Tag Archives: relevance
Chris Wells | Critical Mass Chicago
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Consumers have a myriad of choices in today’s rapidly changing digital environment. As a result, digital marketers have to work harder to deliver extraordinary experiences that resonate with customers. Why is this important? Because it’s the extraordinary experiences we create for customers that allow us to build lasting and meaningful relationships with them.
In order to meet this challenge, it can be a worthwhile exercise to take stock of the terrific brand experiences we’ve recently encountered. To gain some outside perspective on capturing customer loyalty in the new digital social age, I asked a few friends to share their recent experiences with brands.
One friend recounted a recent direct mail piece he received from Southwest airlines and how it produced a significant and lasting positive brand effect for him. He explained that after coming home from a long workday, he opened his mailbox to find a birthday card from Southwest. It was personalized with his name and arrived a few days before his actual birthday. It was a simple birthday card that included a discount on an upcoming flight and a drink coupon. The message was also very simple and direct and included a statement to the effect of “Happy Birthday! Have a drink on us!” According to my friend, this simple gesture went a long way towards building a lasting relationship between he and the airline. Now he always checks for flights on Southwest before any other carrier.
Upon asking another friend, she recalled a recent experience with ProFlowers, an online flower delivery company. She received an email reminder about 2-weeks before her mother’s birthday. The subject line of the email was personalized with her mother’s name, saying, “Remember, Evelyn’s birthday is coming up soon!” Again, not a very complicated message, but a valuable one that made an impact with my friend and helped to ensure she’ll always think of ProFlowers each time she orders flowers for her mom’s—or anyone else’s–birthday.
Both of these are examples of simple but great customer experiences. The mere fact that my friends were able to remember the messaging, timing and impact of these interactions suggests they are the kind of brand experiences most marketers strive to achieve with their customers.
What do these two customer experiences have in common?
- They delivered VALUE and/or convenience.
- They were RELEVANT.
- They were PERSONAL.
We could all take these insights as lessons learned and call it a day. However, as digital marketers we are continuously challenged with how to take these kinds of customer experiences from “great” to “extraordinary” in order to build deeper customer relationships and brand loyalty. Forrester Research wholeheartedly supports this notion. Their 2010 Customer Experience Index indicated that favorable customer experience correlates highly to loyalty — especially when it comes to consumers’ plans for making additional purchases.
Read more about how to take these experiences from Good to Extraordinary
Inspiration often comes from strange places.
†Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, author Scott McCloud examines how we receive different types of information and that process relates directly to design, information architecture, copywriting and content strategy.
Image compliments of Scott McCloud.
“Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.
Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” (page 49)
Anyone who’s ever sat through a client review will understand this. It’s not that images or art are less important; in fact, it’s the art that usually solicits “ohhs” and “ahhs” from the clients, right?
McCloud is speaking more about our intrinsic speed of understanding. We get a feeling from a picture right away.
But we need to process words – to piece together abstract ideas. With words, it’s incumbent that we create the images ourselves, in our own consciousness; we ponder meaning, ideas and symbols. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies knows that this process ain’t easy.
What’s This Got To Do With Agency Life?
Comics and literary theory? Why should marketers care?
In the same way that images are understood before words in the human brain, so too has the planning and creative process developed in marketing agencies. The halcyon days of 1997 were critical for information architecture. IAs became a staple of the creative agency, a bridge between the client’s objectives and the designer’s creative vision.
The same thing didn’t happen for words. It was easy to understand why you’d want to plot out images. But it took another decade for us to plot out what was written on the page and why. (True, maybe astute IAs and copywriters filled this role until content strategy bloomed in recent years.)
So what’s changed? Well, SEO (based on keyWORDS) has blossomed into the main way we find content online. Search engines are ever more refining the way they surface the most relevant content. Our tastes have matured: the internet is no longer the shiny new object – it helps us complete tasks in everyday life. We now use many, many channels to access information and communicate with brands. Findable, useful, contextual, and consistent across channels…online content is more important to our lives than ever before!
It then makes sense that content strategy – a plan for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, relevant content – would guide many important choices we make as digital marketers.
