MarketingSherpa Blog

All marketers should have three key questions in their head at all times. What do consumers really think about your business practices? What marketing approaches can I use to tell them about our business? And where do they want to hear these messages (i.e. channel preferences)?

To help you get an answer to these questions, we conducted research with 2,400 U.S. consumers, sampled to reflect a close match to the U.S. population’s demographics. But we also split them into satisfied and unsatisfied customers to understand how these marketing and business behaviors affect customer satisfaction, especially taking a customer-first marketing approach to all of these business decisions.

We published what we discovered in a 54-page free report filled with oodles of data for the customer-first, data-driven marketer.

But that’s much too much to dive into on a Friday.

So here are some snack-size, social media-friendly (wink, wink) videos to provide you some quick consumer insights from the study.

But first, here’s a little more background about the research.

And now a look at a few of our discoveries…

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Fiduciary duty. These words have been in the news lately, as the government seeks to require that financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to their customers in certain cases.

A fiduciary duty is a legal duty to act solely in another party’s interests. So what this new regulation essentially means is, financial advisors must put customer’s interests before their own. And the financial industry has been fighting this.

As marketers – this should be crazy to us! This is what we should do every day: Put our customer’s interests before our own. How can a business, much less an entire industry, be against the customer?

Remember: You are not your customers

Customer-first marketing begins with the realization that our desires and goals are not necessarily the same as our customers’.

Let me give you an example. Mary Abrahamson is an Email Marketing Specialist at Ferguson Enterprises.

Usually if you go to marketing industry events, and a mobile vendor asks, “Who has a smartphone?” we see that everybody raises their hands. And so the vendor says – “See, everyone has smartphones.”

Well Mary realized – she wasn’t her customer. Her customers were plumbers and HVAC professionals. These people often had flip phones. So, when she launched a mobile campaign, she made sure that text messaging was an important part of her campaign … not just apps. The campaign ultimately generated more than $10 million in online revenue.

So next time you’re launching a campaign – take a fiduciary responsibility with your customers. Think of their needs … and not just your own.

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MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 will be here before you know it, and our team is hard at work planning the agenda, with a special emphasis on customer-centric strategies and approaches.

As we select our keynotes, the team has conducted in-depth research and gained some interesting takeaways from both academic and marketing practitioners.  We highlighted the first five takeaways earlier this week, and we have five more thought-proving insights again for you today.

Takeaway #6. Build habit forming products

Many of the products we use in our daily routine have influenced our routines.

Nir Eyal, author of best-selling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has identified a design pattern in habit forming products. He describes this design pattern, “the hook,” as “an experience designed to connect the users’ problems to your solution with enough frequency to form a habit.”

The hook is comprised of cycle of triggers, actions, rewards and investments. The triggers can be internal or external, but must evoke motivation to act.

For instance, customers need to anticipate the reward for their action or they will not engage. The more involved a customer becomes with a product, the more likely he or she will develop a loyalty to the product.

Nir explains, “Products that create successive cycles through the hook help customers’ preferences, tastes, and habits develop.”

This engagement is what makes these products better, it’s not necessarily the quality of the products.

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At MarketingSherpa, we’re in the planning phase for MarketingSherpa Summit 2017. With the interest of our customers’ experience at the core of our every decision, we conduct extensive research to select the most thought-provoking and applicable keynote sessions for our attendees.

During our research phase, we have identified 10 key takeaways from leading experts (both academics and practitioners) in marketing. That’s a lot of key takeaways, so we’re breaking it up into two digestible bites. Read on today for insights around customer centricity, empathetic marketing and “less is more.”

Takeaway #1. Customer centricity does not mean doing exactly what the customers want

Dr. Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at University of Pennsylvania and Co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Institute, explains that while performing at the level of meeting or exceeding customers’ expectations is a component of customer centricity, it should not be a blanketed approach for all customers.

According to Fader, truly customer-centric organizations do not treat all customers the same because they do not provide equal value to the company. Most of us are aware that we should identify different segments of customers. Fader establishes that while segmentation itself is not a new idea, how it is conducted has evolved from simple demographics to customer lifetime value. He suggests companies organize themselves around different customer segments rather than different products. Then, organizations can deliver products appropriate to their segments of customers.

In summation, to truly become customer centric, companies need to identify and invest in the right customers.

Sometimes marketers might feel as though they are stuck in a permanent promotional cycle. Promo email after promo email goes out, and there are high expectations for each one.

It may make sense to the bottom line, but what is the cost to the relationship with your customers?

Discovering a human voice for your email content was one of the topics covered yesterday at the ninth annual MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, held this year in Las Vegas, where marketers spoke about how a fresh perspective or voice can help keep the magic alive between a brand and consumers.

Marcia Oakes, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Calendars.com, in her Tuesday morning session spoke on her team’s tricky situation last year. The email channel was almost exclusively utilized for promotion, and had no real “voice” despite sending roughly 50 million emails a year.

“We were only talking at our customers, not really talking with them. We wanted to evolve beyond that,” she said.

Find your voice in unexpected places

When Marcia’s team decided to break away from promotions with a monthly newsletter establish a voice, they had to integrate two previously underutilized assets into the email sphere.

Calendars.com social media provided the voice with the plethora of quirky blog posts via Calendars.com’s official blog, “The Daily Grid,” useful tips and boards on Pinterest and a trademarked phrase, “Flip Day,” which gave the brand a fun excuse to reach out with content on the first of every month.

Even the interactive design of the Flip Day newsletter conveys the voice with an interactive grid calendar design that reinforces the brand with engaging and fun imagery. Marcia said they needed to consistently supply newsletter content that:

• Entertains
• Informs
• Is seasonal and timely

The most important aspect, she added, was that if the voice and the content of the send didn’t provide a benefit to the subscriber, it would fail.

To provide that benefit, the days of each month are filled with celebrity’s birthdays, a “word of the month” and historical facts and helpful hints such as “25 make-ahead breakfast ideas” in every Flip Day newsletter. All of this content is interactive and links to Calendars.com Pinterest, Facebook and blog content.

Creating a consistent voice is more than just knocking off the company-speak, Marcia said. It’s a consistent balance of time and assets for the sake of consumer interaction. Sometimes, promotions and monetary goals have to be set aside for the sake of brand equity with your consumers.

“We’re more than just a website to order calendars for your family at Christmas,” Marcia said, adding that the Flip Day newsletter voice has allowed feedback that “is really exciting as a marketer to see someone value your content.”

Demolishing discount fatigue

Jessica Andreasen, Digital Marketing Manager, ZAGG, spoke in her Tuesday afternoon session about subscribers succumbing to discount fatigue.

“We’ve been doing the same promotions for years – buy-one-get-one, discounts, and we were just not seeing the same kind of results,” she said.

To better communicate with their customers, the team at ZAGG decided to totally reassess their email design template with an email send to loyal customers.

“A template can’t get in the way of what you need to say,” Jessica said.

Her team started with a conversation with ZAGG’s Web development team.

“Tell me everything you have. I don’t care if it’s relevant or not, tell me everything you have,” she explained.

Whatever data or information you are able to uncover can help you develop a voice that speaks to your consumer and anticipates their behavior.

With data in tow, Jessica’s team studied their current email template with the consumer in mind – how could they speak to them in the design?

She said it was decided they needed to:

• Disarm the customer by only using one call-to-action, and placing it below the fold
• Connect to the customer by using image and word selection to convey the email’s purpose to customers
• Deliver value to the customer by ensuring product details are prominent

Jessica added, “We still needed to deliver value to our customers – we attempted to do this by enlarging and simplifying the text as well as programming a personalized image.”

Some ZAGG customers had been on the list for three or four years, and Jessica wanted to reward that brand loyalty.

“These are loyal customers. I wanted to have a conversation with them,” she said.

By fighting against the discount fatigue they were seeing and developing a voice through their template to communicate with subscribers, the ZAGG team was able to increase their revenue per email by 152%.

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With our content creation for February’s Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas now in full swing, we wanted to take one last, loving look at our previous Summit – B2B Summit 2012.

Keynote Sally Hogshead was insightful and inspiring. After she stepped off the stage and the crowd headed out to the cocktail hour, Luke Thorpe threw his camera on his shoulder, I grabbed my mic, and we asked her a few questions to help the MarketingSherpa blog audience understand how to market to different personality types …

For those impatient and busy types, here are a few timestamps if you’d like to jump ahead in the video …

0:50 – Segment content using personality triggers

2:39 – Identify which triggers to use with different prospects

3:50 – You don’t need to talk to a lot of people, you need to talk to the right people

4:45 – A look at Sally’s $2-per-piece business card

Related Resources:

Event Recap: MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012

Customer-centric Marketing: 7 triggers to engage customers and build loyalty

HowToFascinate.com – Sally’s website

Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22, 2013, Las Vegas

Let’s face it: Marketing used to be easier, especially for entrepreneurs running small, localized businesses. You once needed nothing more than a Yellow Pages ad to secure a steady stream of business as, let’s say, a local tire shop.

Then came the Internet, and it was still just a matter of having a webpage with your address and contact information. A minor inconvenience, but worth it for those businesses whose customer segments dictated taking extraordinary measures to reach the most tech-savvy people.

Next came Web 2.0, and suddenly it wasn’t enough to just have an online presence anymore. The Web was becoming social. Also, as the bell curve of innovation adoption for the Internet shifted toward mainstream acceptance, it became necessary to engage a wider range of age groups in digital format.

Can potential customers easily research your company and product?

Generation Y has proven itself to be savvy beyond belief in terms of product research, and discriminating to a fault against those brands that don’t make themselves available for online investigation.

A recent study by Lim Ying San and his colleagues from the Multimedia University in Malaysia indicates that a positive significant relationship exists between access and customers’ perceived online retail service quality. Online consumers often want to access a variety of informative sources to obtain up-to-date and useful information for making informed purchasing decisions.

Those sources may include social media, Google and other search engines, and online shopping resources, such as Amazon, as means of price comparison.

In other words, the bare minimum for online marketing and social media for small businesses has changed.

You have no choice

Increasingly, if you can’t be found on the first two pages of a Google search, you don’t exist. If young consumers cannot easily interact with your brand on Facebook, Twitter and, for some companies, even Pinterest, you are worse than out of sight. You are out of mind.

In my house, as I suspect is the case in many Generation Y abodes, we use phone books to hold up the broken coffee table where the leg used to be. Even if I wanted to look at the Yellow Pages, it would only result in spilled coffee. If you want to talk to me about your brand, you need to do the following:

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“How many of you believe you are more fascinating than the average person?”

Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead, who goes by Chief Fascination Officer at Fascinate, presented this question to the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012 audience Tuesday afternoon.

Not many hands in the room went up, which supported Sally’s findings: Only 39% of people believe they are more “fascinating” than “average.”

What is fascination? According to Sally, it’s a moment of total emotional focus.

She has developed the 7 Triggers of Fascination, “which are deeply-rooted means of arousing intense interest.”  Each person, and brand, has primary and secondary triggers. These triggers indicate where your strength lies in fascinating others.

When your company fascinates your audience, your will get more engaged and loyal customers who are more likely to refer others.

That leaves marketers asking, “How can we create the moments of fascination with our consumers that use the same triggers we experience when we are fascinated?”

The seven triggers represent different paths or ways to fascinate your customers with your brand. So, let’s break down each one:

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Does Walmart feature lower prices than your store? Is there a services company in India, or a manufacturer in China that can undercut your price in your B2B industry?

If you are not the lowest-priced offering in the market, you need a differentiator to justify your premium price. Why should customers pay more for the honor of buying from you?

I’ve written before about how a good story is integral to marketing a company that is not the low-price leader. But in this blog post, let’s take a step back. That story needs substance. Where is your substance?

Well, I’ve recently been thumbing through a new book that has an excellent example of one place you can find the substance behind your story – The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the way you work to succeed in the consumer revolution by Brian Solis.

Brian will be a keynote speaker at Email Summit 2012, and every attendee will receive a copy of this book, courtesy of ExactTarget.

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