Dec
07
After The Sale: The Red-Headed Stepchild Of The Marketing Industry
I was a red-headed stepchild, so I can say that. Don’t bother emailing me to snark. I don’t care.
Jeffrey Fox, author of How to Become a Marketing Superstar
“The profitable identification, attraction, getting, and keeping of good customers… Identification, attraction, and getting are pre-sale functions. Keeping includes all post-sale functions.”
He goes on to give some great examples of each, but one of the things I like is the stress he places on ALL post-sale functions. Yep, all of them. Bill collection? Marketing. Delivery? Marketing. Issuing refunds? Marketing. You get the idea. It seems so many marketing books and, frankly, marketing consultants, only emphasize the attraction and getting of customers that they don’t bother to think about keeping them.
This is incredibly stupid.
Several springs ago, when I was traveling, I bought a hat. I had concerns that I wouldn’t be able to pack it, so the store owner offered to ship it to my home business office. We chatted – he said he’d visited my city once before and liked it. We discussed our mutual love of impractical dogs.
In December, they sent me a Christmas card, saying they hoped I’d enjoyed the hat that summer.
This is not incredibly stupid. This is good marketing.
Here’s some even better marketing – the following Christmas, I got another handwritten Christmas card. They hoped my hat was holding up. They wished me a prosperous new year. They told me that thanks to me, and others like me, they were able to bring their business online. They gave me their sparkling new URL.
I was practically tripping over my cat to get to the computer.
There are three very cool things about post-sale marketing:
It’s almost always free.
It costs you nothing to send me an email asking how my son is adjusting to his new glasses. It costs you nothing to send me a link on IM that you thought I might like. It costs you nothing to comment on my blog.
It’s usually very easy.
You don’t need to hire a copywriter to say hi. You don’t need a graphic design team on retainer to write a Christmas card. You don’t need a staff of SEO specialists to click “Contact Us.”
Your audience is captive.
If I know you, the chances that I will read, pay attention, and even respond to your communications are very high. This is because I consider you to be at worst my acquaintance, at best my friend. I don’t ignore those people. I feel nearly morally obligated to at least read what you’re sending.
If I’ve never heard of you, you’d better have a damn good marketing team.
“OK,” you say. “So I’m your friend. So what? What does that have to do with my kid wanting an XBox 360 for Christmas that I can’t afford?”
I, and pretty much everyone else on the planet, will whore out my friends to everyone who will listen. I will buy again from my friends. I will even rebuy products I already own and conjure up someone to give them to, just to make my friends happy. I will work for my friends for free. I will convince other friends to work for them for free. This is good.
More on friends and marketing tomorrow.
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Fine. I’ll call Chris. Man, you really are a pain in the ass, you know that? :)
when i was fired recently i decided to try and give this freelance graphic design thingy a shot, so i let a couple friends know of my plans and they have become the biggest pimps without expecting a cut.
friends are great, even that stupid alcoholic motherfucker (literally) that you have known your whole life and the only reason you are still friends is because you known him for most of your life and have invested way too much time to just call it quits.
i have to agree with james.
I believe advertising (as in life) is really based upon a relational paradigm – not simply a functional one. People are to be loved and valued; things are to be used. When we deviate from this basic precept — we really blow it.
Apart from food, clothing, and shelter — people have three basic needs: to be loved, to belong, and to be significant.
You hit the ‘nail’ on the head Naomi. Great blog.
I’ve always contended that the single more important marketing move any company could make is great customer service. There’s a restaurant my wife and I go to on occassion. The food is good, but it’s not my all time favorite. However, the service is second to none. When you finish your water, before you have time to think about wanting another sip, some guy is already standing there asking for permission to fill your glass.
“Well, ok, but only if you ask nicely.”
We can’t afford to go there very much, but we suck it up just to be pampered.
Naomi,
Thanks for the kick in the ass. Now I’m off to touch base with all my customers again :-)
You are so right – it is the whole long tail concept. Most of our great projects have come from past clients, either as referrals or literally more work. Most of us are in the business of referrals and can’t neglect this.
Which leads to me the eternal question that no one ever answers:
what is the difference between marketing and sales?
I actually took a Marketing class last quarter, and to my surprise, this was a rather large portion of the course. They actually have math for it too: fancy equations like, “it costs you 10x as much to gain a new customer as it costs to keep an existing one”. So, the information is out there, it’s just that companies are incredibly dull when it comes to understanding how to actually apply this.
Instead of thinking how they can actually use this to their benefit, companies strategize around the question, “what is the minimum amount of money and effort that we can put into old customers to retain their business”, as opposed to the question that new businesses and independents think around, “how can we spoil our existing customers and by doing so mobilize them as the greatest marketing team in the world?”.
Anyways, great post, it’s always oddly heartwarming to hear about that kind of genuine customer service and followup marketing. I guess I say oddly because of how jaded we can get about business and consumerism today.. but yeah, its nice to hear when people actually get it.
@ Michael – That’s the great thing about great friends. They believe in you and they’re pleased for you and they’ll go to bat for you.
@ Charlie – Thank you! I think that’s the key – you have to value people. It’s not just about answering the phone on the first ring or having a money-back guarantee. It’s about treating your customers not just like people, but like people that you like.
@ Dave C – We have a restaurant like that here. Do you have The Keg in the states? Anyway, it’s a chain of restaurants and it’s on the pricey side. You can get a comparable steak for about half the price pretty much anywhere in the country but the service, at least at the one near us, is unparalleled. No matter who it is – the host, the server, the bartender, the busboy – they’re all practically deferential. And I keep going back, for every special occasion, every year. (I also order the same thing every time, but that’s because I’m a loser with no sense of adventure.)
Can we discuss why Wordpress is making me moderate MY OWN COMMENT? Why, God, why?
Anyway. Moving on.
@ Dave N – Anytime you need an ass kicking, I am your chica.
@ Shane – Stay tuned. All will be revealed.
@ Brandon – Yes. To all of it. And additionally… in a service business, the vast majority of post-sale purchases have extremely high mark-ups. When I buy phone service for thirty bucks, they don’t keep a lot of it. But when I buy call forwarding for five bucks, they keep almost all. The majority of corporate overhead comes from the initial sale. The rest is gravy, and companies just stick their fingers in their ears and say “LALALA” and ignore it.
That is great marketing, when I worked in sales at a hotel, I used to send holiday cards (all of the holidays) to my customers and the associated vendors. The vendors would rave about the hotel and generated tons of referrals.
Now I need to do this with my online customers. Thanks for the reminder!
Ok, I’ve gotten to number 7. Was it the four glasses of cheap wine? Well, whatever – I just bought your package with consulting. I’m looking forward to your take on how to sell my stuff… “Bare Naked Honey” (no, it’s not X-rated, it’s honey for Pete’s sake!)
Gabriella
Brandon nailed something pretty well. My example of this is the “Coke Rewards” program. I sat down and did the math on this after accumulating a small fortune in ‘Coke rewards’ numbers. I found out the game was totally stacked against the single person. I burned all of my ‘Coke Rewards’ numbers in a big stinking pile of carefully saved cardboard after I figured this out, since I found out that all my customer loyalty was basically only worth an ITunes promo card or some other useless brain melting drivel that would cost me more time and effort than it was worth.
Now, I had a stack of these little slips of cardboard that was over 2 feet tall with the stacks rubber banded together. Do you think I’m ever going to trust their nice marketing department after my little bonfire? Nope I’m not. My only mistake was not filming the pyrotechnics while disparaging their program rules & then posting the whole thing on youtube… But I don’t roll like that, I’d rather talk smack about the company when I get an opportunity to discuss the facts of their marketing down the road.