Why Permission-based Marketing?

Do you still market to people without their permission? Are you aware of how much you hurt your brand when you do so?

I was reminded this week how many people still don't understand the concept of permission-based marketing. I received an unsolicited email from one of my LinkedIn Connections which was a blatant plug for their company. I instantly disconnected from them.

I also meet with many clients who's idea of marketing is to send emails to their contact databases, where none of the contacts were added to the database using opt-in email marketing approaches. Web etiquette dictates that sending emails to people who haven't asked for them is poor form. In fact, no matter how good your intentions or the quality of information you are emailing, unsolicited emails are SPAM.

It also doesn't matter if you are a public sector organization or charity. The same rules apply. In fact there is only one rule.

Never, ever, send an email to anyone that hasn't given you permission to email to them first.

How can you build your permission-based email lists? Here are just a few suggested approaches:

1. Develop a following. You can do this in many ways. Building your personal and corporate LinkedIn pages must be taken seriously. Blog. Join Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Tweet. Post videos in YouTube. Facebook. All of these approaches will build a community of followers who will naturally develop a curiosity towards your offerings and investigate them on their own. This will also create the community or communities into which you are ready to start building your email lists. And developing a following means creating real value with good content. It is not a simple matter of tweeting what you had for lunch.
2. Build the email list. If developing a following is the art, building the email list is the science. This is typically done through tastefully constructed offers to your followers. A great example might be a subscription to a newsletter. You need to ensure the content quality in the offer is as good or better than what is being offered in your social media offerings. The placement of of the subscriber offer can be placed in the sidebar of a blog or in other content you produce. It is an option the follower may select based on the promise of more good content which they have already become accustomed to consuming by following you.
3. Use an email service provider to maintain your email list. This is critical. It provides the double opt-in mechanism to gain subscribers and allow them to unsubscribe in the future if your content no longer interests them. It is the only viable approach to maintaining and segmenting your lists to ensure you maintain the focus of the various interest groups you will develop over time. It is also critical because it stores the approval for you to send emails to your subscribers.
4. Be Consistent. Once you have built your email list, ensure your content is true to the promise you made to get your followers to share their email with you and join as a subscriber. There is no better way to lose subscribers than to fall short of their expectations with inconsistent content relative to the offering you made at subscription time.

There are many organizations which understand permission-based marketing, but many more who are just plain lousy at it. If they can't SPAM you with emails because you checked "off" that option on their site, they get a telemarketer to call on to you instead. This is self-defeating. Permission-based marketing applies equally to any communication you might have with your client or stakeholder. The tools are available to nurture your following, and subsequently your subscribers, but you have to start now to develop the community.

To those that argue this sounds like it is too long term, I would argue that short term SPAMMING and cold calls generate very little in the way of results. If you compare the results of both approaches over a six month period, the permission-based marketing approach will generate significantly better results in the same time period. And you don't have to take my word for it, many others who write about this topic feel the same way.

I believe strongly that if you are not using permission-based marketing you are destroying your brand. You appear callous, desperate, and not at all customer centric. If you were to research what is being written about your company on the web through social media and rating sites, you would see first hand the damage your unsolicited emails are causing.

I strongly encourage any organization not using permission-based marketing to start today. There is no other viable approach to marketing.

Website Customer Experience Checklist

You've decided a new website is long overdue. You are committed to getting it right this time. What key steps can you take to ensure success?

Many organizations start down the path of building a new website with an abundance of enthusiasm. On website launch day accolades are generously distributed to the marketing company for its design and the development team for its tenacity in stamping out bugs and delivering a usable system.

Six months post launch, the rumblings begin about how we might "do it" differently next time and within a year there is a wholesale movement from front line staff and sometimes the CEO for yet another new website. Sound familiar?

So how can this be avoided? How can we develop websites that are built to last?

If you've been following my blog you know I write mostly on customer experience. So you likely expect me to focus on website design principles to improve the user experience and maybe approaches which ensure your website reflects the brand you are working so hard to build. But that's not the focus of this post.

If you are looking for website experience information there are many good sources. Here are a few (you can download them without providing an email - a bit refreshing for a change):

1. Forrester's website user experience scorecard
2. Forrester's website top 10 scorecard
3. Forrester's website brand review scorecard

So where will I focus? My feeling is that website success is determined before the first wireframe is developed or the first design is initiated. It all starts with a business foundation for your website project. Here is my Top 10 checklist for website development success.

1. Will the website reflect your primary purpose? Corporations tend to struggle with this one less than non-profits / government. Often websites are viewed as large content repositories which talk about "our organization and our offerings". Users to the website are greeted with volumes of content, with little understanding of how they can be engaged meaningfully to aid the organization in achieving its primary purpose. This disconnect often happens because the website is given a lower priority by leadership, not tapped for its true potential, and assigned lower risk transactional functions or objectives.
2. What's the website being built to do? This seems obvious, but when I read the objectives for web development projects they are often very fuzzy and clearly hijacked by the marketing department. An objective should have a measurable outcome (remember SMART?). Will the new website sell more products and services? Recruit more members? Increase customer satisfaction with improved service levels? Reduce operating costs? Increase donations? How much and by when?
3. Will it do your business? If your new website is not an extension of your business into the communities you serve (and communities include paying customers) then you should go back to the drawing board. I have talked about online customer service in other posts, but I think we need to go far beyond customer service. Your website must seamlessly integrate with your back-office and make doing business with you easy. If you collect money, customers should be able to pay online and check outstanding balances online. Product manuals and training should be online and available as video or podcasts where applicable. Online forums, newsletters, and company bloggers are now only table stakes for any website. Customers should be able to do business with you on their time and in their preferred method on your website.
4. Will you address the needs of key segments and communities? Not many organizations have the luxury of dealing with a homogeneous base of stakeholders. What are the key segments with which your new website needs to interact? What are the communities which already exist with which your website and social media strategies will need to interact? What are the needs of those segments and communities? Have you surveyed them to solicit their input and needs? I am often reminded of a Venn diagram I have seen many times. In it, the circle on the left defines "what we provide on our website" and on the right is "what users want on our website". The overlap of the two circles in the middle is tiny. You need to avoid this mistake by asking your users in advance. 
5. Will the site be customer centric? This is my favorite topic. Some day the tried and true tabs across the top (Home, Products, Services, Solutions, About Us) will be replaced with something more like (Your problems, Your needs, Your potential solutions, Customers we have like you, What you might want to do next, How else can we help you?, Want to join our community?). 
6. How will you support mass customization? Mass customization is the future of the web so you might as well get started. In the most advanced form of mass customization the user is able to store a version of your website which they tailored specifically for their own needs through their interaction with it. Automotive companies do this by allowing you to store car configurations on their site. You might have to start with some reasonable goals in this area. What are the dialogues you can offer which are customized to user's needs?
7. Is your team engaged? This is not a project for the marketing department. Include the CEO and ensure you have representation from all parts of the business. They all have amazing insights to share. Identify a role for providing input from your customer segments and communities, but don't abdicate responsibility to them. Your core team must decide what is best for your organization.
8. Have you identified the processes required to support the website? This goes beyond technical support. Who will have ownership of content development of identified sections of the site? What is the expected time budget required? Be realistic. The content on your website must be kept fresh and current - always. In addition, what other business processes (backend systems, marketing communications, etc.) must provide support and work hand-in-glove with the website? Document these processes and identify process owners who are accountable for quality and results.
9. Do you have an integrated social media strategy? And this isn't just a corporate Facebook page. I had lunch with a social media guru a couple of week ago who told me there about 800 social media "channels" out there. How do you navigate them, monitor them, and ensure they work collaboratively with your new website?
10. Have you selected the right platform? I have a strong bias here. I am a Drupal bigot. And it appears other mainstream bloggers are coming around to the same way of thinking. You require a CMS platform which can work in the Cloud, be supported by a large base of global experts, is social media aware, and can scale to meet the needs of ecommerce and high throughput, while supporting advanced search and the semantic web. We have used Drupal to deliver hundreds of client projects.

Considering this Top 10 list will put your website project on a stronger foundation. The focus provided by the checklist will ensure you optimize customer experience on your new website, while achieving your business goals.

Website projects are perhaps one of the most important pillars of implementing your business strategy. I believe we often don't assign the correct importance to our online presence through lack of focus, stingy resource allocation (in terms of budget and key internal resource participation), and by treating the exercise as a marketing project instead of what it really is - a critical business initiative which requires a strong business focus. And just like any other investment you make in your business, your website investment must produce business results.

Customer Experience and the Cloud

Are you using the Cloud to deliver a superior customer experience? This is the year to add it to your todo list.

When I talk about customer experience, inevitably people start rolling their eyes in their heads and hoping I don't plan on talking too long. Usually it's because, like me, they are tired of hearing about the one recent lousy customer experience in their organization which created the fire drill where management and unlimited resources were deployed to get the customer happy again. Like most organizations faced with this situation, they provided hundreds of good customer interactions before this poor, highly visible customer experience sabotaged all of the excellent work.

While the fire drills are mostly avoidable with good business practices, it's not my primary focus when I talk about customer experience. With most organizations we focus on the changes required to close the gap between the customer's current experience and their expectations. For organizations which consistently meet customer expectations across customer touch points, the next goal is exceeding customer expectations. My work usually requires that we evaluate each of our primary customer touch points and re-design the customer interaction.

Before any work can be done in developing new customer-facing processes, I believe an organization must adopt some critical design principles in creating an optimized customer experience:

• Consistent - we need to say the same things, make the same promises, and deliver the same capabilities across all of our communications, websites, customer-facing organizations and front-line staff. Certainly our solution performance has to back our claims.
• Customized - every communication, buying and service interaction needs to respect the unique wants and needs of the specific customer. All customers have preferences with respect to the level of detail they require, expediency, needs discovery, and psychographic tendencies. We may also need to tailor the discussion to match the individual's authority within their organization.
• Socially aware - we need to acknowledge the communities where customers discuss our brands, service levels, solutions, and integrate these discussions into our customer experience strategy. Savvy customers always discover disconnects between the community and any claims you make - you will pay heavily for it.
• Content rich - customers require valuable information in their interactions with you, whether it is detailed business discovery in the buying process, comprehensive use cases and customer testimonials, or extensive online training. This information must be available in different media formats to match the consumption preferences of the customer. YouTube has proven that while the information must be of acceptable quality and professionally delivered, in general audiences will not penalize you for less than perfect production values. In other words, get the information to customers versus waiting to make it perfect. Customers will also accept, in fact encourage, beta tests of new information offerings.
• Permission based - OK. I could have included this in the customized design principle, but so many organizations are screwing this up I have included it as its own design principle.

I don't include design principles such as "visually engaging", "interesting" and other such principles. It goes without saying we need to engage the user. Assuming you can offer an experience which addresses these critical design principles, you will be well on the way to improving the customer experience you offer. Sure, you need to design the processes and conduct change management / training, but in general I see too many organizations start with process design before getting the design principles right.

At some point you might be asking yourself - "Why is Kalvin emphasizing the Cloud in this blog post (and actually almost every other post)?" "Is Kalvin trying to optimize his blog for search terms?" Well, actually not. There is one primary reason why I include the Cloud (and even with a capital "C") when I talk about customer experience...

It's because that's where your customers hang out. (sorry...you knew that was coming)

The majority of solutions we use to enable improved customer experience will either reside in the Cloud or use Cloud technologies to enable communication, whether on a PC, Netbook, Tablet, or mobile phone. And what do we believe will be the emphasis of these Cloud-based solutions over the next couple of years?

• A new online experience - our websites need to move from online brochures to mass customized engines to allow user-driven discovery. Websites will adapt to the needs of the customer. Our direct communications will also become customized to the needs of our customers based on critical customer segmentation information volunteered to us through permission-based marketing approaches.
• CRM becomes CEM - CRM has evolved from contact management, to pipeline management, and perhaps in its latest form, to some form of adversarial sales process where we evaluate and document our strengths and weaknesses in an account plan with a view to closing a particular piece of business. When CRM finally evolves into a collaborative, problem discovery and solution building process directly with the customer, it will become a true Customer Experience Management solution. This will  not likely be achieved by the traditional CRM vendors, but more likely through the addition of bolt-ons which bring the customer into CRM through a collaborative, online front-end. The bolt-ons will live in the Cloud.
• New measures are needed - we need to revisit our measures for customer experience. Of course sales are the ultimate measurable result, but not a reasonable proxy for measuring customer experience. Results are created through day-to-day activities which need to be measured for quantity and quality. What activities will we measure in our new socially enabled world? What is actionable social traffic versus noise? How will we achieve the necessary transparency we require to measure new KPI's? Expect to see an explosion in new analytics  and measurement tools which seek to create transparency in the Cloud.
• Customer 360 on steroids - it will be an exciting time for anybody tasked with implementing the design principle of consistency and attempting to measure it. Regrettably, it is going to be difficult. Pulling together information from Cloud-based solutions is still difficult to achieve unless the service provider has already built an interface you require. Integration of information and processes in the Cloud will require investment.
• Product management in real time - I don't want to appear to be too "far out there", but social media and crowd sourcing present opportunities for real time customer feedback which may be harnessed to gain a deep understanding of high value problems we currently solve, or could solve, by brokering our strengths.

In the coming weeks I plan on discussing these topics in more detail, both to look at the business-ready Cloud computing technologies in play (always with a view to business impact), and the business functions and processes impacted in your organization. The overall focus will always be Customer Experience Mastery - mastering the art of exceeding customer expectations.

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