[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/07\/13\/customer-experience-engagement-commerce\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/07\/13\/customer-experience-engagement-commerce\/","headline":"How do we stop customers going dark?","name":"How do we stop customers going dark?","description":"A recent study by the AIMA group shows that 69 percent of consumers are \"delisting\" from marketing communications. ","datePublished":"2015-07-13","dateModified":"2021-12-28","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/charles-nicholls\/#Person","name":"Charles Nicholls","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/charles-nicholls\/","identifier":99,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/e962b2685ccf7f3497c48b9329a3bfdee6bc0d63be5d00eca44592ceaed79938?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/e962b2685ccf7f3497c48b9329a3bfdee6bc0d63be5d00eca44592ceaed79938?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Future of Commerce","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","width":172,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/dark-moon.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/dark-moon.jpg","height":1096,"width":2000},"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/07\/13\/customer-experience-engagement-commerce\/","about":["Consent data management",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/sales\/crm\/","name":"CRM","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_relationship_management","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q485643"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/customer-experience\/customer-data\/","name":"Customer Data","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_data","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q56278300"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/marketing\/customer-engagement-marketing\/","name":"Customer Engagement","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Customer_engagement","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q5196451"]},"Customer profiles: Customer Identity + Access Management (CIAM) for B2B and B2C",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/cdp-customer-data-platform-solution\/data-privacy\/","name":"Data Privacy: Laws, Consumer Expectations","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Consumer_privacy"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/marketing\/","name":"Marketing","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marketing","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q39809"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/marketing\/marketing-general\/","name":"Marketing","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marketing","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q39809"]}],"wordCount":1130,"keywords":["Contextual Marketing","Customer Engagement","Digital Marketing","E-commerce","Personalization and Privacy"],"articleBody":"It seems that marketers have been talking about 1-to-1 marketing for ever. But lots of talk doesn\u2019t necessarily mean lots of action, and there\u2019s little 1-to-1 marketing happening: by contrast there\u2019s lots of bulk marketing, without much thought about the relevance of the right message, or the impact on customers, who are increasingly intolerant of irrelevant marketing.There\u2019s no doubt that marketing has a big problem.A recent study by the AIMA group shows that 69 percent of consumers are “delisting” from marketing communications, while services such as Disconnect.me (now with more than 3 million users) are growing fast. Marketers are (and should be) worried about so many customers going “dark” and disconnecting from their brand.Ironically, marketers are of course consumers themselves, and personally feel of the barrage that marketers inflict on consumers on a daily basis.At a recent conference I did a show of hands amongst the marketing audience, and asked if anyone had unsubscribed or blocked any marketing communications in the last week. No surprise, marketers are \u2018delisting\u2019 themselves just as fast as everyone else.      Your obsession with demand gen is going to suffocate your B2B marketing                We absolutely must stop measuring B2B marketing success in terms of campaign clicks, quarterly reports, and lead volumes alone. The B2B brands who will win are the ones we\u2019ll remember.      The dark side of marketingEmail marketers are acutely aware that their next email could be the one that causes an unsubscribe, where the customer goes dark for good, beyond reach, on the growing list of unsubscribes.Advertising professionals are also aware of the problem, putting in place simple frequency caps when advertisement effectiveness begins to tail off. However in advertising, frequency caps are typically used to manage ROI, not because it impacts the customer experience.For example, retargeted advertising often follows you around the web often for months with marketing that is simply no longer relevant. The longer term effect of this is significant \u2013 the display medium is relegated into irrelevant noise which is automatically ignored, often referred to as “banner blindness.”So why is it that marketers, so aware of the problem both personally and professionally, continue to bombard customers with largely irrelevant marketing? There are three primary reasons.Three reasons marketers are missing the mark when it comes to contextual messaging1. Product centric business modelsMany businesses are fundamentally product-centered, not customer-centric. The way that new products are conceived, built, and promoted is based on achieving internal quarterly sales goals driving a focus on product centred marketing. This leads the marketing team to promote specifically what the company needs to sell, not necessarily what the customer needs or wants to buy. Customer-centric marketing is fundamentally different in that it is focused on customer needs, and solving customer problems, and in doing so drives revenues and margins for the business.2. Bombarding customers is easy, being relevant isn\u2019tMarketing automation tools are at the same time both \u2018too easy\u2019 and “too hard.” The “too easy” part is that it\u2019s too simple to send a marketing barrage out to customers and accept that a 2 percent conversion rate on say email, is good. What about the impact on the 98 percent that didn\u2019t convert? The “too hard” part is that many marketers struggle with getting the campaigns out at the rate that the business demands.Think of any number of major retailers sending five or more emails per week in addition to promoting through different marketing channels at the same time.Simply getting this volume of campaigns out effectively every week is a massive task, which often means that the extra effort required to target messages more precisely gets forgotten. Many marketers feel like they are on a treadmill, doing the \u2018wrong\u2019 thing but while it continues to drive sales it\u2019s hard to stop, because the next campaign is already overdue \u2013 there is hardly time to make sure the messaging is contextual.3. Marketing programs don\u2019t work in a vacuumMost businesses run marketing as a series of semi-independent channels: with separate teams for email, direct response advertising, brand, mobile, in-store, call center and so on. What hope is there for coordination across marketing touchpoints?Yet CMO\u2019s know that marketing has a cumulative impact: Brand advertising will impact responses in other channels. Email impacts calls in the call center and so on. Most marketing case studies look as the positive effects of running coordinated messaging across channels\u2014effectively showing that messages repeated across channels create a multiplier effect.However, in order to really understand these effects, you need also to look to the negative impacts, where in some cases doing more marketing suppresses sales and causes customers to delist. Understanding this means that marketers need to measure cross channel effects in order to understand the true impact they are having on their customers.Measuring the combinatorial effects of different campaigns is much harder, but is critical, because when customers unsubscribe from a brand, they almost always unsubscribe from everything, across all channels.Breaking the cycle: How to keep customers from going darkTo tackle these three problems is pressing for most CMOs, and at the heart is the tricky problem of data.Fundamentally we need to change the way that we think about marketing: Marketing needs to be come experience-based. Experience-based marketing puts the customer first, recognizing that our brand needs to offer a delightful experience\u2014and that the way that we communicate with customers is fundamentally part of the brand experience.In order to achieve this, we have to understand each customer\u2019s current context\u2014what they are engaged with at this moment in time\u2014across channels. Without this data, we cannot ever hope to be relevant, and more and more consumers will delist and go dark.Getting a real time 360-degree view of customers in one place is the start of nailing some of these persistent problems. It means understanding customers all the way from the first touch as an anonymous visitor through to a well-known customer identified with multiple emails, devices, social and cookie identifiers.This gives a solid data foundation for marketing to measure the impact of what works, and critically what doesn\u2019t, causing customers to go dark. It also gives marketers the data required to be relevant.\u00a0Until we tackle the data issue, customers will checkout of our brand communications in increasing numbers.It\u2019s time to start thinking differently about the way we market: putting customers first, to create genuinely engaging and interesting experiences which captivate customer attention and build the brand.  Every digital moment matters.Are you making the most of them?1,000 business leaders dish on how to stand out from the crowd with a great CX. Get the details\u00a0HERE.\u00a0"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"2015","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"07","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/\/07\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"13","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/\/07\/\/13\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"How do we stop customers going dark?","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2015\/07\/13\/customer-experience-engagement-commerce\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]