Marketing Mistakes-Confusing Your Customer
April 27, 2009 by Becky Scott
Filed under Marketing
Mail pieces, ads, and e-mail blasts are important marketing tools. You can direct traffic to your web site for more information about a product or service. But have you thought through what happens after that? What do your customers see once they get to your web site?
The landing page that you link to in your collateral needs to be focused, giving your customer exactly what you promised. If you promise mobile broadband information, but send them to a generic site page, do you think the customer is going to stick around? They might half-heartedly look at a link or two, but if they don’t find it right away they will move on.
And yes, companies are still making that mistake. If you want to see an example, take a look at this entry on Peter Bowerman’s Well-Fed Writer Blog. Even large companies can stumble. So it’s even more important that you don’t make the same mistakes that they do.
What can you do to avoid this marketing mistake?
Take care in writing your marketing materials. Think about what you want to accomplish with this piece. Are you just sending people to your site, or are you trying to give them specific product information? If you want to give them specifics, don’t just send them to your home page and hope they’ll look around. Drop them directly on the most relevant page.
What? You haven’t created a page with just the information that you told your customer was important and easy to find? Get busy! Write that web page before you send out the e-mail. Tell them exactly what you wanted them to know. Have the background on the mobile broadband service, devices, prices, and pricing plans all in one place. Or at the very least, have some basic information with links to the rest. (But beware – web users don’t like to click around too much. They want all of the info presented in easy-to-read chunks, right in front of them.)
Once you think you have everything in place, take a look at it from the customer’s perspective. Is what you’re giving them what they expected? If you can’t distance yourself from the piece, have someone else look at it for you. Make sure you really are delivering on your promise of more information.
So remember, before you send out your insert (or mail piece, ad, e-mail, etc.):
- Think about the purpose of your marketing piece
- Take care in your writing
- Send customers directly to the relevant information
- Create a page if you don’t already have one
- Deliver what you promise
And maybe you, too, can avoid a marketing mistake that will confuse and frustrate your customers. I know I’ll be watching for this in items I write. What marketing mistakes are you looking out for?
(Image: morgueFile)
Thanks for the link back, Becky,
Good stuff. And highlighting how often big companies get it wrong – and it happens so much it boggles the mind. You would THINK that once you get to such high-level marketing from household names companies, that they’d have thought it through, and you’d be wrong more often than you’d think possible. And as I point out in my post, it’s just not at all difficult to get it right. Just takes a little forethought, which many companies are too busy to get around to – and another customer is lost, or at least alienated.
In the great book published years ago, “Service America,” they talk about “Moments of Truth” you have with your customers. Moments when the customer interacts either directly with your company through a representative or through your web site, written materials, etc. And in that moment, you have the opportunity to either further cement a fundamentally good relationship with that customer, or drive them closer to embracing a competitor. And while it’s just not that hard to get it right, so many companies get it wrong.
PB
Peter, thanks for your comment. You are so right that it’s easy to get right, but so many companies get it wrong. Maybe if we keep pointing it out, the right person will see it and fix it. Or hire one of us to do so. ;)
When I worked for a major cell phone company, I tried to make each interaction a positive one. And it was made harder by timed phone calls and a lack of time to follow up with customers. The result? My interactions turned out to be less than positive because I was pushed with quotas and stats instead of taking the time I needed to help customers. I can only hope they’ve changed in the last 8 years.