5 Ways to Alienate Your Customers with Marketing Automation
Our white paper “Serving! One Customer at a Time: How to Win with Marketing Automation” describes what your company should do if it wants to serve online customers like a small business but sell like Amazon.
It’s safe to say that most companies want to improve their customers’ experience and increase sales, yet there are a few that seem to go out of their way to actually alienate customers.
To be fair, maybe these folks just want a little peace and quiet, which is hard to find when customers are always banging down your door to buy something.
For anyone who wants to take a break from success, here are 5 ways that marketing automation can help you to alienate customers:
- Treat every customer exactly the same. Put the “automation” in marketing automation and get the assembly line moving. Customers are customers and content is content. Don’t even try to cater to individuals.
- Serve each customer several e-mails a day. What’s the point of having a hotrod if you always keep it in the garage? Crank up your mean, automated marketing machine and go flat out with content delivery. By the end of the day, you should be able to fry an egg on your e-mail server.
- Send customers a critique of their browsing behaviour. If, after analyzing customer profiles, you’re able to identify people who obviously have no idea what they’re doing, tell them! Send them an e-mail that contrasts their browsing behaviour with what they should be doing.
- Sell the leads you’ve gathered. Promising or not, you can always profit from leads by secretly selling them to another company (not a competitor). Don’t worry about the customers because they’ll figure out what happened soon enough—when the spam starts rolling in.
- Use e-mail to ask for personal information. Customers opted in to receive e-mail from you so they should expect some follow-up. Always ask for birth date, social insurance number, and mother’s maiden name.
Congratulations. Using this list, you should be able to drive off customers and run your business into the ground in no time at all.
But if you’ve had a change of heart and you actually want to continue helping your customers, read our white paper “Hit the Target with E-mail Marketing: One-to-One Best Practices” and then give us a call.
We promise not to ask for your birth date. 