The Trap of Transactional Marketing

This article is a summary of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 15. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

For social impact executives, marketing leaders, and practitioners interested in building better brands, it’s easy to fall into the trap of transactional marketing.

The reality is that we all have done it. But understanding why this trap exists is the first step toward escaping it.

Six Reasons We Fall Into This Trap

1. It's Easy

Transactional marketing doesn't take very much time, it doesn't take very many resources. You throw a call to action on the website or on social or in your email and you call it a day and you move on to your next project.

A lot of the tools that we use are built to support transactional marketing. A lot of the best practices that you see posted are focused around transactional marketing. And in general, the way that marketers have been taught to do marketing — especially in the last five, 10 years — has been largely based on transactional approaches to marketing. The ease and the tools being built for it and the overall kind of playbooks and best practices around marketing being focused, especially as of late around more transactional approaches to marketing and more analytical and data-driven approaches to marketing is largely why we've ended up here.

Data Has Replaced Strategy

When we look at the best practices that we're learning and we're reading from people in the space and maybe in other industries that we respect, the main reason how data has been used effectively — but also taken too far — is when we're doing brand building and marketing, that it is evidence-based. It's not just this blind leap of faith that we're hoping that by doing all these brand building and marketing efforts that we just hope that they pay them off.

There's a valid seed to the idea that we want to make sure that when we're doing marketing that we're doing it effectively and that it's actually driving business outcomes. And it's not just this thing that's being done on the side. It's just been taken too far. And that is because we've had this new set of tools that is very shiny for marketers. 

We have so much more data than we ever used to have, largely because so much marketing is happening through digital channels now. And then we got hyper-focused on micro-transactions and data and conversions and AB tests and all of these tools that we now have at our disposal. 

That's how transactional marketing has become easy when we're being served up all of the tools and the data and the metrics, especially for say, somebody who is new to the workforce and is pursuing a career in marketing, this is the canvas that they've been given to be creative, and of course they're going to operate within that space because that's the tool that they've been given and that's why it can be easy.

2. Marketing Isn’t a Priority

It's almost reflexive. Ease becomes a priority when marketing isn’t. And that has been something that leadership can be guilty of. Maybe the person being asked to do the marketing is being asked to do quite a few other things, and there is not enough emphasis on spending the time and taking the space and making room for creativity. Maybe the people on your team are feeling pressure to just get that email out or just get that post up because there's so many other things to work on. So transactional language or messaging is just an easy way to get the job done or to just kind of check the box.

Because if you don't have the time and energy to build a broader strategy and a longer game strategy, then what else can you do? Either nothing or just checking the boxes. We will make sure we send the emails. We'll make sure we do the social posts. We'll make sure we write letters to donors. Just checking those boxes — we can't do nothing, so we have to do something. So these are the easy things. And also frankly, this is largely what people do. There are not that many organizations who are truly doing longer term brand building work effectively — especially in the social impact space because it is harder. But it is a better way to do it long term.

A Political Campaign Parallel

There was a local rally around a local measure that voters are going to vote on in November. There was a campaign consultant in the room and the campaign consultant was talking about how for a long time phone banking and email campaigns and text messaging campaigns were really effective ways to get out the vote. And that has changed. It’s gone back to the very simplest oldest school way of doing it — door-to-door canvassing. That's back to this technique that takes more time, that takes more effort, that sometimes takes more creativity and improvisation — but ultimately has a deeper impact. 

There's an interesting corollary with the time we're in marketing-wise. 

Because of transactional marketing, because so much of our channels and our inboxes are filled with low effort BS content, and because people can pump out a lot of content in that fashion — we're overwhelmed. And so there's just a saturation point that's been reached. So it is interesting to see some of these more old school brand building approaches and full circle approaches coming back.

Now, don't get me wrong, digital marketing and digital engagement can be extremely powerful, but you shouldn't discount tried and true things like direct mail outreach and person-to-person outreach. And really what it comes down to is regardless of the format or the channel, are you building relationships? 

3. It’s Inexpensive

Transactional marketing is related to the two topics we've already brought up around ease and the tools themselves. A lot of these tools that are at our fingertips are free or extremely inexpensive. 

It can be a false facade for a leader to say, “Oh, we can invest 200 bucks a month in this email platform and boom, we're done on our marketing stack tech stack or our marketing strategy. Boom! We're going to sign up for this email service. It's inexpensive.” It looks good on a balance sheet, especially when leaders are bundling their marketing expenses in with this false overhead justification for the efficacy of your organization. You try to reduce costs and keep it inexpensive.

It's interesting because in certain ways it is inexpensive, but in other ways, brand building can also be inexpensive. There is a perception that building a brand is this massive, huge, expensive thing. And it can be — especially bigger plays in brand building if you're doing a whole rebrand or reinventing your digital experiences or launching a huge campaign. 

For example, you will probably use the same exact tools that you're using for a transactional approach as you would for a brand building approach. You're just applying those tools differently.

So brand building seems expensive in that it's a longer term approach, so you have to constantly invest over years, whereas you can run a given transactional marketing campaign in days, weeks, months. But you don't just do that. You don't just run a month-long campaign and then call a day. Some organizations do. That's not a good strategy. But in certain ways you're still going to continuously invest in transactional marketing as well. So it's not actually that much more inexpensive than a brand building approach if you approach it intentionally and strategically.

4. It Feels Safe

This is a familiar language. Other people are doing it and combined with the fact that it's perceived as fast and easy and inexpensive, it feels safe. And for an organization that is reticent to take risks, that may feel like the right thing to do. Not rock the boat and just keep delivering to your audience the thing that they're used to seeing.

You want to constantly be laying the path for your organization in your marketing. Anytime your marketing feels safe is a red flag. Now, don't conflate it feeling safe with it feeling familiar, because over time you do want to build marketing muscle. This shouldn't always feel like you're constantly reinventing things and that you're learning on the job. There should always be some amount of that. But over time — as an individual marketer or as a marketing team — you should start to get enough reps in that this becomes familiar. 

If it gets to the point that it feels safe and your entire marketing program feels safe, then you are not forward looking enough in your marketing strategy.

5. The Call to Action Drumbeat

Social impact leaders can fall into the trap of transactional marketing based on the best practices that we've seen from any company that's online. One of the things that usability testing companies coach their clients on is to make sure that there are clear calls to action on everything. On every page. On every piece of email you send out. On every social post. Constantly needing to make sure that there is a clear and easy call to action. That relentless drumbeat on calls to action can be a reason we fall into this trap — we have been taught and trained that just everything needs to be a meaningful call to action.

Being good with calling people to action is not anti-brand building. And to extend that, usability testing, or conversion rate optimization, or AB testing, or any of these analytical scientific approaches to marketing are not outside the purview of brand building. Brand building is really the overarching strategy and result that you are trying to create through your marketing efforts. And it's a philosophy and approach that is very squarely and relentlessly focused on customer experience. 

At the end of the day, how are you making them feel? You can be very strategic and you can be very scientific even in your marketing efforts and even do some amount of transactional marketing within a larger brand building philosophy.

Brand building is not just about putting content out there and trusting the people will find their way. You do need to help people along the way — and you want to make it frictionless. A lot of the best practices that we've learned from doing transactional marketing can be, and should be, applied to brand building. At the end of the day, we want to create delightful, frictionless, easy to use experiences for our supporters. 

Where it becomes a problem is if that's all you focus on and you lose sight of how you are making your supporters feel. Are you building trust with your supporters or are you moving away from that credibility and that trust through your transactional marketing? Are you making people feel like they're being extracted from instead of nurtured over time?

A False Dichotomy

Brand building style marketing and transactional style marketing can work in concert and can really help each other and help your organization as a whole. Transactional marketing shouldn't be discussed as some evil. It's how you balance these two things.

None of your content should be strictly transactional. But that doesn't mean that your content can't be conversion focused, or your content can't be driving action, or can't be tied back to metrics that are based on literal transactions. When we use the term transactional marketing — when it becomes an evil, so to speak, or not a best practice — is when you are taking some of these tactics too far. You’re taking them to the point that you are undermining your ability to build credibility and reputability with your audience and you're creating icky experiences for them. We've got to stop marketing like this.

That really goes deep on some of the traps of transactional marketing like fake urgency and straight up bad faith messaging that is misleading or sometimes even misinformation. That is when it's becoming transactional, where you might be driving donations or action, but you're doing it in a bad faith way. 

In user interface design, there’s a concept of dark patterns where you're essentially tricking users into landing at the place that you want them to or clicking the button that you want them to by making them think they're doing the opposite action. That’s a very clear case of transactional marketing. And when people experience that, they are rightfully repulsed and it will negatively impact your brand — forever.

The best rule of thumb when it comes to a brand building approach and how that affects your content:

Some content can be there to inspire, to inform, to educate, to update people. That's okay. Think about your content in a larger brand building approach. Instead, think about:

• How can we earn attention? 
• How can we earn action from our community in a respectful way? 

The same way that you would a friend, if all you ever did every single day to a friend was ask them to do favors for you and you never returned those favors and you never just hung out with that friend and just spent time with them. That would be a very unhealthy relationship. 

So if you think about your relationship with your community the same way you think about your personal relationships, that's a generally good rule of thumb that could inspire and inform your content and marketing strategy.

6. Not Supporting Our Marketing Person or Team

Another mistake we make as leaders in the space, is that we sometimes default to hiring entry-level folks into channel management positions. Whether that's social or email or whatever, we don't give them enough of the training necessary to understand the nuances and complexities of good storytelling and good brand building. 

Sometimes we unintentionally restrict their behaviors and don't give these creative people the latitude to experiment and get creative with the way that they're communicating with the audience through the channels that we've assigned them to. 

That happens all the time. And there's a lot of reasons why that can happen. At the end of the day, what you really need — if you want to elevate your marketing at a social impact organization — is you need to build a marketing and brand building philosophy and culture. Educating everyone in the organization that this is how we show up in our communications, as an organization, as a brand. These are the actions that we're asking people to take and how are we going to do that creatively and strategically? 

And that then trickles down into the more tactical elements of your marketing strategy — such as what are the channels you'll use, what are the communication formats that you'll use. Because if you start bottom up like that and look at channels, content, and formats first, but that's not anchored by and supported by a broader marketing strategy and philosophy — then you fall into that trap of transactional marketing much more easily.

One distinguishing point here. You still need to approach things in a channel-first way in that you need to learn the culture of every channel that you will be playing in. Because if all you do is think about the idea first and then just try and distribute it throughout all these different channels without personalizing it, that is also not going to work. So you have to really look at it from both ways.

How to Move Forward: Choose Marketing the Honors Your Mission

Playing it safe or taking the easiest path will never change the world. Safe marketing may feel efficient, but it doesn’t inspire supporter or donor loyalty or transformation. Courageous leaders break free from the transactional marketing trap and chart a different course — one where strategy comes first, tools follow, and relationships are built to last. 

Every interaction that takes place with your organization is a chance to either reduce people to numbers or honor them as whole human beings. Transactional marketing shrinks your mission — brand-building magnifies it. When you choose to lead with story, trust, and credibility, your marketing becomes a reflection of your values — not your budget. Imagine the impact if every marketing message your organization produces carries the weight of your mission.