MAD MARKETING TACTICS™ !: customer feedback

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Mobile Marketing And Xtreme Texting

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Mobile marketing is now the communication medium of choice as well as the advertising medium of choice. It is a given that website must be mobile-friendly and fully mobile conformed. One step beyond those is to have full integration between your website and your customers through their use of smartphones and other mobile devices. Not every one of your client prospects carries a notebook or laptop -- but the vast majority of them wouldn't be caught without a communications device.

The best aspects of these devices:

1) Lightweight and portable;

2) Almost always on hand (I try to remember to get rid of mine before I get into the shower);

3) Rapid [immediate] message (SMS)capability inbound and outbound;

4) Increasing dependency to do banking, make purchases, and facilitate other ordinary lifestyle exchanges via device, and

5) Spontaneity -- impulse donations, consumptions, poll and survey responses are much more easily gotten via smartphone than through email campaigns.

Just imagine these enhanced marketing possibilities for your online or storefront business:

1) The ability to send out sales announcements, surveys or other information of interest in bulk (transmittal time of less than one second!) to your mobile client base;

2) Receive instant feedback from your mobile client base (CEM - improved Customer Experience Management);

3) Having your mobile client base peruse your website at any time, place orders and transact payment to you.

There are a number of different text to SMS services in the market, and a number of different text messaging services (some of which are free, but most of which offer severely limited capabilities), but the most robust and versatile package that we've seen (The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog and The CrowdFunding Incubator Blog) has been offered by Clickatell.

You can give them a spin by either clicking on the image above, or on this little one, immediately below:

Now get mobilized!

Douglas E. Castle

#MadMarketing

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Customer Feedback: Customers As Resources

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Your prospective and existing customers are your company's quiescent assets -- a giant treasure chest of diversified and multidimensional resources just waiting to be tapped into. Customer feedback, especially on a continuous relationship-centered basis, is one of your organization's greatest tools for:

1) Product and service ideas, designs and improvements;

2) Sample testing an advertising or promotional idea before expending a great deal of money committing to it and launching it -- you can always survey your customers to find out which ideas, slogans, formats, logos they would prefer. Every customer has an opinion and a voice, wanting to be invited, heard and taken seriously. customer polls, surveys, questionnaires, contests for "the best..." are generally very well-received by customers;

3) Brilliant new ideas, applications or markets;

4) Fully-integrated collaborative crowdsourcing;

5) Building a proactive, interactive consumer community or forum to integrate customer's commentary into every aspect of your business.

Your customers have experiences, expertise, opinions which they would be delighted to share with you. And to carry it further, recognize and reward or quote the best ideas coming from your consumers. Give them a feeling of active participation, ownership and pride of authorship.

To best use these customer-centric business strategies, you must:

1) have active social media platforms, forums and outlets;

2) have multiple ways for your customers to offer you their feedback on your site -- an open, bilateral line of timely communication in a "CONTACT US" or "HAVE YOU ANY FEEDBACK?" box, button, chat screen or IM helpline;

3) frequently use polls, surveys, questionnaires and other data-gathering or feedback generating sources -- you might wish to look into WuFoo Forms, Survey Monkey, PollDaddy and other tools devised for this purpose;

4) a system of rewards (psychologically if not financially) for customers with wonderful, fresh ideas, or useful input;

5) formulate aggressive, outreach programs to consistently keep your customers engaged and involved.

Viewed from a slightly mercenary Mad Marketing Tactics Blog standpoint, your customers pay you (by purchasing your product or service), and offer you valuable information (feedback) at no cost! Get your tools from searching your favorite engines for "social sharing buttons," "customer feedback and response tools," "survey and poll creators," and "graph and chart generators" to be able to add a powerful visual aspect to the results generated from every customer interface and campaign.

Douglas E. Castle for The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog

#MadMarketing