Can we please communicate less?

I am back to the blogosphere after a year long hiatus while I finally finished my MBA. What a tough business environment we are swimming in! But all is not completely bleak out there in the marketing land. We just have to learn to be smarter and more relevant to our customers.

Take global communications for instance, Jim Ylisela so eloquently outlined in his blog today that organizations have way too much communication, but poorly applied. Let’s remember that effective communication takes place if only the sender and the receiver are on the same page. Just because marketing department is busy churning out emails, newsletters, blog entries all over the map, does not mean the audience is influenced by what is being put out there for their reading pleasure.

Well, have we ever asked the customer what they really want to hear?

Email is one area less communication is badly needed. There is a lot of debate about email being dead, everyone complains about hundreds of emails they receive and how much time they spend cleaning up their inbox each day. Therein lays the opportunity. Email expert Jeanniey Mullen said: “The days of standalone e-mails, with no integration or support for other channels, are over.” The key is to listen…listen to your audience, learn about their world, their priorities, their worries, pain points and aspirations. Let’s not make email just another mass medium that is used to shove hordes of sales messages down people’s throats.

Listening allows marketers to become smarter and more relevant to their audiences. Thankfully with proliferation of social media, we have so many new innovative ways to listen and build strong and lasting relationships with our customers.

Here is a winning formula to boost your sales pipeline with constant stream of qualified leads:
1. Listen and learn what the customer wants to hear from you
2. Modify your value proposition and if necessary, even your offering
3. Be there when they want to hear from you with relevant content
4. Scrub, rinse and repeat

Let’s not be afraid of less communication. Less is more if we achieved relevancy.