Email Marketing Blog

Learning from my clients...

9/11/2018

The work that I do allows me to come into contact with different types of companies in terms of products and organization. It is a point of pride for me to learn about the clients' business, their interests, goals, and particularly, their ways of working.
My clients find me when there is a need for structure and organization in their digital efforts. They've likely already had consultants telling them to put money on every channel, particularly social, and watch the results 'roll in' into the future. There's of course Google and Bing, and, depending on the type of product and customer, Instagram and some of the other, less well-known networks.
Their efforts look coherent, but they are not. Most of the time, once you look into them, you see that their messaging is 'off' in some networks and 'on' in others, while the timing of the messaging has fallen apart under pressure to keep up artificially urgent schedules.
I've learned that one of the most important messages my clients give me is that the stuff they've been doing does not seem to be working the way they thought it would and that they do not understand why this is the case.
This is the main reason why, when I engage with a new organization, I have some questions that need to be answered to make the engagement worthwhile for the client. Particularly as to what's been tried in the past and whether it has worked.
Sometimes, clients will tell me that they've already spent all their budget on this or that network effort and that it did not render any results worth looking into. Usually, the Network is to be blamed for the failure.
In those cases, it is helpful to look back and understand precisely what the client sees as 'unworthy' about the effort, and perhaps learn from the first attempt at attacking a particular network. A good post-mortem for a campaign is a way to open everyone's eyes as to what a success will look like in the future.
I like to guide those efforts with management and with the relevant members of the organization.
My clients find that those discussions open the way to more structure, improved marketing within their limited resources and that the work that we do together improves their odds of success.
And those are some of the things that get me out of bed in the morning and keep me interested in working with multiple organizations.

You can learn a lot about digital marketing from playing pinball

8/22/2018

Just replace the world 'pinball' with the words 'digital marketing' as you listen to the people describe their experience. I am sure you'll be able to relate to the discussion. I enjoy explaining digital approaches to business challenges as clearly as this video talks about pinball. Enjoy.

If you want loyal customers, ask them to do something crazy...

8/6/2018

Understanding Customer Loyalty as Confirmation Bias
A business can understand customer loyalty as a manifestation of the positive side of Confirmation Bias. This bias is inherent in people's mental model, and is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects.”
— Francis Bacon

You can think of confirmation bias in a negative manner, as a way to prevent you from understanding the world correctly by blinding you to a proper understanding of the evidence in front of you. And you would be correct to look at it in this way. In the real world of contradictory ideologies,

Confirmation Bias is the mental approach that allows two people with opposing views on a topic to see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by it. Unchecked, it can create a dangerous thought bubble that isolates and destroys your ability to relate to the world.

In the context of this conversation, however, we are looking at the positive side of Confirmation Bias. (The technical term for this use of Confirmation Bias is Apophenia).

Looking at the Shapes of Clouds and Mountains
Confirmation Bias has a positive aspect to it. It has to do with patterns and reassurance. The mind is designed to seek patterns in the world and it will create and sustain them automatically, often from evidence that does not support such patterns. For example, people who see figures in the shapes of clouds are using a form of confirmation bias to ‘trim’ what they see to belong to a category of things they know about (sheep or cows or whatever object is on their minds at the time). The trimming process removes whatever elements in their mind would interfere with the creation and maintenance of this mental image. The ‘mental trimming process’ is reinforced via confirmation bias to make the image become clear in their minds, even though it does not exist in the real world.

In the case of looking at the shape of clouds, this is a very mild process and does not involve confrontation. Someone else may disagree with an individual about the shape they see in a cloud, but this will likely not become cause for a duel to the death. However, It is possible for one person to transfer to another person the ability to see the same object in a cloud by telling them about it in a cooperative manner. By describing the shape of the cloud in terms of the elements of the object desired, one person can ‘make’ the other person see what they believe they see in the clouds.

The same process also happens when viewing the shapes of some mountains. People describe shapes and can transfer this description to another person’s view of the same mountain so they both ‘see’ the same thing, even though it is clear ‘the thing’ they are looking at is not really a part of the mountain (or the cloud) in the least.

Triggering Confirmation Bias To Create Customer Loyalty
To apply Confirmation Bias within a customer centric Digital Investment Plan, a business can add a ‘crazy’ element to their marketing approach. By committing a potential and/or existing customer to perform this ‘crazy’ action, the business triggers Confirmation Bias, as the individual will be naturally driven to justify their action to others.

The elements of the Digital Investment Plan come into play to create and maintain the justification details that a customer can use to confirm their beliefs about the action they have performed.

The trigger for confirmation bias can be a story told about the product and its details, or a story about how the product fits in the customer’s world. In other words, the trigger can be a real thing or a story that organizes the world into a shape that helps explain a little part of the world.

Depending on the type of customers in the business target audience, the elements may be 'crazy' or they can be as simple as a higher price than average to trigger a justification discussion.

By designing the Digital Investment Plan from the start to include these triggering elements, a business can run effective campaigns to create confirmation bias driven discussions between customers and non-customers, establishing a high probability of getting loyal customers to stick with the product while at the same time having them advocate the product (in the same way that people share their description of the shape of a cloud) with others.

Source Highlights:
Confirmation Bias discussion from Science Daily

Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Unusual Places

Being Amused by Apophenia

What is Digital Customer Investment?

8/3/2018

Principles Behind The Digital Customer Investment Approach to Customer Centricity
The term Digital Customer Investment (DCI) separates its concepts and objectives from more commonly used concepts like Digital Operations, or Digital Marketing, or Digital Solutions. Any of those phrases carries with it a strong direct transactional intention that bleeds into the activities defined for Digital Customers. This pre-defined intention can act as a prison preventing innovative thinking in digital customer investment. To open a perspective to different approaches that are customer-centric in nature, I have defined digital customer investment along the following principles:

That digital customer-centricity can be achieved via fixed information-rich transformation messaging processes.
That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes can serve as a tool for customer acquisition and retention.
That the process of creating, maintaining, and evolving this information-rich digital messaging processes creates a powerful symbol representing the company at every turn, allows a company to hold a mirror to its own values, objectives, and its purpose.
That by committing to adding the DCI approach to its existing, transactional digital approach, DCI becomes a vital method for the company to express itself to potential and existing customers, as well as any other audience that might happen to view its messaging.
That the success of the DCI process is measured solely by unsolicited customer feedback, properly captured and understood, via company-neutral methods.

A properly applied Digital Customer Investment Marketing plan will support most of these principles from the start and use them as the basis for the creation of the messaging, measurement and implementation of the plan.

The importance of empty words in the recognition of customer value

8/3/2018

See if this sounds familiar:
Going forward, we need to drill down into the customer priorities and engage a deep dive into our big data storage. This action will attack the issues we have found in customer satisfaction, which have not been addressed by our previous representatives. Our stakeholders are concerned about the lack of action in this matter, and want everyone to have a clear idea of the end of play situation we want to create, as well as the leverage we can bring upon the customer to deliver the new numbers that our growth planning requires. Fortunately, our thought leadership research group has come up with a set of actionable ideas that allows all of us to get in the tent and get a group aha effect going, so we are all clear on the end result we are trying to obtain, as quickly as possible.

Once you catch your breath after reading the paragraph above, you may appreciate the importance of verbal clarity when it comes to creating a plan to improve customer value recognition inside a business.

This is why the Digital Customer Investment Plan is called precisely that. It has a purpose that is easy to understand. It does not take a lot of energy on the part of a team to 'get' the objectives the plan provides and the methodology it uses. It should be self-evident. This accessibility, once the plan is created and agreed upon, allows the team to spend its energy focused on the things that matter, and not in getting into endless meetings to discuss 'what it all means' and 'what we are trying to do.'

Organizations that are small or medium sized may find this transition simpler because their focus on the customer may be more accessible to them, with fewer layers to work with and fewer years of history 'of how things are done around here' to work through.

Recognizing customer value may seem obvious, but it can become fragmented because individual areas of the organization view customer value through their own internal lenses. Accounting may view customer value in one way, while sales views a customer in a different, sales-related way, and of course, marketing views the customer in its own particular way.

Over time, this fragmentation sets in and prevents a clear view of the customer as someone who does not attend all the meetings and does not understand the internal history behind this or that decision. This is one way that organizations lose touch with their customer base.

Once this behavior sets in and is organizationally valid, the interests of the customer become secondary to the interests of the individual departmental groups laying claim to the 'real' value of the customer.

The integrated Digital Customer Investment Plan is designed to avoid these issues before they become chronic.

It's not YOUR money...it's the customer's money

7/31/2018

A few years ago we met a founder during one of our engagements. He had placed, at strategic locations throughout the company, several sayings and perspectives that, he hoped, would blend into a cultural view of where the company's principles stood and what were the overall lines that the company culture would not cross.

One of the lines we read was the title of this post: "It's not our money, it is the customer's money."
The sayings and their positioning made us ask: can you drill a customer culture or do you teach it?

At its most transactional level, Marketing is based on repetition. Most everyone who has been exposed to television commercials can recite a jingle engraved in their minds by sheer repetition from watching their favorite programs on television. Over time, the jingle has stuck, which is great for branding in the most transactional sense: you remember the brand that created the jingle (if it is mentioned in the jingle, which it should be). However, does remembering the brand also mean that you remember the culture associated with the brand? And, if you remember the jingle, does it help you select a product from a shelf, be that a mental shelf or a physical one? Or does the marketing simply becomes part of the mental furniture of the individual and is not brought up as part of the decision-making process for the product at the time of purchase?

Drilling a customer-centric culture and applying it to your marketing needs brings up the same questions. You need a certain level of repetition to make the marketing message stick. However, how do you add the elements of a customer culture to your repetitive message so that these elements will 'activate' at the point of purchase, so the customer, when faced with the decision to purchase a product, will consciously bring up the marketing information as an argument in favor of your product, vs. the competition.

What is the combination of messages that has the best probability of success most of the time in terms of getting to a conversion?

The solution isn't to simply repeat the same phrase over and over again and hope that it sticks in someone's mind. That only leads to the superficial, transactional element of remembering. To go deeper, you have to add a sense of purpose to the activities that your company performs. This demonstrates to the customer that you know what to do with the money that they are about to give you. If they agree with this purpose, and if they see it implemented clearly throughout the organization they can see, then, it is more likely that the repeating message will stick in the mind and is used as a definitive argument for generating a purchase.

The combination of messages we are looking for is precisely that: a purpose-transactional combination that, when added together over time, creates a bridge between the customer's action of paying for a product, and the satisfaction they derive from receiving it from your company. This satisfaction, which includes the satisfaction with the product or service purchased, translates into the kind of loyalty that enables people to advocate for your brand and turns them into something more than just a single transaction on a spreadsheet.

It makes your customers a partner in the purpose that animates your company in the first place.

The Monday Thought

7/30/2018

HOW TO KEEP YOUR COMPANY FEELING SMALL AS YOU GROW

In the lifetime of a business, managing the startup culture as the company grows can be risky. The company culture begins to strain because the elements that make a startup feel intimate and coherent begin to spread around the organization. Decision-making processes stretch beyond their initial, intimate boundaries among team members. Branding decisions now cannot be made on the fly, but require careful consideration now that people are actually paying attention outside of the initial confines of the startup hothouse environment.

As new people are added to the team, the feeling of 'this is our little company' does not seem to spread to the new hires, who come to the company (justifiably) filled with the expectations associated with an established, salary-paying organization. New hires make demands that 'older hands' may resent as they went through the process of building the initial company without a safety net, a process that new hires can no longer participate in.

Here are 5 ideas that you can apply, as the manager of a department or even the entire company, to maintain the startup feeling as you increase sales and grow your staff to keep up with the needs of the business:

Do remember that your business succeeds or fails because of its employees and the quality of the work they deliver. The first thing to remember is that this is a real process, with real problems, and that the viability of the company, outside of whether you have a viable product, is the culture that your company/department builds. In a way, a company always creates two major products: an external one, sold for transactional purposes to create and distribute revenue, and an internal one, the company culture, created for relational purposes to create and maintain teams over time.
Communicate the need for process management without sounding like a robot. Process management is a vital part of any living organization. Without some process organization, your internal communications may begin to feel and look like the old-fashioned stock market floor, with everyone running around doing their part with yelling over everyone else. However, imposing a process management process without good, human-centered communication, can lead to failed adoption and cynicism on the part of the employees. This can happen with any size organization, not just large, faceless conglomerates. Avoid this situation by taking the decision at the human level, not at the level of "we are buying a tool so we can communicate effectively with each other."
Distribute ownership of vital processes to individuals within the organization. And let them distribute vital processes to individuals best suited within their teams to control and manage them. Not everyone you hire is dedicated to create a transactional surplus of value with every activity in which they engage within the business, and not every activity within an organization can be transactional-value-plus. Judging every employee and every activity with a transactional-value yardstick is a sure sign of processes congealing around a fixed structure instead of becoming the infrastructure of a living organization. Distributing ownership of processes to individuals who are likely to flourish through them is a way to create centers of enthusiasm within the organization, and by doing so, you are preserving liveliness within the organization as it grows.
Ensure organizational flexibility by example. Every three months, examine the results of the programs or ideas that were evaluated for application in the previous three months. Communicate results quickly and directly. It isn't enough to set up a scorecard or a passive screen to 'tell employees how we are doing.' It needs to be done at a human scale so it can be respected and so individuals can see the effect on the business by seeing the effect of the change on its management.

Smaller companies allow their employees to give and apply ideas to the areas of the company that are still growing and changing. Problem solving is a cherished aspect of a startup organization. As departments grow, ideas become scarce because people don't feel they can apply them anymore. Structures have bDecome too complex, and frankly, the risk of changing things may be perceived as too high. An organization needs to build safeguards around building monolithic systems and processes that cannot accept small, incremental changes without 'an act of congress and legislation.' This flexibility needs to be built-in from the start and will ensure that, as new problems appear in the horizon, everyone will feel they can pitch in to propose solutions.

Treat your employees as employees, not as family. There is an organization where everyone is considered a member of the family. It's called The Mafia. Organizations require employees and managers and their roles need to remain within those boundaries to be successful. Give people space to be themselves, both physically and mentally, and respect their individuality as decision makers. Avoid open-plan offices to increase face-to-face activities. Families are notorious for getting in each other's faces without regard to the individual needs of its members. For an organization to remain flexible, intimate, and cooperative, it is important to give its members enough room to be themselves, that way, they can feel like they are part of a larger whole while still remaining true to themselves.

These suggestions are a place to start building a company that will have a high probability of remaining productive if these principles are followed and if they are re-evaluated on a regular basis. As with any living organization, ideas can become obsolete and the only way to time proof them is to re-evaluate them against the needs of the business on a regular basis.

Sources Consulted (Highlights):
Open Plan Offices:
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-01/everyone-hates-the-open-plan-office-it-doesn-t-have-to-be-that-way

Entrepreneurial Spirit as You Grow
www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/10/22/how-to-keep-your-entrepreneurial-spirit-alive-as-the-company-you-work-for-grows/#31b11df4c0d4

Don't treat your team as a family
www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/should-you-treat-your-employees-family
www.inc.com/kevin-daum/9-reasons-not-to-treat-your-business-like-a-family.html

Forward>>

The Naian Blog