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I mainly work for marketing teams that sell subscriptions. Especially for these marketers, it’s important that they initiate just the right amount of customer interactions. There’s a fine line between what’s enough and what’s annoying, with cancellations as a nasty result when that line is crossed.
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If you keep too quiet, on the other hand, you’ll lose chances of cross-selling and get out of touch with what your customers really think of your brand. So we developed this method that helps us cope with the contact pressure we put on our customers.
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To reach this optimal amount of contact instances, you first realize that there are multiple ways to reach out. Which all have their own amount of intrusiveness in the eyes of the receiver. And you should keep this in mind for the use of different channels and – for some companies – names of brands as well.
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1. Type of communication: Service, editorial, commercial and calamity
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Service messages can be sent on a more regular basis before they become irritating for a customer. The same rule goes for editorial content: a daily newsletter is fine. Commercial offers should be communicated with a bit more caution.
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Last but not least, there is a special case called a “calamity message”. When you communicate this kind of message, you better make sure that no other outgoing messages are scheduled. Consider this: When all your servers are crashing, you shouldn’t follow up with an offer the next day.
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2. Customer interaction channels
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Of course, the channel you’re using to get in touch with customers has different levels of intrusiveness as well. A phone call from a call center, for example, will get there sooner than an email. A text message is much more intrusive than direct mail.
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3. Multiple brands
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A lot of companies approach the market for multiple brands. Think about KPN with its daughter company Telfort or publishers that own multiple titles. Keep the number of customer interactions in mind in this case too!
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You can imagine that, when marketing campaigns of multiple brands from the same company aren’t adjusted to each other, they can start cannibalizing each other.
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The solution
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We found that, when figuring out the optimal amount of contact instances, a grading system works best. Every customer (all their brands included) get a virtual basket with a maximum number of points. Let’s say 25 points a month, for example.
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By making a distinction between every type of communication, like described above, and allocating a number of points to that type we can start counting! A service email can be worth 2 points, whereas editorial content is 5, commercial offers are worth 10 points and calamities are 20.
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This amount of points varies per chosen channel. For example, any of the above types of customer interaction takes up more points when communicated through a call center than via email. When your basket of points is full, the target audience should not be contacted anymore that month.
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Interaction priorities
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So the big question (the one that is always being associated with contact pressure) is: Which offer has the priority? What if the basket’s full?
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A couple of things that we should take into account here is the impact on a customer and commercial impact. But sometimes less measurable factors are part of the mix, like brand experience or deals with external partners. Your own marketers should be able to decide which messages get priority status.
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Why it works
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Because of the grading system, discussions about priority start early on. Perfect! Because that means a more thought-through communication mix will begin to take form.
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It’s easy to change the value that we allocate to a certain type of communication after a while. Or to give our basket more capacity (or less!). It comes down to making contact pressure an item on the agenda for customer interaction, to tackle it proactively rather than waiting for a customer to complain about it.
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