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The “old school” marketing: communication saturation and blind steering

How Digital Marketing can improve the customer experience (2/4)

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We saw in the previous article that far from being the majority, successful customer experiences are still rare today. Indeed, many brands still use “old school” marketing. This marketing consists in pushing as many messages as possible to their potential targets, hoping that some of them will take the bait.

This is the outbound marketing. Having always known only this method, some brands persist in this way by buying lists of contacts to entrust them to a telemarketing service provider. These messages are “pushed” without taking into account the interests of the prospect or customer and are often delivered at the wrong time, without consistency with the commercial maturity of the recipient. Undifferentiated and without the possibility of dialogue, this mode of communication breaks with the customer journey. As you can see, this type of strategy offers little added value and can have a negative impact on the customer’s experience with the brand.

Outbound marketing refers to all continuous promotion actions via calls, mail, radio, TV, flyers, spam, telemarketing and traditional advertising. “Buy, beg, or bug their way in.

 

The result: a frustrated customer

The consequence is that today, 80% of French people consider that advertising is invasive; Symantec estimated that 6 billion spam messages are sent per month worldwide. Consumers are fed up and the image of brands abusing outbound marketing is increasingly degraded.

Companies in the fog

On the corporate side, this outbound marketing is often accompanied by a lack of ability to measure results across different initiatives. It is true that we can obtain, with the help of Excel tables, the percentage of clicks from an email sending or the purchases/appointments generated by a telemarketing call campaign.

However, as soon as you need to compare the ROI of the programs between them or reuse these results in the next campaign, the technological means are rarely appropriate: marketing has long been the poor relation on the one hand of publishers, who prefer to devote themselves to CRM or back offices, and on the other hand of the IT departments, which must take care of the back office (billing) and CRM (sales).

The result is that in 2010, 44% of marketing managers had no idea what would result from a 10% increase in their marketing budget! (according to the Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI study).

An environment conducive to change

Yet the context is conducive to a paradigm shift in terms of marketing:

Avalanches of technology
More and more technologies are emerging that allow you to push the boundaries of customer experience, at a low cost. Often based on SaaS (Software as a Service) technology, they are quick to deploy and do not require heavy investment. This lowers the barriers to entry for a number of sectors, allowing new players to break the codes and innovate
Flood of information
The prospect has less and less time to spend with a brand; hence the importance of being relevant “at the first touch
Social Networks
Prospects have massively switched to social networks and “all email” communication is no longer relevant. You have to go and meet your prospects where they are
More and more educated prospects
They are much more informed about brands, and the role of the sales force must adapt. It is no longer possible to just “push a brochure”.
Prospect has power
The result is that we now want to have the power in our relationship with brands: the days when brands imposed their processes are over! It is more and more intolerable not to be able to interact with a brand when we want, where we want, on the medium we want, and even the way (process) we want.
Snowball effect
Some brands are now offering a successful customer experience, and little by little educating prospects to expect a new standard in terms of Customer Experience. Brands that don’t act are increasingly out of step.
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Posted By Sylvain

For the past 20 years, Sylvain has been choosing and assembling the best technologies for his key account clients, to help them create a successful end-to-end customer experience. Surely the Leonard of the team, he is a fan - and expert - of Marketo! He sits next to his clients, drives them forward and makes Marketing Automation projects succeed with his team.