Member Article

Learn From Annoying Mistakes Marketers Make

From repeating email promotions to not making content accessible across all your channels, avoid these common marketing mistakes which can alienate prospects.

We know the modern consumer is demanding and who can blame them? In a world packed with marketing missives and competing products/services, they want to make sure that they get the right product at the right price, all sold with the right service.

It’s why a joined-up cross-channel marketing approach is so vital – but simple marketing mistakes are leaving many customers so irritated that they head elsewhere with their money.

Customer complaint: “Stop haranguing me with irrelevant marketing…“

The Issue: The customer receives an email promoting a product they’ve already bought.

The Solution: Ensure your marketing automation process is properly segmented and maintained, plus the customer’s journey and their identity is fully mapped out within your system. The best approach for ensuring such successful ‘data wrangling’? First, break down silos between your departments so promotions and the resulting data are being fed into a centralised system that everyone and their campaigns can feed into and from.

Secondly, ensure you have an in-house automation specialist whose sole job is to manage and monitor any marketing automation programme to ensure your marketing department isn’t left with egg on its face.

A vast majority (94%) of customers have discontinued communications with a company because they receive irrelevant promotions and messages.

Customer complaint: “Stop making it so damn difficult for me…“

The Issue: The potential customer watches a TV advert or other promotion but can’t find it online to view again.

The Solution: It’s the ultimate goal of any marketer – the customer being so intrigued by your marketing offering that they actively head out to watch it again, perhaps even sharing it with their peers and becoming a brand advocate in the process. Ensure that your fantastic advert is available and easy to find so you can reap the potential benefits.

BMW goes further than many of its competitors to ensure that consumers can explore its TV content. The car maker has its ownonline TV channel and distributes its commercials on Youtube, creating a truly joined-up strategy for deploying video content. It’s an approach that’s working – according to official Youtube Channel Views data:

Toyota Channel: 207,696 views

Ford Channel: 725,904 views

Audi Channel: 2,303,638 views

BMW Channel: 4,666,412 views

Customer complaint: “Stop fobbing me off…“

The Issue: The customer is forced to listen to a message on a call-centre helpline telling them about the company’s website before they’re put through to an actual human. Worst still, some companies simply direct the consumer to their website, negating the whole ‘human’ issue entirely.

The Solution: There’s a very good chance that the customer has already visited the support section of your website and hasn’t found the answer they were looking for – it’s why they’re calling you in the first place. Alternatively, there are some customers who simply don’t want to go online and would instead prefer to talk to a representative about their issue. In either case, why bother marketing your website via your helpline?

Customer complaint: “Stop wasting my time…“

The Issue: The customer has to sign in again and again to download content, wasting their time and diminishing any goodwill that might have been created by your value-added content marketing strategy.

The Solution: Deploy progressive profiling to avoid annoying customers. Only ask leads for critical information during their first visit (first name, last name, email) and if they show interest, then use progressive profiling to ask more in-depth questions at key stages during the customer’s journey – without running the risk of irritating the prospect.

New tools like unroll.me make it easier for consumers to filter spam emails and unsubscribe from newsletters – so make sure each marketing missive hits its target or risk being locked out for good.

Remember:

Ensure your marketing automation process is properly segmented and maintained. Break down silos between departments to avoid bottlenecks or dead ends. Make all your marketing content easily accessible to consumers whatever channel they’re on. Don’t waste the consumer’s time; your product/service is supposed to make their life easier, not create more hassle.

Discover why marketing is becoming increasingly challenging with tips from the “Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing“. Copy and paste this link into your browser: http://bit.ly/CrossChannelEguide

This post first appeared on the Oracle Marketing Cloud blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sylvia Jensen .