How many different services/benefits/ or offers of value do you provide for your customers?
What is the adoption rate of each of the services you provide?
Is the adoption rate a fair representation based on the ROI you wish to achieve from each initiative?
What is a fair adoption rate to receive from each offer? 5%, 20%, 50%, 100%?
Companies talk about offering more value, new value, or expanded value when the reality is they have a low adoption rate and ROI of what they currently offer. Then they turn to their marketing, sales and communication department and ask them to keep promoting their new initiatives until eventually their customers have tuned them out.
So, what is the cost of low service adoption rates?
There are two primary types:
Intangibles
Company culture
Employees feel self-defeated when they work hard on Project A tasks and activities that don’t get them the anticipated results they were looking for. They may have clear objectives, process, and offer great value however if the value isn’t salable to the customer then why keep beating a dead horse? This feeling of defeat, frustration and disappointment will not only affect Project A but carry over into future projects as well.
Diminished brand promise and trust
If your favorite restaurant suddenly started adding more items to the menu, aggressively promoted services you didn’t care about, and was overly aggressive about their intent to sell you I’m willing to bet you would start to lose faith in their ability to deliver what had already sold you to begin with. When you change customer expectations by adding more offerings, it becomes more difficult to uphold high expectations. This why it is uber important to only have a few core projects at one time which have a high value of participation and do them better rather than adding more to the pipeline.
Tangibles
Time spent
There are two time costs. The second is almost always overlooked. First there is the staff time spent on creating, nurturing, and maintaining the project. Second, the time saved by not working on the initiative. This is also known as the opportunity costs. In other words instead of working on project A and getting this adoption rate or ROI we could have spent time on project B and had a higher adoption rate and return on investment.
Money
There are three money costs. Two are almost always overlooked. There is the money invested in the project for staff, technology, process, etc. The second is the opportunity costs of not spending money on project A and instead of project B. The third is the cost of communicating the offer and then removing it from future correspondence. In other words a branding initiative to roll out services and then rebranding initiative to remove them from existing campaigns cost more to change a website, change print brochures, etc.
Has your company experienced this dilemma in trying to offer more value while sacrificing core offers, value propositions, or services?
Share your experienced with us by leaving a comment below.
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