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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All marketing is built on trust. Without trust, customers won’t subscribe to your email. They won’t open. They won’t click. And they certainly won’t buy.

Keeping this in mind, I interviewed Craig Spiezle, Executive Director and President, Online Trust Alliance, about security, privacy and consumer protection. I’ve also and provided tips on how you can build trust with your customers.

“Privacy policies were written by attorneys, for attorneys,” Craig joked. “And you need three attorneys to figure them out. It’s a great job enhancement thing for the legal profession. It does nothing for consumers.”

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Note: This email was automatically generated from a mailbox that is not monitored.

Ouch!

How often have you seen this line in an email you’ve received from a company? Even worse, are you guilty of including this line in your own email marketing?

When your customer sees that line, she basically hears, “Dearest Customer, We don’t really care.”

Email marketing should be a conversation

Think about it. When you ask a customer or potential customer to sign up for your email newsletter or other email list, you’re essentially asking them, “Can I have a conversation with you?” When they say “yes,” they are taking a leap of faith.

Will you send valuable information that helps them solves problems or meet their goals?

Or will you spam them with endless offers?

Or even worse, send them down the road to perdition and really betray their trust by selling that email address?

By cutting off the conversation before it begins, you question their decision to trust you.

This further worsens if it is in a transactional email, say, with a receipt for a purchase. Here, they took an even bigger leap of faith, gave you hard-earned money on the hope that the product will be as good as you say it is, and they’ll receive it when you say they will.

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Everyone has been playing social media ROI hide-and-seek for some time now. How does social media drive sales? Does the extent to which a firm engages or fails to engage in social marketing impact the bottom line at all? Or, as some have suggested, is the return on social efforts akin to the Loch Ness monster — we’re pretty sure it exists, but nobody seems to be able to track it down.

 What if we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective?

What if social media is more of a process, a series of steps taken at every point in the sales process, which, in totality, makes it more likely to convert leads to clients but, in practice, is difficult or impossible to measure? Or, what if social media has to be done for a certain amount of time and at a certain level of devotion before those benefits manifest?

For instance, a recent study by Dr. Sounman Hong of Harvard University suggests that newspapers’ adoption of Twitter is positively associated with their number of online readers (readers = revenue, right?), and that the strength of the association increases the larger the social network is.

Common sense seems to suggest that social subscribers are added over time, and that a bigger subscriber list, in most cases, indicates a more mature social presence. In other words, we grow into our ROI by continuing to paint the fence and mature our social media efforts.

Another recent study, this one by James “Mick” Andzulis, Nikolaos G. Panagopoulos and Adam Rapp, goes so far as to break this social media evolution down into practical subdivisions. Now we begin to see a pattern emerge. Their take is that our social media efforts evolve though a series of four phases:

Click to enlarge

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Trust is a large part of marketing. You know that. Customers will not spend their money with you if they do not trust you.

Few things can shatter trust faster than a major data breach, and data breaches are up this year. Once customers find out that their credit card numbers, addresses and birth dates have been compromised, say “sayonara,” because they’re leaving.

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