Beyond their structural characteristics, dialogue messages contain five intrinsic requirements.

One: Value
Your customers and prospects aren’t interested in having their business lives interrupted by your marketing messages. Believe it or not, they’d rather not have their voicemail bloated with your non-relevant telemarketing offers. Why, they’re not even excited about continually being offered another line extension they don’t think they need, but you do.

More and more, they resent these intrusive messages and are creating more and more defense mechanisms against them.

But they are willing to be part of a dialogue if it is clear to them that you respect them and their time and that you have something of value to give them.

In other words, to avoid being considered intrusive, a message must have an added value to the recipient. It also has to be received when, where and in the form preferred by your customer or prospect. Unless the message contains something they perceive to be of value to them personally, chances are they’ll reject it.

Value, by the way, includes much more than relevant product information. It also includes things like entertainment, status, empowerment information, job effectiveness and professional development.

Two: Access
An essential aspect of dialogue communications is making it easy for customers and prospects to contact your company at any time, any place, for any reason.

The more ways they have to access your brand, the stronger their relationship will be. The easier it is for customers to get questions answered and problems dealt with, the easier it will be for the customer to develop a supporting relationship.

Easy accessibility, particularly at the time when a buying or use decision is being made or when there’s a problem or need for information, is an added value to customers and prospects.

Three: Human attention
Merely providing customers with an 800 number, Web address or email contact so they can easily contact the company does not qualify as response in the dialogue process.

Response is providing a company representative or system that can listen to your customer or prospect, put the conversation into a context of their profile and history and stay with them throughout the dialogue.

Four: Personal recognition
Of course, once someone is a customer, he or she likes to be personally recognized. That’s one of the first steps in establishing a relationship.

In terms of communications, that means much more than addressing them by name or personalizing content. When a company gives you its business, they feel that a relationship has been established. Even if you see it as merely an “acquisition” or “transaction.”

If you fail to recognize this perceived connection, then your customer will view the relationship as a weak one, not worthy of their loyalty.

So it becomes incumbent on you to treat customers differently than the general market. Which means treating them individually and personally in the kind of information, emotional incentives and value offers that you make to them. (If you’d like to explore an approach to this idea, check out “Hug your customers” in the Five Ways section of this site.)

Five: Brand reinforcement
If you have the impression that a dialogue with a customer or prospect is an ongoing, continuous, daily occurrence, then we’ve overstated things. Or you’re living in another disconnected Shirley MacLaine universe some where.

Customers and prospects do not spend their days thinking about how they can break away for a few hours to talk with you over the Internet.

In reality, dialogues pop up now and then over time. When they need to. Where there is a need. When it’s of value to customers and prospects. Not necessarily when it’s convenient or efficient for you. But rather when customers and prospects want them to occur. Because they’re in control.

That means two things. Dialogues need to be reinforced. And conversations should revolve around the customers and their relationship to the brand.

The brand’s the thing
The brand is the thing that connects your customers and prospects and their dialogues with your company. In their minds, they are communicating with the brand. It is the hook they have in their heads that categorizes and consolidates all these disparate interactions and conversations.

And one of the important benefits of awareness- and familiarity-building communications (some people call it brand communications, we don’t) is its ability to reinforce relationships with people who have already bought your product/service offering. In fact, some studies have shown that in many cases, the majority of ad readers are current customers.

Reinforcement of brand image and promises as well as purchase decisions should be part of your dialogue strategy. It reduces “buyer remorse” and ties both customers and prospects closer to the brand to initiate dialogue.

In fact, brand is so important to dialogue communication that you might want to check out “Increase your brandwidth” in the Five Ways section.