OpenMarket – October 2, 2018
You’ve got a good product. You know who your audience is. Your data is current. And you use multiple channels.
But they’re still not working.
Your customers and prospects just aren’t responding to your outbound messages.
The bad news is that this can be an incredibly frustrating situation for marketers – and a major issue for brands.
The good news is that, often, it stems from one of three fundamental mistakes. Let’s look at each one – and how empathetic brands avoid them.
Wrong channel
Different messages require different mediums. If you’re sending a message that requires deep focus and extended concentration you don’t send a text message. Likewise, if you’re sending urgent information, you don’t send an email.
That’s why when Virgin Trains sends messages to their customers about platform information, they send an SMS. With 90% of text messages being opened within three minutes of being received[1] A2P is the perfect way of getting time-critical information to customers.
Wrong time
How useful would it be getting a reminder that you’ve got a flight coming up in four months? Not that useful. Four days? A perfect time to book airport transport and arrange a last-minute dog-sitter.
So sending your messages at the right time matters. But the right timing can actually empower you to do even more than you’re used to doing.
Club Mahindra wanted to get feedback from their customers so that they could make their 40-plus luxury resorts in India even more wonderful. They found that if they sent a message just after people had checked out they were much more likely to participate in the feedback. The customers got something to do while killing time in the airport and Club Mahindra got more feedback. 140% more feedback to be exact.
Wrong message
It’s fair to say that a huge proportion of marketing messages will feel like spam to the people receiving them. This is true no matter what channel you’re using – email[2] or SMS or application notifications.
The problem is that it’s really easy to focus on the positives of something like a 5% conversion rate, and forget about the experience of the other 95%. Which is only made worse when you consider there’s no way to quantify the emotional experience of those remaining people. Were they annoyed? Disappointed? Bored?
The best way to counter this problem is to make sure you’re thinking about the person on the other end of the message before you send it. Is it information that they’re going to want? Or is it just information that you want to tell them? Get the balance wrong and you’ve got the recipe for a-grade spam.
The empathetic improvement
The common thread that unifies all of these points is a thing the best brands are obsessed with: Empathy.
If you take the ‘outbound marketing’ part out of the equation and just think of it as a person talking to another person, it makes sense that you’d only want a message that’s relevant to your needs at a time and in a medium that suits you.
So now’s the time to take a step back, and using a combination of empathy and data, figure out if your messages pass the hurdles above.
And if they don’t, you’ll know what you need to fix.
Want to learn how A2P text messaging can improve your CX while costing you less? Check out: The New Age of Customer Experience
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[1] http://mobilesquared.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Conversational-Advertising.pdf
[2] https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-survey