Overcommunicating with Your Customers Is Worse than Not Communicating at All

It recently hit me that I’ve been getting tons of emails and push notifications from brands. I started monitoring it. When I realized how bad some of the communication was, I got frustrated and started unsubscribing. And that’s what brought me here: overcommunicating with your customers is worse than not communicating at all.

Two things usually happen with overcommunication—too many ill-timed messages and too many generic messages. To effectively communicate with your customers, it’s critical to deliver relevant messages at relevant times. LighthousePE’s behavior-based AI platform can not only prevent overcommunication but also increase customer engagement and retention.

Respect Customers’ Time

Overcommunicating is especially dangerous when you are pushing irrelevant messages. It’s critical for brands to respect their customers’ time with both the number and type of messages they send. For example, there’s a company I love called Bivo that makes metal water bottles for cyclists. I recommend the brand to people all the time. Now that I have a couple water bottles, though, I’m set for a while. I don’t need an email from them every single day prompting me to buy another water bottle. It was classic overcommunication. Even though I love the product, I unsubscribed.

The lesson is to respect your customers’ time by not overloading them with messages, especially irrelevant messages. If your customer already has your product in their hands, they don’t need a notification to buy that same product. It’s one thing to email every few weeks to share incentives, blog posts, or industry news. Those types of notifications are fine. With the water bottles, I would have rather had the company go silent on me. It would’ve allowed me to continue enjoying their products and recommending them via word of mouth, but because they overcommunicated, I got annoyed.

Consider Past Behaviors

Considering customers’ past behaviors helps prevent overcommunication by eliminating generic messages. For example, I’m a big fan of Smoothie King. I always order the same thing, the dark chocolate banana vegan smoothie, usually after one of my morning bike rides. You can imagine my frustration when I got a generic push notification from Smoothie King encouraging me to enjoy a $3 reward if I bought two pineapple smoothies at 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday night. They have no reason to think I want one pineapple smoothie, let alone two on a random night after I had just visited their shop the day before.

Any understanding of my past behavior would have prevented the company from sending me this generic, ill-timed notification. With LighthousePE, we have guardrails in place to prevent overcommunication; our AI analyzes the moment of need based on a customer’s past behavior, predictive analysis, and location to determine whether or not they should receive a notification at a given time.

Incorporate Customer Location

Brands also have to pay attention to details like location when communicating with their customers. When I purchased supplies to care for my pool, I opted in to receive the company’s notifications. The first time I received a push notification from them, I was in Denmark. The second time, I was in Peru. The offers were great, but they were completely useless to me because I was out of the country each time. It would’ve been better if I had gotten no communication from them at all. Instead, I just found the push notifications irritating.

Brands have to design their mobile app communication strategy to incorporate customer information like location. When you offer discounts or other purchase incentives, you have to do everything you can to ensure your customer can actually act on it. That’s part of our behavior strategy with LighthousePE; we incorporate location data to make sure that customers have the ability to take advantage of the promotion at the moment they receive the message.

Optimize Customer Communications

As a brand, avoiding overcommunication requires sending the right message at the right time to the right customer in the right place. Easy, right? When you integrate AI behavioral data into your brand’s mobile app with LighthousePE, it is actually pretty simple.

LighthousePE provides you with a ton of customer behavioral data, and it helps turn your brand’s mobile app into a powerful communication tool. With this tool, you can send hyper-personalized (read: relevant and timely) messages to your customers on a 1:1 basis at scale.

To learn more, contact me at [email protected] or book a time to speak with me