What is Humanized Marketing?
Imagine the best online shop, with the best design and the easiest checkout process you have ever experienced and imagine calling this e-shop to ask about which number fits you best and in response you get a machine generated response that guides you through the process of deciding. Automated, sleek and fast, but would you love it? Would you enjoy this experience? Would you say that you have a bond with this brand?
Humanized marketing is a wave that every e-business should ride. Humans today seek for inspiring experiences and they do like to interact with other humans, when they want and how they want to interact. This is what humanized marketing is all about, adding human elements across all stages of product lifecycle and consumer’s journey.
Personalized marketing. Is it personalized?
The first attempt of the online business and digital marketing ecosystem to the demand of customers for personalized experiences, is what is called “personalized marketing”. But what do “personalization” means today? In most of the cases, personalization is related to the user behaviour of a user in a website / eshop (e.g. abandoned cart, time spent on the cart, etc.), or it is related to the shopping behaviour and shopping history each customer had in the past (i.e. frequency, days since last transaction, etc). These approaches, even if they are much better than plain push marketing, they handle customers as a set of clicks or purchases, forgetting that customers do not have transactions, but they have shopping experiences. In short, customers today are dealt as pieces of data and not as real humans and this is why any attempt for personalization will be still missing a piece of information, the human piece that cannot be extracted from the human customer. It is necessary to interact with the customers if we want bonds to be created with them.
The first step, become customer centric
The first step towards becoming a more human business is to establish organizational values and commitments that are customer driven. It is a way of saying to consumers “I am listening. I know what you want, I know what you need, I know what you enjoy and I will be with you in every step of the way”.
There are two rules of thumb to follow, simple but really important:
- Make it easy for them to talk by setting up feedback and interaction mechanisms in various points of the customer’s experience. Keep it short, relevant, fast and easy
- Respond to the feedback and leave nothing un-answered. You may need to develop answer scripts, you may handle one piece of feedback at a time and respond but in all case, make sure that you provide a relevant response, put in the same way that you would treat a real person walking into your store.
The more you show your Human side, the more likely it is for consumers to be willing to connect with you and become your promoters. Just start dealing them as humans and not as clicks and sales data!
Can e-satisfaction help me in this process?
e-satisfaction has been designed to be human centric and easy. Easy for you to set up and use, easy for your customers to respond and interact. Moreover, to help you become customer centric and get one step closer to your customers, we introduce the Humanized Marketing Automations. A set of mechanisms such as refer a friend, call back request, alerts, etc. that are triggered in response to the feedback that customers provide.
By combining these automations, e-businesses have the chance to build personalized campaigns based on the experience of each and every customer had, during while walking through their customer journey, responding to their feedback and bring them closer to the feeling that “this business really gets me”!
Also published on Medium.