The Customer Activation Gap. The final pitfall at the last mile of customer communication
Let’s say your marketing campaign has been a roaring success, and thousands of people have bought something or signed up to become customers.
Now they’re in, you need to inspire them to contribute to your most valuable KPIs, like buying new products, renewing their subscriptions, and switching to direct debits. That means communicating with them.
It’s all about execution.
Businesses spend enormous amounts of money on their marketing tech stacks. Sometimes seven-figure sums. If that’s you, you want to get the absolute maximum bang for your buck, so understandably you use the marketing stack to communicate with existing customers as well as prospects.
So you fire up your campaign manager or marketing automation software and create methodical user journeys that elegantly guide people towards the valuable actions you’d like them to take.
The only thing left is choosing and sending the best communications for each individual customer, to spur them through those journeys. All that’s left is to get them to do it.
And that’s the hardest part.
There are so many question marks:
– Which channels do you use?
– What’s the right message for each situation?
– How can you personalise them?
– What’s the right tone of voice?
– When should you get in touch?
– What if the customers don’t react? What then?
This, right here, is the Customer Activation Gap. The final pitfall at the last mile of customer communication.
It’s when you have an awful lot of data about your customers, and you’ve got great customer journeys to take them through. But right at the point of execution, you’re not able to give customers the personal communication they really want.
So what so many businesses do instead is to fall back to their marketing stack to broadcast at their customers as if they were prospects, rather than communicate with their customers personally, eye-to-eye.
And it’s a crying shame—because it’s a sure-fire way to alienate people, increase customer churn, and kill your customer lifetime value metrics. Ouch.
