Stop Annoying Your Customers

A survey conducted by Pitney Bowes in the UK revealed which marketing channels annoy consumers the most and the least. It was conducted in Britain, but there’s no good reason to believe the results would be any different in the US, and none of the results are earthshaking or even surprising.

71 percent of those surveyed said they’re annoyed not just by telemarketers but by phone calls of any kind from any company. Three quarters of businesses, however, still call their customers.

Phone calls from businesses were always irritating, but they’re even more so now than they used to be. In the digital era, even friends and colleagues are reluctant to call each other and risk an interuption when a less intrusive email or text message will suffice. So why should anyone expect most people to welcome a phone call from a company in the middle of their meeting, lunch break, family dinner or date night?

The average person finds telemarketing so exasperating that the federal government created a Do Not Call registry to give citizens some relief. Most smartphones now allow subscribers to block individual phone numbers. The feature is sometimes used to block ex-friends and stalkers, but it’s overwhelmingly used to block telemarketers.

Calling people is also extremely expensive and labor intensive, and since it’s so unwelcome, businesses should seriously consider dialing it down at least a little if not a lot.

43 percent of consumers say they don’t like text messages from companies, either. That’s a lot better than the 71 percent who hate phone calls—text messages are a lot less intrusive—but still, almost half of consumers don’t like it. So if you’re sending texts to your customers or potential customers, now would be a good time to ask yourself seriously if the cost of annoying almost half of them is worth what you might be getting out of it.

Social media and email marketing are viewed as much less irritating. Most of us have spam filters in our email accounts now, and obvious spam messages can be deleted sight unseen with the click of a mouse. Still, more than half of those surveyed don’t want ads flooding their social media feeds unless they consent.

There’s some good news in there for advertisers, though. A little more than half the survey’s respondents said they’re willing to share personal information with companies for marketing purposes. Why? Because if they’re going to be bombarded with ads, they’d at least like those ads to be relevant.

The majority of businesses are gathering more personal information about their customers—including their hobbies and interests, buying habits, preferred travel destinations, and club memberships—but only a quarter of businesses say they’re using this information effectively.

This is what businesses should be focusing on. Rather than annoying their customers with phone calls and text messages, they should, as Kieran Kilmartin at Marketing Crunch put it, “improve the way they are collating, storing, accessing and managing data, so they can ensure it remains an asset. And they must take time to identify consumer preferences, integrating them into a consistent, creative, exciting omnichannel marketing strategy.”