Is it time to add interactive components to your customer communication strategy? Let’s think it through!

By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak

Customer communication strategies form a baseline for testing each interaction with a customer, from bills, statements, regulatory notices, or solicitations, whether their published online or printed on paper.

When a strategy is the underlying guide it’s easier to make all customer communication work together as a whole and not overwhelm a customer with multiple pings.

In previous columns, the topics have covered data and design, but there is an element that touches both—interactivity. Or, rather, designing for interactivity. And, by designing I mean both the design of the customer facing documents and the designing of the infrastructure that supports what happens when someone decides to interact.

That interactivity comes in many forms. It may be the addition of QR codes or other types of 1D and 2D bar codes, personalized URLs (PURLs), targeted text messaging numbers, or a host of technology to existing paper communication. It may be in linking your online and paper customer communication. In all cases it will involve rethinking what happens after the customer chooses to take you up on the offer to interact.

When we talk about interactivity we are talking about getting someone to read a paper-based communication and take an action. That action might be to send a text message, go to a web page, or scan a barcode that results in landing at a web page. If you decide to go this route, be prepared to lay in some infrastructure.

First, you need to decide on what your means of interactivity will be. Do you want to use a PURL or a barcode? Or, would you rather have someone use a short code to text you? Your decisions should be based on how you want to interact with your customers, and also on your comfort with the needed infrastructure.

So, let’s talk infrastructure for a moment.

PURLs are fairly well established technology, so you likely know that a personalized URL requires a landing page. There are all types of technology available to create personalized landing pages on the fly or to establish a prebuilt library of landing pages. Your question, if you decide that PURLs will be your technology of choice, is how you will execute them to make the experience for the customer sufficiently interesting that they will come back again for the next campaign. Some of that involves positioning of the PURL within the document message design, but it goes well beyond what will be on the paper-based communication.

You don’t want to bring a customer to a tombstone page that asks them to put information into fields that you should already know. That means the design of the page should be in alignment with your general corporate branding, and not something with no link to the current campaigns. It also means that you must have a server with sufficient horsepower and bandwidth to support the number of customers you expect to respond to your invitation. You must provide value for their time.

What about adding text numbers, similar to the SMS numbers used to vote on television shows? These can also work as long as you know what you have a clear call to action and a clear understanding of what the customer gets in return for texting a number. Will you send them an email to their phone and ask for more information?  Will you simply send them a coupon?  Will you invite them to special shopping hours? You need a plan, and you need to have the infrastructure to support the short code.

QR and other barcode solutions provide some additional considerations. In addition to integrating the barcode into the overall document and information design, the solution relies on an infrastructure that includes the ability of a customer to read the code. While some phones come with barcode and QR code readers, in many cases activating a campaign means asking customer to download a piece of software to their phone or computer. Part of the planning has to be how to deal with questions that arise from problems in downloading readers, and how to deal with customers with incompatible readers.

Once you read the barcode you need to get somewhere. The barcode reader relies on the encoding to tell it where to go and what to present. If the barcode is not correctly created, you have a problem. If the landing is not smooth, you have a problem. If you land in the wrong place, you have a problem. If you are not master of your own campaign, barcode creation, and server for the campaign, you may also have challenges getting the problem solved.

Do companies do campaigns successfully?  Yes!  Some do.

Is it so well understood that everyone can rest assured that a QR or other barcode will be readable by any customer using their cell phone or a web camera on their home computer? No!

It’s valuable for any company to consider any of these options. It is imperative that all of the technical issues be well understood before moving them into a primary marketing campaign.

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data-driven Communication Evangelist at Kodak. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com. Twitter is @PatMcGrew, and blog is http://patmcgrew.growyourbiz.kodak.com.