. Single-page ads on the left.
7. Right-page checkerboard (one quarter-page ad in each of the page’s four corners).
8. Left-page checkerboard ads.
9. Half-page ad, upper right.
10. Half-page ad, lower right.

Just in case you didn’t notice the first ad

COMMENTARY

Online, multi-advertising can be seen in the repetition of the same ad on a different page of a website.

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Ad-Agency Secret #33–Guarantees that Guarantee a Higher Response

Buyers feel vulnerable. In exchange for their hard-earned money, they take a leap of faith every time they give some of it away. They wonder if what they’re buying will be worth at least the value of the money they’ve exchanged for it.

Offer a generous guarantee on the products you sell so that you can minimize a buyer’s pre-purchase stress.

Whenever a potential customer makes a buying decision, there’s always a battle between their desire to believe in your product’s value and their skepticism about it.

Lean towards longer term guarantees as short term ones (30, 60 or 90 days) tend to make a customer more conscious of that deadline.

Show off your guarantee. Make it seen so you can show your customers just how much you believe in your product’s value (hence your willingness to offer a long term guarantee on it).

Photo (cropped) by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash

I wonder if they’re refundable

COMMENTARY

SkillShare is a good example. It gives you two months free right off the bat to decide if it’s the platform for you. Given the number of competitors out there (including free alternatives like YouTube, which offers a good number of free tutorials on any subject), this seems to be an attempt at only retaining customers who actually find value out of SkillShare and thus choose to pay an annual subscription fee upfront at the end of their two month trial.

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Ad-Agency Secret #34–The Psychology of Size

According to Whitman, bigger ads attract more attention.

But the relationship between size and attention attracted is not one of direct proportionality.

Whitman’s theory?

An ad’s attention value is approximately proportionate to the square root of the area.

That means if you want to double the attention value of your ad, you will need to enlarge it by 400%.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

COMMENTARY

Online, given the standardization of ad-sizing, this booster isn’t as relevant.

In fact, a large pop-up might irritate some of your target customers.

A/B test to find out whether large ads work well for your target customers.

Ad-Agency Secret #35–The Psychology of Page and Section Positioning

The location of your print ad and its positioning on a page doesn’t matter.

What matters are the content, copy and design of your ad.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

It’s hard not to stand out

COMMENTARY

Online, this may not be true given the number of decisions you can make with the positioning of your ad.

On YouTube, for example, you can position your ad (assuming that it’s a video) to play at the start of a video, at the end of a video or even during the video.

Such positioning may or may not affect the effectiveness of your ad although articles like this one by WordStream suggests that positioning does affect ad effectiveness.

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Ad-Agency Secret #36–The Fantastic Four

According to Whitman, ad placement affects an ad’s “Noted” (seen and recalled by a reader) score:

1. Ads appearing on the inside front cover of a newspaper have the highest Noted scores with a 29% increase in this score for similar ads that are run anywhere else in the same issue
2. Ads placed opposite a table of contents get up to 25% higher Noted scores.
3. Ads appearing on the back cover score 22% higher than ads inside.
4. Ads appearing on the inside back cover have 6% higher Noted scores than ads on inside pages.

Photo (cropped) by Julius Drost on Unsplash

See those ads?

COMMENTARY

Online, ad placement definitely matters, especially across the different devices on which content is consumed.

To analyze ad placement, look into heat maps that track a website viewer’s interaction with the webpage, which is a topic that is discussed on articles about optimizing online ad placement, like this one by MonetizeMore.

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Ad-Agency Secret #37–Consumer Color Preferences and How Color Affects Readership

What colors do people like the most?

Men exhibit these color preferences (starting from most liked):

1. Blue
2. Red
3. Green
4. Violet
5. Orange
6. Yellow

Women exhibit these color preferences (starting from most liked):

1. Blue
2. Red
3. Green
4. Violet
5. Yellow
6. Orange

Color preferences can change with age, with blue becoming a more preferred color as we get older.

According to artists, if you’ll be using color combinations, try not to use combinations that cross into primary colors (red, yellow, and blue).

Psychologists, on the other hand, believe that there are four (red, yellow, green, and blue), not three primary colors, and recommend color combinations that employ complementary colors.

According to research done by Daniel Starch, consumers prefer colors of low value and high chroma.

As for specific color combinations, preferences were ranked as follows (starting from most liked):

1. Blue and Yellow
2. Blue and Red
3. Red and Green
4. Purple and Orange
5. Red and Orange

For text coloring, according to Whitman, readership studies have shown that white or yellow backgrounds work best for text. Use black, dark blue or red inks for maximum impact. Black ink on yellow paper is the best combination. Red ink on green paper is the worst combination.

Color also affects ad engagement. Black and white ads encourage more in-depth reading by 60%. For other two color combinations, in-depth reading increases by 40%.

Color has more of an impact of whether your ad gets noticed than does the size of your ad.

Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

COMMENTARY

In addition to affecting whether your ad gets noticed or not and how much attention is paid to it, the coloring of your ad also affects how your brand comes off to a target customer. That’s because colors spark emotional reactions and suggest qualities about your brand — blue, for instance, is the color of trust and responsibility.

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That’s all for today. Read one additional page today since Ad-Agency Secret #37 ended on page 177. I will be reading pages 178–187 tomorrow.