The Mobile Marketing Opportunity of Behavioral Routines

An article recently posted on the Mobile Marketer web site urges marketers to think longer term about what they can and should be doing to nurture a relationship with someone who clicks on their ad from a mobile device. While I certainly agree with all of the advice (and assertions of missed opportunity) in the article, I think that this doesn’t push far enough. There’s something more that should added to marketers’ thinking about interactions with customers and prospects on their mobile devices: routine behaviors.

Some time ago, I signed up to receive Groupon daily offers and, as a result, wake up every day to find my Groupon email waiting for me in my inbox. And every day, I read the email. I’ve probably bought 2 or 3 things in the 18 months I’ve been subscribed, but that lack of conversion hasn’t stopped me from checking that email every day. The reason? It’s part of my daily routine. Wake up, make breakfast, check email—including that day’s email from Groupon. The combination of the variety of the offers, the programmed consistency of delivery, and the fact that I always have my mobile device on hand has ingrained checking that email into my morning behavior.

While it may not be the case that every marketer pursuing every type of customer should think in terms of establishing a presence in the audience’s daily routine, the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices makes it an opportunity every marketer should be considering. To aid in this consideration, below are some scenarios that would make “behavior integration” a strategy worth pursuing:

  • A highly competitive battle for mind share and audience attention
  • A need to expand the target audience’s understanding of the range of product, services, or solutions offered
  • Under-utilization of a rich collection of thought leadership resources

In any of these scenarios—or, most of all, in environments in which more than one of these scenarios are combined—a strategy to foster a behavioral routine that leverages the particular usage profile of mobile devices is worth exploring.

Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium: Maximizing opportunities with customers who switch banks

At this year’s Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium, J. Michael Beird of J.D. Power and Associates and Becky DeGeorge of U.S. Bank illuminated some important trends around customers who switch their primary bank. The number of customers doing this has increased for the second year in a row – in spite of the fairly high level of effort required to switch to a new primary bank.

How can banks take advantage of this trend?

An obvious response might be to ramp up prospecting efforts – but the speakers pointed out that the reason a customer selects a bank is highly relevant to their long-term profitability. J.D. Power and Associates has found that customers who choose a bank because of the bank’s community involvement are the most loyal and tend to give that bank greatest share of wallet; customers who switch to a bank based on a promotion are, unsurprisingly, at the opposite end of spectrum.

Graph: Value Drivers Associated with Primary Purchase Triggers

Banks looking to reap the benefits of the current turbulent landscape through prospecting must understand who they are targeting as their leads, as it should drastically change their acquisition strategy.

What’s even more important than acquiring new customers is maximizing their relationship with your bank once they’ve come in the door. How can you avoid repeating the mistakes of the competitors that drove these customers to switch banks in the first place?

The speakers outlined the necessary first steps for onboarding customers: satisfaction of a new bank customer is optimized if they receive a thorough needs assessment and a follow-up phone call within 2 days. This initial interaction has direct impacts on loyalty and share of wallet.

A complete needs assessment gets at what led the customer to switch as well as how they operate on a daily basis:

  • What were they looking for in their last banking relationship that they weren’t getting?
  • What don’t they like about their last bank?
  • What other accounts (aside from the one they originally came for) do they need or use?
  • How many checks do they write a month?

Such an assessment provides the customer with a positive first impression of the bank, and reassures the customer that they have made a correct decision in switching from a bank where they’ve had bad experiences.

From there, having the person who opened the first account with a new customer call within 2 days to say thank you enhances that customer’s first experience with your bank. It’s a simple step that, according to J.D. Power and Associates, does make a measurable difference in customer satisfaction.

To build on the speakers’ insights, banks targeting customers who switch institutions need to extend and support the customer experience throughout the life of the relationship. How can you use the insights gained from the needs assessment? Are there other simple actions, like that first phone call, that build loyalty in your customers?

The Chicken or the Egg? Interpreting Social Media Data and Business Results

Two recent studies purport to prove that social media has a strong, positive impact on business results.

  • A recent study by Bain & Company uses the Net Promoter Score satisfaction/loyalty research methodology to assert that those customers who engage with companies through social media channels are more loyal (have a higher NPS) and spend more with that company as compared to those customers who don’t engage with the company through social media.
  • A second study by Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey cites data from a survey of Twitter users to argue that Twitter users who follow a company/brand on Twitter are more likely to purchase products from that company.

There is, as I see it, one big problem with this “proof” of the impact of social media channel usage: Did the chicken come first or the egg? Isn’t the most likely scenario the fact that social media engagement AND buying more/loyalty/recommendations are simply both symptomatic of a pre-existing strong connection between the user/customer and the brand? In other words, there’s no proof that social media engagement caused the increase in purchases/loyalty, only that the engagement and the increase coexist in the same population.

The good news, however, is that my note of caution regarding the interpretation of the data touted by these studies doesn’t make that data useless. In fact, a better way to interpret the data would be to conclude that those who engage with a company on social media are self-identifying themselves as that company’s high value customers. With this in mind, the social media channel can then be leveraged to ensure that these customers are rewarded for their engagement: offered special deals, encouraged to spread the word, given opportunities to provide input to product development, etc. Whereas the previous interpretation of the data suggests that it would be a good marketing strategy to try to attract more users to engage via social media, this revised interpretation would lead a company instead to invest in harvesting already engaged users to drive additional revenue.

The moral: Companies must exercise caution when using survey data to drive strategy—not because primary research shouldn’t drive strategy (it should), but because misinterpretation can have significant, often negative, consequences.