Our North American friends will know that in baseball if a player has a batting average over .300, he’s having a pretty good season and, according to Scorecasting, is paid over $3 million more than the average Major League Baseball salary. But when you look at it, a .300 average means that he’s failing 70{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} of the time.
It’s the same in many marketing campaigns where a conversion rate of around 2{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} is usually considered pretty good, and 5{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} has them positively dancing in the aisles. Perhaps this is comparable to hitting .300, and if the customer base is large enough, this usually means decent revenue. But have you ever thought about the impact of your campaigns on your customers that don’t engage, open or click though?
It’s human nature to focus on success. And whilst a 5{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} click-through rate may exceed industry averages, what about those other 95{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} of people you don’t know about?
- Are they even receiving your messages?
- What do they think of the content you are sending? Is it even relevant to them?
- Perhaps another channel would work better?
- How do they feel about your brand? Are they still a loyal customer?
Wouldn’t it be great to find out? And then use this information to reduce the negative impact of not knowing, or getting it wrong, which can really hurt you.
It can be the smallest bit of insight that helps you to delight your customers, turning a customer at risk of churn in to a brand advocate.
And while it’s bad enough that 95{ef82a2006d5c8fe58cb7b8be33b0a8b6fa2c5d226e3dba98a6af852ab28f7035} are not potentially buying from you, how many of these are you also alienating by continuing to send what they probably consider to be junk!
I don’t know about you, but I’m drowning in communications, mostly emails, but also text and direct mail, from companies hoping to entice me to do something, mostly legal, with their company. Customers and prospects are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the daily tidal wave of intrusive, unsolicited and mostly irrelevant marketing communications they are getting.
When poorly targeted communications hit your mail box, or your smart phone, it means that the company doesn’t really know who you are, or what you may have purchased, or shown an interest in, recently. And, despite being a loyal customer, who they should know about, they still send the dive bombers in to spray and pray with plane loads of irrelevant offers that waste your time, and their money.
So while we can obviously hit the “unsubscribe” button, we may not rush to do this because we may want to get some information from this company; but offers that are timely, relevant and valuable to us as an individual. In other words, a well-crafted and personalized message that recognizes who we are, what we want and/or need (they are different).
It really comes down to a fairly simple, but often challenging, premise of delivering the right message to the right people, via the right channel at the right time. And we need answers to some fundamental questions to be able to start that process:
- How do we know who and where our customers are, to target and engage them more effectively?
- How do we ensure that all interactions, across multiple channels, and all key data, are integrated
to provide a complete and dynamic picture of your customers and prospects? - How can we align our strategy around acquisition, sales conversion, retention and loyalty?
- How, when and why should we deliver personalized experiences to different customers?
Because everyone has different needs, wants and preferences, answering these questions is an intregal part of a 4 step process to help companies build a stronger, more personalized engagement model that can maximize communications with their customers. We need to:
1. Understand
2. Target
3. Communicate
4. Measure
Understand:
To truly understand our customers and their wants and needs, we need to look beyond traditional CRM data and integrate that with other vital customer information, across all channels and external sources that is typically finding its way into the Big Data bucket.
This includes information such as:
Acquisition source Geo-location
Influence & sentiment Emotional interaction & transaction behaviour
Recency & frequency of interactions Landing page details
Channels utilized Device information
Target:
This aggregated and integrated data now starts to form a clearer and more complete picture of your customer that can you can use to develop more detailed customer profiles. These customer profiles can help you target your customers at an individual level, providing them with specific and relevant offerings.
This can be based on a range of influential data such as:
Likelihood to churn What, and how much, they’ve told you
Good/Bad experience Actions – past & present
Demographic fit Brand advocacy
Communications:
Getting a generic offer through a mass email campaign is not only ineffective; it can waste time and money and deliver a memorably bad customer experience. But if these communications showed that you understand what matters to them in a relevant, personal and timely manner by saying the right thing at the right time via the right channel, this will have a complete different effect, and will leave a lasting, positive impression.
Measure:
Many organizations think that this is the most important element and clearly addresses the “don’t know” aspect of your campaign by having systems and processes in place to ensure that you do know what’s happening and how your customers are reacting. But it means so much more than that. Gaining immediate and historical insight into your campaigns with standard or custom reports, testing content to improve your conversion rates, spotting relationships with customers and content and predict future trends and behaviours based on your continually evolving data all contribute to the delivery of a great campaign.
So instead of annoying your customers by totally missing the mark, you can delight them with conversations that show that you care. Simply recognizing their interests and responding to their actions can go a long way. This is one area where technology can automate these metrics in a way that not only delivers a vastly improved customer experience, but that saves you time and money, and takes away the hurt.
Measurement is really all about education, and learning what, why and how you need to adapt your customer communications. American historian and writer, Daniel J. Boorstin said that “Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know” Maybe he was a marketer at heart?