“And the way you read my mind…”
Personalization is one of the most effective ways to capture your audience and make them feel like an individual. But there’s a fine line between creating a valuable, personalized experience and making your customers feel like this:
The lesson here is don’t be creepy! Customers are becoming more aware of data privacy and if you seem like you know ‘too much’ about them, you’re likely to lose trust and scare them away from ever doing business with you.
You should never use personalization just because you can. It needs to improve the customer experience, not just built into your campaigns for the sake of it. For some inspiration on how to take personalization beyond ‘Hi [first name]’, check out these 11 out-of-the-box strategies.
“I hate the way you're always right…”
Brands make mistakes. No matter how much you proofread, no matter how in tune you are with your customers, something is inevitably going to go wrong.
What really matters is how you respond to those mistakes. It’s not enough to remove the offending post or ignore questions and comments like it never happened. You have to own up and apologize… or if you upset a particular customer, maybe you just need to buy them a guitar.
“I hate it when you lie…”
Have you ever seen a company making some outrageous claim and thought, ‘there’s no way that can be true’?
Marketing is all about showing your customers that your products and services are amazing and how you can change their lives for the better. But even the tiniest lie can ruin your customers’ trust, upset loyal customers, and damage your reputation. That’s why you need to be 100% transparent in your marketing. Don’t make claims you can’t live up to, and always be honest with what’s going on.
“I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry…”
Don’t get us wrong: creating emotions with your marketing is one of the best ways to stand out and create something memorable.
But there’s a time and place for making people laugh or getting them to cry. Do it tastefully and you might just take a step from ‘just another company’ to ‘a brand with real people behind it’ in your customers’ minds. But if it’s done poorly, or if you rely too heavily on negative emotions like fear, your strategy might backfire.
The most important thing to remember is that the emotion you’re creating needs to make sense for your brand. Does an emotional approach suit your company’s voice, and will it actually resonate with your audience?
“I hate the way you're not around…”
Potential customers are online, looking for the products and services you offer. Are you in the right places for them to discover your brand?
At the very minimum, you should have a website and a Facebook profile. Depending on your audience, there are countless other social media platforms that you can use to your advantage.
And it’s not enough to set up a new channel and forget about it! Don’t create a presence on a platform that you’re not going to regularly use as part of your bigger marketing strategy. You need to be intentional and frequently share content wherever your audience is.
“And the fact that you didn't call…”
Billboards, radio ads, and the belief that marketing is one-way communication: all ideas from well before ‘social’ media became the #1 way for brands to communicate with their customers.
It’s not enough to provide a phone number or website contact form when people are upset. They want to be able to reach you quickly, easily, and they want a response within 24 hours… or even sooner.
Here’s how to make it easy for customers to reach you:
“But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.”
There are always going to be two types of customers in your business: the ones who love you and will become your most loyal supporters, and the ones who will never be happy no matter what you do.
Happy customers are your biggest asset. You can use customer reviews, testimonials, and photos to build more success for your brand and convince even the most on-the-fence buyers.
You can leverage negative followers to your advantage, too. There’s no point ‘feeding the trolls’, as they say, but you can use negative feedback as a way to improve your marketing over time and address common questions and concerns.
We doubt that you’ve made a marketing mistake so huge that somebody wrote a poem about it and presented it to a room full of people.
But we guarantee that at some point, you’ve irritated a customer or lost the opportunity to win over a prospect.
Marketing is all about learning from what doesn’t work and making improvements over time. If you take these lessons and start using the techniques we mentioned correctly, you’ll have 10 things that your customers will absolutely love about your marketing.