“Sometime making a sale comes down to catching the customer in the right mood and time of day. This is aperature, and it’s different for each customer.” – via Signal
When you watched a show like Mad Men, you saw a pretty simple formula for getting consumers to buy products. All businesses needed to do was create a compelling message, and make sure it got broadcast through radio, television (which had very few channels) and print media.
In today’s mega-media world, businesses are confounded by the sheer amount of places their target audience inhabits. Measuring the success of advertising dollars, which was always tricky, has grown even more difficult and painful.
Now, in addition to those old-timey advertising channels, businesses have affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, retargeted marketing, email marketing and social media marketing in which to work their magic of persuasion. They’re also contending with not a few competitors for the evanescent attention of customers.
Signal, who provide real-time, cross-channel marketing technologies, sent us this infographic which does a great job illustrating these aformentioned challenges to the fractured customer journey.
Their solution? The three “C’s”
Create consistency across all device
For example, many of your customers probably open your emails on their phone, perhaps on their commute to work, but do not click-through to your site immediately. Instead, they go about their day, and perhaps at lunch, remember the email from earlier. Only then do they google your company name and visit your website. Somehow, someway, you need to be able to identify this customer and tailor an experience unique to them. You’re creating barriers to purchase if they have to start picking up different devices to find the information they were looking for at a time they wanted to utilize that information.
Capture customer attention quickly
Quick (and I mean quick) load times go a long way to keeping customers clicking on your site and on track to submitting payment, or, at least, reaching out to a sales rep. Make sure that large image files and videos meant to help customers don’t contribute to their abandoning your site before you’ve even had the chance to say hello. This can especially problematic in responsive design—another must in this cross-device world we live in.
Calibrate for customer aperature
“Sometime making a sale comes down to catching the customer in the right mood and time of day. This is aperature, and it’s different for each customer.” So explains this infographic, and it’s certainly a difficult challenge to overcome. Companies spend an almost inestimable amount of time and money creating clever marketing campaigns. And they’re largely successful in matching the right message to the right person. The only problem is that person had a bad day and suddenly—deleted!
Bottom line: Even though you can’t always get the right person in the right mood at the right time of day, you still need to cover all your other bases. And just maybe, your quick-loading, mobile-friendly site speaks to your intended target’s concerns and will overcome all the other inertia involved in the purchaser’s journey.
