Manhattan Marketing Maven

Building Brand Relationships

I have more relationships that I can handle.  I do a so-so job, managingup, down and sideways at the office.  I do a little better with my gorgeouswife, great kid and lovelorn dog.  I struggle to manage relationships with dog-walkers,doormen, dry cleaners, tech guys, postmen, next door neighbors, visiting cousins, finance guys, college pals and professional peers.  I am maxxed out. 

I really don’t have room for relationships with my fabric softener, myshoes, my dishwasher, my news agent, HBO, The Mets, each of the 65magazines I regularly read, my iPhone, Verizon, my toothpaste or my TV set.  And even if I did, I am not sure I’d do any better relating to them. 

I guess I should be thrilled that hundreds of corporations have decidedto take this burden off my shoulders by investing in Facebook pages, Twitter Feeds, Wikipedia entries, e-mails, text alerts, loyalty cards and CRM programs. I am flattered that   somebody out there is trying to keep up with me, keep track of me and keep selling me. 

The problem is I’m an odd duck.  So are most people.  We don’t really dowhat we say we do.  We can be distracted and rerouted by deals and offers.  Wechange our minds easily and frequently.  We take advice from strangers at cocktail parties.  We can be sidetracked by slick design. And for large categories of goods and services just don’t care.

When all the hype, tech talk, bells and whistles are stripped away, CRM rests on threefundamental direct marketing principles.   

Birds of a Feather flock together.  If you can find the demographic, psychographic lifestyle or workflow patterns that define your most valuable or most frequent customers – you can find them easily and serve them better. 

RFM Rules. If somebody takes an action, it’s easier to get them to doit again.  The sooner; the better.  And if you watch how much they spendyou’ll get a feel for how much they could be worth to you as a customer.It’s all about recency, frequency and monetary value. 

80/20 is Real.  20% of your customers yield 80% of your volume.  Ideallyif you can identify the 20%, you can communicate with them much morecheaply and thereby maintain volume while increasing margin.   

After all this, when a marketer gets it right it’s a beautiful thing.  When they blow it, it’s a colossal waste of money. Allow me to site a few examples from my relationship-rich life.  They are not statistically significant or projectible.  But I have a hunch they reflect the state of the CRM art. 

Norm Thompson: Fifteen years ago I saw an ad in The Wall Street Journalthat read “I make the world’s most comfortable socks.  If you doubt me, sendme your card and I’ll send you a free pair”.  Being younger, poorer andmuch more gullible (I thought there was a real guy named Norm in Oregon).  Idid it.  So did ‘Norm’.   ‘Norm’ sends me a flyer about my socks twice a year.  And like a lab rat I buy 3 pairs twice each year. Do the math.  For the wholesale cost of a pair of socks and thirty 50-cent mailers Norm has built me into an annuity with a present lifetime value of $570 and a future value worth at least $38/year.  It’s an ROI you or I would kill for. 

American Airlines: I am a mile whore.  But American seems to know whenand where I fly even though they’ve never asked me a ton of nosey questions.They post my new points quickly and offer me deals on the routes I fly.They upgrade me much faster than their competitors and generally make mefeel like a big shot.  On most flights I get automatic upgrades oftenpresented with handshakes from smiling gate agents.  I’ve repaid theirlargess with frequent use, several incremental vacation packagepurchases, light mileage redemption and positive word-of-mouth. And I'm not so worried about their bankruptcy filing.  

Amazon.com:  The home of the original predictive filter bedevils me.I purchase an average of 40 printed books each year using that magical, demonic ‘1 click buy’ feature.  I haven’t grasped the Kindle yet. But they aren’t very grateful.  They never write or call.   Even the stodgy old BOMC celebrates my loyalty better. 

Brooks Brothers: I have worn Brooks Brothers Oxford cloth buttoned-downshirts since I was eleven.  I used to buy them with money from my paper route.  Since they’ve gone cyber, I have benefited from some great discounts.  But, I can’t tell if they’ve sorted me into a “value buyer” category or if it’s just a coincidence that I only get discount catalogues and discount emails. Yet, they’ve never zero-ed in on what I buy, referred to my purchase history or offered me a logical cross-sell. 

Hertz:  I’ve been a Gold Card holder for twenty years. I still get a kickseeing my name on those digital boards and by passing the counter filledwith tourists and losers.  Immediately getting in the car and drivingaway makes me feel important and very savvy.  But what’s up with their pointsdeal?  They offer me all kinds of irrelevant coupons.  If they’d look atmy transaction history and my address, they’d know how lame the offers are!  Is it still a relationship, when one side no longer pays attention?   

Ultimately building relationships with customers is about paying attention.  The technology facilitatescollecting and analyzing data about your customers.  But the game is wonor lost in using the data at the right time with the right customers. Ideally CRM is like a friendship.  With each exchange and each interaction theparties learn more about each other.  Each gently adjusts for the nextencounter and generally feels good about the whole thing.  Aim your CRM, eCRM and social CRM programs to achieve this. 

 

Experience is Everything

Every so often you have an encounter with a brand that reminds you how little marketers think about customer touch points and how difficult it is to control and shape the customer experience. 

In an era where each and every customer touch can poison a relationship and where any customer can instantly become a viral critic, its surprising how badly brands are prepared to deal with everyday issues. 

Consider two recent examples. 

I go to the Citi ATM and the machine dispenses forty dollars less than I asked for. I validate the underage with the branch manager, who can’t or won’t do anything about it. She puts me on the phone, after an extended wait ( evidently there are no internal priority queues) with CSRs in Guatemala and India both of whom offer no resolution and piss me off. When the issue doesn’t self correct in 24 hours as they promised, the online form won’t take and symbols, like a dollar sign or the ampersand for my email address, and the 800 number is continually busy. No wonder we all hate banks! 

Similarly I get an e-mail announcing that I canceled by New York Times subscription, even though I didn’t. The special number goes unanswered because of high volume, the main 800 subscription number doesn’t get answered, the subscription website takes 12 minutes to load and render and a reply to the email sender bounces. Do you think they’re telling me something about our relationship by this dramatic inattention? Is it a wonder that newspapers are dying? 

These negative experiences are random. Neither brand seems to have any understanding of my purchase history, my status, my long term brand loyalty, my potential as a brand advocate or detractor or my relative profitability or lifetime value sufficient to save me from their systems.  All the platinum cards, special clubs and other marketing blather turn to dust, when you want something simple done and your brand partner can’t or won’t deliver. 

Very few brands think through and map the range of customers’ interactions with the brand or anticipate the result of these interactions on brand awareness, preference, purchase or loyalty. Branding experts talk about the essence and the expression of the brand but very little of their philosophizing gets built into the plumbing of service delivery. All the high falutin’ brand babble doesn’t matter when real customers want real engagement or real services.

Brands need to execute on the brand promise not only in ads but downstream – where transactions take place and where the battle for brand purchase and loyalty is joined. It starts with an attitude. Either you are a brand that understands me, helps me, meets me where I need things or you are not. This can’t be faked or masked by fun Facebook promotions or shortened URLs on Twitter. 

Marketers need to assert quality control over all touch points and anticipate the likely service needs and emotional results of day-to-day business. Infusing the delivery system and the customer service system with a genuine brand ethos will pay off much faster and much better than accumulating thousands of online friends or measuring gross viral impressions

 

Stop the Fan Frenzy!

Many clients are obsessed with attracting more and more Facebook fans. And even clients with modest goals still want to clobber their competitors by amassing more fans. Yet in terms of relationship building and even in terms of reach and frequency the fan frenzy is a total fake out. 

Some “brands” naturally attract large followings. Facebook itself has 52 million. Musical artists like Eminem and Rhianna are at the 45 million plateau with Gaga hot on their heeds with 43 million and Bieber not too far behind with 35 million. Even dead Michael Jackson has 40 million Facebook fans! Coke, arguably the best-known consumer brand on the planet, leads all brands with 34 million. But does it make any sense for brands to spent time and treasure chasing these leaders? 

The short answer is … no!  

Here’s why: 

Fans aren’t a measurement of anything but a random click. Most people hit the “like” button in a moment of enthusiasm but never return. A majority found your page because you were giving something away for free. Most people sign up looking for deals and offers. Most nevernotice the tabs you’ve built out. 

You don’t know who they are. Fans are mostly anonymous. Within the fan base are brand loyalists and advocates, customers, prospects, passing coupon whores, people with questions, random visitors, occasional buyers, haters, employees, stock holders, journalists and 7-year old kids. Even if you are deploying the early stage social CRM tools, its hard to figure out who your fans are, what they want or how best to engage them. For most of us it’s an iterative game of trial-and-error. 

Most fans don’t interact with the page or the brand. On average 30% or less are actively engaged – entering the page, commenting, liking content, posting or responding – each month. What looks like a million fans are really 300,000 actives. 

Not all fans see your brand’s posts. Facebook filters what fans see using the EdgeRank algorithm. On average 9% or less of a brand’s fan base sees whatever you are posting. Now you’ve gone from a million to 300,000 to 27,000; a really steep fall off.  Fans are not a proxy for either impressions (reach) or frequency (post viewings) because both are significantly degraded by the operating mechanism built-into the Facebook platform. It's more important to get your message through to fewer people than to have a big number that never hears from you.

So what’s a marketer do to? 

1. Love the fans you’ve got.
2. Focus on crafting and benchmarking messages that provoke interaction
3. Measure engagement rather than gross fan numbers
4. Shape and feed an on-going conversation on customer terms
5. Resist the impulse to randomly give more stuff away.

 

Why We Must Encourage Opt-Outs

New kinds of data collection and analysis about consumers’ online activities will dramatically increase the productivity of the Web and social media as brand communication channels. But marketers need an open attitude toward privacy plus widely available and easy-to-use mechanisms for opting out.  

Ownership of your online behavior is a fundamental human right. So is the option not to be tracked and not to play with brands. The only debate about the Federal Trade Commission’s “Do Not track” policy should be about the terms and conditions for implementation. 

The marketing reality is that effective opt-out tools, full disclosure and avenues to avoid tracking, yield better, more responsive databases filled with consumers who are open and interested in messages from brands. That’s why marketers must support neutral third party solutions like the Open Data Partnership or concepts offered by the IAB or the DMA.

We must set forward industry standards and best practices for protecting individual rights and privacy. And we better move quickly before the administrators at the FTC lay down arbitrary regulations or before a gaggle of ham-fisted showboating politicians impose a set of draconian rules that kill the Golden Goose. 

The ability to create highly targeted anonymous target lists is growing exponentially. The ability to zero in on individuals with both an expressed interest in a product or category and a high propensity to respond or buy is within our grasp. Traditional data aggregators and processors are being joined by online tracking firms with the ability to build rich, detailed psycho-demographic and behavioral profiles that will give marketers a whole new magnitude of targeting precision. Media efficiencies and ROI beyond anything we’ve seen before are on the horizon. 

These new capabilities will scare the beJesus out of many people. But frankly the more opt-outs we provoke, the cleaner and more productive these lists will be. So our near-term mission needs to be to create easy, well-marked ways out, develop visual cues that alert consumers about tracking and scrupulously respect the stated preferences of our customers and prospects. 

 

5 Ways to Make A Better Analytics Presentation

Analytics are the new black. Everyone is scrambling to count, measure, monitor and calculate what’s going on in the hope of understanding why. The universal goal is to create learning mechanisms that make us smarter and smarter as we move forward. 

But collecting the numbers and making sense of them are two different things. Many of us are like economists. We can tell you what happed but we are stymied in showing meaning correlations or in assigning direct causality. 

A few years ago at open school night my daughter’s teacher said she was teaching the kids to make “numbers sentences.” I had no idea what she was talking about and, like my parents, shrugged and chalked it up to some variety of “the new math.” But in some ways this notion is instructive today because it seems to be telling us to tell stories rooted in the numbers rather than flood our clients with eye charts full of stats and fanciful dashboards.

Josh Messinger says “ its easy to drown in number soup.” Since I confront this daily, allow me to suggest 5 ways to overcome it.

Know your audience. Where they sit determines where they stand and what they want to know. The big guys want the top line. The little guys want to know the details and look at the math. Gear your presentation to where your client sits on the food chain. Anticipate the kind of questions they might be asked and/or the uses they might have for your analysis and play to those pain points. 

Start with the Answer. In creative presentations you have to set things up to set the context and heighten the drama of the reveal. In analytics you need to tell them the answer first. Then show them how you got there. Creative is designed to prompt a reaction to stimulate conversation, debate or collective brainstorming. 

Analytics are designed to be absorbed and operationalized. Analytics point the way to validating or adjusting the strategy or the tactics. Most clients want to understand the dynamics of their business and what to do about it. They grant you baseline functional credibility unless you screw something up. If the answer is credible, they don’t really care how you got it. 

Tell a Story. The numbers are abstract representations of ideas and strategies that the brand brings to the marketplace. They evidence consumer reaction to marketing tactics, media channels and well-crafted messages. As you frame the analysis spin a tale of where you were, what you hypothesized, what you did and what happened. Skip the niggly details to bring clients right into the moment. Flesh out the data by explaining what happened and point to clues about why. 

Factor in Context. The numbers are affected by the direct action of the campaign but also by ambient activities in the marketplace. Seasonality, weather, economic attitudes, taxes and many other online and offline variables influence results in ways sometimes are clear and sometimes are not-so-clear. Place the story not only in the brand context but in terms of customers’ attitudes and behaviors to give the story a realistic texture.

Go Softly. In many cases there is no clear, black-letter, hardcore connection to prove something worked.  There are metrics that point to overall campaign effectiveness ( e.g. ROI, cost-per-sale) and there are metrics that assess media efficiency (e.g. cost-per-click) but there’s plenty of grey area that often can’t be mathematically connected. A lot of the process is like a mystery where its always better to enroll clients as fellow detectives rather than as judge and jury.

Social Media Meets CRM

Social CRM or the use of social media combined with traditional CRM campaigns and software potentially gives marketers the ability to move faster, scale quicker and breakthrough long-standing internal silos.  

In theory the real-time nature of social media conversations add another dimension and another marketing challenge to the prospect of building and sustaining meaningful customer relationships. “Social CRM,” it is claimed, “enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions… It is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” 

Social CRM is a way for companies to regain entry to on-going conversations about them. Customers “discovered that they can enjoy a more accurate, timely and relevant customer experience without the organizations disrupting the flow of influence.” Traditional CRM programs don’t get it, are brand rather than customer-centric, can’t move fast enough to counter a hit or a groundswell on Twitter and don’t have the social cred to mix it up with their own customers. Therefore social CRM gives brands a fighting chance. 

Driving this idea forward is a new study from Altimeter titled “The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management authored by Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang. The 18 cases are plotted on a quadrant matrix with axises for market and technical maturity and speed of adoption. 

Presented as a work-in-progress, the use cases and attending rhetoric are catalysts for crowdsourcing more analysis and more insight from the CRM and marketing community. They also make a considerable nod to thirty CRM vendors many of who are prospective Altimeter clients. 

The majority of the use cases center around the ability to listen, monitor, discern, engage and rapidly respond to movements in the social sphere. The authors cite the 5Ms – monitoring, mapping, management, middleware and measurement as the “foundational processes to provide a framework to filter huge signal-to-noise ratios from blogs, tweets and other social media.” 

There is an unarticulated underlying assumption that the current or evolving set of automated tools can separate the signals from the considerable noise in social media and produce insights or intelligence that moves markets. It’s something the NSA, with all the computing power in the world, aspires to. And it’s far from true. 

The current tool set is based on a bunch of baked-in untested assumptions and algorithms which often require considerable reading of the tea-leaves and spin to create a sharp=edge or meaningful insight. And while marketing, PR and social media gurus of all stripes cite sentiment analysis and keyword mining tools as the latest wonder; they are much less wonderful than advertised. 

The use case scenarios are filled with provocative ideas. Consider these: 

Marketers must identify top influencers, rank top conversations, prioritize top channels, identify velocity of discussion and gauge the tone of topics. Absent common definitions or mathematical formulas for most of these terms sorting, weighting and filtering then judging impact, reach and influence are very difficult to do convincingly. This will be the immediate gating factor for social media analytics and the tools being sold today. Defining terms and creating benchmarks should be top priority for the marketing analytical community. 

Brands must track what’s being said so they can quickly respond. They must constantly monitor sentiment, velocity, discussion and relationships in order to make real-time corrections. Brands have been doing this in one way or another for 50 years. The trick is to understand how to efficiently mine sentiment, assess velocity, leverage relationships and connect these variables to business results. Nobody really knows where the threshold of ill feelings intersects with sales declines. And nobody really knows how or how long the reservoir of brand affinity and brand loyalty mitigates real missteps or name calling on social networks. 

Social media cues creative development. Armed with real-time information about words, language, tone, environment and intensity, marketers can craft messages targeted to specific social media channels that will penetrate faster and resonate longer or further. 

Events are no longer fixed in time or space. Social media extends the pre-sell run-up and the message runway for any event. It also enhances the experience with real-time reactions and interactions and creates its own after-party and long tail. Social media extends event shelf-life. The Internet makes every event a global experience. Events or segments can be spun out across the Web in real time or persist on YouTube or other sites forever. 

Organizations must identify not only where their key prospects and customers interact but also the key needs that a brand aims to help with. Social media helps discern watering holes and pain points. In theory, customers gather and talk about issues outside the earshot of brands and in terms that rarely mirror marketing speak. Social media threatens to expose who’s talking, where and how to make marketing and sales messages infinitely more effective. “ By participating in the right conversation at the right time, a sale can be intercepted from a competitor’s hand.” Or social media can reveal “the information needed to rank an individual’s level of influence, determine friend or foe status, associate the relationship with the organization and select an appropriate response channel.” This sounds great but requires considerable data collection and processing combined with field level intelligence; a combination few marketers have mastered.

Smart organizations recruit, recognize and reward advocates who provide support. “Advocates also play a role in responding to scenarios where it may be awkward for the organization to address such PR fires.” Social media breeds shills who can be deployed in a crisis and plausibly denied by the company. 

Organizations can no longer afford to design products and services in a vacuum. “Organizations must capitalize on innovation trends that range from product fixes and enhancement requests to feature and solution suggestions.”  Online customer conversations can yield genuine intelligence about products and services that can sped innovation and inform subsequent offerings. By capturing, organizing and prioritizing ideas in the social media realm, “ customers, partners and industry watchers can play a role to expedite requirements gathering, prototyping and demo tests.” What this doesn't say is that the pre-requisite for effectiveness, assuming you can gather and process the data, is an openness on the part of technologists and developers who own product sets and who consistently and notoriously think they know better than their customers. 

There is no question social media will play a role as CRM evolves. Exactly how and with what weight has yet to be worked out. Some of these ideas are the early imaginings of advocates, dreamers and entrepreneurs. Others are solid approaches that will migrate from traditional and offline formats onto the Web and social media. 

In most cases the marketing approach and the customer relationship management concepts are not new. What’s new is the connection to and use of social media in a CRM context. In some cases social media’s contribution to improved CRM is happening now. In most, Altimeter is laying out a future agenda.

Talk to Me

People crave human connection. A new survey of 1052 online customers by ATG concluded “live voice is still the preferred method of communication for most online buyers in most situations.” This validates the long held “high-tech/high-touch” idea that first surfaced in the 70s. 

And its not too far fetched. As things become faster and more complex, the need for help, clarity and real-time answers increases. Customers are tired of phone trees, FAQs, IM and e-mails that are too often ignored. It’s a no-brainer that human intervention helps convert browsers into buyers, especially if they can get questions answered accurately and quickly or have fears allayed by a soothing voice. 

We consistently underestimate the power of the human voice to build connections and credibility. Have you noticed that older people (35+) still make calls while younger people duck any opportunity to speak on the phone by heavily utilizing SMS, IM and even social media?  Maybe things are changing, but there is no substitute for one person talking to another. It’s the oldest and most persuasive form of communication and the human voice, even disembodied, has unique powers that marketers shouldn’t take for granted. 

Lest you think this is just my preference, consider data from Genesys and Greenfield Online that estimates the cost of poor customer service – missed connections and unsatisfied customer interactions – at 83 billion dollars each year.  And the biggest losers are the “usual suspects” cable companies, financial services marketers and consumer products firms who cheap out on live voice interactions in favor of  excruciating phone trees, never-answered e-mails or even Twitter. The absence of human connection breeds brand defection. Interestingly the biggest switchers are customers 27 to 42. 

Immediacy and customer control seems to matter. In the ATG survey, click-to-chat and click-to-call work differently than a simple 800 number. Why? Because the newer technology promises greater customer direction and control and does not yet have the expectation of a complicated phone tree and/or a long wait on-hold. 

Between half and two-thirds of survey respondents sited the need for instant human interaction and ranked voice interaction as one of the top 3 features desired on a web site. Seventy percent said click-to-call would be “very/extremely” useful when making an online purchase. The preference numbers increase as the price of the service, the complexity of the offering or the sensitivity of the information (i.e. social security numbers) escalates. This feels right to me even though ATG is hawking click-to-chat and click-to-call functionality. 

The bottom line: “Broadly speaking consumers prefer a live voice in a majority of situations” because talking to a real person makes customers feel understood, humanizes and speeds up the process. Even in the Twitter era the old saw is true – people buy people and then the transaction begins.

The Fine Art of Complaining

Every so often a favorite brand infuriates you.  That’s when brand loyalty and preference is genuinely put to the test. Saving a customer becomes a matter of swift, compassionate and effective customer service operating against the fading memory of previous good brand experiences. 

Banks are leading culprits. On a good day, banks nibble away at your money. Widely perceived as a necessary evil, these days they are drawing major ire by borrowing large sums from the government and crying poor mouth while simultaneously gouging consumers with a slew of fees and charges. Many banks ratcheted up these bogus fees and changed the due dates and the rules for payments and credit cards in anticipation of new laws outlawing the most egregious abuses. Worst of all the outsourced droids on the phone are neither compassionate nor empowered to solve problems.

This situation has created a new breed of unhappy customers. They now share their angst on social media and bad mouth miscreants online. But while this releases some of the steam, effective complaining is the most effective form of redress. 

Recently my daughter overdrew her account because she didn’t really understand the linkages between her savings account, checking account and her debit card. She was charged $790 in fees. In lieu of rejecting her cash request, $225 in fines was assessed against a $10 overdraft. If you’re getting hot just thinking about these numbers, you now have the picture. 

Enter her mother, the professionally aggrieved Wall Street lawyer, who swiftly complained to the CEO of the offending bank, who, in turn, eliminated the fees and restored equilibrium to my daughter’s financial and emotional universe. 

For those seeking to battle corporate greed and callousness, here are Jane Shahmanesh’s six rules for provoking effective customer service. 

Act Swiftly. Don’t stew. Attack. Don’t give the bureaucracy a chance to loose focus. Don’t be put off by the initial unhelpful contact. 

Go to the Top. Get your message to the top forcefully. Fed-X your letter to the CEO, who often has a special process for resolving customer issues and who has a clear incentive to be a “good guy” publicly. 

Detail the Problem. Document the issue and any interactions you’ve had with underlings. Don’t get excited. Just write down the facts. 

Make a Specific Request. Tell them exactly what you want. In some cases you might need to rationalize why you want the proposed “fix.” In this case, it was straightforward; she wanted the abusive fees canceled out. 

Outline the Consequences. Here’s where you lay out the carrot (you’ll save a loyal and profitable customer) and the stick (we’ll go to the Attorney General and bring a class action suit against you). This doesn’t have to be nasty. Don’t use a threatening tone but convey determination and intensity to support the inference that this problem won’t go away without direct action from the recipient. 

Ask for the Order. Politely but firmly reiterate the “ask” and close the communication.

5 Steps to Avoid One-Night-Stands with Your Brand

It takes a lot to create brand awareness, preference and purchase and the goodwill that is created as each individual accepts, internalizes and aligns them with your brand. Yet like lust, it can evaporate quickly or swing into emotional reverse in a second, if the love is unrequited in the course of the initial brand experiences.

 

Consider this real-life example.

 

For months, a successful professional woman is thinking about a new personal computer. She reads everything she can find. She talks to everyone she knows. Interested, but clearly a digital immigrant, she slowly rallies to the idea of an Apple MacBook Pro.

 

She scours the Apple website. She visits the Apple store several times to hover over the potential purchase. She quizzes the associates and gets the feel of the track pad on her fingers. She examines the machine from every angle mentally picturing herself typing purposefully, carrying it to meetings and surfing the Net from bed. She’s emotionally trying the brand on.

 

Slowly and deliberately over several months, she talks herself into the purchase. She knows it’s double the cost of a new PC. She is clearly in touch with her anxiety about learning new moves. Worried that she might not truly be a “Mac person” in her heart of hearts, she discusses the prospective purchase endlessly with her Mac-enabled friends listening closely for support, validation and any signs of doubt..

 

On her 8^th visit to the new Apple Store on West 68^th Street & Broadway, she makes the leap of faith. Encountering the young androgynous salesperson, 30 years her junior, she test drives the MacBook Pro for the last time. Her questions are answered. Her doubts are put to rest. She buys the machine and the $99 Apple Care package. Excited by the prospect of one-on-one training, she schedules her session 48 hours later -- right then and there.

 

Giddy like a teenager she puts the funky bag on her back and struts home feeling like she’s turned over a new leaf and tuned a corner in her computing life. She calls all her friends, excited to report her new purchase and eager to be welcomed into the ranks of the Apple faithful.

 

Fast forward 48 hours. She is awakened early Sunday morning with a call from the Apple Store. They pre-emptively cancel her first training session claiming that the store will be hosting a concert at that exact moment. When asked why they scheduled her in the first place, she gets a non-answer answer. The next opening isn’t for 5 days.  The Apple Store rings off.

 

Our new brand loyalist is pissed off. Feeling heart-broken and betrayed, buyer’s remorse sets in even before she’s unpacked or plugged in her new machine. Her excitement and empowerment turn to dust. She rants to all her friends.

 

The moral of this tale:

 

1. Understand how and why buyers buy.
2. Appreciate the emotional commitment buyers make to your brand
3. Accept the idea that purchase is not the end, but the beginning of a relationship
4. Do everything you can to eliminate disappointments within the first week of purchase
5. Anticipate everything that can go wrong and structure your system to avoid them

Raking in Referrals

Getting customers to refer you is the number one business fantasy. Actually getting customers to refer you is the number one business challenge. Nicole Wicks at ReferNow aims to close the gap.

Referrals are every marketer's wet dream. They are powerful, personal, profitable and dirt cheap. Referral customers come in wanting to buy and eager to engage with your brand. It's your game to lose. And its a lot easier and cheaper than trying to efficiently find, convince and close new customers. If you can just get 15% of your happy customers to tell their friends ... who knows how much goodness can result?

But in real life, referrals require customers and businesses to step outside their comfort zones and act pro-actively;.an impossibly difficult task. Customers have to love you so much that they're willing to put their ego on the line for you. Its a very high bar to jump. Many of us have been teased friends who were astounded that we liked a particular brand or who were disappointed by the reception they got or the actual goods and services after such a big buildup.Nobody wants to be a shill or a salesman and many of us have already developed a complex mental system for sorting and filtering the recommendations of friends, relatives and co-workers to optimize politeness and screen out bad taste or different sensibilities.

For employees asking for a referral is a second close; one that could possibly undo the money sale that just transpired. Nobody dares to appear "pushy"and many salespeople feel that customers need to bask in the glow of a purchase and maybe even actually use the product before you hit them up for a referral.

So while it seems like a logical thing to do; it rarely gets done. Enter ReferNow.com a platform for small and medium sized businesses eager to capitalize on happy customers for either  referrals or repeat business.

Based on "the psychology of people" and "old school good manners" this site offers businesses a tool -- basically a software and reporting set-up -- for driving referrals and repeat business for $148/month by making it "as simple as possible for our customers and their customers,"  Nicole claims.

It works just the way you might imagine. The business solicits an e-mail address from a happy customer. Then using the platform to track and report things -- you send the happy customer an e-mail containing an offer that he/she sends to friends. When the friends respond they are directed to a hosted landing page and -- bingo -- a unique code is triggered. Both the new customer and the referring customer get points which they can redeem for stuff, presumably good stuff and stuff they want. Each participating business determines what the stuff is though Nicole advises them to offer something unique or a little extra by saying, "a referral customer is a free customer, so don't be stingy."

So far in the quest for referrals, they've learned:

• The price of referrals is a function of industry and is related to the buying cycles
• Cash is everyone's favorite incentive. A $25 Gift card = cash.
• Electronics -- as incentives -- are yesterday
• Customers like locally-based rewards

Working with 100 plus clients, the site, in its start-up stage,offers platform access,concepting and consulting. The cost is low because ReferNow aims to be the little guy's simple CRM tool. The platform can handle 150,000 unique users so they're aiming high.  Reports are exportable to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.