How Marketers can Attract Customers in the Swipe Economy

How do we connect and interact with customers in this new, fast-paced world of swiping and split-second decisions?

Many apps today use the swipe paradigm in decision making. Take Tinder, for instance, a smartphone app that aims to ignite romantic sparks between people using geolocation technology. Powered by Facebook and now, optionally, Instagram, the app shows you pictures of prospective romantic matches according to location and your preferences. If you swipe right, you’re saying you like that person. A swipe left, however, means you’re not interested. On Tinder and similar apps that use this paradigm, if two people both swipe right on each other’s profile, it’s a match; you can now message each other from within the app.

Today’s marketers are in the same situation as Tinder users in search of connections. Our prospective customers can easily flirt with multiple brands at once. Empowered by cross-channel and technological choice, customers can be extraordinarily fickle.

So how do we connect and interact with customers in this new, fast-paced world of swiping and split-second decisions? How do you survive as a brand in this “swipe economy?” Simply put, at all times, you’ve got to be alluring — not just to avoid the left swipe — but to actually attract a right swipe and then maintain the conversation and relationship that may follow.

Once customers “swipe right,” it doesn’t mean commitment; only that you’ve got their interest. We, as marketers have to understand that we don’t want to right-swipe everyone because we won’t be the right match for everyone. Finding and recognizing the right match means understanding our market — our users, our customer pool, our differentiators in the marketplace. Creating a mutually beneficial situation requires us to provide something unique, useful, and meaningful, and that means being discerning about where we put our efforts.

If you’re confident you have something to offer the customer and the customer has something to offer you, then swipe right.

It’s a match! But now…who starts the conversation? Do you make the first move or wait? Sometimes you as the brand should take the plunge, providing, say, an outbound offer. Sometimes the customer will initiate contact, looking for something in particular. You should be prepared for such inbound contacts, ready to satisfy customer cravings. Remember, you’re not the customer’s only prospect.

Once contact is initiated, you must light the spark and fan the flames. To successfully woo your customer, I recommend employing six tools of seduction using T.I.N.D.E.R. as an acronym:

Triggered

Individual

Now

Data-driven

Engaging

Relevant

Triggered

Triggered messages go out automatically in response to something a user does. Customers won’t feel appreciated or acknowledged if you fail to send something as basic as an order confirmation in response to a purchase. Like a solicitous lover, you’ll also need to be at the ready with other triggered communications as the situation evolves, sending real-time messages such as payment confirmations and shipping notifications.

Proof that customers want you to engage them this way is shown by an Epsilon study, which found that “Triggered open rates were 76.7% higher than business as usual (BAU) messages.” Click rates, meanwhile, were “151.9% higher than BAU messages.”

This is a valuable opportunity. Brands that know how to romance consumers use triggered communications to further charm them.

Individualized

Your messages, meanwhile, need to be sincere: tailored to the customer with whom you’re building a relationship. Just as the would-be Don Juan cannot succeed using recycled pick-up lines, you as a brand cannot expect to engage the customer with a generic message. You must offer something better — you must offer something real, and real means communicating specifically with each customer. Do that using data. Instead of sending the same newsletter to everyone, why not personalize some of the content according to what you know about a person?

Now

Immediate, instant, real-time — such responsive engagement will set you apart from other brands. It’s understandable that the more quickly you respond to a customer’s needs, the more favorably the customer will look upon you. It’s also understandable that failing to do so will drive the customer to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

Data-Driven

An individualized customer experience, as I mentioned earlier, demands customer knowledge. Unfortunately, so much data is available that the smart marketer must be picky about what data to collect in order to provide the best experience for each customer. Your company needs to have a strategy for data collection and use; that strategy needs to be based on forethought. What data do you need? Why do you need it? How will you use it? How will collecting this data benefit the customer? Ethically collecting, organizing, and analyzing the right data will allow your brand to gain insight into customers so that you can put your best foot forward. With insight, you have the opportunity to be engaging.

Engaging

Flowers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, markings, and scents. The variety we see in flowers is all about being as engaging as possible to particularly desirable pollinators. Use your data to learn how to be alluring to your particular customers. You want your customers to visit. You want them to open your emails. And when they do, you want them to take action.

Relevant

Sending messages to customers about products already purchased is a loosing proposition akin to forgetting important details about your Tinder match on the first date such as where they went to school, what they do, their name — or worse — mixing up details about two different matches. You lose when you send a message that says, “Dear (blank space/misspelled name/wrong name).” Such communications aren’t relevant to customers who want mutually beneficial relationships. Data is the key to unlocking the hearts of customers, allowing the marketer to provide messages relevant to a particular customer wherever the customer is on his or her journey.

Remember, if you want to spark results, succeeding and thriving as a marketer, you’ve got to send triggered messages in real time, using data to make those messages engaging, individualized, and relevant. Use T.I.N.D.E.R. to start a fire and you’ll deserve that right swipe.