For those of you who have heard me talk about my company, Bridge Worldwide, you know that I always say that we’re a digital AND relationship marketing agency. We’ve always been the latter, going back to 1979 (and the former for almost that long). It’s an important distinction to me. Digital agencies make a lot of cool stuff, but many lack the fundamental skills that are required to build lasting relationships with customers.  Of course, we can make cool stuff too (and win the biggest awards in the process), but we pride ourselves on being able to deliver the relationship marketing piece.

So, with that, I thought I’d share what I know and have learned about relationship marketing from working with some super talented people over the past few years and from the experience we’ve gathered from managing programs that now have more than 30 million total members. I should pause for a minute and, of course, mention that we think relationship marketing is evolving to something better called Marketing with Meaning. However, the basics of what makes relationship marketing REALLY work is embedded into Marketing with Meaning.

PS: If you’re looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on “The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma.” It’s the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.

To get started, relationship marketing isn’t this:

Just because you ask someone’s permission before bombarding them with ads, doesn’t mean you’re not still bombarding them (of course, no one is asked to”opt in” in Minority Report, where the clip above comes from). That’s not real relationship marketing. Here’s our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath):

“Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication.”

Ongoing: It’s a rhythm of regular, expected communication.

Direct: It doesn’t mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms.

Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI.

That last one is important: “fills a need.” If you’re not doing that, then you’re probably just annoying your customers.

So, to ensure you’re not doing this, I’m going to share with you what I consider the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. If you’re doing any of these, stop now. Seriously…now. In a later post, I’ll share my 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing. That’ll be the list of “what TO do.”

One note, some people refer to relationship marketing as CRM, or customer relationship marketing (or management). For the purposes of this post, I’m saying they are the same thing.

So, here’s the list of what NOT to do:

7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing

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1. No enrollment
2. Program lapses
3. Loss of interest
4. Make it hard
5. Dollars don’t solve everything
6. No customer ownership
7. All about the brand

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1.  No enrollment

If your metrics for your program look like this, well, you can imagine that your program isn’t likely to be a success. While having more enrollments in your program doesn’t mean that your program is better than one with less, low enrollment numbers (i.e., well below your target) does indicate a larger problem. This problem can be a number of things, but it usually points to a lack of commitment in the program by some function within the organization. Presumably, you set your targets based on solid estimates and extrapolations. Perhaps it was a certain percentage of people who visited your website. Well, if “corporate” pulls funding for all the traffic drivers to your website, then you aren’t going to hit your target for enrollments either in this example. If you have a bunch of enrollments followed by a bunch of opt-outs, then your program just might be bad (or commit a number of the sins below).

Figure out why and fix it.

2. Program lapses

Nothing annoys me more than this one. I enroll in your program and one of two things happen. Either you send me a welcome email or direct mail right away and then I don’t hear from you for months or you don’t send me anything initially and three months later send me the first correspondence. If you’re doing this, then don’t even bother continuing. Put yourself in your customers’ position. They probably get a lot of email that appears to be junk everyday. If an email for a program they signed up for three months ago and have long forgotten shows up, how do they react? <DELETE>. And that’s your best case. Worst case, they’ve literally completely forgotten about signing up for this program and think that your message is unsolicited spam. They report that spam to, say, Google (via their Gmail account) and before you know it, Google thinks you’re a spammer. Not good.

3. Loss of interest

This is somewhat related to number two above, but has an entire other component as well. If you never send me anything, I’m going to forget why I spent the time signing up in the first place. I’ve moved on. I probably signed up for your competitors’ programs too and if one of them is taking care of me and I’m using their products too.

And to illustrate why it’s so simple to lose interest in your program, I’d like to show you a random day from my Gmail inbox. I chose July 16 because right now I miss the summer. Here’s what it looked like:

Almost all of the emails I got that day were for programs I have signed up for at some point. You’ll also notice that I didn’t open a single one of the emails. That’s what I mean by “loss of interest.” Why did I lose interest? Simple: if your offers and correspondence are always the same, people forget why they signed up in the first place. Something interested them. Something sparked a touch of excitement. That’s long gone and they aren’t even opening your emails anymore.

4. Make it hard

There’s no better way to kill your program than to make the enrollment process a pain. Someone sent a screenshot to me of this form a while back (they can’t recall where they found it, so if it’s yours, speak up and I’ll give you the credit).

It’s a perfect example of what I like to call an “are you kidding me?” form (usually I put an expletive in there as well). An “are you kidding me?” form is one that a person takes one look at, says, “are you kidding me?” and clicks onto a different site. If your enrollment process makes someone say “are you kidding me?” then change it immediately. Keep in mind that you don’t need to know everything about the person at the beginning. Think about it as though it’s a first date. If you asked all the questions you ask on your “are you kidding me?” form, then you wouldn’t have many second dates. Instead, get the basics now and later on collect more information. Remind people that the more they tell you, the more tailored your offers will be (they will be tailored, right?). Then deliver this. The more the customer sees this, the more information they’ll share. And, by the way, you don’t get a pass by making your two thousand, initial profile questions “optional.” Just the sight of them or the thought that one day they’ll HAVE to answer them to get anything useful from this program, is enough to turn people off.

5. Dollars don’t change everything

Hold onto your hats, this one’s a bit technical. For those psychology experts out there, you’ll love this one. The main idea here is that simply “bribing” your customers via more and more offers or discounts over time isn’t likely to be a winning long-term strategy. The reason for this is simple. First, you have to keep increasing the offers to keep these people interested, which will eventually bankrupt you. If it doesn’t bankrupt you, it’s because you’ve withdrawn the best offers and likely lost a ton of very unhappy customers.

So, why, you might ask yourself, do people who previously have been given so much instantly desert me when I stop the offers? This is simple and, ironically, it turns out that those who are offered less, will likely be the ones who stay with you forever even when you take away their small offers. It’s a classic case of cognitive dissonance at work. In this case, your loss of customers is explained because you never changed their attitude towards your products. You only changed their behavior because of the money (or other offers) you gave them. When you take away the incentive, you’re left with the same attitude they’ve always had, which means they go back to the original behavior (i.e., not buying your products). This phenomenon is called the Point of Minimum Justification (which is explained really well in one of my favorite business books: Universal Principles of Design). It’s illustrated like this:

As you increase incentives, you change behavior (red line). This is the idea behind “everyone has their price.” That is, for the right amount of money, people will do almost anything. The blue line shows how attitude changes with increasing incentives. It too increases at first with increasing incentives, but eventually disappears. Attitude here is your attitude to the product or service (or situation). An increase in attitude on this chart symbolizes a positive change and you want people with a higher, positive attitude towards your product.

Why does this graph look like it does? Simple. When you give people a lot of money to do something, they justify doing it because of the money and NOT because they think what they are doing is a good or enjoyable thing. On the other hand, if you give people very little incentive to do something and they start doing it, they justify the reason for doing it because they believe that what they are doing is a good or enjoyable thing. It’s all because of cognitive dissonance. In the case of a product being marketed through relationship marketing, increasing your incentives will get people to use your product because they are simply taking advantage of your incentives. When the incentives are gone, so are they. On the other hand, having just the right incentives causes people to truly consider why they are using your product. They become more invested and perhaps learn more about what makes it so great and even become advocates. Since they aren’t justifying using your product because of incentives, they justify it in other ways.

The point at which you can provide the smallest incentive with the greatest change in behavior AND attitude is the point of minimum justification. It’s what you want to shoot for in your program. In the case of pharma, I see too many new adherence programs relying soley incentives to keep people on the drug. This isn’t a winning strategy. For people to truly want to continue their treatment, they need to understand why they are taking it and the risks and benefits. If they’re just taking it to collect your incentives, then they aren’t doing this. You’re not changing attitude, which won’t be effective over time.

For more on where this concept was born, check out the Wikipedia article explaining Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic experiment back in 1959.

6. No customer ownership

If I have nothing invested in your program, then I’m not going to continue with it. My investment is usually my time and if I haven’t given you this, then I’m not going to be a part of your program for long. However, be careful that you don’t create this investment while you commit sin #4, Make it hard. Don’t create work for people just so they waste their time. That’ll get them to quit your program really quickly. Instead, find ways to ensure people’s time investment yields them something of value. Consider the time people invest in tracking their runs via Nike+. It would be hard for another competitor to come along and steal away any regular user of this program simply because they have so much invested. They’d have to start from scratch and they’d lose all the “credit” for all the runs they’ve done, lose all connections to people they’ve challenged, plus having to learn a new system. Nike+, of course, gives great information back in exchange, so people feel that their time investment is worthwhile and at the same time, they make it harder and harder for themselves to leave the program each day.

Remember these things? They were everywhere for a long time. What made this so effective is that AOL realized the more free time they give, the more likely you are to stay with them when you run out of free time. Why? Simple. You’ve invested so much time into it by the time 1,000 hours (or 45 days) rolls around. You’ve got an email address you’ve shared with others, a profile that took a long time to get just right, friends who you IM…you’re not leaving all of that. AOL used this concept perfectly and became the largest ISP almost overnight. Of course, if your service stinks, then no amount of investment will keep people forever.

7. All about the brand

People don’t inherently care about your brand. The sooner you recognize that, the better. Certainly, this is true for most pharma brands. And, while some brands might have an almost cult following (Apple, Harley, etc.), most brands don’t have this luxury. Because of this, your program has to offer more than just a connection with your brand. There are already so many other programs out there connected to specific brands and stores that people lose track. Instead of getting overwhelmed, they just drop everyone. Does your stack of loyalty cards look like this?

Do you think any of these stand out from any other? Is it any wonder why people never have their card when the cashier asks?

To stand out, you program has to offer more. It has to be more than just the product. Nike+ isn’t all about Nike’s products. It comes with a valuable service that makes me (all right, makes other people) better runners and, in turn, healthier.

So, those are the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. Steer clear from these and your program is already far ahead of most that are out there. Coming soon, I’ll share the 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing, which will highlight what you SHOULD be doing to make your program a success.

If you’d like a POWERPoint version of today’s post, you’re in luck. You can download a copy of The 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing (538 downloads) right here. One request: if you do download it, how about sending out a tweet?

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1. The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing
2. The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma
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