Tag Archives: customer engagement

Sales Are Driven By Relationships Not Ads

by on April 21, 2009 in Relationships

How do you communicate with your current customers? Do you only send them mail when you’re launching a new product or email them when there’s an upgrade to purchase? Have you taken a good hard look at what you communicate and how often you communicate it? Is it all BUY, BUY, BUY?

If so, that’s a prescription for buyer fatigue. The reality is that sales are driven by relationships not broadcasted advertisements.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Years ago, when I took over as director of membership development for a professional association I encountered similar outreach attitudes. The only time the association sent a message to a member was when their membership was about to expire. For first year members, the communication path was to send an overwhelmingly large welcome packet (or the “hernia kit” as it was jokingly termed) and little else until their membership expiration notice nine months later. As you can imagine, that did nothing to build the kind of engagement necessary to guide that new member toward renewing for a second year. Does this sound familiar?

When I entered, we assessed the plan but we did more that just retool around specific objectives. We knew what we wanted: renewals. What was missing from the prior plan was what our members actually wanted. They wanted value, they wanted a relationship with the association, they wanted to be recognized as more than a walking wallet.

Take a look at how your company is building relationships with your customers. If your only communicating more ways for customers to buy, then you’re likely not cultivating the long-term relationships necessary to generate more sales to your current base. And this is a base that – if they’re wildly engaged and passionately loyal to your company – are going to spur referrals.

Online Community Roundup: April 3 2009

by on April 3, 2009 in Communities

For all who work with online communities, you should read these two exceptionally insightful blogposts from the past week:

Rachel Happe writes about encouraging respect, acceptance and patience in online communities. One challenge that many community creators and managers face is how much oversight to impose. It’s a delicate balance where you don’t want to squelch activity and yet there are certain “rules of the road” which community members need to adhere to. There’s a lot of room for exploring this topic and Rachel’s post is a great starting point.
Read The Social Organization: Respect, Acceptance, & Patience

Spike Jones at the Brains on Fire Blog has a terrific take on Ellen McGirt’s interview with Chris Hughes in Fast Company. Chris is one of the key figures behind President Obama’s innovative, grass-roots campaign. What I dig about Chris is that he understands that the technology behind online communities is important, but without people and relationships it simply becomes digital nothingness.

Spike highlights this quote from the article:

It doesn’t matter if it’s a company or a campaign; you build around commonality. If it’s real people and real communities, then it’s valuable. Otherwise it’s just playing around online.

Spike goes on to make a few points that every organization should consider: Be thoughtful in approaching social media, have a specific strategy for connecting to your audiences, aim to build deeper relationships that focus on the needs of customers, and be courageous enough to communicate transparently.
Read Brains on Fire Blog: Real People + Real Communities = Commonality

Three Questions On The Future Of Online Communities

by on March 30, 2009 in Communities

Online communities have the potential to bring your customers closer to your company (or constituents closer to your organization if you happen to be a nonprofit). Okay, there’s nothing new in that proposition. Since the web’s infancy, we’ve known about the potential of tearing down geographic barriers and bringing different people together around common causes. But how far have we truly come?

There’s a rather insightful article from CIO dated 2001 that talks about online communities as a way to engage customers so this idea has been around for a while. It’s interesting to see how the case for communities evolved during this decade. For instance, remember when online communities were synonymous with discussion boards? Companies were pursuing stickiness by getting site visitors to interact with other visitors. The assumption was that once a company created such forums, visitors would know what to do and a vibrant community would magically form. And the community would pretty much self-manage itself. Oh, and companies would not need to invest many resources or effort to maintain the community. Did I capture all the assumptions?

We’ve learned much in the past decade about how to most effectively incorporate communities into a company’s online and brand presence. But online communities are still not in the mainstream. I think this could change in the next few years. Not only is the technology improving, but companies are finally beginning to understand that online success means focusing on the social dimension of community.

Here are three questions that come to my mind when thinking about the future of online communities:
1. Will there be widespread adoption among businesses and nonprofit organizations?
2. Will online communities become an integral part of business strategy or continue to serve an ancillary function?
3. Will communities live up to their immense potential or will they serve as mere tools for selling and moving product?

Thoughts? Any other future-focused questions we still need to explore?