What if they come to you?

So much time is spent on perfecting campaigns for customer and prospects. We focus on the list, the subject lines, the copy & the image, the call to action, some of us even focus on the landing pages. All this with the idea to gradually coax the recipient into responding to your offer. Sometimes, the recipient might just call you up or walk into your store or branch. What are your chances of the person serving the recipient knowing about the offer?

Here are a few things you could (gradually) do to make the 'people channels' part of your program.

1. The easiest thing to do is to make a simple mistake in the copy, targeting your own people. The first person to find the error should get rewarded with a free lunch or a bread or as I have seen in some instances - recognition. This makes your team look for offers and give you advice. Now target the prospect list with the regular email (without the mistake).

2. As the team gets more involved, solicit their advice. Take a copy of your email & pass it around to them. Ask for subject lines suggestions. I know of a few companies that have a betting pool for what subject line will work best - the goal is three fold - split tests with customers, employee involvement, and it gets everyones head in the game.

3. Call up or visit your team to inquire about the effectiveness of your email. Ask them what people are saying or to look out for what people are saying about your campaign. Provide them with your contact information as well so they can reach out to you themselves with suggestions. Try to work this into a process, where every one of your campaigns collects employee and recipient feedback.

4. Put out a special email to your team, explaining the offer to them. Give them options for each segment and if you have a decent database you can even personalize the offers for each recipient if your people were to look it up. This way, there is unison in your messaging and the offers are consistent, yet personalized.

In a subsequent post we will talk about how Casino's, Banks, and some companies with loyalty programs are leveraging their campaigns to make their 'people' more powerful in making targeted offers and in collecting valuable customer information. All this towards building an effective contact management system.