Do Customer-Centric Communities Answer the Scalability Question?
The biggest online challenge for multichannel marketers is the ability to acquire large numbers of new customers and prospects quickly without jeopardizing e-mail deliverability and/or reputation scores. Traditional methods used to acquire new online customers and prospects — such as banner advertising, co-registration, list appends and even search marketing — all fall short when pushed beyond the inherent limitations of best practices.
The all-important freewill opt-in sign-up process gets bastardized when companies push to acquire bubble prospects, i.e., those needing inducements beyond freewill opt-in to give companies permission to use their e-mail addresses. This results in an increase in complaint rates, which in turn negatively impacts e-mail deliverability and reputation scores.
If you find yourself in this situation, you ought to focus on customer-centric communities, which you can use to acquire customers in a very different manner. They use the viral power of social networking and focus that power on targeted communities of people known to need a specific company’s products/services.
This kind of community is unlike large social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, which merely offer marketers new ways to advertise and advertising agencies new ways to think about creative. Acquisition programs targeting large social networks are subject to the same scalability limitations, while customer-centric communities are not.
A customer-centric community consists of a sponsored branded portal that acts as the homepage of the community and a tool suite that includes alerts, message boards, photo and file sharing, and other social network-type functionality.
These kinds of communities also let individual members create personal discussion groups consisting of friends, family and business associates. These groups are the key to the unlimited scalability of the community and by default create unlimited opportunities for companies to acquire targeted new customers and prospects.
Here are three examples of how customer-centric communities can work:
- A sporting goods company launches a customer-centric community in which members invite friends and family to join discussion groups around their favorite team(s). As people in these discussion groups share team-related comments, photos, tickets and other content, they do so within the branded portal of the sponsoring company. In addition, they participate in forums posted by the sponsoring company and interact with the company through feedback and other links tied directly to the company’s Web site.
- A pet supply company launches a customer-centric community in which members invite friends and family to join discussion groups where they can share photos and stories about their pets. As people in these discussion groups share their photos and other content, they do so within the branded portal of the sponsoring company. In addition, they participate in forums posted by the sponsoring company and interact with the company through feedback and other links tied directly to the company’s Web site.
- A company providing content and supplies to diabetics launches a customer-centric community in which members invite friends and family to join discussion groups where they can share diabetic recipes with one another. As people in these discussion groups share recipes, they do so within the branded portal of the sponsoring company. In addition, they participate in forums posted by the sponsoring company and interact with the company through feedback and other links tied directly to the company’s Web site.
In each of these cases, the viral targeting is explicit. Everyone in the first example is a sports nut; in the second example, everyone has a pet; and in the third, they're all diabetic. It's easy to see how customer-centric communities translate to catalog companies, not-for-profit companies, online publishers, green companies, associations and e-commerce companies.
Most importantly, the sponsoring company’s branded portal (i.e., place of business) is also the meeting place for all of the personal discussion groups generated by the customer-centric community. It becomes the place not only where people share content with each other, but also where all members of the community transact business with the sponsoring company.
Customer-centric communities are all about the customer. There's no random advertising clutter, no unwanted solicitation and no uncontrolled member-to-member access. They're simple for customers to navigate and clearly meet customer needs.
For companies doing business online, customer-centric communities are all about risk-free, highly scalable acquisitions. If you want to acquire sports enthusiasts, pet owners, diabetics or just about any group of people likely to be enthusiastic about your products and services, there's no better vehicle.
Neil Rosen is the founder/CEO of eWayDirect, an e-marketing service provider. He can be reached at neil@ewaydirect.com.
- Companies:
- EWayDirect
- People:
- Neil Rosen
Neil M. Rosen is President and CEO of Fairfield, Conn.-based CertainSource, a B-to-C funnel acquisition management and email retargeting solution provider.