Invest in customer experience, not in marketing!

Wow, that might be a provocative thought for some marketing and sales executives. Growing your business by spending less on marketing? Well, kind of. It’s just a different perspective on marketing – delivering exceptional customer service and a great customer experience is the new marketing. It keeps existing customers loyal and attracts new customers through referrals. Many studies have shown that:

• It costs many times more to sell to a new customer than to an existing customer
• Word of mouth and referrals are the most effective marketing

There are many success stories of this approach (e.g. Zappos.com), and it seems obvious that the “sharing culture” of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc.) makes the focus on customer experience more crucial than ever. So, how do you create a great customer experience? It’s simple: Set the right expectations and then exceed them with your product and service offering. Or in other words: Under-promise and over-deliver! Of course, the challenge is to identify (and manage) the customer expectations, and then package and deliver a product / service combination that actually exceeds those expectations. Here are some ideas:

How to set and manage customer expectations:

• Better understand customer needs, challenges and behavior
• Evaluate emotional factors (urgency, anxiety, etc.)
• Listen to customers and their comments and expectations (Twitter, Facebook, sales/service calls, surveys, etc.)
• Document your findings! Include “expectations” into you marketing planning and strategy process.
• Communicate the right story. Make sure your marketing/sales communication to customers doesn’t over-promise or set the wrong expectations

How to meet and exceed expectations with your offering:

• Step into the role of a customer and evaluate what they “experience” when doing business with you – think about every touch point. How do they learn about your product? How and where do they buy? How do they pay or get invoiced? How do they get your product/service delivered? How do they use it? How do they get help and support?
• For every important touch-point, you should identify (and set) the customer expectations and then align your services/products to match or exceed those expectations.
• Design a more customer centric process and culture. Encourage the whole organization to “work for the customer”. Give your employees the freedom to “wow” the customer (discount, free shipping, special treatment, etc.)
• Evaluate if you are targeting the right segment (If you offer a high-price, high quality product and you target the “low-price” audience, you won’t be able to exceed their expectations)

As you can imagine, there are endless possibilities of detailed research, human behavior analysis and other scientific methods to optimize customer expectations and experience, however, the goal of this blog is to simplify things. 1. Make your organization aware of it; 2. Focus on customer experience as part of your marketing strategy; 3. Start evaluating the various customer interaction touch-points and better align expectations with your product/service delivery.

Marketing is about asking the right questions

I work with a lot of start ups and small companies and often I get asked for the quick fix: "We just need to find the right blogger", "we just need to get mentioned in NYTimes", "we should be on Facebook", "we just need a Rolodex for referrals to get our first customers". Well, this might work, but it is neither a sustainable nor repeatable strategy to launch and grow a business. Actually, it is like playing the lottery, you might win, but most likely you won’t.

Every business is different and a key part of launching/growing your business is to find what works and develop a scalable model - and it all starts with asking the right questions. When I sit with my clients, they are very appreciative about the questions I ask:

• Audience: Do you really understand your audience? Their needs and behavior? Their daily challenges?

• Value: How do your products/services address those needs and solve the challenges? What value do they provide? (not features!)

• Objectives: What are your business objectives - in numbers? Can you actually measure those? (Note: You can only manage what you measure!)
  

• Strategy: What’s your (go-to-market) marketing strategy? Is it aligned with your business objectives? Is the whole team aligned around this strategy?

• Story: Do you have a compelling story that sells? Why should customers buy your offering versus the competition? What’s your elevator pitch?

• Plan: Do you have a plan in place to execute your strategy? Is it aligned with your business strategy? Does your team know and understand the plan? Is it realistic based on your available resources?

• Success metrics: How to do you measure success? What are the key metrics that drive your business? Do you know them on top of your head?

Some of the questions might look so obvious, but I often experience that they don’t get the right attention and focus. The above questions help executives better understand the needs of their audience, refine their offering, deliver customer value and create a compelling message – and this is what successful marketing is all about.

The business marketing app for iPhone and iPad – Marketissimo!

We are very excited to announce that our new marketing app for iPhone and iPad is available in the Apple iTunes App Store. Marketissimo helps you jumpstart your marketing by asking the right questions and exploring new marketing ideas & strategies. You can also easily share topics and ideas with others via Facebook, Twitter or email. The app will guide you through key questions to improve the effectiveness of your marketing and accelerate the growth of your business:

1. How effective is your marketing strategy?
2. Do you have a compelling value proposition?
3. Does your story sell?
4. What's your social media strategy?
5. Is your website delivering enough sales?
6. Do you fully leverage SEO and Search Marketing?
7. How do you measure success?
8. and more...

For whom is Marketissimo? The marketing app is designed for marketing & sales professionals, executives, Chief Marketing Officers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. Marketissimo is like a personal “marketing coach” in your pocket - it guides you through critical questions to grow your business to the next level.

The Marketissimo app for iPhone & iPad is free and is available in the Apple App Store!

The email marketing success checklist

Emails and newsletters to opt-in audiences are still working. What’s not working as well are "cold" emails to rented or purchased lists, long-winding emails without a clear offer or call to action. Here is a list of things you should check:


Segmentation and targeting is everything
Any communication is only successful if the message is target towards your audience. For different audiences you need different emails, content, offers and call to action. Even within one segment, try A/B split testing: 50% get subject line A and the other 50% get subject line B, etc.

Subject line is key
Large percentage of email marketing success is driven by the subject line. The subject decides if the email gets opened or not, or worse, goes directly into the spam folder:

• Make it short (50 characters or less)
• Create curiosity
• Match with your actual email content and offer

Short and simple
Nobody wants to read long texts or emails (anymore). More and more people scan texts, they don't read. Make it easy and quick to get the essence of your email.

• Short (No scrolling required)
• Use bullets (versus paragraphs of lots of text blocks)
• Use images to get attention or emotional effects
  
• Clean, simple and professional design

An offer they can’t resist with a clear call to action
Probably the second most important driver for success is an attractive offer (what do I get?) targeted to your specific audience and a clear call to action (how do I get it?) in the email.

• Sign up, register, or download
• Buy now, free trial – special offer
• Get a chance to win
• ...
  

Landing pages for a "safe" landing
The goal of a landing page is to “land” people and don’t let them take off without having signed up, registered or purchased something. Here is how:

• Deliver what you have promised in the email
• Don’t distract with other offers, navigation, etc
• Ask the minimum amount of information you need
• Make is easy and obvious (buttons, etc.)
• Simple and clean design of page

Measure success and always be testing
Email marketing has many variables such as, time of day sent, day of the week, subject line, offers, design, etc. If possible, test different subjects lines, offers, layouts, and optimize your email campaigns over time. Here are the key metrics:

• How many emails were delivered (did not bounce back)
• How many were opened (use HTML to track)
• How many clicked-through to the landing page
  
• How many actually "accepted" the offer
• Cost per lead/sales

Accelerating sales and growth through partnerships and channels

Are building partnerships and channels a key strategy for your company to accelerate sales, enter new markets, deliver new products, and drive overall growth?

Startups are understandably focused on proving out their sales and marketing model or internally building technologies and solutions. However, as your company evaluates its growth alternatives, it is important to thoughtfully consider and evaluate the benefit of partnerships and channels sooner than later. Partnerships and channels can provide:

• Faster access (and at lower costs) to customers, new markets, segments, and geographies

• Complementary products and services that help drive your sales

• Needed sales and engineering resources, capital, and expertise

• Differentiation from competitors

• Validation of your business with the investor community

• Strategic funding and downstream potential exit

As you evaluate whether partnerships and channels can help you achieve any of the above goals or other strategic objectives, it’s also important to assess whether your company’s culture supports or can support partnerships? Does your company have the expertise and experience in developing effective partnerships? The CEO and management team may understand the value of partnerships, but is this value embraced throughout the organization? Developing a strategy is just the first step. How to execute a partner strategy, develop effective partnerships and channels, and achieve projected growth – that is the great opportunity.

Do you have your VC pitch ready?

Your pitch to Venture Capital firms should answer one essential question: Why should I give you my money?

I have created VC slide decks that answers this question through the following 11 sub questions. The answer to each question becomes a slide. Here you go:

1. What customer problem do you solve?
2. How does your solution or product solve it?
3. How big is the market for this?
4. Who is competing with you and why are you better?
5. How do you plan to sell your product?
6. How do you make money with this?
7. When do you expect a return?
8. Do you have an experienced management team?
9. What are the key mile stones and when will you reach them?
10. What do you want to do with our money?
11. So, why again should I give you my money?

By answering each question with one slide you should have a nice and short story that you can tell and that VC's will remember. This also means you won't end up with 28 or more slides. Keep it simple, short and compelling.

The goal: Get them interested, get them curious enough to get another meeting.

Market positioning and messaging is key

A few months ago I asked an executive of a startup company what they do. He said: “We are the global leader in software-as-as service for ….bla, bla, bla”. Throughout my career I heard similar statements over and over again. People work lots of hours on fine-tuning a sentence that is pretty much meaningless to the target audience. Your target customers only wants to know:

• Is this for me?

• Can this help me to make my life easier, better, more exciting, etc.

• Does it save or make money, improve quality, etc.

• How does it work?

• Is it worth the money and effort?

There is a great book called Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout and I found one quote in the book that tells it all:

“Positioning is not what you do to the product, it is what you do to the mind of your audience”

So, don’t look at your product, think about your customers and prospects and how they will use it. You just have to “position” a picture that shows your audience that life will be so much different, better, more efficient, etc. when they use your product or service.