CONSUMER ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME - GAME CHANGER FOR MARKETERS?

07 July 2016

What can you do in 30 seconds? Prepare some tea? Sneeze? Write and post a comment about this article? The truth is you cannot do much in such limited time, yet it is all you have to attract consumers' attention, reveals a recent study run by YouGov. Luckily, there are some ways to reach consumers with short attention span.

30 seconds or even less is the length of time that your average consumer spends absorbing digital marketing content online at any one time. In other words, brands have very little time to grab the attention of Internet users. Do you want to reach today's ever-so- distracted consumer? You must realize that designing your strategy by channel is no longer effective, nor scalable. Symbol of our times, this perpetually connected consumer, or PCC, presents both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers. And while a competition for consumer attention has become really fierce in this hyper-connected environment, there is still an opportunity for retailers to engage consumer's interest across devices and channels.

Invincible email triumphs over text and social

Email may be perceived as one of more traditional, if not slightly outdated channels, yet as many as 50 percent of consumers claim to spend between five and 30 seconds on average on emails from brands. This implies that email's rather unaggressive, opt-in character is still highly appreciated. Just 32 percent of consumers spend the same amount of time on marketing SMS messages. Incoming social posts from brands are less likely to be properly digested with 27 percent of consumers spending the same amount of time reading tweets, Facebook posts or content delivered via other social channels.

Given a soaring popularity of social media, these findings may come as a shock. We all have grown to think of social media as powerful tools to build engagement as part of a cross-channel strategy. Yet they may not be the only - or the best- way to reach consumers.

Based on Accenture data, email again emerges as the most effective method, this time for consumers receiving and using coupons. Roughly 44 percent of American shoppers claim that they would rather have all their offers come through email. Shockingly, an almost archaic, printed "snail" mail (content delivered by conventional postal services) comes out as the second best- liked method. Finally, in-store offers seem to produce desirable results, at least to some extent. However, if you are determined to advertise a special offer among your customers in a truly effective manner, your strategy should not depend exclusively on texts and social media.

Rising above the noise

So are today's consumers suffering from some sort of attention deficit disorder? Shorter attention spans are most likely a symptom of changing consumer behaviour and abundance of new channels. Bombarded by content from every digital device, connected consumer is constantly distracted. Studies have shown that that 49 percent of consumers receive between two and 10 marketing emails every single day. In the world where widely accessible and "always-on" distractions are mushrooming, it is extremely difficult for a consumer to concentrate on just one thing or one piece of content. What does this "digital noise" mean to marketers? They must double their efforts to get their messages across and build engagement. Brands must to tap into this new dynamic by learning how to drive loyalty of a constantly distracted customer.

Sources: www.businessinsider.com; http://www.responsys.com; http://www.turn.com;