Can we talk???

I don’t typically like to quote the “big guys,” but I happened to like this one from Steve Greifer, Senior VP of Promotions at Digitas, as printed in the August edition of Promo magazine:

“Even when we’re not driving a final sale, we’re always driving to create a relationship….and incent people to give us information and continue the dialogue.”

I’ll forgive him for the use of the non-word “incent” because what Greifer says makes a lot of sense. It isn’t always about the sale or closing the deal. It’s all about continuing the dialogue. That isn’t always easy to measure, of course. But maybe that’s why measuring the performance of a single campaign doesn’t always give a complete picture. It’s what you do over time, over multiple campaigns. And if your clients/customers/prospects are willing to pick up the conversation where you last left off, ideally both talking and listening, then you’ve succeeded, at least partially, in building a relationship. And all good things follow from that.

Incidentally, this is why marketing professionals using the e-mail channel care about unsubscribe rates. It's a useful indicator for looking at what percentage of your list is wanting to shut down the dialogue and could tip you off to problems with your communications.