Drive omnichannel marketing pressure to drive growth

Marketing pressure is the sum of all a brand's interactions with a customer over a given period. We use the term "pressure" because it refers to the accumulation of successive actions sent to the customer. Some use the term "commercial pressure", because the relationship between a company and a customer is often mainly transactional.

When this pressure is perceived as too strong by the customer, the impact on the brand can be very negative. The relationship deteriorates, sometimes leading to a total break with the brand (unsubscribing from communications or even stopping purchases).

Conversely, when marketing pressure is considered appropriate, the customer relationship is strengthened. This leads to more conversions, loyalty and engagement with the brand. In short, everyone wins!

But with so many different channels, offers and customer profiles, how can we ensure that the right pressure is applied to each individual?   

We propose to answer this question in this article.

In 2022, the activation channels between a brand and its customers are multiple:

• Emails,
• SMS, 
• Push notifications on the web or mobile,
• Mail,
• Social networks, 
• Display, 
• And many more.

With this increase in touch points, consumers are increasingly solicited and it is easy for them to feel that they are being assaulted from all sides.

This pressure seems even greater if your competitors are also communicating on a majority of channels - in a consumer's mind, two competing brands can be assimilated and/or ignored because they are drowned out by all the solicitations received, especially if the messages are not personalised and present the same type of offers at the same time.

Marketing pressure has therefore become a performance factor to be mastered with care. Finding the right measure has a direct impact on customer relations and ultimately on sales and the reputation of your brand.

The consumer must be approached at the right time and frequency. For this, the sending of the communication must be based on the customer's willingness to receive a message.

But do brands really apply these good practices?

For most companies, managing marketing pressure means :

• Manage the number of communications per channel: limit the sending of 3 SMS per week for example.
• Determine the number of mailings per segment: define a number of mailings over a given period for a group of individuals.
• Follow established industry rules: send a welcome sequence with an email every x days, the same number of reminders to all inactive customers...

The problem with this approach is that it is not always relevant.

Let's take the example of the SMS channel. Limiting the number of SMS sent will restrict the marketing pressure on this channel, but what about the other channels? A global approach to all contact points is necessary to be effective because it is closer to the reality of consumers. It is therefore necessary to consider the number of SMS messages but above all to be able to manage the total number of communications received by a customer to really balance the marketing pressure.

As for established business practices, it is not necessarily a good idea to follow them. Indeed, these "rules of thumb" are not regularly checked and what worked in the past does not mean that it will work today, let alone tomorrow! Moreover, they are based on a compromise, i.e. on what works for the greatest number. But this does not work for everyone. Good practice" is only good if it makes sense for the market, but more importantly for your consumers.

This is all the more important to keep in mind if you want to stand out from your competitors. If they send an email every X days for the first week after subscribing to a newsletter, doing the same to try and be as 'present' in your customers' minds as they are will not differentiate you. Worse still, it sometimes increases the overall marketing pressure and can damage your product or service.

However, considering the quantity and frequency of communications is not enough! The quality of these must also be taken into account: some people prefer purely commercial content, while others pay more attention to relational content and still others to a mix of the two! It is therefore important to add a content relevance criterion to complement the frequency and number of mailings per channel. For example, the perception will not be the same for 2 promotional offers received per week depending on whether the customer is a promophobe or promophile. In the first case, it may cause annoyance and in the second, satisfaction.

The good news is that a new approach to customer marketing using AI makes it possible to manage marketing pressure by taking all these parameters into account and managing them on an individual basis.

Today, a marketer independently manages several activation platforms corresponding to different channels.

With CRM Copilot, you'll finally be able to take a centralized approach to all channels, by configuring marketing pressure rules in a single platform for all communications. The marketer can set the number and frequency of messages per week and per channel. Marketing pressure is thus managed in an omnichannel way, and not in silos, respecting each customer's appetence for each channel (his or her preferred channel(s)).

But in addition to the frequency and channel used to interact with customers, the marketer can play with the rules of marketing pressure with confidence thanks to the relevance of the content sent to each customer; a unique feature of the platform.

It is the marketer who controls and chooses the "omnichannel rules" of marketing pressure. It therefore becomes a growth lever in its own right because, depending on the sales target, it can be increased or decreased in order to push a particular type of communication on a particular channel at a given time.

Marketing pressure is controlled and the overall effectiveness of your marketing is increased!