Making it Happen
Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website. In hindsight, the idea of a hotline seems so obvious and yet it is ignored. Marketers seem to have resigned themselves to 80-90% of their emails and SMSes being ignored, and most of their push notifications being undelivered. This is where the opportunity for smart marketers. The coming downturn and push for self-sustainability and profitability offers an inflection point to change the foundation in the brand-customer relationship.
The good news is that there are many innovations which can support a push by marketers to build the hotline with their customers. Email 2.0 offers interactivity in emails via AMP, daily habit-forming content via Ems, micro-incentives in the form of Mu tokens as Atomic Rewards, a new metric to track engagement intensity via Hooked Score, and a new type of product-led agency (Progency) to do it all. Email 2.0 is the best way to build the hotline – better than 2-way SMS or even WhatsApp. Everything that can be done in other push channels can be done via Email 2.0 – and at a fraction of the price. The good news is that marketers are already sending out emails daily to their customers. What needs to change is the underlying tech and the mindset.
The combination of AMP and Atomic Rewards offers a very powerful combo to build the hotline. AMP offers an “All-in-Email” approach – Shop in Email, Search in Email, Play in Email, Browse in Email, Earn in Email, Chat in Email, and so on. There is no need to leave the email at all – no need for click-throughs and landing pages! Atomic Rewards offers the foundation for Loyalty 2.0 – incentives for marketers to nudge customer actions. Mu tokens can be used to get attention and zero-party data; they can also be used to drive referrals and reviews because every customer also has a network and voice. Think of Mu tokens as the non-monetary equivalent of loyalty points which are linked to money and transactions.
A hotline also means a greater frequency of communication. Ems powered by informational microcontent are a great way to keep the relationship alive. Every email doesn’t have to be just an offer to buy. Stories can drive the emotional connect and help build community. What brands are doing on the social channels can be replicated within Ems.
Over time, the same underlying themes of Email 2.0 (interactivity, in-place actions, incentives, insights) can be replicated on the other push channels – making for a true omnichannel hotline relationship with customers. Every interaction is an opportunity to collect volunteered data that enriches the customer profile – and helps increase personalisation on not just the push channels but also the brand properties. This will become even more important in a world where privacy has taken centre stage and the efficacy of using cookies is diminishing.
So, the message to marketers: make the Hotline via Email 2.0 as the crux for customer relationships. It will not only improve customer experience but also drive profitable growth. In an uncertain tomorrow, the Email 2.0 Hotline offers comfort and certainty for brands and their (Best) customers.
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Additional Reading
