Tag Archives: Word of mouth

Field Notes Gets Free Prize Inside, Do You?

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If you haven’t read Seth Godin‘s Free Prize Inside I encourage you to run over to Amazon or your favorite bookseller and pick up a copy.  If you have read it, but it’s been 6 or 7 years, find it and read it again.  I was reminded of Seth’s Free Prize Inside this week when I received my package of Field Notes notebooks from Coudal Partners.  Because Field Notes gets the Free Prize Inside mentality.  They give the little something extra – the surprise and delight – that takes an excellent product and makes it one worth talking about.

See for yourself.  All I ordered were the notebooks.

Field Notes

You can see that in addition to the notebooks I also received a rubber band to bind them all together when open, a pencil, a sticker and a year-long calendar.  All waiting for me without me even suspecting it.  It was a true delight when I opened the package. And their inclusion is what has me writing about Field Notes right now.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a gimmick.  This isn’t the toy in the Happy Meal.  Because it doesn’t matter how good the toy in the Happy Meal is, the food still sucks.  With Field Notes the product itself is excellent.  I knew that going in.  I had read plenty of good things online to know that I wouldn’t be disappointed.  And I wasn’t.  But it was the little something extra that says, “Thanks for your business. We hope you come back,”  that makes it special.

So my question to you is, what’s your free prize inside?  What are you doing to surprise and delight your customers?  Can you find something that will take your product from really good to one worth talking about?  What could you add that would make your experience go from satisfactory to memorable?  And how can we avoid the Happy Meal trap?  How can we create something genuine that doesn’t feel rote, that feels like it truly is a surprise, instead of the fruit basket that every client gets?

One thing is for sure, if you can discover your free prize inside you’ll soon find that more people will be talking about you and the “little something extra”  that puts you above the rest.

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Marketers Need to Stop Putting the Cart Before the Horse

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We need to stop.  One of the easiest hacks in marketing is to put the cart before the horse.  And we’re all guilty of it.  I’m guilty of it.  Too often it’s easier to roll out yet another ad campaign or more collateral or another sweepstakes than it is to turn the lens inward and look at what we need to improve our core product.  Why?  Two reasons. One, it’s really freaking hard and two, we’re under pressure to hit short-term numbers.  It needs to change now. Otherwise marketers will continue to be the bane of our existence, hawking half-baked products with disingenuous pitches.  We need to stop putting the cart before the horse and do the hard work.

We need to take responsibility

Marketers, at our worst, leave the hard work to product and operations teams, washing our hands of responsibility for truly creating a product that markets itself.  Why?  Because  we often feel that we aren’t empowered to drive a quality product or improve internal processes like customer service.  I believe that’s more of a cop out than a reality.  It’s easier to feel helpless and say “that’s not my job” than it is to try to be of service across the organization to a department that is struggling to meet the unrealistic promises that you keep churning out to drive more customer acquisition.

It’s time to end that pity party and roll up your sleeves and do the hard work. Now.

We need to see the damage we’re creating

Marketing departments rarely make decisions that wipe out entire product lines or businesses.  That’s a good thing.  But what they do instead is far more subtle and insidious. And, I argue, equally as damaging in the long run.  Like “death by a thousand paper cuts,” marketing departments expand their claims just a bit, push out half-baked products that customers won’t love but won’t complain about, cut a return policy from 90 days to 30 days and make all manner of subtle changes that are better for the organization and worse for the customer.  Why?  Because it’s easy and it’s hard to see the negative impact of each minor change.

It would be better if these marketing decisions did set off nuclear explosions.  You’d be sure not to push that button. Unfortunately a minor annoyance like a paper cut is easily forgotten. And so goes the bit-by-bit march to a place where you’ve put your cart before your horse.

We need to think longer term, and teach our bosses how to do it too

When you push a claim or offer to get a few more heads in the door what you’re saying is that your priority is customer acquisition over customer satisfaction and retention.  You are trading near term dollars for long term relationships, brand equity and word of mouth opportunity.  The short term is the only term and you’re willing to sacrifice all the benefits that you know are accrued to those that take a longer look; but the pressure of now compels you to compromise.  we need to stop.

We need to tell our bosses why we need to stop.

Do the hard work now

We need to stop putting the cart before the horse.  As marketers it’s too easy to do.  We’re good at promotion – we better be anyway – but maybe we’re not good at helping design a better customer experience on the phone.  Well, we need to learn how to do it and be able to help our colleagues if we’re going to thrive and actually contribute to making people’s lives better.  We need to get involved with product decisions and advocate for our customers.  We need to beat back the compromises that are made in the name of timing and incremental pain and budget. We need to rage against mediocrity in our processes and products and fight for the promise that our customers are buying from us when they put up their hard-earned money for our products and services.

It has to start now.  We need to do the hard work. We need to put the promotion off for a quarter while we improve the support section of our web site.  We need to trade the print campaign for the live chat functionality on the web site.  We need to do more learning and listening and less hawking and pitching.

Only then will marketers create true value for the customers they’re trying to reach.  Only then will we put the horse where it belongs.  Up front.

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Customer service is your best marketing

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Every marketer I talk to wants word of mouth.  They want people to talk about them, to “go viral” and have their product be sold by rave reviews from newly minted acolytes who spread the word unceasingly to their friends.  Then I ask them about their customer service.  And I usually get a blank stare.  This, I tell them, is exactly why they won’t get that word of mouth that they’re praying for.

Without great customer service you severely limit the opportunities to build the relationships with your customers that get them on your side.

Sure, you may have a product that wows people out of the gate.  But that will likely be a small percentage of your customers.  The rest will need to be convinced.  The rest will have problems, challenges and questions that need to be answered.  A billing problem that isn’t resolved will leave a bad taste in customer’s mouth – no matter how amazing the product is.

Companies that win realize that customer service is a core asset to the brand and to the product.  They realize it is a marketing opportunity to take a customer problem and turn it into a memorable experience that is worth talking about – spreading to their friends. And they don’t just pay customer service lip service.  They invest in it.  Just like any other marketing effort.  They put real money towards better training, better hiring, better technology – all to improve that valuable customer interaction.

The hardest part of any marketers job is acquiring new customers. It’s the most expensive of any effort.  Retaining customers and delighting them, in contrast, is far less expensive, yet few precious dollars are allocated to making sure that each experience with an existing customer turns them into a fan.

One of my favorite sayings is “If I only had $1,000 to invest in marketing, I’d put $900 towards ensuring great customer service experiences.”

So how much do you value your existing customers? And what are you doing to ensure that they get an experience so memorable and satisfying that they’ll go out and help sell your product for you?

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How Many Trade-Offs Can You Afford?

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Trade offs. We’re asked to evaluate and make trade offs everyday. Particularly when it comes to things that are hard. Building a web site. Creating advertising. Starting a new public relations campaign. Delighting the customer. All hard tasks, all made harder by the constant need to make trade offs. How willing are you to trade quality for cost, or time for cost, or user experience for profit? These questions are posed every day and answered differently by people depending on the situation and the costs of the trade off.

The million dollar question is how many times can you trade things that benefit you over things that benefit the customer before you lose? If you automatically opt someone in to email marketing upon registration you’ve traded a faster list build for the trust of the customer. If you build in aggressive upsell offers in your sales funnel you’ve traded a larger order size over customer goodwill and usability. If you use an auto-attendant on your phones you’re trading cost for customer aggravation. In each one you’re making a bet that the cost savings outweigh the damage you do to your customer relationship.

Trade offs are like playing chicken with your customers. Who will blink first in a race down to the mimimally acceptable transaction?

What a sad and dangerous way to engage with customers. Playing chicken, seeing how much they’ll tolerate before walking away for good is never the way to building a successful, long-term relationship. It’s why you don’t see great companies doing it. You may see profitable companies doing it. But you don’t see companies and brands that people love doing it. Why?  Because people don’t want to invest money and time in to an adversarial relationship; they want a beneficial relationship. One that helps them. No one wants to look over their shoulder constantly to make sure they’re not going to get jumped.

Bigger companies, quasi-monopolies and government can get away with it-simply because we have no alternative. A cable provider can treat you like crap, so can a telco, because switching costs are high and choices are limited. In those environments the trade offs are easy to make.  Trade 200 customer service reps’ salaries by keeping people on hold 5 minutes longer? Easy. Cap Internet bandwidth and add another pricing tier to penalize your most active customers? Easy.

But small companies don’t have the luxury of making those trade offs. Why? Because people can and will go elsewhere. It’s hard to vote with your wallet when you only have one cable provider in your area. It’s a lot easier to vote with your wallet by choosing one of a dozen companies providing the service you need on the Web.

Additionally, small companies don’t have the advertising budget to gain the traction they need with the mass audience. They need strong word of mouth to grow their business. They can’t treat their customers poorly or ding their pool of goodwill repeatedly during the sale process because only bad things can happen:

  • They’ll get one sale but the customer will never return, looking for a better service in the future
  • The customer will abandon the sale process and try someone else
  • The customer will buy but not tell anyone
  • The customer will buy but tell anyone who will listen not to buy
  • The customer will not buy and tell anyone who will listen not to even bother

All of those outcomes can spell death to a small company trying to build a reputation.  The world is too small and too connected today for small companies to make repeated trade offs at the customer’s expense.

In reality trade offs must be made.  There are development limitations and cash limitations that make it impossible to meet every expectation right off the bat.  But this simply makes the trade offs that you do have control of even more important.  Because people will put up with and understand that as a new company you need to make trade offs in some areas.  In others, people aren’t as forgiving.

So if you rely on word of mouth, if you rely on reputation to grow your business, think long and hard the next time you look to trade something for the time, respect, effort or goodwill of the customer.  Because the next trade you make could be the one that causes your customer (and their friends) to walk for good.

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