Leading brands are 'destroying customer relationships online'

by Noelle McElhatton, marketingdirectmag.co.uk 18-Nov-09, 14:20

LONDON - Many of the UK's top brands are threatening to wreck established customer relationships as they expand online, a new report argues.

They are doing so by ignoring the basic marketing principles in their email communications.

This is one of the findings of a year-long study, e-Orchard, conducted by Stephens Francis Whitson. The agency reviewed the email marketing campaigns of more than 200 brands.

The report claims to have uncovered evidence of brand owners bombarding customers with irrelevant, mistimed and inappropriate emails.

It splits the brands into 'saints' and 'sinners', with the likes of Mini, BA and Ocado showing how it should be done.

While economic pressures are driving more brands online, many of the companies in the survey "are sending out blanket email campaigns simply because it is cheap to do so," the report claims.

The e-Orchard survey covers companies operating across a range of sectors such as retail, financial services, FMCG, travel, entertainment and leisure and argues that some brands surveyed showed:

Scant evidence of differentiated communications depending on customer knowledge, behaviour or value
Poor co-ordination of on and offline communications
Dangerously high frequency of highly repetitive, hard sell messages
Brands stuck on transmit: little attempt to engage in any genuine dialogue with customers
Rare examples of genuinely clever, creative, smart brand and commercial thinking.

Ben Stephens, managing partner at SFW, said: "We want to look hard at this subject because it is where digital, as a channel, and direct marketing, as a discipline, collide.

"While we recognise that the economic climate calls for cost-effective marketing, the danger is that because it is cheap to do, many brands are simply spraying their customer base with poorly planned and executed emails that ignore even the most basic principles of customer marketing."