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A new year is upon us! For marketers who are focused on marketing and customer communications, assessing performance for the past year and benchmarking your measurable results will help you to determine your goals for the coming year. Are you communicating enough with your customers? Are you communicating too much? Are your messages being read? Is the customer experience good? Could it be better? Is it time for a refresh on your communication strategy?
It is very likely that things need to get better and be more productive. Here are 5 things each marketer ought to consider as they plan for the new year:
1. Are you connecting with your customers through the best channels?
Email has been the most cost effective marketing strategy for years. There is no doubt this is a solid channel as exemplified by businesses big and small using email to connect with their customers. But maybe this channel is not gaining the same traction that it used to with your customers.
Adding channels to your marketing mix could make a huge impact by connecting with your customers through a channel they prefer. These additional channels could include SMS text messaging, Inapp messaging (to the web page), Print (printed letters/postcards), or even Voice dialling.
Adding more communication touch points could be the difference in making your customer experience better and more productive.
2. Are you relying on outsourced help to conduct your customer messaging?
It might be time to bring your customer marketing inhouse. Technology is now much easier to use and makes creating beautiful content accessible to most marketers (HTML coding is not a requirement anymore!). Your marketing team likely has the passion and ability to conduct compelling messaging campaigns that are successful. They have the home-field advantage and could be your best resource.
3. If you do have multiple communication channels – are you managing traffic effectively?
If your organization is managing multiple marketing/e-commerce platform solutions, it may be a real challenge to effectively use these platforms to communicate with your customers. For example: are customers that just made a purchase potentially receiving messages offering a discount on an item they just purchased at full price? Are customers receiving both email and text messages – when they should only receive one or the other? Customers likely do not complain about receiving too many messages….they just unsubscribe. Integrating disparate solutions can be costly and complex. Consolidating onto a multichannel platform could be the answer.
