Are you damaging your customers’ impression of you?

We saw this article by Jonathan Davies of the Digital Marketing Magazine talking about damaging customer loyalty by a disconnected marketing experience. See an excerpt of the article below.

“Customer loyalty is being damaged by organisations that are unable to provide seamless experiences across channels and timely access to information, according to MuleSoft.

The Connected Consumer Report 2017 found that as a result of these disconnected experiences, a significant number of UK consumers said they would consider changing their insurance (63%), retail (61%) or banking (55%) providers. Furthermore, respondents cited public services as the most disconnected industry (58%), with 44% of respondents claiming that they or someone they know have experienced a delay in care due to information not being shared between different healthcare professionals.”

Of course, the above is talking about the customer perception of large organisations. We don’t see a difference for smaller companies. We believe the same rules apply to anyone engaging in marketing activities.

We agree that these days we are looking for more of a personalised experience in how businesses interact with us. We want to feel that the business cares about us, not just about achieving “the sale”. Loyalty seems to be a very fickle thing. One bad experience is enough to turn most people off a company, sometimes for life.

The marketing gurus tell us that we constantly need to feed our customers with positive original content that appeals to them; and to deliver it via the channels that their customers are currently using. We say that you need at least 5 marketing channels to deliver your message. One or two simply won’t do. You cannot put all your preverbal eggs in one marketing basket.

Further, the old 80:20 rule still pervades of course. 80% should be useful information that your customer is interested in and 20% can be about your offers. If we oversell then very quickly we see our customers leave. It’s a scary prospect (pun intended), particularly when you know what hard expensive work it is to get the customer in the first place.

So, what can we do to keep the customer more loyal?

• Creating personalised marketing. When your customer thinks you are speaking to them personally they will respond more favourably.
• Keep your language friendly. No one like corporate speak and techie acronyms. Use every day friendly language to speak to your customer. It makes people feel more relaxed and open to your message.
• Make it easy for them to see the information that interests them. That means keeping up to date with where your customers are going for their information and using those channels.
• Now for the most important one. Make sure that when your customer responds to your marketing that it is easy for them to connect with you. Ensure there is someone monitoring the channels you have chosen and is responding quickly. On social media, people want a response in a few minutes. Same for web chat bots. Not surprisingly, it’s even faster for the phone. Those “your call is important to us” messages are not well received by anyone.

Are you interested in improving your marketing success? If so, then sign up for our free master class “Mastering Your Marketing For Success” on May 24^th in London. To find out more CLICK HERE.