…three in four consumers said they receive too many emails from brands, and one-fifth said they could not handle the current volume…69 per cent have ‘unfollowed’ brands on social media, closed their accounts or cancelled subscriptions.*
In these times, when the market is flooded with products and services, the most efficent way to engage customers is to offer them customized content. To achieve this, brands need to focus on observing the nuances of individual preferences.
Marketing has come a long way since the time brands first toyed with the idea of reaching out to their customers and prospects. Initially, catalogs and other promotional materials were sent, usually by post, to the company’s entire database—hoping that a few interested people would respond. But later, keeping pace with the times, marketers began using digital technology. However, unfortunately, they continued to follow the same old style of marketing —mass marketing, where the same message was blasted out to an entire database, irrespective of individual tastes, patterns, or buying preferences. Further, email made it possible for them to send mass mails at low-to-zero cost. This approach may have been excusable in a pretechnology era when it was impossible to gather data about each customer. But in the digital age, it is unacceptable and detrimental to growth—primarily because customers today are more demanding and do not share the same sense of brand loyalty as previous generations.
streamlining data to customize
Today, consumers leave digital footprints across every touchpoint—every click, every browse, every search. And consequently, marketers have access to an enormous amount of data on their customers’ or prospects’ digital body language. This can be consolidated to create a comprehensive, unified view of each person. When they really know their customers, they can send messages that are specifically relevant to them, on the channel and at the time they prefer. In today’s world, where customers are inundated with marketing messages, it is hard to get them to respond even to messages that are relevant. So irrelevant messages do not stand a chance and are destined for the spam folder.
This story is from the March/April 2017 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the March/April 2017 edition of The Smart Manager.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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…three in four consumers said they receive too many emails from brands, and one-fifth said they could not handle the current volume…69 per cent have ‘unfollowed’ brands on social media, closed their accounts or cancelled subscriptions.*In these times, when the market is flooded with products and services, the most efficent way to engage customers is to offer them customized content. To achieve this, brands need to focus on observing the nuances of individual preferences.
