Category Archives: Retirement and Benefits

A Customer Experience and Lead-Nurturing Horror Story

What you are about to read really happened. It illustrates why companies need to pay better attention to the customer experience and why marketing — or a dedicated customer experience function — needs to have visibility into all points of communication with customers and prospects.

About two months ago, I received an email from Ronnie, a salesperson at a call center technology provider. I’m sure he was emailing me because I had previously filled out a form to obtain a white paper. I read and deleted the email because EMI doesn’t handle provisioning or recommending call center technology and I felt that talking to the sales person would be a waste of both our time. A few weeks later, Ronnie sent another email; he speculated that I “might have overlooked” his previous email and again asked for a meeting. I know how not getting a “no” answer can be a drain on a salesperson’s time, so I decided to write back to Ronnie:

Hello Ronnie,

I didn’t overlook your last email…I read it and deleted it. But kudos to you on your persistence. The reason I deleted the email is that we are not in the business of using or even recommending to clients contact center technology. If a need should ever arise, I’ll look you up.

Good luck and good hunting.

Imagine my surprise — and by surprise, I mean aggravation — when two days later I received another email from Ronnie, this one more insistent than the last:

Anthony,
Trying to reach you. Can we schedule a call?

That’s the whole email. Makes you want to be a customer, right? I wrote back to Ronnie in a tone much less considerate than that of my previous email, explaining I had in fact responded to his earlier email and he should not email me again.

Guess what happened three weeks later? That’s right, another email from Ronnie — exactly the same as his second one. Needless to say, he got another email back from me, fuming. Now the (somewhat) happy ending to the story is that Ronnie finally got the message (literally and figuratively) and responded very apologetically, which restored a bit of my faith in Ronnie and his company. But some significant damage was done.

What this story illustrates is how detrimental a lack of coordination and oversight in customer communications can be. This situation might have been avoided if sales email outreach were templatized and triggered by a lack of response by a customer. Obviously there was a template involved (hence the exact same wording in the second and fourth Robbie emails), but the triggering mechanism failed. Moreover, even if I hadn’t been furious about the lack of recognition of my replies, I would have been turned off by the fact that the second and fourth emails were exactly the same; if you’re going to create templates, create multiple templates for different stages in the sales process and don’t repeat their use.  Email templates in the sales process should follow a logic that assumes consumption by the recipient and seek to respond to that consumption/lack of response by changing the messaging and/or offer. While there is always the potential for innocent human error, the objective of lead nurturing should be to make the entire process as automated and mistake-proof as possible to maximize the impact (and also reduce the burden on sales to compose and send the emails).

I hope Ronnie learned a lesson, but did his company — or is some other Ronnie destined to make the same mistakes that could cost the company a real prospective customer?

2012 Email Evolution Conference: Email Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Evolving

The conference kicked off its Thursday session with a substantive and thought-provoking keynote from Jessica Harley, VP of Customer Marketing at Gilt Groupe. While her presentation touched on many aspects of Gilt’s email marketing efforts, the most notable theme was that we — as marketers generally and email marketers specifically — can’t think about email marketing in a vacuum. In that email marketing vacuum, response rates appear to be declining and social seems to be gaining precedence. But outside that vacuum, email continues to play a vital role in driving engagement and conversions.

Expanding outside the vacuum enables email marketers to recognize that conversions and email’s impact may be felt in ways that aren’t captured by traditional measures. In Harley’s experience at Gilt, customers may look at emails on a mobile device but then convert indirectly on the same day via the web or via an App. In this scenario, the email is the trigger to go to those transactional channels. Therefore, we need to evaluate email performance not always on an immediate basis — how many viewers or clickers did the email drive in the first day or two — but with a longer term view. And if we think of emails as doing more than driving a single transactional response, we need to extend our measurement, for example, whether a series of emails over time produce a more engaged, higher value customer population.

In EMI’s presentation with State Street, I expanded on this theme: consider thinking of email in the context of all the other response channels. Since our objective as marketers is to drive engagement and transactions, it’s important to remember that email is but one means to that end. For certain customers at certain points in the decision-making process, email might not be as effective a means as direct mail or calling.

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.