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Our Favorite Reads of the Week: Digital, New Rules, Art, & No Regrets Customer Engagement

Too much content, too little time? No worries, I’ve gathered some of the latest and greatest resources from industry top performers. This week, it’s all about customer engagement and we’ve found some gems from McKinsey Quarterly, IBM, Marketo, and more.

IBM Report: C-Suite Establishing More Direct Customer Engagement

Good read, great graphic, and video. CXOs have plenty of tasks on their plate and they are still rushing to pile on more. Namely in directly engaging with customers to influence the company business plan. In fact, more than half of today’s CEOs cite customers as having the most importance in business strategy development.

“If you’re a C-Suite executive, it may be time to join in on those key customer interactions and consider shaving time and resources off other organizational investments not involving customers.”

The Pitfalls of Customer Engagement in a Digital World 

Great use cases on Twitter and Facebook to show why digital can’t replace real-world interaction and vice versa.

“You’ve heard the critique that digital cannot completely replace face to face human engagement, well here are two examples that back it up….”

The New Rules of Customer Engagement

There is no formula for how many touch points is right, so stop counting!

“Goodbye, customer touch-points. Hello, ongoing, meaningful contact that actually drives revenue. Here’s what you need to know to be more engaging right now.”

The Art of Social Sharing: 5 Social Campaign Ideas to Get Your Audience Engaged

A Ralph Waldo Emerson quote + customer engagement advice? Always a win.

“As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it “our best thoughts come from others”. An excellent way to get your audience engaged, is to provide them with a reason to share your message on their social networks.”

Five ‘no regrets’ moves for superior customer engagement

McKinsey & Company dive into 5 strategies to get your company on the right track before you develop your full set of processes manage customer engagement across the whole organization.

“The biggest [significant organizational challenge] is that all of us have become marketers: the critical moments of interaction, or touch points, between companies and customers are increasingly spread across different parts of the organization, so customer engagement is now everyone’s responsibility.”

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Google’s Chris Fong: Strategies for Brand and Direct Response Marketers

If you are managing your company’s Google campaigns or are charged with the byzantine task of optimizing and allocating spend to various campaigns, Chris Fong encourages you to take a step back every once in while, reconsider your strategy and think about how and why you’re doing this.

Have you decided to what degree you’d like to target customers with brand or direct response advertisements? Here, Chris provides fundamental advice and guides you into asking the right questions before executing an online marketing strategy.

As a side note, here’s a good brush-up on the basics of AdWords, which is good to revisit now and again to see what’s new.

Chris Fong leads Google’s channel sales partnerships team that works with automotive, travel and legal partners. His team helps partners to build long term, profitable businesses around Google products. Prior to this role he started Google’s direct sales advertising division’s focused efforts with education organizations in 2006. His experience at Google also includes working for Google.org in Tanzania evaluating business plans and mentoring entrepreneurs and Google Reach in India consulting for a microfinance organization trying to grow from 90,000 to 1 million clients and teaching computer literacy skills to 12-14 year olds from New Delhi’s slums.

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A Dozen Ways to Cultivate Customer Relationships

The principles behind building profitable customer relationships will never go out of style. From the days of the corner store to today’s most agile multichannel enterprises, these 12 principles remain the backbone of cultivating successful relationships.

1. Continuously learn about your customers

This is the first principle of managing customer relationships because it is the most fundamental. From this everything else follows. When you know your customers, you can make sound business decisions about how to develop your relationships with them. Maintain your knowledge in customer profiles that are available to all who need them.

2. Anticipate customer needs

Knowledge of your customers presents new opportunities for making the right offer or delivering the right service to the right person at the right time. Analysis of customer profiles, especially using today’s analytics tools, can provide powerful insight about needs and how to best serve them.

3. Handle different customers differently

The power of this principle lies in the potential for optimizing the value of each customer relationship through differential treatment. Based on customer segmentation, contact centers can provide user-appropriate Web and IVR interfaces, routing routines, the best-suited agents, and appropriate content.

4. Interact with customers

No matter how sophisticated the technology that organizations and customers use to communicate, your customers are human, and people appreciate being recognized, listened to and understood. Relationships tend to develop when you interact.

5. Focus on revenue and retention more than on reducing costs

Yes, a renewed focus on building relationships can require so many organization-wide process changes that operational cost savings may well be realized. But keep your eyes on value, overall revenue and retention first.

6. Increase value for your customers and of your customers

It is precisely because building customer relationships increases value both for customers and the organization that it is such a compelling strategy. When executed properly, the focus on building relationships and brand loyalty is a win-win for customers and the organization alike.

7. Present a single face to your customers to make their experiences with your organization seamless

Seek to simplify the experience for your customers. Take a holistic view of your customers and consolidate information from across the organization, regardless of geography, department, function, contact channel, social community, or product line.

8. Enable information sharing and interaction across the organization

It is both a requirement and a benefit of customer relationship management that organizations improve their internal communication processes. The only way to develop a comprehensive view of each customer’s relationship with the organization is with the full participation of every functional part of the company.

9. Create business rules to drive all customer relationship management decisions and automation

Business rules codify and automate processes, specifying what should happen in specific situations, thus enabling both differentiated customer treatment and automation.

10. Empower agents with information and training

Just as the cockpit of an airplane displays all the information a pilot needs to fly in any conditions, the contact management screen should pull together cleanly and clearly all that the organization knows about its relationship with that customer. Empowerment is a complementary principle because no set of business rules can or should fully anticipate every conceivable situation.

11. Retain the right customers

Customer knowledge and the capability for differentiated customer treatment significantly improve many organizations’ capabilities to retain customers.

12. Remember that the effective management of customer relationships is a way of doing business

Technology is an important enabler, but as these 12 key principles demonstrate, cultivating customer relationships requires much more. Customer strategy must be a way of doing business.

You can trust these principles. Build them into your strategy and operational plans, and you will be well positioned for the changes ahead.

 

by Brad Cleveland, Senior Advisor, ICMI

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Don’t Hide That Unsubscribe

Small, gray font.

Buried at the bottom of an email marketing message.

Nearly impossible to read.

It’s almost as if whoever added it there does not really WANT you to see it.

You know what I’m referring to, right?

The CAN-SPAM Act – the United States law that governs unsolicited email – states all emails must have an opt-out mechanism. Traditionally, marketers have plopped the unsubscribe link at the bottom of email marketing messages. In fact, many vendors automatically include an opt-out in the email footer.

However, I’m here today to tell you … don’t hide that unsubscribe!

Instead of trying burying your unsubscribe link in the footer of your emails in small, gray font, I challenge you to put it at the top.

Yes, that’s right, not only am I suggesting not hiding the unsubscribe, I’m telling you to put it front and center.

That’s exactly what the team at woot! does in its Daily Digest email.

Now clearly the messaging and imagery has to be consistent with your brand. Not every individual or company can get away with “Are you nuts?” the way woot! does.

So why am I advocating moving the unsubscribe link (or button) to the top of your emails? The bottom line is this: If someone wants to be removed from your email list, they’ll find a way.

If your unsubscribe link is hard to find, your subscribers will take one of the following actions:

  1. Delete your email (while cursing)
  2. Mark your email as spam
  3. Ignore your email (this time) and then do (a) or (b) the next time they get your message.

If they want “out” … make it easy. The alternative is not nearly as pretty.

If you want to take it up a notch, have a bit fun with your unsubscribe images. That’s what Chris Penn, Vice President of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications, does.

In his “Almost Timely News” Saturday email newsletter, Chris includes the following:

Unsubscribe/Remove Yourself

Once upon a time, there was a giant, huge unsubscribe button. Now, we just use popular memes.

 

Each and every week, he replaces the unsubscribe image with something unique. Chris has a bunch of them saved on Flickr. If you have a few minutes to spare, it’s worth reviewing them.

You can also get have some fun with the landing page that shows up after someone unsubscribes. Groupon did this a few years back with its “Punish Derrick” video. It’s worth two minutes of your life.

Finally, if you are not quite ready to move your unsubscribe link/button to the top (woot!) or create a unique image meme every week (Chris Penn) or produce a post-opt out video (Groupon), you can still change your typical (boring!) unsubscribe link to something like this:

Not into these emails anymore? That’s cool. Just unsubscribe now. No hard feelings. I promise.

Whichever option you choose, it’s still important to include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email marketing campaigns. This is where people typically look for it, so be sure it’s there too!

What does your unsubscribe option look like? Do you have it buried at the bottom or is it front and center? Please share in the comments below!

 

By DJ Waldow, Digital Marketing Evangelist, Marketo

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Use the (Visual Content) Force Wisely

Humans are social and visual creatures. We’re also hunter-gatherers. So it’s not surprising that we created the Internet in our image: bending and evolving it to meet our information hunting and gathering needs. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that images popping into our Facebook News or Twitter feeds get hunter-gatherers like us clicking, watching, and sharing.Facebook and LinkedIn are betting on it, while the popularity of Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr seem to prove it. But creating visual content for its own sake is pointless; like all marketing communications, visuals need to support your strategy and be created in the context of meeting customer needs.

I want to see what you think…

Consumers are increasingly using social networks to “see” what other people like them are doing, what decisions they’re making, and what the results are. Instead of knocking on doors or having impromptu coffee shop chats, consumers are posting their problems or needs on Facebook and asking for recommendations.

How did that vegan BBQ recipe turn out? Your friend Sharon just posted a picture to her feed and even her non-vegan friends are gushing. How valuable was the online certificate program John took earlier this year? Check out John’s updated LinkedIn profile with a new, official headshot for his new official promotion.

“Seeing is believing.”

One big reason visual cues are so persuasive (and attractive) is that they fire up a large chunk of our brains at once. Apparently, the neurons in our brain that handle visual processing take up a whopping 30 percent of the cortex: Compare this to 8 percent for touch and 3 percent for hearing.

As marketers, we’ve all been told “Show, don’t tell,” or “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Why? Because humans are drawn to visual imagery, we process it easily, and because of this, visuals do a great job helping consumers cut through information clutter, especially in today’s uber-cluttered online world.

Online, consumers still desire some kind of “visual proof” of what people and organizations are posting, reviewing, using, or listing on their resumes. We may be glued to our iPad miles away, but seeing is still believing.

Use the (visual) force wisely

Social networks are primarily ways to connect with like-minded people, and to some degree, reinforce our preferences. We assume people we know are similar to us in some way. This means we have a higher level of confidence that the information coming from our social networks is relevant to us and our decisions.

Keeping this in mind, your content strategy should use visuals wisely. Yes—photos, videos, and infographics grab eyeballs online and engage your customers. More importantly, brain research also shows that images can improve the quality and speed of learning, information retention and better convey meaning—as long as those images are relevant to your topic or audience, and help clarify or add context.

Hit the mark and your visual content can stand in for a friend’s opinion on Facebook, or an online review. Your videos and photos can speak directly to the right customers, offering the “visual proof” that’s most beneficial for the way each customer segment makes buying decisions.

Guest Post on the Trip Advisor for Business

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Customer Communities- Innovate Your Social Business

Customer communities are the foundation for any customer experience strategy. 

To understand that statement though, it’s useful to first explore what I mean by CX and how a company can build the necessary culture and implement the underlying technologies that can truly impact customers and provide an engaging experience.

CX is a broad term used to refer to a strategy that is designed to orchestrate a positive experience or interaction for customers at any and all touch points. The definition extends to the systems, processes and employees that impact that experience as well, which in reality could be all employees and any technology. This probably seems exceptionally broad to many of you, especially since most companies define “customer facing” employees as a small subset of employees that interact directly with prospects and customers. I’d suggest though, that in the spirit of evolving a full CX strategy that companies must change that definition and include all employees, as

even the most remote activities of an employee has the potential to impact the customer.

For example, you probably don’t think of the employee tasked with locating a specific product in a warehouse to fill an order as customer facing, but I’d submit that in fact, that employee might own one of the most important pieces of a CX strategy…getting the right product to the customer in the promised timeframe. Let that part of the process go wrong and see how many happy customers you have.

Customer Communities – The Evolution

Customer communities are quickly evolving and companies are finding that they can be used across many functions very effectively. Many communities are initially deployed as a way to encourage peer to peer support and interaction as a means of deflecting some of the customer service calls. These customer support communities are proving very valuable to companies but if that’s the only focus for the community I think you’re selling it’s potential short. That same community is generating useful content that can be harvested and reused in the companies knowledge base and also for training and documentation, for example. The community also provides a fertile ground for marketing and sales. Word of mouth advertising is a very powerful marketing tool and can be driven through the community by providing a positive experience and by nurturing influencers in the community.

Customer Communities for Content Marketing

We hear the terms “content marketing” and “inbound marketing” a lot these days and for many marketing organizations the concepts are very different from the traditional approach to marketing. Outbound marketing in a world filled with individuals that are overwhelmed by information and numb to most broadcast ads, email marketing, telemarketing, etc. is just not as effective anymore. The customer community is a facilitator of content marketing, or getting prospects to view relevant content at critical education and evaluation phases of their buying activity. The community is also a vehicle for ongoing conversation, which is a key function of inbound marketing; listening, responding and nurturing a relationship.

Customer Communities for Sales Intelligence: Socialytics

The customer community is a great source of sales intelligence as well. By using socialytic listening tools and analyzing the collected social data in the community, buyer needs, potential and even direct intent can be determined. The extension of the use cases for communities doesn’t stop with marketing and sales though. Communities are a integral part of an innovation management process and can provide product marketing and product designers with a source of ideas for improving current offerings and for new products and services. Using the broad customer community as a source for product and service ideas not only provides much better and broader input to the innovation process but also increases customer engagement by involving them more intimately in defining and improving the company’s products and services.

Who Are You?

In building a CX strategy that encompasses multiple touch points across online and off, one of the biggest challenges is effectively answering the simple question of who are you? On the surface this seems pretty straight forward but it is not, in fact it can be extremely difficult. Knowing you as “you” on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, the company’s eCommerce site, in the company’s loyalty program, and in the actual store all require some way to link you to multiple identities. How many email addresses and usernames do you have? The customer community platform may hold the key to this identity problem, or at least be an important part of the solution. Most communities start with a simple sign up process, maybe even offering to use a public social network as the vehicle for signup like Facebook connect or Twitter. That is the first link in putting the complete identity picture together. The next step is the community profile itself. If you can establish a trust relationship with the customer, demonstrate value and draw customers into providing a more complete profile then you fill in the puzzle pieces even more. This is incremental trust building of course, much like the concepts that were developed in the 1990’s around permission based marketing by Seth Godin and others. In other words, the more you demonstrate responsible use of personal data and the more value I can get from the community by adding personal details, the more likely I am to help clean up the identity questions. The community is the most natural place to do this.

Companies are using customer communities for many things and seeing very good returns for the investment of management time and in the underlying technology platform to simplify community management. What unique use cases have you developed for your customer community?

 

By Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC

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Use the (Visual Content) Force Wisely

Humans are social and visual creatures. We’re also hunter-gatherers. So it’s not surprising that we created the Internet in our image: bending and evolving it to meet our information hunting and gathering needs. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that images popping into our Facebook News or Twitter feeds get hunter-gatherers like us clicking, watching, and sharing. Facebook and LinkedIn are betting on it, while the popularity of Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr seem to prove it. But creating visual content for its own sake is pointless; like all marketing communications, visuals need to support your strategy and be created in the context of meeting customer needs.

I want to see what you think…

Consumers are increasingly using social networks to “see” what other people like them are doing, what decisions they’re making, and what the results are. Instead of knocking on doors or having impromptu coffee shop chats, consumers are posting their problems or needs on Facebook and asking for recommendations.

How did that vegan BBQ recipe turn out? Your friend Sharon just posted a picture to her feed and even her non-vegan friends are gushing. How valuable was the online certificate program John took earlier this year? Check out John’s updated LinkedIn profile with a new, official headshot for his new official promotion.

“Seeing is believing.”

One big reason visual cues are so persuasive (and attractive) is that they fire up a large chunk of our brains at once. Apparently, the neurons in our brain that handle visual processing take up a whopping 30 percent of the cortex: Compare this to 8 percent for touch and 3 percent for hearing.

As marketers, we’ve all been told “Show, don’t tell,” or “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Why? Because humans are drawn to visual imagery, we process it easily, and because of this, visuals do a great job helping consumers cut through information clutter, especially in today’s uber-cluttered online world.

Online, consumers still desire some kind of “visual proof” of what people and organizations are posting, reviewing, using, or listing on their resumes. We may be glued to our iPad miles away, but seeing is still believing.

Use the (visual) force wisely

Social networks are primarily ways to connect with like-minded people, and to some degree, reinforce our preferences. We assume people we know are similar to us in some way. This means we have a higher level of confidence that the information coming from our social networks is relevant to us and our decisions.

Keeping this in mind, your content strategy should use visuals wisely. Yes—photos, videos, and infographics grab eyeballs online and engage your customers. More importantly, brain research also shows that images can improve the quality and speed of learning, information retention and better convey meaning—as long as those images are relevant to your topic or audience, and help clarify or add context.

Hit the mark and your visual content can stand in for a friend’s opinion on Facebook, or an online review. Your videos and photos can speak directly to the right customers, offering the “visual proof” that’s most beneficial for the way each customer segment makes buying decisions.

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Effectively Navigating Employee Issues and Employment Laws

As an HR practitioner, you are often asked to determine whether an employee issue is heading into legal territory. To do this, you need guidance and a utilitarian method for assessing complex issues. Read today’s post, then download the free HR Law Navigator tool as your resource and “check in” for assessing employee concerns.

Most HR practitioners aren’t lawyers, yet they’re on the front lines of handling employee situations that have the potential for raising legal concerns. Navigating the ins and outs of ever-changing Equal Opportunity Employment (EEO) laws—at the federal, regional and even country level—isn’t an easy job. Even though you may have a centralized HR department that handles employee relations issues, HR generalists and consultants are still usually responsible for gathering information about potentially problematic situations. HR practitioners are also often asked to seek advice from legal experts and to partner with them to determine how to manage and respond to such situations.

As an HR practitioner, your job is not just to minimize your organization’s risk of legal exposure and make sure people “play by the rules”; it’s to ensure all employees have a safe, productive working environment within which to thrive and create the most value for your organization and its stakeholders. HR practitioners need to feel confident making the call to send an employee concern up the chain, or to launch a full-scale legal investigation. But what kinds of questions should you ask to make sure you’re assessing a situation fully? How do you make sure you recognize whether an employee situation has the potential for legal concerns? The answer is, it often depends.

“The toughest part about dealing with EEO issues in HR is the nuance involved. Every situation is unique and requires empathy, rationality, and understanding. The reasonable person standard that exists when determining disparate treatment in many cases creates a lot of grey area to work within, but good faith efforts go a long way,” said Beth Livingston, assistant professor of Human Resources at Cornell University’s ILR School.

That grey area is one reason Livingston argues that empathy is perhaps the most important skill for an HR practitioner when it comes to figuring out which HR issues require legal advice.

“Most employees want to be treated fairly and want to avoid litigation; HR practitioners want likewise. If we look at it from this perspective, the incentives are already aligned,” said Livingston. “The same situation can affect different people in very different ways, and the more HR practitioners can attempt to understand the employees they work with and what their values are, the better they can address issues before they become legal liabilities.”

Download the free HR Law Navigator, a resource included in eCornell’s Human Resources program, to help you recognize potential legal issues involving employee situations, gather sufficient information for seeking advice from legal experts, and chart a safe course when making decisions that impact your employees and your organization.

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7 Essential Strategies of Highly Effective Communicators

Humans are born communicators. Before we become verbal, we’re very effective at sending nonverbal messages and cues. Inside organizations, we still communicate with words and gestures — in person, via video, online, or over the phone. Regardless of its form, effective communication is the grease that lubricates our business relationships, employee interactions, and performance management efforts. After you read the article, download our free e-book 7 Essential Strategies of Highly Effective Communicators to get the strategies for effective, powerful communication.Read More

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If Content is King, Segmentation is Queen

 

It’s 1996. You’re Bill Gates. What’s on your mind? Interactive multimedia content, the kind made possible by the Internet. Revolutionary content that would transform the Internet into “a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products—a marketplace of content.”

A place where “content is king.”

Fast forward to 2013 and new content is being created, curated, and shared worldwide at record speed. But many organizations using content creation as marketing strategy still ignore one of Gates’ other nuggets of wisdom:

“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.”

This is a content strategy: rewarding customers with deep, up-to-date content that’s relevant to their interests. How to get there? If content is king, then old-fashioned market segmentation is queen.

Customer, know thyself

Rewarding customers—their needs, their desires, their concerns—with what’s on the screen starts with segmentation.

Consumers already self-segment online. They’re increasingly using social networks to “see” what other people like them are doing, what decisions they’re making, and what the results are, posting on Facebook to ask for recommendations.

Why? Do we really believe our hundreds of Facebook “friends” are experts on everything from glass baby bottles to buying a new car?

The truth is that we don’t care. It’s tough making decisions, and even tougher when decisions get bigger or more expensive. In a world of information overload, the more we can block out unnecessary or irrelevant input, the easier decisions become. One way to do this is to use familiarity, or social closeness, as a gauge. We implicitly trust someone we know—even though we met her once at a party 10 years ago—and attach greater weight to her opinions.

This doesn’t seem like a great tool for making important decisions. But it makes sense in a way marketers can understand: We assume the people we know are similar to us in some way. That means we have a higher level of confidence that the information coming from our social networks is relevant to us and our decisions.

Marketer, know thy customer

By segmenting your customers, you are increasing the odds that the information you’re generating for target customers will make the cut. A useful market segment is one that hits the sweet spot, where customers receive maximum value from your product and the company makes maximum profit from sales to that segment.

Ideally, segments should be made up of customers that respond in a very similar way to your marketing efforts, and who respond differently than other customers (in other segments). These differences form the basis for your content marketing strategy.

What’s your persona?

Different customers respond to your marketing efforts differently based on a broad range of variables: demographic, geographic, and psychographic. Somewhere within each segment, there’s an ideal customer for whom your product, service, or specialty is the ideal solution. To execute your content strategy, bring these ideal customers to life by creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas flesh out the key factors that differentiate segments from each other. Think of creating buyer personas like you’d describe the conversation you had last night with “the most interesting man in the world.”:

  • Who are they? — What’s their age, gender, personal quirks? Where do they live? Add as much real-life color as possible.
  • What do they do? — What are their daily activities and responsibilities? Think beyond work or school to hobbies, moonlighting gigs or volunteer work.
  • What are the biggest challenges or issues they face this year?
  • What are their long-term aspirations, professionally, personally, or both?

Long live the king

Now that you’ve created the most interesting buyer personas in the world, you can begin to know them better. If you hit the mark, your organization’s content can stand in for a friend’s opinion on Facebook, or an online review. Your videos and photos can speak directly to the right customers, offering the visual proof that’s most beneficial for the way each customer segment makes buying decisions.

The more you know about your target customers — through research, meaningful segmentation and vibrant buyer personas — the more you can reward them with content that fits their needs, solves their problems, and positions your organization as a trusted member of their social network.

Guest Post on the Kapost Content Marketeer