Initiative

Gaining a good customer perception through email

Customer perception is vital in this modern era as we are seconds away from looking at any review that had been written by someone else. This can be pivotal to other moving forward on whether they chose to purchases a particular service or product. So it’s essential for a company to get their interaction with their customers right as this could be their downfall if not thoroughly thought through.

Good customer perception can be achieved through many different online platforms and communication networks. It can also be achieved through face to face interaction which can be the most effective dependant how on the customers expectation and whether the product or service reached, but to reach a wider audience you need to go online.

There are many risks associated with trying to obtain a positive customer perception, these are mainly because you need to choose the right time and the right audience to target for you as the company to get a good review and a good public perception.

(Google, 2017)

A good way for a company to be perceived as good by their customers is effective PR; effective PR can make a company that has been dying for many years re-establish themselves again in the market. An example of good PR is the Carlsberg billboard, which gave out free beer to those who went up to the billboard itself. This is good PR as this gives the consumers or general public the idea that Carlsberg are a giving company and care about their customers. This will create good word of mouth for the company, which is always good as its free advertisement.

(Google, 2015)

PR can also reach millions if not billions of people as they will use public media to spread the campaigns to as many people as they can, with good PR and effective communication a positive customer perception can be reached. On the other hand ineffective PR can cause the opposite effective, for example when Pepsi released their now famous advert with Kendal Jenner, the advert itself wasn’t bad but the message people got from it was negative for an advert that tried to be politically correct and got it very wrong. This caused many newspapers to pick up the story, which caused more people to learn of what Pepsi had done causing a lot of negative talk towards Pepsi (video can be seen below).

Looking at this and my initiative of creating a better customer perception through an email campaign, you can see that it’s essential for the tone and the audience to be correct for the campaign.

Strengths of using email:

• Practically everyone has email
• One email can be sent to the mass
• Can keep track of who has read the email

Weaknesses:

• One email can be sent to mass – this makes it seem as if you aren’t being given a personal service but rather you just be another customer
• Can be sent straight to junk mail so won’t be seen by target audience.

Looking at the strengths and weaknesses I feel the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, which makes it a more viable platform to use for the email strategy.

Email can also be multimedia, so by following the trends at the moment, you can begin the email PR campaign hitting the ground running. By watching how the campaign goes and seeing the impact it has created you can evaluate whether it has been successful or not. The research you can do to make sense of the idea of using PR can be seen on a day to day basis when companies out trying to outdo each other with new and improve adverts or services.

Looking at the Oasis model of how to create a PR plan for the implementation of the new strategy, you can see that evaluation is a major part of the planning process. By using the evaluation and customer feedback you can use this to further improve what you’ve started by considering improving the criticism and improving overall.

References

Emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk. (2018). EZproxy Login. [online] Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1108/SRJ-04-2015-0056 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018].

Gregory, A. (n.d.). Planning and managing public relations campaigns.