I think my favourite thing about the holidays is all the pretty stuff.
I love the Christmas windows in the department stores, with their inexplicable North Pole penguins. I’m a sucker for a beautifully wrapped fake present under the fake tree in the fake place that is a mall. A choir, a vaguely creepy inflated snowman and a bit of Bing Crosby and you have me. And my credit card, too.
This where I think marketers get into trouble when it isn’t Christmas time. (I will stipulate that you can also get into plenty of trouble when it is Christmas time). We just love the wrapping. We love a fantastic landing page with carousels and pop-up thingies and pixels firing away. Yet we’re not too fussed with the horrific workflow that follows when a customer actually tries to buy something.
We think there’s nothing grander than a beautiful pitch deck, forgetting that the pitch is just an hour or two but setting up the customer, done badly, is like a year-long colonoscopy with no anesthetic.
Marketers think new customers are just fantastic, and worthy of discounts and freebies and love, sweet love; and in that, we forget all about the grizzled survivors of our Customer Abuse Departments. They, too, need presents and egg nog and the assurance that their revenue also matters.
Remember the Soya Candles
Yet the cost of those shiny new customers just keeps going up, doesn’t it? And like all those soya candles, they seem like the right thing to buy in the moment but when you get them home, you realize you actually had a cupboard full of perfectly good candles your friend Andrea guilted you into buying last year. Somewhere in there is a point and that point is that existing customers may have lost their lustre and a button or two, but they still pay their bills and our salaries and are worthy of some attention.
How about that packaging? You spent ages on it. Maybe you entered a competition or two. Well good for you: Cannes has its charms. But did you spend anywhere near as much time on what was inside? I thought not. I’ll take a risk here and suggest that while the packaging fails to decompose in the North Pacific Gyre, what was it in might well be failing to do what you promised in a suburb of St. Louis.
The same is true of all those wretched websites. Did you notice when the agency sent over the wireframes that there was more than one page? Those things beyond the pretty blinky landing page with someone named Dreck standing by on the live chat, those pages are the ones where you make or break the deal.
They are the ones with the content your prospect needs to make the business case for you. They are the ones with the case study, the technical specifications, the pricing and the product shots you couldn’t quite be bothered to look at properly. Beyond them is the dreadful purchase process where you wait to the last minute to reveal that shipping will cost more than the item being shipped, or that your support centre works 9 to 5 but in Slovenia. You get the picture.
As you know, I don’t make resolutions, but I have no problem imposing them on other people, and so my resolution gift to marketers everywhere is to make 2017 the year we pay as much attention to the enduring quality of the gift as we do to the bow we stick on top of it.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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