Have you ever wanted to show respect to a person and said something like: “Man, you’re so marketing!”? Exactly, you have not. “Marketing” does not sound proudly. It’s rather associated with hypocrisy, greediness and dupery. When you see an apple with sticker saying: “100% natural vegan gluten free” you think: “pure marketing!”. Aversion towards the discipline is common: Gallup’s research in USA shows that advertising and marketing are one of the least trusted industries.
Time for self-examination! All of us want to build long-lasting relationships with customers, meet their needs and solve their problems. So, why are we so pigheadedly doing things which drive our recipients crazy?
The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing
1. No personalization: Everyone dreams of getting random offers of not needed products. Bulk messages are the internet equivalents of advertising brochures distributed to everyone in the same breath.
2. Mock personalization: it occurs when you know that you need to personalize but you are too lazy to analyse your client’s individual preferences and needs. So you are just sending a bulk message but with the user’s name in the topic to make it feel like personalized offer.
3. Tricks: and making a fool of your client. It concerns contrived e-mail topics or CTA, writing “Re:” or “Fwd:” in topics to suggest a continuation of a previous conversation. It is a certain way for your e-mails to be marked as a spam.
4. Redundancy: can I have more e-mails, please? It reminds an attempt to take the client by force using preponderance. But marketing is not a war- don’t your client as your opponent, which you need to “win” with a secret trick, treat them like a partner who needs your help.
5. Hidden opt-out: If they cannot find it, they won’t unsubscribe! It means more addresses in your database. But you know that that does not work, right?
6. Bare offers: Marketing is about scrupulous and poker-faced forcing offers to your clients. Don’t waste your time on educating, providing values or bonding: they are here only to buy it. Once again-object treatment: customer is a simple object of our actions intended to buy.
7. Isolating emails: Having lots of communication channels at your disposal, it is easy to lose count of what a particular user sees in each of them and if it falls into place- unless we use Marketing Automation tools. Thus, it happens very often that brilliant campaigns are misunderstood or seem intrusive for some receivers.
Social media misdemeanours
8. Pretending: Many companies falls into a trap called “We need to have Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram!”, because everyone does- and then copy a popular solution for a particular media. For example, Facebook loves cats- we want cats! Twitter loves hashtags? So use loads of it! However, the beginning of your social media activity, should be finding a proper platform for your company, a place where you meet with your clients and talk about your business, without dressing ot up as something else.
9. No reaction to feedback: When seeing a negative comment- just panic or delete it. Mind you, there is nothing worse than a conversation with those nasty customers, having only claims and demands!
10. No frequency: Marketers sometimes appreciate social media so much that they engage in every platform, forgetting about regularity in each one. Hence periods of silence suddenly changing in the phase of tweeting every single minute!
Blameful contents
11. Recipient? Abstract! Who is your recipient? Many marketers write their content blindly based on their instinct and imagination. Meanwhile, they can use a tool like Buyer Persona, to create a precise image of the customers.
Creating Buyer Persona is easy with our step-by-step guide. Download free ebook
12. Bullshit. Meaning daydreaming in our materials in order to make a product seem more interesting. It’s a bullshit, whopper, and dupery altogether with well-worn phrases like “A category leader” , “High quality- low price” , “Save money and time”.
13. You’ve got no balls. Once tried works best. That is why, company blogs are strikingly similar to each other, full of run-of-the-mill posts in a similar style.
14. Boredom. Too long texts full of complex sentences. Add some hermetic jargon sauce… and voila! This is education, definitely not pleasure!
15. Outdated content. Your materials are getting old and become out-of-date, that is why they need to be refreshed once in a while. Get through your ebooks and infographics: maybe they need some corrections? Unfortunately, not every post is an evergreen.
The philosophy of marketing
16. You don’t listen. Many marketers do not treat communication as a conversation, but they would rather consider it a monologue, more or less attractive, but not engaging both sides. It results in an inability to interpret signals sent by customers, and what’s more, the reluctance to solutions which make you hear their voice (survey, live chats, forms).
17. Disturbing. Marketing doesn’t need to mean bombarding the clients with messages, no matter what they are doing at the particular moment. Because, there is a difference between attacking a user with our banner, while he is occupied with studying or working and between sending your offer exactly when he is looking for a particular product.
We annoy our customers by not treating them like real persons: when we avoid personalization or use tricks laughing at their intelligence. Having on your disposal such solutions like behavioral segmentation, Buyer Persona, Marketing Automation, you can stop this object treatment and start a conversation with your customers.
This way you help changing stereotypes about marketing. According to Brittany Huber, we are living the consumer society: we buy a lot and we like receiving information about new products. Therefore, marketing can be an important and pleasant part of everyday life, rather than a necessary evil. It is up to you to make sure that your customers feel better.
Which one do you find most annoying? Maybe you have your own candidate to win the title of “Most Hated Marketing Practice”?
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