Buyers’ attention is costlier than gold

Source: dericbownds.net

Anyone of us has been or is a buyer and a seller at the same time. Even if you are not part of a private business, you are still a buyer and seller. We buy food, clothes, cars, travel, homes and sell homes, cars, unnecessary things. Being a buyer and a seller makes us involved in this interactive process, whose first utmost step is to grasp somebody’s attention (if selling) or be attracted by a product or service (if buying). It is all about attention.

For sellers it is important to find ways to get through various shields to get to the potential buyers’ eye, mind and, finally, heart. Not that easy in the present-day ocean of terrorizingly omnipresent messages sent through all possibly imaginable media channels. Going a couple of decades back, this task would have been easier as businesses were practicing the push method of getting the message across to the customer’s eye or ear. Now the times have drastically changed: buyers are immune up to 99% of all messages sent to them. They have adopted the pull strategy in opposition to the push one. Now it’s them who sieve through the information flows.

Companies and not only need to reitinerate their communication strategies through a set of steps, which are really down-to-earth and do not require much investment.

Know your buyer

There is no wonder that even now there are plenty of companies who simply squander their marketing budgets out in vain hope of getting to customers through wrong channels or, which is worse, getting to an inexistent audience. Why, for instance, deliver millions of printed catalogues to every single household in the city if it gives an increase of 1% in sales? See what Yves Rocher (they are in cosmetics) does: sales assistants always ask if buyers want to sign up for promotions and newsletters. By collecting this information they will not send coupons and promo information to Dick, Tom and Harry. They’d rather direct it to ladies who shop with them frequently: my wife, for example

Deliver quality

Quality of the offer product should not be doubtful and should be in line with the promises. Back to Yves Rocher (I will refer to them at least once more here): the quality of their cosmetics is higher than medium, but not outstanding. But their key advantage is that their product is of the same good quality every time you buy it.

Offer consistency

The message delivered to potential buyers need to be consistent. If the information comes from different channels the customer needs to be able to recognize it. The wording of the ads and promos as well as design and styling differing from each other every week may create confusion with customers. To me if it’s red today, it should be red tomorrow to think its features has not changed.

Be regular

Regularity is also an important point to consider to attract attention. But the touchy thing here is not to overdo it. I got subscribed to a business magazine last year and got bombarded with renewal notes every second week after the first subscription month. Come on, guys, I have 4 more months to go… Sorry for them I discontinued my subscription, asking myself why they sent me 6 reminders (0.50 cent postage every time) for the subscription of 25 dollars year – 12% of the total cost of the subscription?

Be accurate

Accurate data collection is not to be disregarded. Data processing people are not too much motivated by the monotonous job they are doing. As a result, errors come in place. Getting back to the magazine subscription topic, my friend refused a subscription after waiting for 3 months for the first magazine to come. After calling them 3 times and asking to correct the address (change the unit number) his patience was lost as well as the subscription for the publishing house, which had to send him the refund check.

Customize

I hate receiving generic message starting with Dear Sir/Madame (you cannot determine whether I am a Sir or a Madame – a bad beginning!). But I pleasantly read messages addressed to me by, at least, my first name.

By the way, the already-mentioned Yves Rocher, uses these ways of attracting potential buyers’ attention quite well. My wife buys way too often from them