Musings of a Marketing Maven

I wince when direct marketers trumpet their expertise at managing so-called “conversations” with customers or prospects. It must be that their definition of a conversation and mine are really different.

Poor DM execution often reveals how far vendors really are from what truly matters in conversation: listening and responding appropriately to what the other party says.

Why Aren’t They Listening?

The US telecommunications and cable providers may be among the worst repeat offenders of old-fashioned, bad direct marketing.

You can’t help but think that an intelligent investment in CRM linked to marketing automation and well-scripted offer triggers might go a long way toward minimizing wasted spending on unwanted or irrelevant direct mail offers.

Take Qwest, for example (my local phone provider). More than once a month, for several years, they’ve mailed me with the same offer: for only $xx.xx per month, we’ll give you “high-speed Internet” access. Until fairly recently their direct mail offers were foolish enough to describe the service as “blazingly fast.”

They’ve trained me to be cynical about the hype in their offers…

From time to time, I call Qwest to get the up-to-date facts on high-speed access to my premises. (The current answer: only 256Kbps, for more than $30/month — and my business is located within 8 miles of Seattle. How sad is that!)

Until today’s mailing, the fine details in Qwest’s offer never specified the actual download speed to this location — even though they have the answer in their database. So they waste my time by forcing me to inquire, and then frustrate me when the answer is so far from compelling (or so far from the implied promise of their offer). Even my cell phone can connect to the Internet faster than 256Kbps!

On more than one occasion I’ve told Qwest’s CSR that until they can match or exceed the local cable provider’s download speeds to this location, I have no interest in hearing about Qwest’s Internet access service. If they were recording my feedback in a CRM system, and using it as a trigger in their direct marketing campaign, they would know not to bother sending me an offer guaranteed to have zero appeal.

Bad DM Execution Can Tarnish the Brand

Instead, they remind me at least once a month:

• how little they listen to me or my business preferences, even when I make the effort to provide feedback…
• how out-of-whack their value proposition is, given its high price for a surprisingly low bandwidth;
• how behind the times their marketing automation and customer intelligence systems must be;
• how poorly linked their customer service center must be to their marketing organization or CRM system (if they have one);
• how offensive it is that they keep wasting paper, ink and other supplies on something that will only end up in landfills or recycling centers.

Sadly, they’re not alone in this kind of behavior.

As for me, I’m not in the business of providing direct marketing services (or counseling clients about DM), but it makes me cringe when I see the same mistakes repeated over, and over, and over…