Some of you will be too young to remember the fax when it was a powerhouse in the industry. Ok, I don’t think it was really ever a powerhouse but it was an option to businesses communicating with their customers before digital marketing.
The fax ticked so many boxes that media planning demands including mass reach and the ability to target b2b customers. As GDPR didn’t exist yet, all company faxes were just available to message in the same way that your own door at home is a free pass for “junk mail” selling you a pizza or announcing that your property is currently in demand. Junk mail is a term embraced by the consumer, and later adopting the term Spam which can be credited to Monty Python.
The fax was a dream marketing solution enabling companies to drive consumer messaging, reaching high volumes, anytime during the working day. It had very low production costs, namely a fax and a phone line, and brands could literally write on a piece of paper and “fax it”.
However, the fax was a sly operator using paper it hadn’t paid for upon arrival. A fax would also reach any company no matter the reader ranging from the CEO, the secretary through to the cleaner or a fax could arrive and be printer jammed or worse still, print and glide into oblivion under a table.
How companies have used the tools available to them over the past decades often dictates how the consumer eventually reacts to them, hence the emergence of Junk and Spam labels.
After we rejected the fax for reasons like technology advancement, sustainability or simply because the fax quickly became that mate in the pub who doesn’t buy a round, marketers moved onto other media channels to grow their brand.
Unfortunately as an industry we projected the spam culture onto email when it arrived, before moving on to asking customers to complete lengthy forms and share personal information.
Take the landing page, years old, reliable and still employed in most marketing campaigns. Landing pages help to collect information, qualify customers and provide information that informs or sells. There are people who love a landing page, but there are customers who prefer to engage with brands differently.
The customer, as the emergence of GDPR and success of social platforms show, prefer to have control over how they engage and converse with brands via their devices. A recent government survey showed that more than 60% of people prefer to communicate via mobile messaging and yet do we employ the best practices here and are we aligned to the customer?
A quick glance at TV shows that consumer behaviour has changed. The once regimented broadcasting at people in designated time slots has quickly become platform subscriptions where the customer now watches what they want when they want to. Customers expect choice and it’s the same with how they engage with companies, simply put “on their terms”.
Conversation is the currency brands aspire to but despite already having existing databases of opted-in customers, mobile messaging is either often overlooked for other, in some cases more expensive channels, or due to bad practices is condemned by cynicism or a sigh by the customer.
To this extent, the mobile messaging industry whilst not new, is largely under valued by many and all too often is employed as a fast and cheap tactic mirroring the past endeavours of the fax and the road email also ended up taking.
It costs so much to acquire customers and their loyalty, so it doesn’t make sense to ignore simple ways to communicate with them and there are tools available like RCS, Whatsapp and Conversation sequencing which offer the ingredients to build customer focussed marketing campaigns.
Mobile messaging doesn’t have to be like The Fax or a poorly executed email campaign and is a massive opportunity for brands to improve their data and communications strategy by allowing the end customer to choose.
Mobile messaging will give your owned media the teeth it’s been dreaming of, and to the rest of the media plan, well it’ll be that colleague who buys ice cream when the heatwave arrives.
コメント