Day 14: What keeps planes, marketing and Christmas in the air.

Guys, as I write this, I am sitting on my bed surrounded by a gigantic pile of clothes, five jackets, a dog, and an empty Starbucks venti latte cup. I’m tired, I have a sore throat, I’m leaving for a two week trip in two days, and I’m desperately afraid of flying.

And I’m still writing this. I’ve been spending lots of time thinking about the true meaning of customer love over the past week while I run around like a hamster, and in my head, it’s sort of like contemplating the true meaning of Christmas (I know, it’s November, but I love Christmas). Sure, you know what it’s supposed to be about: meaning, connection, celebration. But there’s all that other stuff involved too, that everyone knows but doesn’t want to talk about: stress, gifts, worrying about what you’ll get in return for your efforts.

For me, that’s the hardest thing about this customer love challenge.

I have a hard time running a business where I spend a month loving people and then selling something to them right at the end of it. It feels uncomfortably like trading love for money, just like Christmas feels like trading gifts for love some years to me.

I also can’t imagine I’m the only one sitting around in a disorganized house worrying about this kind of thing. As a professional marketer (man, I really hate that title), I’m used to dealing with clients who think that marketing is the opposite of love. Marketing has a reputation as a bunch of things, and loving isn’t one that comes up a lot. And maybe that’s part of my attraction to this challenge: the inherent assumption that at some point, love and marketing work together somehow. Like Christmas and commercialism, or like the way planes are really held up by air currents, even if that seems impossible when you’re on one.

So, here comes the practical advice bit. I don’t have as much of it as I like, because more than a week into this challenge, I still have no idea what my product will be. But here are some rules that I’m trying to follow to help bridge the gap between love and marketing.

Ask Your Customers What You Can Do For Them

Catherine Caine really gets credit for this, because she gave me this piece of advice months ago. But I’m poaching off her today, because it’s simple and true and we don’t do a lot of it. It doesn’t have to be a survey; if you’ve got 30 extra seconds, just put the question out on Twitter or Facebook. What is the one thing you could produce that would improve the quality of people’s lives?

I think that, at heart, we’re all worried about producing more junk for the internet. I know I am. There’s so much pressure to produce, though, that we feel like we can’t keep up. Everyone else seems to put out eight e-books per month or a new program every two months, and it’s hard not to give into the pressure to just produce something, anything, just so you won’t be behind.

That’s not what this challenge is about. It’s about a product that serves a need, not a product for the sake of having one more sales page up on your site.

Trust the Opt-In Marketing System

I remind myself of this on a daily basis. We’re lucky to be part of a system online where we get to choose who markets to us. We sign up for mailing lists because we’re interested in the products or content. We pick people to get to know out of the sea of noise that is Twitter, because we think they’re genuinely cool.

The people who are on your mailing list or reading your blog already love you. It’s like those times in a new relationship where you’re both waiting for the other person to say, “I love you.” Those people who have opted in for your stuff? They’ve already said it, so go get them.

And now, your challenge for the day, if you choose to accept it:

Find one way to say “I love you” back to your customers. It can be as simple as a Twitter message, or as complicated as a sale for your most valued customers. Really, that’s the reason I’m writing this, surrounded by laundry and airplane fear and empty coffee cups: I love you guys, and I don’t get to say that enough.

Today, Holly is saying that she loves all of you by giving away five free spots in her Kaffeeklatsch program. Go check it out here!

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