Still pursuing your career? You may want to read this –
A “touch” sounds friendly enough, doesn’t it? Maybe two hands placed on your shoulder but today, [thanks to technology] it’s more than likely to be delivered in a variety of other ways. Technology opened up a ton of opportunities for marketers to reach consumers such as text messaging, and email or an announcement over a website or even a pop-up from a virtual assistant. This all seems friendly enough, so what’s the problem? After all, it’s better than a sales person knocking on your door unexpectedly only to ask, “Hey, what’s for dinner?” as they push their way unexpectedly into your [space, your home. This could be a modern day Seinfeld episode. I can tell you these type of intrusions still exist and they’re going on every hour of every minute of every day, on your clock. Marketers refer to their constant dripping on prospects and clients as “touches”. Someone somewhere figured out there’s a “science” to the number of touches one can create. They discovered that the more touches a marketer can pack into a week or a month or a quarter or years over years consistently, the larger their recurring revenue stream appears to grow. So there’s an eventual payoff, but exactly how that will take shape varies on many factors. One of the reasons this has been successful is in a thing known as trust building. Trust takes time to build and “touches” accelerate the process of creating trust around a product, a service or in favor of a specific individual.

Numerous timed touches are impactful over time but they can also be annoying to the recipient. You see the fact is when you “touch” a consumer you force them into making a decision, as small as it can be they still must make some sort of decision. “Do I listen to his/her message or should I ignore?”. “Should I respond or not?” Let me mention some of the business sectors more apt to employ a “touch” marketing strategy. Advisers of every kind – from realtors to insurance companies to private client investment professionals, all of these employ touch strategies often. Online retailers employ touch strategies [on steroids] to the point of being annoying, regardless of whether any targeted individual has purchased anything. Today, we’re seeing charities employ “touch” strategies to drive new contributors to their causes. Usually these type organizations make appeals to the heart to boost the amount of dollars raised.

It’s about building trust over time and keeping the firm and/or a sales representative in front of clients and prospects as often as possible. A touch strategy does not guarantee that you’ll reach your goals of doing business with everyone you target but given a consistent and persistent message can provide boost getting your message out there. It’s human nature, walls we put up tend to soften or crumble the more we have been contacted and become acquainted with a certain company’s services and people. Keeping yourself in front of someone you’re pursuing a relationship with [of any kind] helps to build trust faster than any other measure.

What I’m finding now is that I can’t have a conversation with a service representative at my bank, an educational institution, or even the host of my brantology.com site without being asked to complete a survey. No matter how short these conversations are, they never fail to ask for my feedback afterward. This is a type of “touch” program. It can also serve as a backstop to take the temperature of the customer or user of a service. Plus, organizations these days want to know what their clients are thinking, which helps them build a marketing profile for who is more likely to do business with them going forward. This is all perfectly legal stuff and as I point out there’s ample evidence that consistent “touch” programs drive business. However, it comes at a cost of wearing out the consumer. There’s just so much time in a day, most people have other things to do besides filling out surveys. Still, I’m graceful about it but usually I find very few of my inquiries [via phone or email] actually deserve commendation. What happened to just providing service to customers just because it’s a job responsibility? And why am I being presented with a computer screen asking me to tip someone who took my food order? There’s something wrong here. Meanwhile, requests to complete surveys are coming nonstop in our mailboxes along with reminders that we can give to this charity or that charity; text messages and emails arrive from every product and service imaginable these days; and don’t forget dinner invitations to attend investment and tax seminars. Where does all this end? When will reasonability return? It won’t, not until “customer touch” strategies stop working and stop they will at some point once people can no longer take all this bombardment from solicitors. I can truthfully say that cold door knocking on residences has gone, shall we say passee, for quite awhile? I bet no one predicted that cold door knocking would ever go extinct. From the milkman to the vacuum salesman to Encyclopedia Britannica to Mormonism to Jehovah Witnesses, yes, knocking on stranger’s doors was all the rage back in the day. Personal “touches” are made much easier these days, way easier than licking a postage stamp and driving to a post office. Personal touches have been redefined as a text message, an email, or virtual assistant. C’mon Man, that’s personal enough ain’t it? The reality is that what was once considered a “personal touch” has been redefined in this age of technological innovation.

Addendum: It all comes down to how busy you already are. First of all if you’re seriously busy already you won’t need to add any new marketing strategy. If this describes you, you’re probably late career and maybe you receive referrals pretty regularly [that’s how I built my financial advising business]. Let your best clients do your marketing for you. Know that people hang out with people like themselves, funny how that works isn’t it? Plus, do you have someone who works for you that can manage all these “touches” in the form of emails, text messages and follow-up phone calls? Or even snail-mails with little handwritten notes saying something like, “I thought of you when I read this article”. Do you really have time for this? Because if your heart is not in it then it’s disingenuous to start something you can’t finish. When I was working I decided to bite the bullet and grow my business over breakfasts, lunch, dinners and referrals instead of dropping all these touches every week and every month, but some do and it seems to work for them.