How To Keep Customers Coming Back: 6 Trends You Should Know

by Eric Tsai

Living in southern California I love going to restaurants, cafes and retails stores to experience what companies are doing to attract customers.

From merchandising to customer service, I’m gradually seeing three popular marketing trends that everyone is doing to spread their brand voice.

First, almost every company is in on the social media bandwagon specifically leveraging Facebook and Twitter to engage with their fans and broadcast their offerings.

Second, companies are finding ways to collect your contact information to build their email list by offering discounts, coupons or customer loyalty programs.

And third, businesses are aware of their reputation online on places such as Yelp, Consumer Reports, OpenTable, BizRate, Amazon and CNET.

Some of using these information as a way to improve products and identify service gaps.

All three marketing tactics are proven to be somewhat cost-effective in terms of managing their reputations online while funneling leads and converting sales.

There is enough free information out there that business owners and marketing managers can find to start immediately so I’m not surprise that everyone is doing it.

In fact, I always check out the Twitter or Facebook page of where I’ve visited to see what level of engagement and following they have as well as to identify how the platform was utilized.

The result I found is that companies fall into two categories of social media marketing buckets.

First are the highly engaged profiles with regular updates and a large following that creates instant social proof. Second are the uninspiring profiles with the lack of updates and little to no interactions.

This is the same observations made by Jeremiah Owyang, who recently posted on his blog that, “many brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon, without giving proper thought about the impacts to their marketing effort. In particular, many brands are putting ’social chicklets’ on their homepage to “Follow us on Twitter” or “Friend us on Facebook” without considering the ramifications.”

This is the problem with low barrier to entry tools such as Twitter and Facebook that many brands are using without a real deliberate strategy.

I encourage those of you that are serious about your digital marketing efforts to use Jeremiah’s matrix to help make your decisions.

Keep in mind, you must understand not just the rules of the game but also how it applies to your specific industry, your customers and your organization.

There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to find what you’re looking for while connecting you with like-mined individuals from networking to referrals, relevant information is available in abundance.

The questions is where do people get those information and how will these content providers be perceived?

First you need to realize that all of the answers have changed.

Same Questions, Different Answer

Although the internet has forever changed our expectations in media consumption and in communication, one thing remains constant for businesses today: the question of how do we attract more customers to us?

How do we get customers to spread our brand? How do we get customers to buy more and buy often?

As a marketer today you must realize that we’ve been asking those same questions for decades and in order to answer them now you must first understand the following 6 fundamental social change in customer perception and behavior:

1. Choice overload: Customers are bombarded with choices; the market is saturated with selection.

And people get frustrated when they have to make a decision from tens and thousands of product categories, brands and price points.

Everything looks the same, everyone sounded alike and it doesn’t help when people have shorter attention span as we become more distracted everyday.

2. Conflicting information: We’re in a hyper-connected marketplace where people are using social media to discuss new products, do their own research, cross referencing information in the blogosphere and everything goes from frustration to confusion.

There is simply too much information and how can an average consumer know who’s right and who’s wrong?

3. Customers know marketing: Over time, customers understood the game of marketing regardless of B2C or B2B.

Described by Tom Asacker: We’re no longer passive consumers but active discerners participating in how products are marketed at us.

This is why there is an increasing trend in banner blindness and average web users will give you only 8 seconds to decide if they’re going to stay or not.

4. Lack of trust in the marketplace: There is a sense of distrust in the marketplace. People simply don’t trust individuals let alone corporations.

We’re conditioned to identify the tactics such as sense of urgency (buy now and save!), risk reversal (money back guaranteed!), or scarcity thinking (for a limited time!).

Watch any TV infomercials and you’ll find those tactics in most of them.

Simply put, these tactics are losing their effectiveness and even if they worked that led to engagement opportunities, you must meet the customer expectations otherwise it’s hard to fool them twice.

5. People define your brand: Brand messages only sets the initiate expectations of your target audience and ultimately people make meaning out of things themselves.

When push comes to shove, people go with what feels right not your product features or service benefits.

It’s how you make them feel, not what you tell them how they should feel. If they can relate to your message, it only means they’ll give you a few more seconds to keep going down your path to purchase.

Your brand is defined by how you make people feel about the decisions they’ve made not just your messages.

6. The shift towards frugality: This is the simplest concept to grasp as the recession has permanently changed the way consumers behave and perceive value.

It goes beyond pricing strategy and product promotions.

Whether you’re a retailer, a B2B service provider or a marketer, this means extracting deeper customer insights to build meaningful, differentiated messages that communicates relevancy.

This is best described by a recent article “The New Consumer Frugality” in Strategy+Business, by Booz & Company, in which the authors defined six frugal consumer segments.

After a thorough understanding of the above trends, you should also be aware of the fact that brands are becoming publishers creating opportunities that’s leveling the playing field.

And in order to be successful moving forward, you either have great content strategy or you have unique customer experience (in product or service innovation).

Content Marketing Creates Relevancy

Recently Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com, a content strategy evangelist published a post after speaking at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 on how companies focus solely on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media that produce without a real content strategy.

Specifically he noted that “any online marketing, whether social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, landing page conversion, etc., does not work without first having content strategy.”

As a brand strategist that focuses on marketing integration, I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve heard business owners and marketing executives realize the need to change their strategy, but it’s often due to the need to “keep up” with the current trend. “We must get into social media because everyone’s doing it,” or “We need to engage our customers on Facebook and Twitter.”

But what does engagement mean to your organization? How will that benefit your bottom line or increase sales?

It’s easy to setup a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn Group.

The key is what will you be pushing out to generate meaningful conversations?

How will you provide value that sparks engagement?

Why would people spread your idea or pass on your name?

What’s the call-to-action when people get to your website, your blog, or your social media pages?

Product Innovation Creates Loyalty

The other way to win in the marketplace is to deliver awesome products or services that build brand loyalty via innovation.

An easy example would be what Apple is doing with their continuous innovation in products from iPod to iPhone to last weekend’s release of iPad.

Amazon’s endless pursue to have everything available, fast and easy via their online store regardless what you’re looking for.

Zappo’s unmatched customer service in finding and delivering not just the shoes you ordered but what you may also like.

For restaurants, it’s the food you cater, the service you provide, the price tag you put on as the total experience that says “we’re different.”

Customers will automatically go on to Yelp and OpenTable to give you reviews and recommendations. Your customer will decide what quality is and what value means to them.

I love what James Surowiecki wrote in an excellent piece in The New Yorker: “the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.”

You’re going to struggle if you don’t deliver brand experience that’s worth talking about.

Everyone have access to the same tools and resources, if you can deliver a mix bag of value using content marketing strategy on your innovative products, you win.

The take away: Brands must adapt to the new realities that everyone is a content producer and we are no longer competing on eyeballs and clicks only, but value that builds long-lasting relationships in a trust-driven era.

It is essential to establish clear, integrated marketing strategies for various media channels in order to deliver personalized messages that properly aligned with your business objectives.

If you don’t know your desired outcome, why are you implementing tactics where you can’t see what success means to you?

If you don’t have exceptional products perhaps its time you should rethink your product strategy.

Are you re ready to get actionable to integrate your marketing efforts?

Reputation Management Using Social Media

by Eric Tsai

Recently I purchased a new vehicle and was excited about the whole experience. I’ve had many cars in the past and the part that always annoys me is feeling the pressure to buy from the sales people on the floor.

But this one is different.

It was like two friends talking about cars and with no initiation about buying. She wasn’t worry about selling.

Obviously I purchased the car and about 3 weeks later I had to go in for some service and again the experience was painless and I even got a loaner car to drive for a few days.

I was so thrilled that I wanted to endorse them by leaving reviews on their social network profile. Then I discovered a string of negative reviews online and what’s worse is that they received an average of 2 out of 5 stars on multiple websites.

So I called the sales person that sold me the car and she said she will help me pass it to her corporate marketing executive. Below is a slightly altered version to keep both the dealership and sales person confidential:

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Dear Jenny (not real name)

I’m a happy customer because I had a great experience buying a vehicle from you. It was enjoyable and I felt no pressure or that I wasn’t been judged.

When I came in for a service a month later, your service department was superb not to mention I can talk to the technician forever. The car was serviced promptly and the entire process was painless.

With such exceptional service and people, why is it that your dealership only gets

3 out of 5 stars from Google?
2.5 out of 5 stars from Yelp?
3 out of 5 stars from Edmunds?

The reason is simple. No one is managing your company’s reputation online.

People typically would only review something when they’re either excited, happy, satisfied or vice versa; frustrated, angry or dissatisfied. Looking at some of the reviews you will find YOUR NAME is all over the positive side, which is the reason why not all the reviews are negative.

As you can see the negative reviews out weights the positive reviews. Nobody from your company is defending the dealership brand and it’s unfortunate because your car manufacturer makes a product that practically sells itself.

But does your dealership have any loyal fans that would refuse to go to other dealerships because they love you guys so much? Does your dealership have any advocates internally or externally that promotes the positive things about your company?

Does your management care? And what are they doing about it? Is the entire business run on listing cars on websites, classifieds, and print advertising? Then why should I come back to buy my second and third vehicle from you?

There is NOTHING on your website that shows credibility of your great sales people, hardworking service advisers, happy technicians or a sense of strong community. Just bunch of product photos, inventory listing and resources that every other car dealership has on their website.

How can I trust your brand? I only walked in your dealership knowing there is a deal NOT because I know Jenny Smith, the awesome sales person was there. If your dealership competes ONLY on price, then it’ll be very difficult to build value in the business because there won’t be any long-term customer relationship forged that way. And that’s not what your GM wrote to me in his thank you email.

Unless you’re selling a commodity such as water, people don’t buy what you sell, they buy the experience! And even water brands are working hard to differentiate from the competition, what marketing efforts are you doing to differentiate? What reasons are you giving me to talk about your company and your people?

Now, would I recommend your dealership? Sure but I would tell people to ask for Jenny in sales and Kevin in service.

Sincerely,

Eric Tsai

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Reputation Management is Marketing

It should come to no surprise that reputation management is marketing. And crisis management cross over to reputation management as well, thus it should be considered as marketing too.

Take a look at the recent two big crisis for these two brands: Tiger Woods and Toyota. One is a billion dollar personal brand and the other one is a multi-billion dollar consumer products brands.

For Tiger Woods, he opted to go with the silent treatment, laying low to let things wane a bit and the conversation just kept going. Even after his public statement, the damage has already been done, sponsors dropped him and fans still skeptical on his integrity.

With Toyota, it’s indicative that there is no magic solution to fix a fundamental problem on a technical issue on the accelerator. The key is to manage the crisis in a way to mitigate negative press going viral as it did on Twitter just check the #Toyota hashtag.

According to AdAge, “on Jan. 22, the day after the recall, buzz within the social web skyrocketed, with the number of posts about the automaker going from less than 100 to over 3,200. With the stop-sale announcement four days later, online chatter shot from about 500 posts that morning to more than 3,000 by that afternoon.”

In both cases, the respond time is just as critical as what’s been communicated.

As we continue to transition to the social and relationship-focused era, companies will no longer be able to ignore social media and online marketing because the truth of the matter is the more social you are and the more transparency you expose, you’re more likely to convert the sales and retain loyalty.

And if you’re able to provide a community for your fans, customers, staff or even vendors to interact and engage with each other, they’re also more likely to buy repeatedly not to mention providing you with referral business as well.

According to the latest report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate, “social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of… 60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly 8 in 10.”

Social Networks Continue to Grow

And it helps that social network giant like Facebook is now just as popular as Google according to Hitwise,”Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week… Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week. ”

Just look at the chart below and you’ll see how Facebook have exploded while Google maintains its steady traffic. Why the exponential? For one, Facebook is a great way to get started with social media since most people will already have a couple of hundred friends that they can talk to about anything.

For businesses in the offline world to reach customers they would have to make hundreds if not thousands of phone calls or send out loads of flyers that would cost lots of money and resource. Now companies can do that a couple of times a day for free through a Facebook page or a Twitter tweet.

The take away: All businesses should start exploring with social media to find their sweet spot. Traditional media channel such as advertising on TV, magazines or billboards can still be expensive with unpredictable results. Social media has a low barrier to entry (yes it’s cheap) and allows you to meet people in a fraction of the time that it would take in the real world to start building meaningful relationships.

However; you must factor in the the resources and time spent on social media marketing, because it can get out of hand which can lead to inefficiency and ultimately costing you more.

You don’t even need to have a profile on every social network like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Simply focus on one that you’re comfortable with, develop a process in which you can implement a systematic approach and see what results you get. If you get the result you like, keep doing it. If you don’t, try something else.

Whether you like it or not, people will continue to talk about your brand and you can either choose to ignore it or do something about it.

Customer Experience: Do You Really Know Your Audience?

by Eric Tsai

It’s no surprise that the increasingly social web have enabled customers to be heard while helping to improve the very products and services they’ve purchased.

As millions of people continue to search online for the product they need and the service they want, do you know how the recession has impacted your customer’s value perception?

How are you going to improve the customer experience to optimize your products and services?

Your customer may have already shifted their spending in favor of private label brands over name brands or reduce the quantity or frequency of buying altogether.

Perhaps the freemium business model has become the new standard to get your customer to try your product.

Whichever way you look at it, consumer’s perceptions of an interaction are influenced heavily from their purchasing experience, by how they research to who they trust.

To understand and improve customer experience, companies should first research their customer’s natural behaviors, and then seek opportunities to influence those behaviors through targeted strategies and niche offers.

According to a recent Nielsen analysis revealed generationally shopping habits that reflect diverse lifestyle preferences and economic habits.

Naturally, Boomers have the highest earning of any group, followed by Gen X, then Millennials and finally Greatest Gen.

What’s interesting is that according to the study, “Millennial and Gen X shoppers favor mass supercenters and mass merchandisers over more traditional formats like grocery or drug stores which remain a draw for the Greatest Generation and Boomers … Millennials today represent the largest population segment—over 76 million strong—just slightly larger in number than the Boomer segment. The two groups together represent half of the U.S. population.”

From these data, marketers should apply behavioral economics to further understand the minds of their customers.

Once you understand the patterns contributing to buy and not buy, you can craft highly targeted campaigns and behavioral tracking techniques to connect with customers.

Couple that with direct customer research such as surveys or focus groups, you will end up with a customer segmentation metrics that can help you define how changes of an offer can influence the way people react to it.

However, it’s critical that a more systematic approach to behavior targeting is used when defining your customers.

This will help to make irrationality more predictable in an attempt to understand the behavioral economics of your customers.

Here are some questions you should consider to help you improve customer interaction:

Where does your customer go when searching for your products and services? Online communities, offline advertising, word-of-mouth, search engine, blogs etc.
How and where did they obtain the knowledge necessary to make a purchase? Do they know how to find what they need?
When and how do customers gain access to your products and services?
What kind of lifestyle and overall financial situation are they in?
What does value mean to them? Where is the line drawn between getting a bargain vs being cheap?
Who and what influence their buying decision? And why?
What conversations are generated around the ‘benefits’ of your product and services?
What are some of the potential barrier to purchase? Lack of knowledge, confusion in the market, price points, product features etc.
Who are your competitors and how are they perceived in the customer’s eyes? What other options do they have if they don’t buy from you or your competitors?
In your vertical, does you customer look at brands first or price first? Is the service or support more important than the product itself?

You may consider paying for research from companies such as ComScore, Ipsos, Harris Interactive, TNS Group or Hitwise just to name a few.

If you’re not ready to pay for research, you can always conduct direct customer survey yourself or simply start gathering free data from sites like Consumer Reports, MarketingCharts, Pew Research Center or eMarkter on a regular basis.

Here is an example from the Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study that provides a high-level overview into the complete online shopping experience.

Often times, paid research firms will provide complete free report as well, you just have to keep an eye on it or subscribe to their newsletter. Here is one focusing on eCommerce from ComScore: State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09

State of US Online Retail Economy in Q3 09 –

You can also search on sites like Docstoc, Scribd or SlideShare to find more supporting data.

Keep in mind most of the data on those sites may be dated but you can still use them to investigate current trends or form your own insights.

The take away: Because of the many factors contributing to consumer’s buying pattern and media habits; there is no silver bullet to improve customer experience.

Instead, the goal is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of customer satisfaction from desirable customer interaction. Do you know what makes your customer tick?