Leave me alone!

The other day, I got four emails from the same company within eight hours. One was a generic message from the local sales person (Hi, I'm following up...), one was promoting a local sale (Visit today for 50% off!), and the other two were promoting new product lines the company introduced on a national level.

At this point, do you think I was interested in what this company had to say? Not by a long shot. I was annoyed, and they lost a certain level of my respect because their right hand clearly didn't know what their left hand was doing. How would that translate to customer service down the road, or warranty work if needed? I went from a strong prospect (after all, I'd provided contact information) to a disgusted potential customer who felt slightly abused.

So, are your customer contact channels coordinated? There are so many ways to send messages to customers these days, you need to make sure everyone in the company is on the same page. I'm not talking about the personal correspondence that occurs between a sales person and a prospect during, or even after the sales process. I'm talking about email marketing messages.

Often, email marketing messages are not coordinated within a company. Marketing is sending one thing, and sales staff is sending another. (See the first paragraph). This can be especially true in a large organization that has both a corporate and a local marketing department who share a database.

The result is prospects being bombarded with messages that are inconsistent, may or may not adhere to brand standards, and are generally way too frequent. Email marketing should be coordinated with all other customer contact channels to ensure this doesn’t occur. This means marketing must communicate with sales to plan message content and frequency.

An integrated marketing program is essential. Email marketing must be included in the big picture and not left up to chance. If it is, there will be a lot more annoyed prospects out there.