Why I Love Your Customers Even If You Don't

Happy customers are your company's biggest asset

Welcome to the first official issue of Backstage Pass on Substack! Backstage Pass was launched over 10 years ago as an extension of my book Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans. This newsletter will help your business/company/organization learn how to more effectively connect with its customers.

What is a ‘backstage pass’? It’s a pass that lets you go behind the scenes and see how things work; the mechanics, the structure and planning involved. That’s precisely what Backstage Pass will do; pull back the curtain and let you see how effective customer engagement initiatives and programs are designed and executed.

Helping clients learn how to better understand and connect with their customers has always been a passion of mine, and it’s what I will be breaking down each week. I’ll be examining how to better connect with customers and understand them, along with the tactics and strategies for doing so. Such as loyalty programs, brand ambassador programs, customer journey mapping, customer advisory panels, voice of the customer and any other manner of customer experience initiative.

Some of you are long-time readers of Backstage Pass, but for those of you who are newer, I wanted to start off my first issue on Substack by giving you a sense of how I view customer engagement. Whenever I work with clients to develop customer engagement strategies, I have certain core beliefs/principles that guide my work. I thought it would be good to cover those in this first issue, because everything I write from this point forward will be guided by these beliefs:

1 - Your passionate customers are your best salespeople. You know this. How many times have you been shopping for an item in a store and while you are considering, a fellow customer says “I have that same product, and I love it!” We’ve all been there. And many of us have done the same thing ourselves. We promote the products and brands that we love. So when another customer, unprompted, comes up and suggests we buy a product, we usually listen. We definitely trust a recommendation from a customer we don’t know more than an advertisement from a brand we don’t know.

Your passionate customers are your best salespeople. Smart brands understand this, and empower their customers to sell for them.

2 - Interaction > Understanding > Trust > Advocacy. Smart brands make an effort to engage directly with their customers. It helps the brand better understand their customers, and the customers better understand the brand. That higher level of understanding leads to more effective communication for the brand. Which also lowers costs.

When your customers understand you, they will be more open to listening to your brand. And that can lead to trust, and when your customers trust you brand, they will advocate on its behalf. One of the core teachings I stress to all my customer engagement clients is the need to facilitate direct interaction with their customers. All of your customer loyalty flows from that.

3 - Loyalty happens after the purchase, not before. This is a core concept that’s hard for many brands to wrap their heads around. Let’s say you are taking your car to the dealership to get the oil changed. While it’s there, the service technician tells you that really need to get new tires. “Well how much is THAT going to cost?” you ask. The technician says normally it’s $500 for a set, but because you are a frequent customer, they can give you a 20% discount!

Would that 20% discount make you more loyal to that car dealership?

Here’s another example: Let’s say your other car also needs an oil change, but at a different dealership. You get in to drive to the dealership and notice the car is absolutely filthy; there’s trash, dirt, dog hair all over the place. Ah well, it can’t be helped. You take the car to the dealership, the technician says you are ready to go, you pay and get in your car to leave, and notice that your formerly filthy car has been vacuumed and is now spotless, and seems to have that wonderful ‘new car smell’. On the dash you notice a mint, with a note underneath it. The note is from your technician Brad, thanking you for stopping by and wishing you a great day.

Would Brad taking a few minutes to vacuum your car and write that note after your purchase make you more loyal to that car dealership? I bet it would.

4 - Your loyalty program should build loyalty to your brand, not your offer. Building off that previous point, let’s talk about the difference between incentives and rewards.

Incentives come BEFORE the purchase in order to entice another purchase. Think of the classic loyalty tactic, the good ole punch card. Go to your favorite fast food pizza joint. Buy 9 slices, and the 10th slice is free!

This tactic doesn’t build loyalty to the fast food pizza store, it builds loyalty to the offer. What happens once you get that 10th slice of pizza for free? The fast food pizza store slips you a new punch card. You have to start all over at 0. You know what else goes back to 0? Your ‘loyalty’.

Rewards come after the purchase and build loyalty to the brand. A reward is given independent of the purchase. You aren’t trying to entice a future purchase, you are trying to communicate appreciation for a previous purchase. Brad’s note and mint was a reward, it was a thank-you. You weren’t expecting him to vacuum your messy car for you, and you appreciated the fact that he did so. That simple gesture increases the chances that you will want to do more business with that particular car dealership.

5 - The best marketing is invisible, the worst marketing becomes invisible. As soon as we view something as ‘marketing’, it gains an ‘ick’ factor. We view it as a commercial, and as a result we tune it out.

View almost any street-level image of Times Square, and you will see the same thing; People walking and totally ignoring all the many marketing messages that are all around them. They literally tune them out. The worst marketing becomes invisible.

The best marketing is invisible. It doesn’t seem like marketing. Creating ‘invisible’ marketing happens when you understand your customers, and know how to create communications that create value for them. You don’t sell them on your product until they are ready to buy. Until then, you help them understand how your product fits in their lives. You talk about them, you talk to them, until they are ready to talk to you about buying.

When your marketing has relevance to the customer, then the customer doesn’t view it as marketing. Relevance happens as a result of understanding. Remember my earlier point that Interaction leads to Understanding leads to Trust, which leads to Advocacy? When you interact with your customers, you begin to understand them, and you understand how to communicate to them in a way that’s relevant for them. When you create relevance for your customer, the customer will trust you, then advocate for you.

And when the customer advocates for you, that means they are marketing for you. We go back to the example at the start. “I have that same product, and I love it!”

That was marketing. It didn’t feel like marketing, and that’s what made it so effective.

In the end, that’s why I do what I do: I want companies to get better at marketing. And 90% of getting better at marketing (likely more like 99%) is about getting better at understanding and connecting with your customers. Every single week here I’ll show you how to do just that.

So thank you SO much for reading! I’m thrilled to be writing Backstage Pass on Substack and I’m super excited about the community here as well as the connection and communication functionality that the platform affords us. If you aren’t a member of Substack, I would highly suggest that you join and please ask that you follow me so we can better stay connected.

The next issue drops on Thursday, we’ll dive into addressing the top objection that companies have to investing in customer engagement. Have an amazing week and thanks for reading!

Mack