GOPE WALKER
Learn effective strategies to strike a balance between promoting your products or services and maintaining a positive customer experience.
Overzealous marketing can have a negative impact on a business, causing financial and reputational damage. Intrusive marketing, such as junk mail and email overload, can irritate and put off potential or existing customers. It’s crucial for companies to focus on relevant and timely communication to avoid losing customers’ lifetime value and damaging their brand reputation, as well as contributing to environmental concerns. By tailoring their marketing strategies to their customers’ needs, businesses can develop a sustainable customer base and build a better reputation.
Marketing is a key enabler for every company. Done effectively, it helps them to successfully promote their products or services and to win new business.
Yet, done the wrong way, it can be detrimental to the business, damaging it both financially and reputationally. At its worst, it can bring a whole company down if the issue goes viral.
Marketing has been around, it seems, forever. Now, it’s everywhere, from advertising billboards in the street to banner ads on websites and email marketing campaigns.
The problem is that when there is so much marketing around, it just becomes a nuisance and people turn off. Take, for example, the fact that a staggering 17.5 billion pieces of junk mail are sent and received in the UK every year – that’s 262 pieces of mail per person.
Intrusive marketing Understandably, every business owner wants to talk about how good their company is – after all, they have poured their heart and soul into it. But the fact is, oftentimes, it’s not relevant to or interesting for many people.
A common mistake that many firms make is being too overzealous with their marketing. It only serves to annoy and put off potential or existing customers.
When people are spending more time deleting marketing emails and shredding post than actually using the product or service, it’s time to stop. There’s no point bombarding an occasional user with emails that aren’t relevant or timely for them – it’s time-wasting and brand impacting.
If anything, it’s going to send them the other way, and make them more irritated and unlikely to want to use the product or service. Particularly when they are being inundated by hundreds or even thousands of other companies competing for their business.
Email overload With 175bn marketing emails sent every day, they range from new product or service launches and campaigns to updates and invitations to upgrade. Most either go straight to the junk folder or are deleted right away.
But, given the amount that is received every hour or even minute, it’s an annoying and time-consuming process that adds to the working day. While it may take only 10 minutes per day, it all adds up: over a week, it’s an hour, and, in a year, that equates to one week.
Extrapolated across the whole workforce, that’s 32 million weeks a year spent deleting, reading, unsubscribing or replying to emails. When that time could be spent more productively, either at work or a home, it’s easy to understand why this type of marketing is both invasive and a nuisance.
Junk mail Short of blocking emails, it’s extremely difficult to stem the relentless tide of emails from companies that have obtained your details. It’s the same for junk mail.
As cold-calling in person has dropped off as a practice, with only two percent of door-to-door sales now garnering a sale, so unsolicited mail has only increased. Again, the vast majority of these letters go unopened or are thrown straight in the recycling bin.
Loss of brand reputation Effective marketing needs to be timely and relevant to the recipient. If it isn’t, it’s just an irritant, which if it becomes too persistent, can cause customers to unsubscribe, resulting in their whole lifetime value being lost, or, worse still, to react by taking to social media to complain or warning their families and friends to avoid using that company’s products or services.
Environmental cost Asides from the business cost of bad marketing, there’s also the environmental impact it causes. At a time when businesses and their customers are focused on environmental, social and governance goals and initiatives, every email sent out adds to their carbon footprint, producing, on average, 0.3 grams of CO2. Added up, the 62 trillion spam emails sent every year account for 1.86m tonnes of CO2.
The solution There’s a simple rule of thumb to marketing. If a customer buys a product or service from a company regularly and recommends it to new customers, is there a reason to contact them?
Therefore, there has to be a compelling reason to market to those customers that aren’t such regular users. That requires understanding why they need to be contacted and what message should be put across.
Rather than overloading customers with irrelevant and irksome emails, firms must look more closely at the data they have about who they are, how they buy and what they want. Any correspondence needs to be tailored accordingly, to ensure that it successfully reaches its target market and has the desired effect.
By taking a bit of time to do this, businesses can develop a more sustainable customer base. They can also build a better reputation and do their bit for the environment, while letting the customer get on with their life, free from interference.
ABOUT THE AUTHORGope Walker, CEO of Data Kraken.After working for blue chip companies for 16 years, Gope was disheartened by the lack of innovation in the analytics arm of most businesses. The desire to innovate in order to optimise and improve businesses using data-driven techniques was rarely seen at the level Gope deemed appropriate – hence the birth of Data Kraken.
Today, the Data Kraken team are working with clients across multiple continents, offering data-driven insights that allow companies to manage their business as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Source: Martech Cube
Original Content: https://shorturl.at/cgqxJ
