Customer Experience Management – How to KEEP Your Contacts on Your Side
Do you sign up for “updates” from people/websites? I do, I have an inbox full of emails from names I don’t recognize and wonder why I ever bothered to subscribe to.
There are one or two that I open every time and I feel personally connected to.
- What makes these few stand out?
- How have they succeeded where all the others are just a waste of electrons?
- What should we all be doing in our customer experience management to be memorable to our customers?
Email vs. Facebook
Email was the first social media channel that companies used to communicate with their customers. It uses broadcast messages to people who have signed up, in exactly the same way as Facebook and other social media sites do. The difference is that social media sites allow customers to respond, whereas email responses (if any) are private.
My emails fall into two categories, those who are trying to sell me services and those who want to give me things.
Fails
The companies whose every message is focussed on selling to me are unsuccessful. I delete their emails without even opening them. I was vaguely interested in finding out more about their services when I subscribed, but now, a few weeks later, they all merge into one another and I wonder why I ever bothered. Sooner or later I unsubscribe from their annoying emails.
Successes
The companies that want to offer me freebies do so as a marketing come-on. I know that but theirs is a strategy that appeals to me and works for them. I have passed on their offers to others through G+ groups that I use because I think the freebies are genuinely useful even to people who do not want to buy the company’s paid services right now. The company is getting its name out there and has a positive vibe associated with it.
Success Case Study – HubSpot.com
I signed up for Hubspot emails because they are useful. This company has managed to maintain my interest in their products because its emails continue to be useful to me. I have shared their links in Google G+ groups and on Twitter because I found them genuinely useful and thought that others would as well.
The first email that drew my attention had a download link to four free infographic templates that were editable using MS PowerPoint. I had to sign up for regular emails from them but Hubspot had clearly invested resources in producing these free and useful PowerPoint templates, so that seemed fair enough.
Every email that Hubspot sends me contains similarly useful resources.
I did check out the services that the company offers and if I can ever afford to pay for such services, I will use Hubspot because I feel a loyalty to them.
Success Case Study – Boost Blog Traffic
The success here has two factors, the genuinely useful free resource links and the inspirational guy behind them.
I have signed up for many bloggers’ resources in the past ten years; most of them are now consigned to the trash, where they always belonged. Jon Morrow gives away products that others would sell, such as his Headline Hacks.
I read every email that I receive because I really find the resources that they contain to be useful in my day-to-day writing.
What Makes for Email Success?
Both of the companies that have succeeded in persuading me to open their emails have done so by providing me with continued and continuous value for the time I spend reading the email.
Facebook responses are public, so any company using this method of communication needs to have someone assigned to handle any responses. Any queries need to be addressed immediately and any negativity countered before it can go viral. Bad news always spreads faster than good news and the only way to slow this spread is to respond and to produce “good news” items that can go viral instead.
I subscribe to a few company Facebook updates, most of them have alienated me by inundating my Facebook page with worthless marketing messages. The few I have not “hidden” are those that send only infrequent messages that are useful to me.
Useful messages include memes, beautiful photos and competitions that are simple to enter.
Good Facebook Practices
It is essential to remember the crucial difference between Facebook and email messages: Your customer responses will be seen by thousands of people.
If you send out an email with a typo or a bad link, you can just send another email tomorrow and apologize. Your customers will not laugh publicly at your discomfiture. If you make a mistake on Facebook it is forever and is more likely to be spread than any of your positive marketing messages. It is essential to treble-check every company social media post before pressing the “Post” button. Mistakes can never be totally undone.
Remember that your customers are allowing you to post messages to them on their prime social medium. You need to treat that permission with respect or it will be removed.
Any messages you send should be primarily social and be of benefit to your customers:
- Special offers
Social media sites are a great way to tell your loyal customers about any promotions that you are running.
- Competitions
Competitions that are simple to enter and have valuable prizes are likely to be “shared” by your customers.
- Inspirational messages
These will be infrequent, but if you can find a way to link your business to a news event or an inspirational quotation or image, it will send out a positive message.
Competitions can be especially useful if there are negative comments to be countered. They are especially likely to go viral in the same way as the negativity did and will go a long way to countering it.
Conclusion
You can use both emails and social media sites such as Facebook to grow and maintain customer loyalty, but you can only do so if the customer allows you to. You need to keep your customers interested and the best way to do this is by constantly supplying interesting and useful messages and resources.
These require a substantial investment in staff time and costs, but if you do not make the investment, you will not succeed.
[signoff][/signoff]
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Succeed: Small Business Network, Powered by Staples
Discussion: How Do You Keep Your Connections Loyal?
While these are important points, I think a major point is being missed, and the title suggested it would be touched on. And that is- loyalty. Not marketing gimmicks, which will create business, but will they create repeat business?
Will they create a real sense of trust and integrity, or will you look like an opportunistic huckster? The choice is yours.
If you want your business contacts to stay loyal to you, YOU must be loyal to them.
Listen to your customers. Help them when they need it. Let them help you when you need it.
Stand by them in difficult times, cheer them on when they have their own successes- if you can use that as a way to do a little promotion for yourself, too, so much the better, because you can promote not only your good, but demonstrate that the virtue of sticking together does make a difference in this world.
Not just community or congeniality, but common courtesy and mutual respect are too absent from the business world these days, so much of our interaction reduced to buzz, buzzwords, jargon, blurry communication, legalese, and a general feel of smarmy that it really makes me wonder where we went wrong.
Loyalty is one of the most important virtues man has been endowed with, and in our business dealings, it seems that we so very rarely use it.
Perhaps we need to re-examine where our loyalties lie. Are you loyal to your boss or your employees (or both)? Are you loyal to your customers and sub-contractors? Do you encourage people to stay or keep you by your own behavior and practices?
Those are the things that create loyalty. Not a promotion on Facebook.
By Charles Larkin
Thanks for your thoughtful comment Charles.
You are right in that I should have placed more emphasis on customer/business loyalty. I implied it and perhaps because of my age and background I make an assumption that businesses are loyal to their customers as people rather than just as sources of cash: It is certainly how I run my own business.
Loyalty is indeed about much more than repeat custom, but when businesses and customers online may be thousands of miles apart and never meet, social media contacts become the only way that the two groups can get to know each other. I am not suggesting that Facebook and email promotions are the only means of engendering loyalty, but that they are an important part of it.
How we actually define loyalty is another question that I suspect will be the subject of my next article for Compukol.
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Linked Business
Discussion: How Do You Keep Your Connections Loyal?
Nice article. I thought I could pull a point or two out of both your email and Facebook recommendations to use, and you reinforced something I’m already going to start doing. In your experience where do you see the biggest mistakes being made if you had to narrow it down to one or two?
By Chris Hedges
Thanks Chris for taking the time to comment. I’m glad you found the article useful.
I think the most serious mistake people make with Facebook is to forget where they are, in someone’s private space by invitation. To abuse that privilege and to send marketing messages is just asking to be Hidden.
With emails I think the biggest mistake people make is not to offer something for nothing in every email.
Emails may be (almost) free but to make them work as a marketing device you need to invest resources just as you would in any marketing effort. Am email that is not read is like showing ads in an empty movie theater; cheap but still a waste of money.