MarTech Basics #3: How to Talk to Customers
Get that first message out
My dad used to tell this story about succeeding in business.
A young engineer gets his bosses’ attention as he walks down the hall
Engineer: I’ve been working hard for the last few months, and wanted to ask you what your advice for getting promoted is.
Boss: Well one of the most important parts of succeeding is presenting well. How many presentations do you do a day?
Engineer: A day? Maybe one if I have to show something to another engineer, but—
Boss: You don’t give one presentation a day; you’re giving hundreds. Everything from the way you shake a hand to the tone of your emails is a presentation. Master those and you’ll succeed in anything
In the previous two MarTech Basics articles, we covered:
What MarTech is & why it’s useful
How we should think about customer information
In today’s post, we’ll be taking the logical step after learning about your customers—Presenting to your customers!
Why talk to customers?
You might think that you can avoid customer relations disasters by refusing to communicate your customers, but that’s wrong.
Every interactions with your brand—and even ones where customers only think you’re involved—is a presentation to customers.
Email marketing is a presentation. The way you appear in newspaper articles is a presentation. Even customer service is a presentation!
In this post, we’ll cover some of the more common ways to interact with customers. We’ll make sure you’re thoughtfully planning out your next presentation.
How Do I Talk To Customers?
Decide what you want to convey (not say) and what success is
Match the tone with the way that you tell them (timing, channel, tone)
Determine the wording for the final message
Get over your fear and send it out!1
1. What Result Do I Want?
Message Takeaways
What do I mean by “decide what you want to convey (not say)”?
I mean that you should decide what you want your intended audience to take away from the communication. Do you want them to feel inspired? Worried? Informed?
Imagine being the family receiving this death notice from Heller’s Catch-22:
“Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.”
This letter technically conveys the right information.
This letter technically contains the same words that a personal visit from an officer might have.
But the reaction to and feelings a reasonable person would have are extremely different between the letter and the visit.
Decide what you want your audience to take away.
Not choosing what you want your audience to take away is still a choice!
Marketing Metrics
Now that you’ve chosen your desired reaction from the message, choose the corresponding desired result.2
Here’s where MarTech starts to creep in.
You need to pre-define what you’ll be measuring to see if your message did what you wanted it to.3
Leave a comment below with any metrics you’ve seen crash and burn once leadership made them KPIs
***KEY POINT***
Choose metrics that make you money. Tie back everything to strategic goals, even brand identity initiatives.
Always focus on the bottom line.
Companies and employees will optimize to meet whatever targets you set.
Make sure to set good targets!
***KEY POINT***
Make sure your analytics and processing are set up in advance of sending out your messages.
If you’re in a small company, record email opens and clickthroughs so that you can see what resonates with your audience.
For larger companies, pre-define your measurement suite to match your goals.
Whatever you do, make sure it’s measured so that it can be improved.
2. How Do I Get That Theme Across?
The next step in talking to your customer is choosing how to reach them.
Each way that you can reach your customer has an effect on the message received.
Marketers distilled McLuhan’s, the preeminent media theorist of the 20th century, work into the following quote: “The Medium is the Message”.
He means that the way that you tell someone something matters as much as the message itself.4 This idea ties to the concept of customer communication "channels"
Marketing Channels
A “Channel” in marketing or customer communications means the method that you use to reach them.
For example, physical mail to a customer is a channel.
Social media posts are channels.
Direct email is a channel.
Talking to your customers in person is also a channel.
Pick your channel to match the takeaways you chose in step 1. If you want to inform an existing audience of a new product offering that is relevant to what you’ve had previously, directly emailing your existing customers is a great choice.
On the other hand, a social media post is great for audiences who aren’t customers yet but are similar to your existing fans.
I’ll have a future article about how to pick a specific one (or ones), but for now, look into the strategies that incorporate your goals and channels.
See here for an example process.
3. Wording? Copywriting? MarTech?
Determine the wording for the final message. Much like the baggage that the choice of channel brings with its message, wording does the same.
The dictionary definition can differ from the common usage of a word. Consider your message wording from a few different perspectives to confident that it means what you intend.
Additionally, use A/B or Multi-Armed Bandit Testing to make your messages more enticing to your intended customer base! Try out new things and see if they work.5
Paired with your better understanding of customer information from the last post, you should be able to learn about your customers over time from how they respond to communications as well.
Keep track of the measurements and analytics that you’ve already decided are important. We’ll need to use those to determine if our communications are successful.
4. You’re Ready!
It’s easy to overthink your first communications.
Whether you’re trying out a new strategy within an enterprise marketing department or drafting your first email for your new company, don’t get stuck.
There are (often forgotten) costs for letting a good customer interaction opportunity pass you by.
You’ll always have reasons not to do something.
Don’t let analysis paralysis keep you from cultivating your customer relationships!
Send that email! Post that ad! Release that new white paper!
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If you know anyone who could benefit from this information, feel free to send them a link to the article.
No one sends 500 bad messages in a row. You’ll naturally learn what your audience likes. Don’t get caught in analysis paralysis!
Make sure this corresponds to something that will eventually mode the needle of your business. Impressions do not pay the bills—conversions do.
It’s really easy to call anything a success or failure depending on your mood if you don’t define things in advance. I’ve had article's with way more views than I had originally expected on the first day, adjusted my expectations, and still been disappointed when they ended up having more than my original hopes.
For more detail, I’d recommend reading McLuhan’s book where he goes in depth. A specific example of what he means for customer communications could be something like this: An Instagram ad can technically have the same text information that an email or physical letter would, but a marketer for a funeral home company would be making a serious mistake by using a social media channel to share information about their services to the bereaved rather than something with more seriousness and consideration like a letter.
I’ll be going into more depth regarding testing strategies and data collection in the future