Brands Stumble on Coronavirus Emails to Customers

Marketers have sent a deluge of emails about the coronavirus to customers over the last couple weeks. Brands hope to inform and reassure customers, but many messages do neither and some might by hurting customer relationships.

Some messages provide specific, helpful information about store hours or services, but many are brand-centric rather than customer-centric.

Customers sign up for email lists to receive information that’s valuable to them such as deals or introduction of new products. Customers become increasingly annoyed after reading the 5th message about how much a store cares about the safety of its employees and customers.

Of course, the business cares about its employees and customers. It would be news if it didn’t. But is the store open or not? Of course, it cares about sanitation. But what and how often is it cleaning?

Some marketers, it seems, send emails just because they can. Customers are surprised to see messages from brands they can barely remember.

“The problem is that everyone is switching into full-on tactical mode and aren’t thinking strategically or holistically across touch points,” Ted Nelson, CEO and cofounder of marketing agency Mechanica, told Fast Company. “Their brand teams are siloed from their social teams, which are siloed from their demand-generation teams. As a result, the overall interaction as a customer feels discordant.”

More Customer Anxiety

The emails may not be as comforting as companies hope. Already anxious, customers don’t want to see messages that make them more anxious, experts told The Wall Street Journal.

“Everyone is anxious, so you’re talking to an anxious audience,” Lloyd Rang, CEO of Lloyd Rang Communications in Toronto, told the Journal.  “And if you as a company are contributing to a bunch of emails that are flooding peoples’ inboxes, you have to ask yourself the question: Are you helping or not?”

The Journal article compared email messages. In one, Gary Friedman, chairman & CEO of RH, formerly Restoration Hardware Inc., thanked nurses, doctors and other health care workers. About half way through, he said the company was closing its physical stores.

A message from Levi Strauss & Co. announced store closings but said its website would remain open. In a show of honesty, it acknowledged that “shopping for jeans is probably the last thing on your mind right now.”

Marketers that show empathy by producing content that meets the concerns and needs of their audience will see better results.

The Rise of Virtue Signaling

Some brands are engaging in “virtue signaling,” publicizing their values by simply stating their feelings about an event with little or no concrete actions. Those engaging in virtue signaling seem more interested in boasting about their virtues than providing information or solutions, explains author James Bartholomew, who coined the term in 2015.

Virtue signaling is pervasive on social media networks like Twitter where people express outrage at perceived injustices without offering real kindness, or even confirming that the supposed crime actually happened.

While politicians and political pundits have performed virtue signaling for years, more brands and CEOs have joined the act in recent years. In the last couple weeks, the corporate pronouncements have exploded.

Got Something Meaningful to Say?

“The problem with marketing messages that merely signal your brand’s virtue without doing anything further is that they waste customers’ time, and do little to impact your relationship,” writes Augie Ray, vice president of customer experience at Gartner, in Social Media Today. “In fact, messages like that can do more to hurt brands because of what’s missing – anything meaningful for customers.”

In addition to providing no helpful information, some messages appeal for business. They announce the company is still open and willing to receive customers in barely concealed desperation. The most troubling are from stores with physical locations that solicit customer visits in spite of recommendations that people stay home.

“Companies can be excused for wanting to keep customers buying, but they cannot be forgiven for making their self-interest and desperation evident in marketing communications,” Ray writes.

Bottom Line: Well-meaning marketers wish to maintain communications with customers during the coronavirus crisis. But some branded email messages merely extol the organization’s virtues with little or no consumer-centric messages and risk harming customer relationships.