What Makes People Listen? Relevant Communication

People don’t opt out from relevant communication.

People have a high tolerance for the things we find personally very important: perfect design, look and feel, fonts. Nobody will unsubscribe because your email looks ugly. Not that you shouldn’t make good-looking emails; your brand should be consistent across channels. But is that really the critical thing?

What actually causes an opt-out

1. Irrelevant information. “I don’t want to buy a vacuum cleaner, I already have one and it works great.”
2. Wrong personalisation. “My name is not Johnny. If you haven’t got my name right, what else did you get wrong about me?”
3. Content misaligned with values, needs or ethics. If you don’t know what matters to someone, you can’t speak to them.

How to be relevant

First, know your customers better:

• Gather fresh data: profile information, preferences, interests
• Track engagement: clicks, opens, submits, views
• Listen to social responses and run sentiment analysis
• Understand what troubles people by analysing support cases and complaints

Second, deploy a reliable and integrated marketing automation platform, so those failures become less likely.

Some argue these platforms are too expensive. But how much more expensive is it when customers leave, or start sharing their frustration with friends, family and social media?

Archive: this article dates from an earlier phase of our work, when marketing automation was our main focus. We have kept it online because the thinking still holds, but it is not where our practice sits today.