The Engagement-Ready Messaging Closed-Loop Framework

A short read for CEOs that demystifies today’s communications

Edited by Olaf Hermans, Ph.D., Relationship Engineering

Your company ─ and I define your company as a brand, all its artifacts, and all people representing your brand ─ continuously sends out signals. You are probably unaware of the majority of those signals and even more oblivious to what perceptions they form in the minds of people who happen to notice them. However, you want to send people, and let us narrow that group down to potential and existing customers, meaningful messages in the hope they will positively engage. Positive engagement is a broad spectrum that ranges from expressing interest in becoming a customer of yours, through spending more of their available attention, time, and money with your company to being active promotors of your brand. In other words, you want to create engagement-ready messages that result in an experience that triggers the desired reaction.

The Engagement-Ready Messaging Closed-Loop Framework or ERMCLF demystifies the mechanics of today’s predominantly digital communications. It is a simple guiding principle that starts with the question of why to communicate in the first place and ends with the question of how impactful your message was. In other words, to what degree did your message trigger the desired reaction?

In essence, companies have only four reasons to communicate; they are:

1. To inform, you want to make a group of people aware of who you are and of something in particular that you offer. You do not expect an explicit response. No explicit does not mean there will be no response; your message might lead to fierce debates and shares on social media.

2. To interact, you want to trigger an explicit reaction, an online or offline conversation, a click on the “like us” or “download whitepaper” button. Or, you can simply and sincerely ask customers how they are feeling.

3. To transact, you want to trigger a purchase decision, an exchange of value, a click on the “buy now” button, or the full and on-time payment of the invoice you send your business customers. Perhaps you want a co-creation effort from your customer.

4. To activate, motivate the customer to spend time and research your message, and set the stage for engagement and contribution beyond mere interaction and transaction. It adds value to ongoing sales, prepares for the next ones, and provides more certainty about future purchases.

The relational position towards you or the position of trust and goodwill is a basal theme of relationship engineering or RE.

Of course, you can combine the reasons. You can add a brochure (to inform) or a survey (to interact) to your invoice, but there is always one dominant reason. Anyway, the first two questions in the framework are who should be engaged and why? The answer to these questions comes from your deep understanding of your customer’s current passions and pains, their relational position towards you, and the alignment of your business goals with your customer’s objectives. Since you send a communication to get a result, your message must be engagement-ready. A small reality check is due here; none of your customers wakes up in the morning with the intent of putting more money in your pocket. It’s quite the contrary. Engagement-ready means the reaction to your message will first benefit the customer and, as a consequence, your company as well.

Once you know who and why to engage, you must define the content. The content is the core message of the communication and what emotions the core message should trigger. The second step is to design, to make the core message perceptible to the senses. Is it your intent to trigger all senses (adding music and scents in a showroom) or a few? A picture and a piece of text are visible, and a podcast is audible; a video pleases eyes and ears if done well.

The third step is to decide the medium, not to be confused with the channel. The medium is what or who carries the message. One can print a text on paper (the medium), and the Postal services (the channel) delivers it. Now you know the content, design, and medium; it is time to choose the mode of delivery. To say it otherwise, now your message is ‘channelable,’ and, hopefully, ‘digestible’ for your target audience.

Again, your choice is simple. You can spread or deliver your message through a single, a multi, or an omnichannel. While what a single channel is, is evident, the difference between a multi and an omnichannel is one’s ability to, for instance, start reading the message on one’s smartphone and seamlessly jump over to the desktop, and then to a tablet if so desired. In a multichannel, this is not possible; the same message is just delivered through more than one channel.

All channels divide into two categories (own and external), with each class having two sub-categories (digital and physical).

Once your company skillfully crafts and spreads the message based on the golden rule of engagement-ready messaging, you must realize that your message either enters or escapes the realm of current and emerging customer passions and pains. Dear reader, I do not know you, and therefore I cannot be relevant-by- design to you. If you find what I write pertinent, it is because of relevance-by-chance. If you have come this far, I can only assume something caught your attention, and now you spend some of your valuable time reading. The sole purpose of this article is to inform, and I do not expect an explicit reaction. Maybe you feel compelled to share it with your peers or discuss it with your staff.

The effectiveness of engagement-ready messages intended to deliver precise results is measured by the number, the value, or the order value of the desired reaction, and the degree of fulfillment perceived by the customer. Technology offers many applications to measure responses, attitudes, and sentiments, yet they are always secondary to the relevant content. So for you, as a CEO, the next time you discuss with the people responsible for your communications and customer experiences, be it your staff or an agency’s, you have a framework you can use to ask them the rights questions and advance your results.

Stay safe and customer-centered,

Jef