Marketing campaigns and customer perception

In dealing with their customers, companies make ever greater use of technology in ways that are often counterproductive. Email and social networks are tools that allow direct communication, and they must be used properly and in moderation. The information I provide must be of interest to the person who receives it, not sent out in bulk in the hope of a 1% response rate.

In a marketing campaign, which parameters are usually used to measure the response?

The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) usually used in analyzing email campaigns are:

1. Delivery Rate: an indicator of sending performance; it measures whether the information was actually delivered.
2. Open Rate: an indicator of the number of messages that were opened (not very reliable today: since 2021 Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature has automatically downloaded message content even when messages are not opened).
3. Click to open rate: measures the percentage of clicks made in the messages that were opened.
4. Click Rate: a more precise indicator of response; it tracks clicks on links.

Along this descending path we go from delivery percentages close to 100% at point 1 to figures close to 0.5% at point 4.

The question we do not ask ourselves concerns the effect of the email on the 99.5% of people who turned out not to be interested. In the relationship with existing customers, these excessive, mass contacts are a measure not of attention but of indifference toward the specific customer.

Even when contacts are personalized, we often start from assumptions that can undermine our credibility:

1) Customers want an (emotional) relationship with the brand.

False: 77% of those surveyed say they have no relationship with the brands they buy from. Trying to build a relationship with customers through a constant stream of emails or loyalty programs often produces the opposite effect. It is important that the customer be the one to choose whether, and how much, the supplier may send communications, satisfying those who want to be contacted without annoying the others (the majority).

2) The number of interactions increases customer loyalty.

False: there is no correlation between the number of interactions and customer loyalty when contacts are few, while as contacts increase the opposite effect can result. Customers are looking for tools that reduce cognitive overload: quick answers to their requests, easy access to information, less unsolicited information.

(source: Freeman, Spenner and Bird, “Three Myths about What Customers Want,” Harvard Business Review, 2012)

It is generally accepted that personalizing marketing activities (including direct marketing) brings nothing but advantages, both for marketing and for the customer. Yet even personalized contacts based on information not directly provided by customers (web browsing, previous purchases, co-marketing) can have a strongly negative effect on how the campaign is perceived: they can give customers the feeling that their privacy has been violated, leading to distrust of the medium, the message and the company. One study speaks in this regard of “personalization reactance”: a highly personalized email, if the company does not justify why the offer suits the recipient, reduces the willingness to respond, especially when the service is perceived as not very useful (White and colleagues, Marketing Letters, 2008).

A study of young, educated internet users found them rather skeptical of companies’ efforts to personalize content (Kaniewska-Sęba and Pilarczyk, 2014).

The soundest way to make the most of customer contacts is to become a reference point for information the customer cares about, and to communicate on topics the customer has asked for. The customer’s perception of the company is an asset that must be protected, by limiting unsolicited contacts as far as possible and investing in content creation rather than mass campaigns.

Since 2018, with the GDPR, limiting unsolicited contacts is no longer just good practice: promotional communications normally require the consent of the person concerned.

(Alberto Viotto)