Quit Confusing Creepy for Savvy: How to Market to New Customers and Regulars
The old adage goes that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customer base. (Let’s assume that’s true for the purposes of my point.) Logic serves to try and get more new customers to make up that 20% base of regulars. What many companies fail to recognize, especially in the digital age, is that expectations between new customers and regulars are widely different.
Regulars expect businesses to know things about them, whether that’s a standard order, certain preferences or even some personal information – family, upbringing, favorite sports team, relationships with coworkers, etc. Because they’ve shared that information with you, it’s good customer service to anticipate or apply those needs. Having a server, bartender or barista ask, “The usual?” feels good. It strengthens the relationship between the customer and the brand.
We live in a time where a lot of this personal information lives online, but if we use it to talk to new customers, it can come across as assumptive or, worse, creepy.
Plenty of us have looked up someone on social before meeting them, whether that’s dating, a new client or a possible hire. However, I question how often we bring that information into a first encounter.
Not everything crosses the line. It’s perfectly okay to use things like zip codes, “like audiences” on Facebook or certain interests to display messages to prospective customers. If you sell dog food and someone has shared they love dogs, it’s reasonable to use that information.
Things teeter on inappropriately invasive when it comes to retargeting, cart abandonment, routines or using what someone says on the phone to serve up ads.
Imagine someone went into your store, browsed and left without buying. Would you chase them down at their home shouting, “I watched you look at this stuff! You didn’t buy it! Do you want to buy it now?!”
Or worse, “I know you got coffee at our shop once but you’ve been regularly going to another competitor. I heard you talking to a friend about Reese’s the other day, so we came up with a peanut butter latte you might like because we care that much about you.
Oh, that was Reese Witherspoon? Our bad. But since I have you here, would you like to buy our latte?”
These examples sound a little melodramatic. I admit they are to some degree, but they aren’t too far off from what’s possible now and what will be possible in the future.
As a marketer, ask yourself, would you rather create experiences to build genuine relationships that get referrals or would you rather leverage people’s private information in the hopes you guessed right about them?