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Archives for August 2014

Using the Psychology of Consumer Behavior to Increase Marketing ROI

buy nowThe psychology of consumer behavior is one of my favorite subjects, so I was thrilled to stumble on an infographic from Help Scout (shown at the end of this article), which shares 10 ways to convert more customers using psychology.

Consumers are human beings, and human beings are innately influenced by their emotions and their psychological makeups. The psychology and philosophy of branding, marketing, needs, and actions are intrinsically linked. Ignore consumer psychology, and your results will be limited.

Take a look at the infographic below to see some amazing statistics from actual research studies as well as tips to help you increase the returns on your marketing investments by recognizing, adapting to, and addressing the psychology of your target consumers.

Some of the highlights include the following findings:

  • Adding a minimum to a call to action can significantly increase conversions.
  • Transparency matters, and admitting mistakes (even if your company isn’t at fault) can improve the perceived trustworthiness of your brand in the minds of consumers far more than pointing the finger at others does.
  • Without follow-up, there is a significant chance that consumers will ignore your messages.
  • Labeling consumers and making them feel like they’re part of a group (or the “enemy” of another group) will improve results.
  • Even very small surprises and rewards can have a positive effect on motivating a consumer to take action.
  • Consumers are more likely to have a strong relationship with a brand if they believe that the company shares similar values to their own.

Each of these findings shouldn’t be surprising, but marketers often forget consumer psychology and replace it with clever copy and trendy imagery. At the core of every marketing campaign that bears your brand’s name should be the psychology or your target consumer.

Why aren’t you getting the ROI you need from your marketing programs? Compare your outputs to your target audience’s psychological makeup. Do they match?

All purchase decisions have some element of psychological influence. Whether that influence happens when a consumer sees an ad or when that consumer is standing in the aisle of a store, it almost always happens. Don’t ignore it or undervalue it.

The world changes but human psychology keeps going. Don’t try to make your consumers adapt their psychologies to your brand. It won’t work. Instead, study them and develop buyer personas, complete with demographic, behavioral, and psychographic analyses. That’s how you use the psychology of consumer behavior to increase marketing ROI.

convert-customers-infographic

Image: Deb Collins

The Importance of Upsell Relevance for Brand Development

euros dollar growthWant to make a customer angry? Offer them an upsell that is unrelated to their original purchase.

Want to make them angrier? Offer them that same upgrade again.

Want to make them so angry that they won’t buy your brand again and will tell other people not to buy it either? Offer them that same upgrade one more time.

Making one more sale and increasing per-customer sales numbers are important for most businesses. However, upsell relevancy is critical to not only closing the additional sale but making sure the customer will return, possibly become a loyal customers, and even better—become a vocal brand advocate.

The key is developing upsell programs that are highly relevant to consumers at the moment they’re making a purchase. If you have the right offers, you still need to invest in training your customer-facing employees so they understand how to offer the upsell in a way that maximizes sales without negatively affecting the brand and jeopardizing future business.

At what point does that extra sale become less important that the potential future relationship with the customer? You need to evaluate this for each upsell campaign and strike the right balance for each opportunity.

Customers might be willing to forget that a salesperson tried to sell them an upsell that was completely irrelevant to them—as long as the transaction can continue without further delays. However, offering the same irrelevant item a second time is certain to cause frustration and irritation which will negatively affect their perception of your brand. Offering that item a third time is nearly enough to have them walk away from the current transaction and is guaranteed to leave a negative impression of your brand that motivates them to tell other people not to buy your brand.

What level of brand and future sales risk are you willing to accept in order to squeeze in one more upsell today? For salespeople who are working on commissions, what do you think they would do in this situation? They have to meet a quota or at least sell enough to pay their bills. Do you think they’ll let a customer walk away with the hope that they’ll come back and buy from another salesperson in the future or do you think they’ll keep pushing to close the upsell today?

Policies, procedures, and training are critical to developing and implementing an upsell program that builds your brand and sales—both today and in the future.

Image: Svilen Milev

Online OnBoarding

If you’re based here in the UK, you’ll be bracing yourself for pictures in the papers tomorrow of young people embracing each other happily, or jumping in the air, waving bits of paper. They’re already on schools’ websites, and online…

Yes, it’s Results Day today, and I’ve been to school twice (A-levels and AS-level results). I did spot a genuine embracing scene (though no jumping).

Of course, things move faster these days than they used to: almost immediately, Daughter 1 received a congratulatory email from the Vice-Chancellor of her chosen university welcoming her, and providing a link to a dedicated set of web pages to help ease her through the onboarding process.

lancaster onboarding

It’s been interesting, over the last year or so, to observe the touch-points that universities are using to target their potential recruits, and to entice them to choose a course at that university – ideas that might be useful to corporate recruiters. (More on this another day).

Obviously I haven’t seen as wide a range of university onboarding techniques as we have of their recruitment techniques, but I thought this approach to it was impressive, and a similar approach would work well for new recruits.

As well as the countdown clock, the onboarding pages provide:

  • a checklist of things to do before arriving (fees, accommodation and pre-registration) with links to travel help and an app
  • things to do on arrival day (dates, finding your room, getting IT/wifi to work, room inventories, how to find a timetable) with links to help services and a list of essential documents
  • things to do in the first week (timetables and events, social media links, transport…)
  • what happens after the first week (studying, events, societies, the surrounding area)
  • and how to find help.

Many of these are things that a new recruit also needs to know – though no doubt there are a few others to be added for the workplace. Providing advice, checklists and documentation online would be reasonably easy to set up, and very helpful to new recruits.

State of Digital Coupons in 2014

digital couponsThe State of Digital Coupons report from RetailMeNot and Forrester Consulting reveals that digital coupons are still a critical method of building brand loyalty and generating sales.

In fact, coupons are the most effective method of influencing customer purchase decisions with survey respondents ranking coupons twice as effective as sales (59% vs. 28%) and more than six times more effective than daily deal vouchers (9%).

Furthermore, more than two out of three consumers believe that coupons effectively build brand awareness and generate loyalty (68% each).

Nearly one in two consumers are more likely to try a new brand when they receive a coupon for it on their smartphone while shopping in a store (47%), and more than one in three consumers are likely to switch brands when they receive a digital coupon on their smartphones while shopping in a store (36%).

Not only are digital coupons effective in driving brand loyalty and sales, they’re also extremely effective at motivating people to visit brick-and-mortar stores. In total, 50% of consumers are more likely to visit a store if they’ve received a digital coupon from that store.

Digital coupons are one of the few marketing messages that consumers truly want to receive from brands. The research found that 60% of consumers love to receive digital coupons. The majority of consumers find digital coupons in email messages that they receive from brands, online searches, coupon mobile apps, and emails sent to them from coupon companies.

It’s important to keep in mind that just because consumers want to receive digital coupons doesn’t mean that all coupons will be successful in generating sales and brand loyalty. The research study found that nine out of 10 consumers use digital coupons within several days of receiving them. In fact, approximately one in three consumers use digital coupons immediately after they receive them, and another one in three uses them within several hours of receiving them.

For brand marketers, digital coupons should be a core component of your retail marketing strategy, but remember, the lifespan of a digital coupon is very short! You need to test and balance your frequency of sending coupon messages with that brief digital coupon lifespan to find the best distribution schedule and method for your brand’s target audience.

Image: mrceviz

The Generation Gap Among Digital Consumers Is Getting Bigger

The generation gap among digital consumers in the U.K. keeps getting bigger according to new research from Ofcom.

Every day, more people consume more digital media, content, and communications. The research found that the average U.K. adult spends over half of their waking hours engaged in some kind of media or communications activity. The use of multi-screen multi-tasking by 99% of U.K. adults enables them to conduct 11 hours of communications and media activities in less than nine hours each day. And U.K. adults’ media and communications consumption will continue to grow.

The Ofcam study found that U.K. adults spend an average of 3 hours and 52 minutes watching television each day and an average of 3 hours and 3 minutes listening to the radio each day. 97% of U.K. homes have digital TV and 48% of U.K. radio listeners have a DAB radio in their households.

Online and mobile content consumption continues to grow, too. The study found that 82% of U.K. households have Internet access and 93% of U.K. adults have mobile phones. 61% of mobile phone users have smartphones, and 16% of U.K. households are now mobile-only, meaning they no longer have landline telephones. The average mobile subscriber in the U.K. sends 169 text messages per month. On the other hand, the average residential consumer receives fewer than nine pieces of mail in the post each week and sends fewer than seven pieces per month.

Ofcam surveyed U.K. adults and children and found that the “Digital Day” is very different for adults over the age of 24 compared to young people under the age of 24. As you’d expect, younger people spend far less time listening to the radio each day than older adults and view less television each day than older adults.

Following are a few findings from the study about the digital consumer generation gap that brand marketers should be aware of as they develop their marketing initiatives:

  • Young people between the ages of 16-24 spend as much time engaging in text communications as they do watching television whereas older people spend more time watching television.
  • Young people spend half of their time “watching” media viewing live television (i.e., not viewed from a DVR), while older adults spend more than two-thirds of their “watching” time viewing live television.
  • Young people spend 65% more time using social media each day than older adults.
  • Young people spend 163% more time using their smartphones each day than older adults.
  • Young people are three times more likely to get their news online than older adults.

The digital consumer generation gap gets even bigger when you look at the habits of children. Ofcam found that smartphones are the most used device (after television sets) among children between the ages of 12 and 15, and tablets are the most used device (after television sets) among children between the ages of six and eleven.

Understanding the media habits of U.K. consumers is critical to ensuring your marketing campaigns get in front of the right audiences at the right times. Make sure you consider these digital media consumption trends before you invest in a marketing campaign that won’t drive the return on investment you need.

How to Build a Company Culture that Supports Your Brand

googleplexWhat does your brand promise to consumers? Does your company culture reflect that promise?

Your employees are your most powerful brand advocates. Do they believe your brand promise? Do they live that promise every day at work?

If your company culture doesn’t match your brand promise, then there is no reason for employees to believe it or advocate your brand. Instead, they’ll be reminded every day that the company’s message to customers is very different from the reality of the company. When these two things don’t get agree, your brand is in trouble.

Internal branding is critical to brand success, which is why it is so important that your company culture reflects and supports your brand. Only then can brand experiences for customers truly resonate as authentic and trustworthy, and without brand trust, your company is in even more trouble!

Here are some of the steps you need to take to develop a company culture that effectively supports your brand. The sooner you get started building the right company culture, the better.

1. Define Your Core Values

This certainly isn’t a new step, but it’s one that is far too often checked off of the To Do list and forgotten. Little thought is given to developing the company’s core values aside from making sure they sound good to anyone who reads them. Actually living those core values is something that rarely happens. However, companies that develop laser-focused, non-negotiable core values that live up to their brands’ promises typically see employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and sales increase.

2. Develop Processes to Integrate Your Core Values into All Aspects of Your Business Operations

Don’t just send the list of core values around to employees, add them to the new hire handbook, and forget about them. Instead, the core values should be evaluated as part of every business process. Commitment to the core values should be a part of every job description and every employee’s performance plan and review. Leadership must take ownership for ensuring the commitment to the company’s core values is made by every employee.

3. Educate Your Employees

You can’t just assume your employees understand and live your core values. You have to educate them—not just on what the core values are but why each one exists and what it means to each employee and each customer. Train them on how to integrate the core values into their daily jobs and decision-making. Expand your Code of Conduct and Ethics to include language related to living the core values in support of the brand promise.

4. Hire People Who Match Your Core Value System

Take the time to evaluate prospective employees for “culture fit.” A qualified applicant might not be the right cultural fit for your company. Personality assessments are particularly effective in identifying employees who will or will not excel in your company’s environment. Invest time into the interviewing process to ensure new hires have a chance for success.

5. Apply Your Company Culture to Brand Experiences

Once your company culture reflects your brand promise, it is far easier to develop effective brand experiences for consumers. Employees will be more supportive of products, services, promotions, new opportunities, and so on. As a result, the brand has a better chance at success.

Bottom-line, your company culture and brand promise must be aligned or your company and brand success will be limited.

Image: Maria Ly licensed CC BY 2.0