Time to Change Your Communication Strategy: Part 1 – Reality Hurts

Let me start with a quote by David Ogilvy: “What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”

It is an excellent phrase with a clear message that whatever is your medium of communication, if your content doesn’t stand out then it would be wrong on your part to expect good responses and high conversion rates.

Do you really even give your email content a thought before sending it out to your subscribers?

The answer sadly is not in the affirmative. In order to achieve quicker results, marketers tend to adopt the easiest possible methods to generate maximum traffic and transactions. I pity these marketers who are narrow minded and have a short term mindset and only look at the immediate benefits they get from “Batch & Blast” style of campaigns.

I don’t blame them completely since they work towards achieving their quarterly/yearly, but with a Myth – “More emails we send higher would be the revenue.”

Also from the brand prospective, this style of communication won’t help them sustain in the market for long and soon you will find that your loyal customers are opting out of your repetitive and boring style of campaigns.

Don’t you think it’s high time you brought in a change?

Changing your communication strategy:
Let’s get the basics in place and I will cover the advanced techniques in the upcoming write-ups.

The immediate action you can take, probably even while reading this blog, is how you segregate customers based on the subscriber’s interaction over the email or website/store in a defined time frame. (6 months/3 months)

• Subscribers active for last 6 months (Email or Website)

• Subscribers inactive for the last 6 months (Email or Website)

Start with reducing the frequency of emails to the inactive users and sending them limited and “hard to say no” type of offers.

To add another level to it, slice your database and make meaningful segments by following certain parameters such as:

1. Demographics:
   Make the most of all the details you have of the subscriber. Consider all the possible details and accordingly segment/personalize your communication. Everything right from Age, Gender, Income, Location, Marital Status, Account number, Salary, etc.
2. Past transactions of a subscriber:
   Helps you predict the customer’s area of interest and also helps you to cross promote related/complimentary products.
3. Product pages visited:
   If you are tracking the pages visited by every user, try and analyze his website behavior. If you are not doing it, start now. Every page he visits gives you valuable information on the predicted interest areas of that subscriber.

Looking forward to hear from all of you on what type of segmentation you do as today. I have covered some innovative segments which brands from different sectors can make use of, you can view it here – Part 2