The Average Person will be Exposed to Roughly 4,000 Adverts Per Day
From jingles onto the radio, to the countless billboards, posters, and other ads we pass on every drive and walk, people are exposed to tremendous amounts of advertising. Open up your email inbox, check your text messages, there’s a good chance that you’re being marketed to. Fact is, we are constantly bombarded with ads, and quite frankly, it’s easy to grow annoyed.
For marketers, this presents a challenge: how can we market to people without annoying them? On one hand, you need to stay in front of your customers to remind them that you exist. On the other hand, you don’t want to generate negative associations and feelings by annoying them.
This is a difficult tightrope to walk, but it’s a necessary one. Let’s go over some tips for achieving balance.
Sending the Right Amount of Emails
How many emails are too many? It might be tempting to email your customer every day, or even multiple times per day. After all, emails are cheap to send. Yet if you send too many emails you may reduce results. So how can you strike a balance, keeping your customers informed without annoying them?
First, don’t spam your customers. Don’t send them the same email repeatedly. Don’t send them filler emails. Every time you send an email, you should be trying to add value to your potential customers. If the email doesn’t add value in some way, whether that be information, a promotion, or otherwise, you probably shouldn’t send it.
To find the right amount, you’ll have to experiment. At the more frequent end, most marketers will rarely send more than one email per day. One or two emails per week, however, can also be very effective. You’ll have to study your audience to determine the right amount.
Don’t Ring the Phone off the Hook
Emails can be a slight annoyance. A far bigger annoyance is calling or texting. Emails are easy to ignore. Phone calls and text messages? Not so much. They can be intrusive, forcing their way to in front of you.
For marketers, this has an obvious appeal: it’s more difficult for customers to ignore you, however, in practice, you’ll get your customers attention, but it’ll often be negative. When it comes to marketing, not all publicity is good publicity. You want to build trusting, mutually beneficial relationships.
When you do call customers, take notes and or record the conversation. Afterward, reflect on what worked and what didn’t. With your established accounts, try to get some feedback. How can you help your customers and how can you make sure you’re not wasting any of their time? With effort, your phone conversations will become more effective, producing better results, and reducing annoyance.
When it comes to marketing, not all publicity is good publicity. Click To TweetBeing Social Via Your Social media profiles
Social media has become a powerful tool for marketers. To be clear, social media doesn’t always produce immediate results in terms of sales. However, social media offers a way for you to build and maintain relationships, which are vital for marketing. It’s important to maintain your momentum, however, and to create vibrant social media accounts that people want to engage with.
This means adding value by providing useful content and insights. Promotions and offers can also be effective, but your social media accounts should focus on relationships. If your media profiles are not growing, or worse, are shrinking, then you’re likely doing something wrong.
Don’t be discouraged. Take it as an opportunity to improve and refine. Experiment a bit, look at the social media thought leaders in your area, see what they are doing and if there’s a way to emulate them while remaining unique and true to yourself. While you should always stay true to yourself, it’s usually best for businesses to avoid political posts and the like.
You also need to be sure your posts are focused on and relate to your industry. You can take a generous approach. For example, an all-natural skincare company might occasionally talk about environmental damage because the audience will care and there are likely ways to loop it into the company’s products. A skin care company may not want to focus on completely unrelated issues, like the space race.
At the end of the day, what’s essential is being “real.” Skip corporate spam and cookie cutter posts that lack emotion or feeling. Produce genuine content that adds value and is unique and interesting.
Give Your Customers Feedback
Customers will often post reviews and comments on social media pages. Likewise, they will be emailing your customer service department, sometimes with complaints, but often with suggestions or compliments. Engage with them. Thank them for their time and input. Learn what makes them tick.
If a customer leaves a negative review it’s on you to reach out to them to see what you can do to make their situation better. A broken product? Offer a replacement. A lost shipment? Ship a new one. Ignoring them will result in a broken relationship, while proactive engagement can often turn a bad situation good.
Conclusion: Add Value, Be Engaging, Be You
Spam has been losing its effectiveness for years. Remember at the beginning of the article how we mentioned that many people see upwards of 4,000 adverts per day? Well, people are very good at tuning those advertisements out. The constant bombardment has helped people build up an immunity to annoying, pushy spam.
For savvy marketers, this isn’t all bad news. By focusing on adding value and engaging with customers, you can cut through the noise and stand out. Be you, show your customers some love, make sure you exhibit personality. Don’t annoy, empower instead. And make sure your customers know that you care about them and their needs.
By doing all of the above you can establish lasting, powerful relationships with customers. These, in turn, will result in more value for all parties involved.
