5 Common eMarketing Mistakes that Hurt Brick and Mortar Businesses

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and it has turned out to be a real sleeper.  Its an incredible text…what caught me off guard is that its chock-full of fundamental insights on Internet marketing-as a whole.  My biggest take away from the book is something thats been with me for a while but the book reinforces it even more which is that organizations should get back to the basics of putting the customer first.  This holds true whether we’re talking analytics & metrics or any other web marketing related topic.

Needless to say taking this mindset into your run of the mill everyday web interactions can be an eye opener.  There is no shortage of companies polluting the web by not following the #1 rule of online marketing-treat your customers the way they want to be treated; not the way you want to be treated.  I’m not naming offenders or anything like that, so instead what I’ll do is highlight some of the madness that I’ve been cuing in on lately and how these mistakes serve to blunt the effectiveness of the offender.

1. Customer abandonment. This is where a business starts out offering the thing that their customers actually want and then stop mid stream to offer the exact opposite product or service.   Take for instance a company that has done the research and observed that their customers absolutely love pink bracelets…Let’s also say that not only does the company know how crazy their customers are about the bracelets but that they even know which aspects of the bracelets turn their customers on, as well as the actual phrases and language that the customers use when talking about the bracelets.  What do you think the wise company would do?  If you said they’d market to the customers by speaking like their customers, then you’re absolutely correct.  And initially the company does just that and as a result they have a nice happy little circular relationship with their customers where they’re in complete sync with their customers’ intentions.  You got me?

But guess what happens?  Some wise guy or gal in marketing decides that “great just aint great enuff” and gets a bright idea that its time to switch things up.  So all of a sudden they break from the harmony and the marketing person begins marketing the bracelet the way that he thinks makes sense.  To make matters worse once the customers start voting with their feet the marketer makes more adjustments and takes the message even further away from the customer.

2. Spam enabled marketing.  The title pretty much says it all right?  This is when companies take the offline marketing framework known as mass marketing and try to mimic that approach with their online marketing.  So the result is that when you open up your Twitter DM’s or your email client you have more junk messages than you know what to do with.

Image via Wikipedia

So am I saying that web marketers should never market to customers that they don’t know? Of corse not.  To the contrary.  But as web marketers we can at least be relevant in our messaging so that there’s a strong chance that the audience we’re reaching out to is interested in what we’re talking about.  As soon as the marketer crosses the hurdle of relevance they are no longer in the spammer category.  Interestingly, I’ve heard many people say that they if they open up their email inbox and notice an unsolicited email that’s about something that they were actually already thinking about they are actually appreciative to the marketer for sending them something relevant and are much more likely to consider the offer.

3. Its all about me social media.  You’ve seen it before brands that manage to make every single tweet, every blog post, and every thing else online all about them.  In a world of a million messages per minute what do we do when we see companies executing these marketing tactics?  Well that’s just the problem, in order to respond to a marketing message we must first notice it, right?

And just like that kid from grade school who always started their sentences with “well, my so and so is better than yours” we learn to tune these types of messages out.  Marketers…step your game up.  If you find anything online to talk about besides your brand, then…Seriously, Brian Solis puts it best when he says engage or die.  Of course, in order to engage we must first listen.  Sometimes simply listening can be magical and as the saying goes the Lord gave us two ears and one mouth so go figure.  And if you don’t have anything profound or meaningful to say just keep quiet and keep on listening.  If you do it long enough and let the other person know that you are genuinely interested in listening then an amazing thing will begin to take place on its own-you’ll build a relationship.

Before you know it they’ll be asking you for advice on the topic that happens to be your line of expertise.  And just think, before people started coming to you for help you were sorta like that wheel runner (the hamster)-your feet were moving but you weren’t moving an inch.  Now of course in your case you were atop of the soap box ranting on and on about your products, but since no one was listening your conversions simply held constant.

4. One legged marketing. One legged online marketing is what happens when you have a marketer who only uses one aspect of online marketing to push their brand.  You may have seen this person before their always talking about the miracle of SEO or social media or what have you.

But what happens when a challenge arises that requires a different online marketing tactic?  You might of guessed it the brand is dead in the water.  And this is something thats much more pronounced online simply because messages spread so quickly over the Internet.  So let’s say that you manufacture widgets (my favorite product from Econ 101!!) and you are all about that SEO. Well one fine Wednesday afternoon you received a big order from a new customer. Whoopee!!!

But wait…when your customer received the shipment, on Friday morning, it turned out to be something that they didn’t want.  It being Friday and all + a beautiful day outside let’s say that you decide to take that long stroll during lunch and you don’t get back to the office until 3 o clock in the afternoon.  By now you’ve got two voice mails from your customer saying they got the wrong thing (in this example not only are you the marketer, but you’re also the customer service, and shipping all rolled into one cause you’re a small business-hot dawg!) after all day you shipped a defective order to one of your customers.  So you do what any sensible business person would do and you check the shipping log against the orders from Wednesday and notice that there was no error-the customer has obviously made an oversight so problem solved and what do you know…its 4 o clock now.  You’ve got your chance to let the top down and get out of dodge.

So Monday rolls around and you’re back in the office but check this out…as evidenced by that email full of negative feedback on your return policies plus several more voicemail’s that came through in the wee hours of the morning  the customer who sounded a little concerned on Friday is now a highly irate customer.  Being the good person that you are you fix the problem for the customer-free of charge and whew…dodged a bullet on that one didn’t you?

But wait that’s not all…the next week rolls around and you notice that all of that SEO isn’t panning out anymore because your orders have been cut by 40%.  I think you can see where this is going…You do a search on your keywords and notice that you’re still appearing in the search engine results pages but now someone’s tweets about you from the weekend before are showing up and you can see where 10′s and 10′s of other tweeters retweeted that original tweet.  Plus you’re seeing that there is something on Facebook about it and that someone else who had absolutely nothing to do with the situation what so ever decided to blog about poor customer service and decided to make your business the poster child.   Now at this point you are at a pivotal point.  You can engage in some online PR of your own or you can choose to stick to your guns and keep on optimizing your pages.  Unfortunately, more marketers than not actually choose the latter.

5. Flying by the seat of your pants (FBSP) Marketing.  This is when online marketers can’t seem to make up their mind on which online tactics to keep and which ones to scrap.  The result is an inconsistent message and a confusing information scent.

But what’s really to blame here? Or rather what is the real problem…is it that the online marketer keeps changing their approaches or is it something larger?  If you chose “B”, then I’d say you betcha, its worse than them not being able to make up their mind.

The root of the problem is that this marketer does not have an online marketing plan.  This is very serious.  If you don’t have a plan or a strategy how do you even know where you want to go or even if you somehow do manage to make it there-how you know it?   Online marketers who don’t have a marketing plan can wreak havoc on a brand often going through tons of ad dollars, marketing tools, personnel and etc. yet they never achieve anything of substance.

Again, it all goes back to Kaushik’s mantra of truly building a customer-centric organization.  If you find making one or all five of these mistakes, then:

• Remember to take a few steps back and learn what your customers want
• Anything that you’re doing that they don’t want should be done away with
• Continuously  integrate your customers expectations and intentions into your  online marketing efforts.

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