Improve your marketing in operational communications

A new global media report issued in October 2010 by Deloitte has revealed that online advertising is losing sway against more traditional advertising and appears to have only a minor influence on buying behavior.

When a colleague first presented me with this fact, as written in an article of a well known South African newspaper, I refused to believe it. How is it possible that online advertising can have less impact than traditional advertising, which in many ways has lost its affect on the market through overexposure? Surely online advertising is naturally more targeted than traditional marketing? My naivety seems to have gotten the better of me. After digging a little deeper and paying closer attention to advertising online (which in fact proves the point that I was not taking note of online ads), it seems the majority of online marketing is not targeted at all.

So how does this relate to email?

It naturally follows the same line of thought. If you are including marketing material in your operational communications or sending purely marketing related messages to your customer base and not segmenting and targeting this base accordingly – you are wasting your time!

You have to employ a new strategy for digital advertising if you expect your customers to interact accordingly with your brand. Print and digital marketing are far removed from one another, yet the same methodology is applied by many marketers.

Know your customer & use appropriate trigger points

Create a Customer Lifecycle Management strategy that maps your customer’s interactions with your company – from on boarding, management and retention through to the sometimes unavoidable possibility of your customer leaving. Each of these customer phases and the additional interactions they have with your company during this time provides you with vital trigger points, which will enable you to interact further with them, via email, SMS etc.

Every company representative that interacts with your customers has a responsibility to gather additional information. This can happen after the fact e.g. a text message sent to a customer asking them to rate your company’s service, following an interaction with your call centre, or during the interaction e.g. asking a customer to participate in a poll or survey from within their monthly eStatement.

The feedback you receive from these interactions goes a long way. Not only will you get to know them better, but it will also give you more insight into their requirements from your brand. Customers expect you to know them and by doing so, prefer that you communicate with them with this knowledge in mind. When you have enough knowledge about your customers, segment your base and start to target your communications.

Over and above this, if you are not communicating effectively and regularly with your customers, you are not top of mind. In the myriad of email and mobile communications we receive on a daily basis; where does that leave your brand?

In short, when you have the tools available to create intelligent, customized communications that target the needs and interests of individual customers – use it. Many of your competitors already are…