• by Ryan Deutsch , September 2, 2010

I was fortunate enough to attend MediaPost's latest Social Media Insider Summit this week in Lake Tahoe, where attendees discussed social CRM, social measurement and everything in between.   

On the final day, I joined a roundtable moderated by Eric Gohs, the senior manager of social media and mobile marketing at Lands' End.  The topic, one very familiar to email marketers, was "Letting the Customer Lead."  For almost an hour, the group discussed the importance of listening to the customer with empathy and leveraging the customer's voice to inform direct marketing, product and overall corporate strategy.   

Representatives from Zappos, Disney Stores, Travelocity, Williams-Sonoma and Champion shared strategies and programs where the customer's voice provided the basis for digital campaign execution.  At one point, a few members of the group lamented that marketing's infatuation with data and analytics has pushed us away from the customer, resulting in marketing decisions based on data aggregation rather than conversations with individual consumers. 

As email marketers, we track and leverage data to inform elements of the programs we run: opens, click-throughs, conversions, opt-outs, heat maps, and so on and so on.   But what about good old customer feedback?  Not something you see in a report, but something you hear directly from the source?  Not something upon which you base an assumption, but something that can be categorically accepted as fact because it came from the consumer's mouth? 

So as I leave the summit and sit a few rows behind Eric on a United flight to Denver, I wonder if it would be possible to create an email program based solely on direct conversations with recipients instead of assumptions from attribute data.  In creating such a program, it would be important to consider the following: 

Content:  Identify content based on direct customer input.  Understand what your customers are passionate about.  Participate in conversations on the social Web, and immerse yourself in the topics that your subscribers choose to engage with.  Interview consumers in stores or other venues where engagement occurs, and have call center and customer service team members interview customers on the phone.  Not long interviews, not surveys -- I'm talking something simple: "We are working on new email programs and want to know what issues are important to you. What do you want to hear from us? How can we help make your life easier, more interesting or entertaining?"  Use this input to create content.  

Cadence:  Cadence of this program should not be tied to a calendar.  Cadence should be dictated by the content that the consumers voice interest in.  If no interesting new content is available related to the shared passion you identified in speaking with consumers, then... do not mail!  If new content is available daily, build your program to facilitate a conversation on a more real-time basis.

Tracking:  Use conversational engagement to gauge program success. Monitor the social Web, your Web site and other communities and look for mentions of your program.  If the community of customers shares your content with their networks as part of their social conversation, you are on your way.  If they engage directly with the brand in a conversation (providing ratings, reviews or other UGC), then you are really hitting it out of the park.  After all, this is the ultimate measure of brand loyalty: a consumer's willingness to speak positively about your brand to her family and friends.

Optimization:  Here is another great opportunity.  Randomly select a number of customers and create an email focus group.  Schedule a conference call or in-person meeting and have them provide direct feedback on your programs -- from subject lines to offers to subscription management to dynamic content components. There's nothing as enlightening as actual consumer feedback on programs.

Brands participating on the panel at the Social Insider Summit shared stories in which actual conversations with consumers resulted in new product development and communication strategies. I am well aware that no email marketer worth his or her salt (myself included) would give up an ounce of reporting data.  The accountability of our channel makes it one of the most reliable in direct response marketing.  However, I am intrigued by the prospect of designing a campaign based solely on direct customer input.  Such a program should serve to tighten the bond between brand and consumer, possibly increasing email program engagement in the process.