“I got the Whoop fitness tracker just like the one you’re wearing. It’s been on my mind since I saw a post about how well it tracks sleep and recovery,” a brand manager told me as part of some pre-meeting small talk. He’d called us in for a potential collaboration.
“Chalo, let’s move on to the brief. We need a multi-touchpoint communication strategy email, WhatsApp, social, and push notifications. You know, so that the leads are nurtured till the time they convert.”
If I had opened my Whoop app at that very moment, it would’ve shown a spike in my stress rate, probably with a suggestion to get my blood pressure checked.
He saw a post. The memory of that one feature stuck with him. He was ready to buy and must have simply ordered it online. But for his brand, he imagines people flow through a neat, linear funnel touching every man-made touchpoint, getting “nurtured” from a lost, helpless human to an enlightened consumer who finally purchases once the last WhatsApp or email is fired.
Why do marketing managers (on both the agency and brand side) forget what it’s like to be a regular human when they create strategy?
I run a services business in India. Very few things can mentally break me down. But believe me when I say push notifications and email marketing campaigns targeted at me have made me weep.
What makes you, as a strategist, think that bombarding me with an email every day will make me invest more money in your mutual fund? What makes you believe that cracking really bad jokes through push notifications will make me feel hungry and order from your app?
I’d understand if there were no unsubscribe button. You could harass me until I caved and bought your product. Paying you would be the only way to make it stop and I would pay. But you know the weapon I have: unsubscribe, or worse, uninstall. And I will use it.
This, I believe, stems from a basic lack of understanding of consumer behaviour. Not the kind you invent on dashboards the real kind. The kind that recognises how consumers actually buy. That most of your audience isn’t in-market for your product every day.
Purchases happen randomly. You do it too. If you’re not in the market for a washing machine, no ad or frequency number in the world will convince you to buy one. And God forbid the day your current machine breaks down you’ll look at the first few options you can remember.
More often than not, you won’t even consider more than four brands. One of them will be Whirlpool… Whirllpooooool. See? You sang it. That’s what memorable advertising does. It helps you recall the brand when you become a category buyer.
I once asked someone from an automobile brand who had a 12-month email and SMS plan for website leads “How long does it usually take you to decide on a car?”
She said, “One to two months, max.”
I followed up: “So is it possible that your lead has already bought another car and won’t even look at car ads for another five years?”
If you’re on a marketing team, here are a few strategies I’d beg you to reconsider. They sound very strategic and polished, often accompanied by rocket emojis especially on LinkedIn:
- Email marketing strategy
- Push notification strategy
- WhatsApp messaging strategy
- Cart abandonment recovery strategy
And the grand combination of them all: the lead nurturing strategy.
Don’t get me wrong these are not bad mediums to use. In fact, they’re brilliant when used thoughtfully. Luxury brands, for instance, do a great job of informing customers about new stock via WhatsApp, sent personally by store managers.
But don’t assume your audience wants to hear from you on every platform simultaneously. It’s a cheap medium, but it might cost you a customer.
I would rather put my energy into creating advertising that is memorable. Make sure it reaches as many people as the budget allows. And, of course, be present when the consumer searches for me on a search engine, an e-commerce platform, or in-store.
That’s it. Human stuff.
In conclusion, I’d like to say that Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha, once mentioned in a video that they send only 10–11 push notifications a year on the Zerodha app. If they have nothing important to say, they just don’t say it.
And I think this is why he is a billionaire.
(Views are personal)
