Do you speak your customer’s language?

What if you executed a marketing campaign in English, but your customers only spoke Swahili?

This scenario may not seem very likely, but something like it happens every day marketers come to the office.  While their customers may only speak the language of email, or mobile, or Facebook, marketers continue to focus their attention on direct mail.  You know, the old fashioned, “arrive in the mail and go in the trash” mailings that we receive daily and toss almost just as often.

Now, I do not mean that direct mail does not have a role in the marketing mix.  It unquestionably does.  But what I have been finding in my recent conversations with clients is that those clients  dedicate a disproportionate amount of their time to paper mailings, while the world is moving to be more and more digital.  We have plenty of friends in their 40′s and 50′s who check  Facebook 3+ times a day, but rarely look at  direct mail for more than 5 minutes daily.  Not only does direct mail fail the test of time spent, but also the test of focus — my friends just do not spend that much time thinking about direct mail and they certainly do not talk about it (while Facebook is part of daily conversation).

If you want to communicate with customers, you have to speak to them on THEIR terms — in the channel that is the most comfortable for them to use.  If not, customers won’t tell you directly, they just won’t respond at all.  What you get is not complaints but silence, which is worse, since we want enagement from our customers.  If they are communicating with us, then it means that we have some relationship going, for better or worse.  But if they are silent, then we have no data, no sign that they even care.  And they probably don’t.

The fewer languages we speak, the less likely we are to be understood.

How do you figure out what language a customer prefers?  You can do this in one of three ways:

• You can ask them. Send out surveys, ask them in person in a store or through a sales contact, post a poll on the web site and in emails.  In order to ask them what language they speak, you have to ask them in all the languages they could prefer (and are feasible financially and executionally).
• You can send them multi-channel communications and see what works. Read the response data and leverage the insight in future communications.  If a customer only responds to email, then there you go.
• You can use the channels their friends prefer. This effort takes a bit more work, but will allow you to scale your effort (figure out the preferences of more customers) by estimating how some customers wish to be reached by using available data on other customers.  Whether through modeling or core cross-tabs, this approach lets you start quickly and get more accurate over time, based on what you learn.

I am not condemning direct mail at all.  But we do know that direct mail response of over 2% can be considered very high.  That means that 98% of customers do not respond that way.  How many more can be reached through alternative channels?  A growing number over time, that is for certain.

Only by leveraging multiple communication can we find and use the language our customers prefer.  If not, then we run the risk of “falling on deaf ears,” and seeing our silent customers leave over time.

What is your experience adding new marketing channels?

How well can you determine the channel of preference for specific customers?

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Tagged as: Database marketing, Direct marketing, email marketing, Facebook, Marketing, Multichannel marketing