Dialog is defined by Merriam Webster as: 1) a conversation between two or more persons; or a similar exchange between a person and something else (as a computer).
Maintaining a dialog with consumers will always be an evolving process. With the fleeting nature of permission and the impatience of consumers, marketers will have to continue to evolve their ability to communicate individually with consumers in order to prevent losing them to the competition. Creating dynamic email programs with an interactive loop is a great start.
In order to build true dialogs with consumers, we need to:
1) Obtain initial permission.
2) Find out more about our customers and prospects.
3) Tell them what they want to hear.
4) Listen better.
OBTAINING PERMISSION
Over the past few years, marketers have moved quickly up the sharp learning curve of the necessity of obtaining permission prior to communicating with consumers. Techniques such as free membership offers, promised updates, offline promotions, mailings to third party opt-in lists, sweepstakes and instant win games have been proven to be effective tools in obtaining this permission. The challenge is that permission is temporary. If consumers do not receive value in each email received, they stop reading and responding. The dialog is ended and permission is lost.
FIND OUT MORE
As marketers, we will probably never know as much about our customers and prospects as we would like. Currently, we conduct surveys and focus groups. We register consumers and record transactions and response rates. The problem is that surveys and focus groups are aggregate not individual; registration is static and consumers are dynamic; and transactions and response rates are too infrequent to provide a reliable picture of the consumer.
TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR
Sure, we want to tell our consumers about every new product or promotion and encourage them to buy more and more often. But do consumers want to hear it? If marketers do not communicate frequently enough with consumer, they risk losing precious share of mind. If marketers send messages that don't interest the consumer, they risk having future messages ignored - deleted without being read.
LISTEN BETTER
A broadcast, regardless of the medium, is not two-way communication. Most so-called dialogs between marketers and consumers are like a voice coming out of a loudspeaker. In the past, our feedback has been limited to 800 numbers, email addresses and web pages where consumers can update their preferences. These techniques do not illicit significant response, and the dialog quickly becomes a monolog.
Q: WHAT IS A MARKETER TO DO?
A: Become a source for high quality information related to your offering to the consumer.
This does not mean simply writing some tips or providing a few links to articles and blasting it to everyone. We have all gotten newsletters like that and we know where most of them end up. A dynamic email program should expand permission, provide consumer value and establish a feedback loop. There are three important steps to ensuring that your service builds an effective dialog with consumers:
1) Choose quality content that reflects favorably on your brand.
2) Learn with each interaction and build individual profiles on your consumers.
3) Complete the interactive loop and make each email sent better than the last.
CHOOSE QUALITY CONTENT
The content can be obtained directly from online magazines and trade journals or from content syndicators. It is better if the content comes from more than one source. It is also best if this content includes news directly from you. These are your customers and prospects and they do want to hear relevant product information. By incorporating your messages into the high quality content, you position your messages as news instead of a promotion. This makes the consumer more open to receiving your marketing messages
LEARN WITH EACH INTERACTION
A dialog needs a feedback mechanism -- in this case, recording the interaction of each individual consumer with his or her content. To make this feedback truly effective, categorize every piece of content sent to your consumers so that their response will teach you more about the consumer's interests. It doesn't matter that you know a consumer read an article on 'How to Choose the Food for Your Cat', unless you know the article was about pets, pet food, cats, and cat food. Ideally, you want to know how relevant it was for each category: Was the article about pet food in general and it just mentioned cat food? Was it about cats and just mentioned cat food? Or was it primarily about cat food? Each classification tells you something different about that specific consumer's interests.
COMPLETE THE INTERACTIVE LOOP
This is the point in the dialog where even some of the best marketers stop listening. The next newsletter will be blasted out and the consumer who read an article about cat food gets the same content as the consumer who read about a dog show. This 'blasting' approach is the easiest thing to do, and it is also the reason that dialogs become broadcasts and permission is lost. Dialogs are by definition two-way communication. The consumer just told us 'I like cats and I am investigating cat food.' And we ignored her. We should send the cat lover more information about cats and less about dogs, and a dog lover more about dogs and less about cats. The consumer receives more value, while you learn more about each consumer's interests.
There are two important steps in completing the interactive loop - continually refining each consumer's interests and delivering individualized information via email. Depending on your internal email delivery and analyses capabilities, a simple version of this step can be applied internally. For example, you could create 10 different version of the Pets newsletter and assign a newsletter to each consumer based on his or her interests. This will show a significant improvement over static newsletters. As consumers' interests change, the content they receive changes as well.
The refining of consumers' profiles can also be accomplished to some degree internally using an age-old favorite of marketers, an RFQ (Recency, Frequency, & Quantity) analyses of response. This will have to be adapted to work for content and will not capture trends within the population. It will update consumers' preferences so that they get more of what they like and less of what they don't. It will establish an individual dialog with each consumer.
A NEVER-ENDING PROCESS
Maintaining a dialog with consumers will always be an evolving process. With the fleeting nature of permission and the impatience of consumers, marketers will have to continue to evolve their ability to communicate individually with consumers in order to prevent losing them to the competition. Creating dynamic email programs with an interactive loop is a great start.
