The Lunch Pail: A Digital Marketing Blog

What a great age we live in as marketers! More than ever before it is easy to collect information about our customers and the general consumer. It is easier because consumers are quick willing to share it. The problem is that marketers historically demonstrate a very poor ability to listen to what consumers are trying to say, then leverage that information to benefit the consumer.

A recent report from Forrester Research uncovered some interesting statistical nuggets. First, only 32 percent of marketers have an understanding of what their customers do across channels. Channel silos in internal marketing organizations not only fracture effective communications across various channels, silos make the marketer’s job much more difficult. Not only is a lack of message relevance and message redundancy a reality, but consumers become frustrated with brands that fail to understand how they browse and buy. Marketing silos are a fast track to customer attrition.

The other interesting statistic that demonstrates the same internal disconnect amongst the vast majority of marketing organizations is the 37 percent of marketers that actually do know how their customers prefer to receive communications. So, if a customer prefers to receive communications via mobile, or only email, or both, most marketers have no clue. Given that the technology exists to create customer/marketing databases solely for the purpose of better understanding and communicating, what is the hold up?

Well, Knotice’s Director Strategic Services – Bryce Marshall – was recently featured in Chief Marketer on the topic of relevance in marketing communications. He details some effective approaches that circumvent the natural silos that develop within internal marketing organizations as online marketing has evolved over the past 15-20 years. The article is a good read as he provides specifics on how to build relevance into an overall marketing strategy in an incremental way. There are myriad barriers to relevance, created primarily by the natural evolution of digital marketing. The established barriers are not going away through one department realignment or new software partnership. Incremental strategic relevance is the key to unlocking better relationships with customers.

Here is one last statistic that fully demonstrates the barriers to better customer communication. While 80 percent of marketers pay lip service to the value of customer preferences, only 12 percent of marketers actually ask their customers basic questions like the frequency they prefer to receive email at. Twelve percent!

Opportunity for customer relationship development – the kind that translates into real incremental revenue – exists. Now it is up to marketers to make it happen.