Aligning your email content to meet your business objectives AND customers’ expectations is a tricky line to walk. Generally speaking the business needs will win the battle, the consequence of which means customers are receiving emails that in no way support their needs as a consumer. The questions should always be asked when designing an email programme – are we serving content to our customers that support this stretch of the customer relationship? Are we satisfying their expectations?
The approach to doing this can be very simple – take every programme in place and undertake a process of content needs analysis: What do we (want to) tell the customer Vs. What the customer expects to hear.
To take a simple example: Post-registration email. What does the customer want to see Vs. What are the business demands? Here are a few examples of how far away expectations can be, resulting in irrelevant content and a bad introduction to the brand:
The Customer: Inspire me Vs. The Business: Aggressive sales message to drive first conversion
The Customer: Know me and know what I like Vs. The Business: Maybe personalise with their name
The Customer: Educate me Vs. The Business: Promote our continual discounts
The Customer: Understand me Vs. The Business: Throw as much generic product at them to entice them in… need that first conversion asap.
The Customer: Make it easy Vs. The Business: Don’t waste valuable email real estate with anything that won’t contribute to that first sale. Give them loads to look at.
You can see how quickly the expectation of the customer takes a back seat to the pressures of a demanding trading team, competitive market place, aggressive sales plan etc. However in spite of these challenges it is fundamentally important to place the customer at the centre of any content strategy when developing an email programme – take assumptions out of the equation and tell them what they expect, or even demand to hear from a welcome message, to weekly newsletter to loyalty or lapsing retention programme.
The customer has to underpin everything now more than ever.
