Lube the user experience into pipeline marketing

Marketing has always been a tool for creating a sales pipeline. However, on online world it would be foolish to leave it there. In the ecommerce land we have a growing acceptance of pipeline marketing, which looks at every point in the buying chain and uses persona driven marketing actions to lube the user experience through to a purchase.

So what is it? It’s a communication plan that starts then follows the customer through to and often after purchase. The goal is to prompt the next phase of the buying process. Usually this involves three great marketing breakthrough’s of the 21st Century – a managed user experience, the email reminder and the email alert.

The beauty of pipeline marketing is that it provides verifiable, revenue driven, incremental gain from the natural feedback process it generates. This is a numbers game that that simplifies market planning. The above the line marketing throws customers into the sausage factory while the below the line marketing pushes them through the sausage factory.

It also fits the technology environment in which ecommerce exists – this shop is just a stream of code on a bunch of servers. And it fits your website design and build process as your customer service and sales force is an email server working on triggers based on the visitor persona and buying stage of the customer.

In this, part one of three; I’ll talk about how pipeline marketing fits into the buying process by identifying and targeting personas.

When your web design company comes up with the design concept; it’s highly likely they used personas of your customers to address the navigation through the website. Personas are ‘typical’ but imagined customers like a new prospect, a returning prospect, a new customer, or a returning customer.

Personas go into detail of that typical person– age, gender, task orientation, expectations and frustrations and are similar to what you might brief into an advertising agency. These personas have been used to design your website around their likely user paths to help them achieve particular tasks.

This is a persona of the prospect for online share trading:
Age:   30
Gender: Male
Online Experience:  High very heavy internet users – 73% of this group fall into the heavy internet usage category*
Income:  Have high personal incomes ($100k+)
Interests:  They are well versed in the happenings in the business market and veracious users of business media and their media usage reflects this. Love sports, cars etc and anything competitive.
Media consumption:    They are heavy readers of both newspapers and magazines – 45% read 6+ newspapers per week, and 60% read 6 or more magazines. They are nil-light consumers of TV and Radio
Online needs:    Want to get where they want to go quickly. All info upfront, nothing hidden. Self-service
Investment needs:    DIY investors that don’t like advisors and will not take advice.

Pipeline marketing also fits an alien concept to marketing – User Acceptance Testing – which is part of the website build process. UAT tests use cases or tasks created around the persona to discover whether the website has been built to do what it was envisaged. These personas identify who is on what page, why and where they are likely to go next.

An example is a sign up process. A use case walks the user through the task to see whether sign up can be achieved. However, UAT only addresses the interface and not the psychological inertia within the process. This is part of a larger buying process.

The persona works right through the purchase decision and the first visit to your website is likely to be in the first three stages identified above. So with the right carrot your pipeline marketing works on top of these stages to push the user through the process by addressing needs, frustrations and expectations.

In the case of the internet, most commonly the pipeline marketing is a tool for lead generation plus an email layer over the top of the online presence that overcomes psychological friction points by extending the initial user experience from the originating website.  My next post talks about this.

online reputation 101

In New Zealand we have a number of healthy internet communities that act as watchdog on those industries that at times ignore their customers. www.propertytalk.co.nz, www.nzmoneytalk.co.nz and www.sharetrader.co.nz are excellent communities for people to acid test the reputation and behaviour of the companies they deal with on a day to day basis. And more and more they are showing high up on search results of the brand names the communities talk about. So as a business, it’s very important to take notice and ensure your side of the story is heard.

Managing your online reputation is a lesson in long term public relations crossed with a mix of customer service added with a heavy spray of brand management. It’s easy to see why you could get it wrong. But there are simple rules for a business to follow in a area fraught with danger.

Rule number one: Be honest about who you are – in other words no astroturfing. This means identifying yourself if you choose to participate in the communities.  Don’t pretend to be someone advocating a business if you are part of that business. You’ll will be found out very quickly and online, this is a dishonesty crime doing your brand more damage than good. This thread here is a good example www.nzmoneytalk.co.nz/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1198. Way to go! Good bulldozer plant.

Second rule, be honest about who you. Yup it’s rule number 1 but this time it means being your brand. So if your brand promises luxury and service then that is your remit for answering those difficult questions. If anyone asks why they can’t have a cheaper version go back to the “because we’re not cheap, we’re luxury”. In other words don’t be everything to all people. Be who you are.

Rule number 3: Get someone who can do something to be your voice. I manage our reputation online. It was necessary, we were getting slammed. When I started putting our voice online I did it on sharetrader.co.nz. This was the most influential community for our type of customers and had the biggest critics.

So I went on there and answered the questions and went through some pain but where we could respond we did. Where we couldn’t we were honest and explained our position. It was so successful the thread got kicked off, it was too popular and we weren’t paying the site owner.   And here is what happened www.sharetrader.co.nz/showthread.php?t=5559.

By participating and talking and being honest about what we could and couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t do we created advocates. These advocates participate elsewhere and when you have advocates your online reputation grows. We get criticism and it is usually justified. But the most important thing is giving an avenue for your customers to talk to someone who can do something, someone senior who can make decisions. Respond where you can, be honest when you don’t agree and suddenly you have an honest relationship with your customers. And with that comes a good online reputation.

Rule number 4: Protect your customers privacy. Read our thread on www.sharetrader.co.nz and you will see customer specific gripes, enquiries, compliments. When you reply, do it with the same respect for their privacy you would have through your other channels – stick to one-to-one. Always acknowledge the issue online and always say you’ll investigate (and then you’d better do something very promptly or the gripe will keep appearing). But never chat online about their situation because if you do, you’ve breached trust. And you have done so in front of the whole world.

Rule five: this isn’t an advertising campaign. You are in it for the long haul. Yes, the bulldozer plant also breaks rule number 5. What happens if the campaign ends and they want to keep talking to you? What if the bulldozer plant ends? For example have they answered the last comment there yet? Or is the reply still going through Risk and Legal. Nope, the campaign is over.

So thems the rules. It’s hard to do well. So why do it?

Apart from a loyal customer base, valuable first hand feedback and adding to your brand? Read this http://forum.nzmoneytalk.co.nz/viewtopic.php?t=347&sid=1cda4212b1182b3d90ff00ed762fff93.

Unprompted, unscripted. That is a good online reputation.