How Marketing Communications Can Influence Customer Behavior

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How Marketing Communications Can Influence Customer Behavior

Matt Laddin, who recently retired, has written some super blogs. You can find them here:  https://insight29.com/blog/2017/06/26/how-communications-influence-customer-behavior/ He has been a great partner over the years and I miss speaking with him. Iv'e worked with a lot of people in the education sales and marketing arena over the past 20 years and he is one of the sharpest in our niche. What I appreciate most it how he cuts to the chase. Nothing is better than laying things out simply and directly. It's a motto that I have taken up over the years. There is so much communication coming at us from every direction that it's best to keep things short, clear, and on topic- all wrapped up with a good prescritptive call to action. I like to think that K12 Data operates in this manner. We provide the best school and district email marketing lists in the industry and we take pride in how simple it is to work with us. For over a decade we have compiled quality education email lists for our thousands of great customers. If you are looking for super education email lists look to K12 Data. 

From Matt:

"I received an email this morning from Seth Godin’s blog that resonated with me, and raised the issue of how we train our customers to interact with us. It’s a true phenomenon, and raises important points of how we conduct our marketing communications and the effect they have on our businesses. Here’s the gist, and I’m mostly paraphrasing here. The comments that follow are my own opinion and not Seth Godin’s — at least as far as I know!

If we routinely run last minute sales, customers won’t buy in advance because we trained them to wait.

While I do believe that there is truly a place for discounts and sales, like when we need to clear out overstocked inventory, but if we make it an ongoing practice we’re potentially digging a hole for ourselves that we might not be able to get out of.

I was once hired by a company to fix a problem stemming from a routinely sent discount catalog that took up to 80% off the price of their products. No one was buying unless it was from the discount catalog. The fix was simple. Stop doing that.

If we announce things multiple times, getting louder each time, then we’re setting the expectation that customers ignore the initial announcements.

Repeating messages to our marketplace is important, regardless of what that market is, since a majority of our audience does not pay attention to the first communication. You know that’s the case, because we don’t have open rates of 80%, but rather 20%, or when cold prospecting many times less than that. But if we go out 8, 9, 10 times with the same message and same offer, then we’re fostering lethargy, not action. We don’t need to “yell” over and over again at our prospects for them to take action.

And this leads to Seth Godin’s ending statement:

The way you engage with your customers (or anyone for that matter) trains them on what to expect from interactions with you.

As a communicator, your role is to initiate and lead the interaction with prospects. That’s what marketers do, and the type of customers we generate — and in many ways how they behave — is entirely up to us."