Contact strategies

One of the most important puzzles for marketeers is how to reach the right audience with the current fragmentation. The digital age made it easy to communicate, but as a result many messages are worthless and neglected. Think of the negative impact unwanted calls from call-centers can have. Not a very value-adding form of sales. The same goes for spam. And apparently, there is also a market for spamming voicemail boxes. I agreed after reading "Pingercasts Bring Spam to your Voicemail" on Mashable that describes the functionality of Pinger. A new services that let's you (when you're in the USA) send voicemails directly to a group of people. Presidential candidate John Edwards uses the service to deliver the latest hot news to all people interested in the campaign. Pinger uses a 'permission marketing' approach, phone numbers are collected on the webpage and messages are by opt in only. Even then, imagine that companies start to use this kind of services to flood your voicemail box!

Sending messages (just as putting advertisements in magazines) is easy, but is it effective? To be successful, not only the contents and distribution of the message counts, the value of the content becomes increasingly important. And this means more than just coming up with a creative concept or a meticulously researched multichannel strategy. In each interaction you have little time, so each 'moment of truth' has to add value. It still amazes me that e.g. banks just send out general brochures which in most cases do not add any value to my personal situation. They just factor in the current accepted response rates - which are low - really a low standard to set for creating a contact strategy. In my opinion too many organisations fear from 'corporate communications terror', the fact that the communications department tries to invent a perfect world with the perfect corporate image and wants to have a say in everything. Well, I know that the world is not perfect (I call your lousy contact centers), so don't try to fool me. Time for interdisciplinary teams that integrate sales, marketing, communications and especially operations to deliver value based contact strategies.