The Art of Authenticity: Valuing Genuine Customer Relationships
There is No Safety in Numbers
By Spider Graham
A number of years ago I sat down with a client who shared with me that he was concerned with the email churn rate his company was experiencing. I asked him to elaborate.
“Well, it's pretty simple”, he told me. “Three months ago we had 130,000 subscribers. Today we only have 110,000. We’ve lost 20,000 subscribers in the past few months!”
I thought about this for a moment before asking him a question that he wasn’t ready to answer.
“Did you really lose them or did they do you the favor of ducking out so you could focus more on the people who care about what you have to say?”
For so many years I worked with clients who were all about reach and frequency. It was about reaching eyeballs. But I often countered that effective marketing wasn’t about reaching the most people, it was about reaching the right people.
Back then I watched companies try to bulk up their email lists by using things like sweepstakes giveaways to increase their numbers. What we discovered was that at the end of the day, instead of having a list of people you can chat with about your products and services, you had a list of people who were hoping they'd be lucky enough to win a new car or giant flat screen TV.
This idea of trying to reach the greatest number of people has hung on longer than it really should have.
If I could offer you access to 1,000,000 followers who didn’t really care much about what you do for a living or 1,000 people who are very interested in what you had to say about your products and services, which would you choose?
For me, having 1,000 people who would want to participate in conversations about ways I can help them would be the holy grail. I would want to cultivate that list and frankly, remove from it anyone that was merely a tire kicker.
A few years ago futurist and all around thought leader Kevin Kelly put forward the idea of 1,000 true fans. The basic question was could a writer or other type of artist or business make a living from having just 1,000 consistent fans willing to make a few small purchases a year? His conclusion was not only could they, but there were plenty of examples of people who were making a good living selling directly to people who truly wanted to engage with them.
A great example of this is writer Jeremy Robinson. Apart from being a prolific novelist covering a range of sci-fi, fantasy and slightly dystopian topics, Jeremy and his team have spent years growing and cultivating a community of fans and readers. This means that every time Jeremy publishes a new book (which is currently 3 to 4 times a year), he already has a captive audience he can turn to to promote the book and get them to share the news with their friends.
And Jeremy certainly isn’t the only creator to discover that by selling directly to fans writers and other artists can have deeper control over outcomes and profitability.
Can businesses outside of the arts use a similar playbook to reach ‘fans’ who really care about their brands? I think they can.
When marketers approach their customers as friends instead of conquests, interesting things happen. Years ago, a great deal of marketing felt like a predator/prey relationship. If a marketer hid behind a bush long enough, an unsuspecting prospect would eventually come along to be pounced upon and sold to. Today, the marketers who are succeeding are those who can keep in mind that the prospects they want to make contact with are real people with real needs and real emotions. In most cases they’re looking for solutions to problems they face in their day to day lives. But they’re rarely just looking for a vendor who offers products that meet those needs. It also matters to them that they like and trust that brand.
People also want to be respected by the people they do business with. Nobody likes feeling like a wallet with legs. Of course we all understand that there will be a value exchange between us as consumers and a vendor, but we still like the idea of being respected while the exchange is taking place.
This means that vendors need to find ways to actively engage prospects almost as if they were trying to make friends.
However, this isn’t always a fast or easy thing to grow. This type of marketing needs to be grown organically over time. It's very hard to win hearts and minds simply because you threw a lot of money at the problem. Instead marketers need to create situations when people can discover them and their brand values and then make a decision to be part of that community. It's about making friendships happen between a brand and the people who want to be part of that brand’s community.
Today, if I was working with the same customer concerned about his email churn rate I might actually take it as good news.
“Great!” I would tell him, “You have successfully gotten rid of 20,000 people who don’t want to be part of your community. This makes it easier for you to reach the people who really do care about what you can do for them”.
The bottom line is that all brands need to be able to tell a compelling story about what they offer the marketplace and need to do so in a way that is engaging and inclusive. It’s all about being authentic and giving the people that you reach the ability to be part of your brand team.
About Spider Graham
Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.