tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23995955360258626412024-03-13T04:33:06.343+00:00Thinking DigitalFuture trends in Digital strategy, Total Customer Engagement, CRM, eCRM and multichannel marketingStefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-63422135396048834662015-01-08T13:32:00.000+00:002015-01-08T13:32:00.422+00:00Strategy in the post-digital era<div class="p1">
First came ‘shopping,’ when the shopkeeper made you feel welcome. In my local shop, Mrs Frances knew everyone by name, and could anticipate almost any request. When she was asked for something new, she listened and knew next time. It was very difficult to catch Mrs Frances out more than once. She was there to serve her customers.</div>
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<span class="s1">Then came ’shopper,’ with aisles that were set out for our convenience. The idea was that by watching how customers behaved in a store, the owner could set the store out best to meet the pressing needs, putting the rarely-bought at the back or in the corners where you wouldn’t get in other peoples’ way while you were choosing. It was a slightly more sophisticated way to put the customer’s needs at the centre of the experience.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This led to ‘customer journeys,’ perhaps biased not in favour of the shopper but in favour of the store. Studying how customers behaved led to commercially-driven thinking about how they could be tempted to buy more, or to vary their choices. Ultimately, brands started asking for prime positions, and others created ranges to meet every conceivable need. Shopping became either a world of temptation, or an annoyance, or more convenient, depending on your value to the store. Data started to be looked at in the abstract, not the personal.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Then along came digital. It removed the shop from shopping altogether in some cases. It became a distracting obsession if I’m honest; and I speak as a digital strategist. Shops talked of the digital versus bricks and mortar future, and took fright at the thought that all industries might go the way of bookselling. FMCG brands spent serious money trying to find ways to market digitally in anticipation of the demise of the real world. It took twenty years for us to get past the notion that digital would replace shopping in shops.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But digital is not the new world. Digital did not replace real life. The digital éclair didn’t win. Digital, like all great revolutions in technology, is being assimilated. We live in a world where we shop. Where the role of every medium, analog, digital or (in the traditional sense) social, will end up just being aspects of our environment. And that presents a massive step change in the way we think of strategy as it applies to marketing to consumers. Gone are the ideas that each channel in its place, run within and by a silo of specialists, with a channel-specific goal and vision. The silos simply have no relevance in a world where a customer journey can take in so many momentary contexts, where as more are added the boundaries disappear and the marketing ecosphere becomes more democratic. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Appearing in sharp relief once again is the customer. The new marketer has to focus on that, because to do anything else inevitably exposes massive blind spots. We are talking about viewing marketing not as disciplines like CRM, or shopper marketing, or social, digital, outdoor, PoS, but as genuinely coherent customer engagement. The goals are no longer awards, or social kudos, or reducing basket abandonment (although all of these play specific parts), the goal is coherence along the entire customer journey. It’s a new way of thinking. You can think of it as post-digital if you want to put it in (or outside) a box. But the reality in our stark new consumer-centric world is a new discipline: Total Customer Engagement. Welcome to the new era.</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-32360119521309473042014-12-09T10:28:00.000+00:002014-12-09T10:28:49.106+00:00Big plans, no noise<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">So, my blog has been a little slow of late. Largely because I’ve been immersed in ambitious (and I hope revolutionary) plans. And I’m doing that because as a twenty-year agency vet (I started one of the first few digital agencies, in 1994) it’s so terribly easy to get comfy and do the same things over and over again.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In fact, I’ve launched a number of agencies - sold some, folded one (my bad), watched a couple get absorbed, bought one back… but always relatively small, very cool (my 17-year business partner Jason Holland is to thank for that). Time I think to change gears with my incredible team.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">So… no blogs at the moment. Not many articles either. But interesting diversions (see this <a href="http://agoranews.es/2014/11/03/ie-marketing-day-future-marketing-digital-and-beyond" target="_blank">video</a> from my recent trip to Madrid’s IE Business School) and looking forward to an absolutely amazing ’15. Watch this space!</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-76973753079279627342014-11-20T15:28:00.001+00:002014-11-20T15:28:51.820+00:00The marketers who get to grips with CRM today are tomorrow's superstarsOver the past dozen years I have been working in CRM. My team has delivered global strategies for major brands like Virgin, News International and McCain, and I have been teaching marketers CRM skills at the Institute of Direct & Digital Marketing and at Hult Business School, where for the past few years I have taught eCRM to Masters in Marketing students and MBAs. Lately I have been running masterclasses for Heads of Marketing at the Groucho Club (email me for info), and I have noticed something remarkable about people who have these skills: they make unusually rapid progress up the career ladder - so I thought I would pass on a few of my observations.<br />
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CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) or eCRM (the digital version, though these days the terms are interchangeable) is founded on a deep understanding of customers. The skills required include the ability to interpret data, to extract customer insight, and to act on it. They also include the ability to plan ahead, sometimes based on an understanding of what customers do or are likely to do over the span of several years (think: buying a car or a sofa).<br />
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The run of the mill marketer tends to get caught up in day-to-day delivery of campaigns; CRM people manage to do this while understanding the over-arching context of the campaigns. More often than not, a campaign within a CRM programme will not drive instant revenue, but will increase the value of the customer to the brand over the course of several campaigns. And this requires a long view. As we all know, daily pressures (get a campaign out, check copy, chivvy along an agency, test an app) do get in the way of thinking big, so how does a savvy marketer make it work?<br />
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It all comes down to measurement and markers. CRM requires an understanding of the lifecycle a customer is on, from first consideration of a brand to loyal consumption and recommendation. Using data skills to help map this out provides several fantastic tools at once: a long view of the customer relationship; a sequence of stages in the lifecycle, from engagement to conversion to retention; and a series of timed steps along the journey.<br />
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This customer journey map is wonderful, because it allows us to think long term whilst giving us sight of the next few steps. By applying some numbers to each step - say, 1% fewer customers who stop engaging at the end of the step - when they get added up over ten steps that may be a significant increase in revenue. In other words, you can focus on the next immediate improvement, and will find after a while a significant change has been achieved. It's a really simple principle.<br />
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That same principle is why some of the people who started out in the geeky bit of marketing, CRM, are now superstars leading their organisations' growth. At each step they set a target and saw what happened. Their success was measured. They proved their value to their employers - and in return, rose rapidly. Many of today's superstar marketers have CRM skills to thank for it.<br />
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Felix Velarde is Chairman at Underwired (underwired.com), the leading CRM consultancy, and teaches at Hult International Business School and the IDM. For information about any of these courses, including those for Heads of Marketing, email him at felix@underwired.com<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-82641922818222269382014-08-18T11:56:00.000+01:002014-08-18T11:56:44.561+01:00Multichannel is about persuasionThere is a common misconception in modern post digital marketing, which stems from a view that because it is difficult to track which media and devices a consumer uses, it’s difficult to ensure they’re always getting the same message.<br />
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This is not the case, however. The functional implication of this is that brands need to extend the notion of “brand consistency” into “communication universality”. In other words, you get the same message in the same style no matter how or where you receive it. Multichannel seems to equate to the “same message on every medium”. Pervasive marketing, put another way.<br />
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A practical example of this is those supermarkets that have a TV screen above the entrance, showing either their TV advertisements (ads) or their point of sale (PoS) promotions. You may have seen the crowds of people stopping at the entrance to watch the latest commercial. You haven’t? Well, there’s a reason for that. Every channel is different and each has its strengths. When not playing to their strengths, it manifests as a weakness. There is, in my view, absolutely no point whatsoever in trying to make any communication universal. TV ads work when on TV – they don’t necessarily work in a four-centimetre box in a browser window.<br />
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Even if you could devise one that did, how would it work at PoS, or on a mobile without sound? By trying to make a piece of communication platform-neutral, we neuter platform-specific creativity – we render the advantages of each venue, medium or device redundant. Multichannel is therefore a much-abused term in common marketing practice. What multichannel means, when it is not a catch-all for “make it all look the same”, is “use every channel to its best advantage”. Taking this one way might imply a fragmented, incoherent collection of messages. And again, that’s not ideal. So what is?<br />
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Multichannel marketing done properly requires a genuine understanding of customer lifecycles and framed within that, customer journeys. Customer journeys are the articulation of researched cycles within awareness, prospect, engagement, consideration, conversion, retention, advocacy and win-back phases of the lifecycle. Data, (Big data sometimes, but not necessarily always) provides the information, data planning – especially CRM planning – provides the insights, and customer journey planning converts this into a series of sequences. Attach to each point in the sequence a trigger, information, value exchange or call to action and we have a plan we can use to map the customer’s engagement from each phase of the lifecycle, leading to the next.<br />
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And this is where multichannel comes into its own. With this map in hand, and the data and validating research into the behaviours, preferences and attitudes of the customer, (each map will look different according to the segment defining a particular type of customer and their interactions with the brand), a start can be made on defining how each touchpoint should be executed. For example, if we know that a shopper always shops on a Saturday at 10am in Warwick, and buys a basket of produce, which we can predict, for their family (which we know about), then we might want to increase their loyalty by delivering some real value – in this case, in the form of genuinely relevant vouchers.<br />
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We have several possible touchpoints, we could send them a mobile message, for example. Or e-mail. Or in the post. Or at the till. You can see that by approaching multichannel in a simplistic way the answer would be “all of them”.<br />
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To make it effective, we need to understand the sequence involved:<br />
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“Thanks for shopping with us” – printed on the receipt, same day as last shop.<br />
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“Here’s a voucher based on your last-but-one shop” – sent by e-mail, two days before the next shop (which our research shows is when a shopping list is planned ).<br />
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“Did you print this week’s voucher?” – a targeted ad on Facebook, Friday afternoon.<br />
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“In case you forgot, use this code” – SMS, Saturday morning.<br />
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“Do you have any vouchers?” – sales assistant.<br />
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This is true of multichannel marketing, albeit using a microscopic sequence to illustrate the principle. It requires coordination of course, which is why most people don’t bother doing it. But the rewards can be staggering – it’s generating an extra £5.75m a year for one of the brands we work with, and it has barely scratched the surface. With an understanding of what multichannel truly means, customers can be engaged to an astonishing degree. Multichannel isn’t about pervasiveness after all. It’s about persuasion.<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-47076186260758891642014-07-31T14:19:00.000+01:002014-07-31T14:19:40.501+01:00Is personalisation and segmentation in marketing necessary?Big brands think personalisation is the preserve of the cutting edge, big budget marketers. But no one should forget that all they are doing is replicating the personal service we, as customers, were once used to when we went shopping to our favourite small independent stores. The reality is it’s in reach of every company, whether small or large: SaaS allows us to do it at low cost, while the big vendors charge millions for systems that can’t possibly ever be fully utilised. The investment that is required is in the customer journeys, the content and the behavioural economics that goes behind planning the programme. Only that way can you drive massive, measurable financial returns.<br />
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But do customers actually like it?<br />
Most people prefer to be addressed by name – we’re hardwired to respond (that's why you always hear when your name is mentioned on the other side of the room at a party). If you wish to build a relationship between your brand and a customer, then you have to behave as if the brand is an individual, and recognise the individuality of the person you’re trying to relate to. That’s all but impossible if you speak generically or impersonally. That’s not to say that’s how all marketing works: TV, for example, can work brilliantly to create brand resonance when it ignores the personal relationship between brand and consumer altogether.<br />
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So we need to segment our customers to personalise our marketing?<br />
The two are entirely distinct. Personalisation recognises the individual, by identity, position in a customer lifecycle, attitudinal trajectory and behaviour (observed and forecast). Personalisation therefore allows truly individualised communications. Segmentation on the other hand is a ‘meta’ discipline, taking broad-brush strokes to datasets filled with people defined by characteristics; these could be behaviour, motivation, demographic profile, propensity etc. In other words, segmentation is about how you describe people and personalisation is about how you talk to people. Although each is different, it is important to consider both to achieve a desirable outcome from your customers.<br />
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By segmenting customers, businesses will have a greater chance of achieving success and thus creating a loyal customer. Segmentation is a no-brainer. There are two examples that come straight to mind to illustrate the power of segmentation. The first was a campaign for Virgin Holidays back in the early days of eCRM, this was the first time we ran an email campaign segmented simply by previous purchase behaviour and the (very simple) campaign generated £3million of revenue on the spot.<br />
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The second was a campaign for The Sun’s Dream Team Fantasy Football. Previous segmentation had been unproductive. We took a look, decided to approach segmentation from a motivational point of view and decided the two motivations were likely to be ‘passionate about football’ and ‘in it for the money’. This simple insight increased revenue by 93% in 90 days.<br />
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Very often, fantastic CRM is about simplicity and insight, not complexity. In our experience, segmenting customers into 6-7 segments will drive 90% of the value creation available, proving that in fact many customers like brands to appeal to them individually: by doing so it will increase the customer’s engagement with the brand, thus creating loyal, valuable customers.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-53532711569077314052014-06-25T14:56:00.000+01:002014-06-25T15:04:51.472+01:0024 hours with SmartThings, a home automation adventureWay back in the mists of time I sponsored SmartThings (smartthings.com) on Kickstarter. About an age and a half later they finally got round to getting the kit licensed in Europe and after a bit of irritation and some judicious chasing, I received a badly packed box of gizmos and a hub, no instructions included. Being a bit of a geek I set to work.<br />
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I received a hub, three proximity key fobs and a ‘multi’ sensor, which gauges temperature, angle, humidity, acceleration and closed/open. I set the hub up with only one false start, when I tried to power and network it via an Airport Express rather than directly into my main home ethernet - support from SmartThings was fast but useless, so I let my inner nerd have rein and quickly found the solution.<br />
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I then set up a proximity fob, my iPhone (which gives you the option to set a proximity alert when the phone reaches, say, your local train station, or closer, the front door) and the multi. The multi has been attached to an internal door, and set so I get an alert on my phone when the door is opened. I have so far worked out that the most sensible (for now) combination is thus:<br />
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<li>If my wife or I leave the house and the back door is open, we both get an alert</li>
<li>If either of us leaves the house while the door is open, but one of us remains in the house, no alert</li>
<li>If I arrive at the station and my wife is home, she gets an alert, but if she isn’t, she doesn’t</li>
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I have yet to incorporate the other two fobs. I’ve already decided I want a couple of switchable plug sockets, so that if we both leave the house all the stuff left on standby gets switched off at the socket, and back on when either of us arrives back.<br />
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I’m starting to get the hang of it. I suspect it may get slightly expensive, this home automation thing - and I have a suspicion it will eventually change our behaviour (and our electricity bills) for the good. I’ll keep you posted.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-27608428055538508802014-06-12T18:22:00.000+01:002014-06-12T18:22:47.638+01:00It's the Art of Perfectly Timed Marketing<b>Guest blogger – Jen Talbot, Senior Account Manager</b><br />
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Responsible for the day-to-day account management of some of Underwired's clients including ESPN and Regus worldwide, Jen advises on digital best practice and marketing strategy, and coordinates planning workshops for customer journey mapping.<br />
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Jen joined Underwired in July 2013 bringing with her experience from previous roles at Havas EHS in account management and project planning for both digital and integrated campaigns for brands in the financial, utilities and leisure sectors including Barclays Wealth, CPA Global and E.ON.<br />
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In an age of connectivity, where everything has become instantaneous, the sense of meaningful communication has been lost in the constant noise of notifications and reminders. So, with this being today's reality, what does this mean for the modern day marketer?<br />
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When you see a stunning rainbow or a great piece of street art, what do you do? Instagram it, Vine it, Tweet it, Facebook it? When you're out for the day how many times do you respond to texts, WhatsApp messages, emails or tweets?<br />
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Media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, has outlined our obsession for trying to capture the moment, but never quite living in it, in his new book 'Present Shock'. He makes the point that, "The only kind of people that used to be contacted this frequently and this incessantly, were 911 operators - and they would only do it for two or three hours during the day. And then they would be medicated in order to be able to live that way".<br />
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<b>Kronos vs Kairos </b><br />
Taking inspiration from Ancient Greek, today's marketers have two differing methods to select from, when looking to determine the 'right moment in time' for customer communication. Definitions of 'Kronos' and 'Kairos' - both Ancient Greek words for 'Time' - distinguish these methods:<br />
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1.<b>Kronos </b><br />
Kronos means chronological or clock-driven. A marketer's version of Kronos is: "I know that by sending my newsletter on Thursday at 1pm I will get a better response than at any other time". Or "I know that by sending an email every week I will get more repeat purchases".<br />
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2.<b>Kairos </b><br />
Kairos is the alternative sense of time, succinctly put by John Pulakos, in his 1983 article 'toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric': "In short, Kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right time." In marketing, we can interpret this as both the readiness or 'openness' for conversation, and the choice of selecting the appropriate moment.<br />
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<b>The age of bombardment </b><br />
According to Microsoft, the average person has 184 emails in their inbox and receives at least another 28 emails each day. According to Ofcom, 49% of people regularly 'media mesh' - using devices for completely unrelated activities whilst watching TV - and an average of 500 million tweets are sent everyday.<br />
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With all this noise and irrelevance, companies are forever looking to achieve efficiencies using the Kronos method, a chronological approach to sending marketing communications. By doing a simple Google search of 'best time to send email' 1,550,000,000 results are produced. But how many companies implement this approach without looking further into their audience motivations?<br />
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<b>When IS the right moment? </b><br />
One source suggests potential reasoning for the most successful time frames for each sector and industry. For example, the 'post work peak' (between 5pm and 7pm) is considered to be the best time to send marketing emails, in terms of open rates.<br />
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When Gmail announced the implementation of 'tabs' to its inbox, companies were concerned that response rates would go down. In fact, within the first few weeks of the update, the opposite was true and the open and transaction rates actually increased. Although rates are approaching the average again now, this uplift highlights the affect of taking the Kairos approach and the importance of having an audience that is 'ready' to view marketing emails. This 'readiness' essentially means that recipients are in more of an open mind to click through to the email and transact where relevant.<br />
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<b>Kairos in CRM </b><br />
Readiness, or indeed Kairos, is absolutely key to CRM, as it ensures marketers are carefully considering when the audience is 'ready' to hear from your company. In so many cases, communication programmes are run on a periodic or silo basis - onboarding, newsletters, loyalty programmes, retention - all overlapping and clamouring for attention.<br />
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Let's think now about how many times a company has said 'thank you' to you for being a customer. Now let's think about how many times a company has said 'thank you' only to use this as an opportunity to cross-sell? Some might see this second option as an efficiency that their customers would appreciate. But by having a 'dual-purpose' communication you actually weaken both messages. There should be a time and a place for everything. The acceptance and desire for tools, such as the Gmail 'tabs' or Outlook's 'advanced rules', show the increasing importance for customers to control when they are ready to be spoken to. So with this in mind, a thank you should just be that; 'thank you'.<br />
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<b>Kairos in practice </b><br />
Confused.com is a good example of using Kairos in practice. Having used the insurance search engine for a quote comparison in March, a month later - when I'd nearly forgotten about it - they sent me a birthday email. There was no sales message, just a humorous email from the brand mascot, Brian the Robot. The email immediately put me in a great mood and brought Confused.com to the front of my mind. It made me want to show my friends and it generally made me feel pretty good to be a customer. A couple of months then passed by and they nudged me again, this time about a new app that was available.<br />
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Confused.com is playing the long game as it clearly understands that it will be a year before I make another decision about my insurance. We both know that I'm not in the market right now, but in the meantime I'm being made to feel appreciated - and entertained - therefore enhancing the chances of a repeat purchase. And before I return to the website, to potentially make a purchase, I have been providing my word of mouth recommendations to colleagues and friends about the company and its great customer service.<br />
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<b>Conclusion </b><br />
So after all this talk of Ancient Greek, where do we as marketers stand? Well, hopefully with a realisation that when juggling existing communications plans, business goals, stakeholder opinions and a disorganised or legacy database, the thought of "What does the customer want from my company?" can often fall by the wayside. But, this question should hold equal if not a greater importance than the thought of "What do I (the business) want to tell my customer?" This is because it can inform and give greater value to everything from data segmentation to communications content.<br />
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When a communication becomes supportive and not 'shouty', useful but not needy, and timely yet not thoughtless, we start to see appreciation in the form of response. Through this approach, we regain the value of meaningful communications and become able to cut through the chaos of a 'Present Shock' inbox.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-22737405652592819982014-05-14T09:24:00.001+01:002014-06-12T17:27:27.267+01:00Total Customer engagement: growing trend of "Total Customer Engagement" and how this is affecting the future of marketing<div class="p1">
When I was a kid, we used to shop in the same places all the time. We'd walk down the street and say hi to the butcher walking in the other direction. He'd always have a smile, and maybe make a cheeky comment about us kids. When we went into his shop he'd comment on what veg would go with the meat my mum had chosen, and tell her to say hi to Jeoff when we went into the greengrocer's next door. There was always a kind word. For decades my family shopped in the same shops. There wasn't anything called customer engagement. But that's what it was.</div>
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Nineteen years ago the web turned up, messed up customer experience by turning it on its head, reducing the shopper interaction to seven clicks, shopping carts, price comparison and basket abandonment. Almost twenty years on, we've learned a huge amount about technology, about acquisition, about usability, great design, optimisation and the always-on mentality. Having now come out the end of e-commerce's terrible teens, here are the things we now know:</div>
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Retention only comes after acquisition</div>
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Loyalty only comes after service</div>
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Advocacy only comes after loyalty</div>
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Win-back only comes after failure</div>
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Three clicks is best, though if you have a process that takes more than ten by the time you've got the customer to seven she's unlikely to turn back and go to your competitor</div>
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Responsive design means you can make the experience similar across PC, tablet and mobile</div>
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...and so on.</div>
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What we've also started to understand is that the customer is on a journey. Over a decade, we have perfected the art of defining that journey by understanding that there is a natural sequence that doesn't feel forced if you ask the customer to take the journey with you. This in turn, is based on the idea of the nudge - that one little step at a time can lead to significant change. When we look at where a customer is, what they like, where they go and where we want them to go, we can then readily develop a map of the customer's journey from first point of contact to lifetime loyalty, in little incremental steps. </div>
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The art of customer journey planning, which came out of the in-store retail experience and the desire to drive customers past high margin discretionary items on the way to their target staples, has been translated to the online world and perfected over ten years by the specialist eCRM agencies like Underwired and others. And this customer journey, delivered using the cheapest digital channels, has been developed to allow brands to examine each little, incremental step on its own and optimise its performance. By extension, when lots of little increases in performance are added together, huge changes in revenue can be achieved. To illustrate this, by increasing revenue by 3% for a single step, when applied over 24 steps will double your revenue. We do this all the time.</div>
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By adding a dimension of customer focus to this rather technical, commercial focus, segmentation has been taken from its shopping experience roots (for instance, when our butcher would know that because ours was a three kid family, we'd be more likely to buy mince than a steak), via direct marketing thinking, properly defined in the early seventies, to the digital age. This digital age has allowed marketers to think in big numbers, to define shopping habits not through inference, but through observing behaviours from Google search to repeat purchase in an e-commerce system. Behaviour, enhanced by adding demographic data, married to motivation (back again to inference) gives us 3D segmentation. And 3D segmentation gives us the tools to develop different customer journeys for different types of customer.</div>
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All of this you're familiar with, I suspect. Marketing is now largely scientific. We can develop customer journeys for different customer types and take them from one step to another leading to maximal (or at least optimal) lifetime value.</div>
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It's been a revolution. And the kids have grown up. Almost twenty years on since the first days of the web and the painful birth of a new way of retailing, this discipline of how to engage with customers is finally about to emerge from its teens.</div>
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So where does it go from here?</div>
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The next generation of retailing takes what has gone on up until now and builds on it. In actual fact the Next Big Thing is really simply an extension to everything you have just read: if you look at how segmented customer journey planning has been expressed in practice, the next step in its evolution is quite clear. Thus far, we have made use of digital channels to do all of this. The web to capture attention, to engage people with the brand on the website (or landing pages), to engage and retain them using email, to convert them to customers using e-commerce.</div>
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And thus far, we've been viewing the customer journey as something we as master marketers define for our customers.</div>
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In fact, customers are on their own journey. They have lives, which are multi-threaded, which involve the web, and mobile, and walking down the street with their kids. They live lives ruled by their motivations, the people they listen to, their immediate needs, and their whims. And, critically, they are influenced by all sorts of things that aren't just digital.</div>
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The customer journey plan does work. It does have a crucial role to play - as marketers we must have a framework for holding the hand of the customer while we take them one step further: without it we don't know how to brief it to agencies, we don't know how to measure success and we don't know how to optimise it. But it ignores the fact that customers (actual real people!) have their own sequence, and they are unlikely to share it with us, even if they know it themselves.</div>
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One of the facets of this which informs what will happen next is that in real life, customers aren't just on email. They don't just use digital. Sometimes the critical nudge that will take the customer from point 16 to point 17 isn't online. We may have to reach them offline.</div>
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The customer journey requires us to think in a channel-agnostic, or multi-channel, way. The future of this marketing discipline requires us to map the customer journey without assuming it will be served at every step by an online touch-point. If we do this, the customer journey plan we describe can more closely reflect the customer's own journey and the way she actually lives her life. By defining customer engagement on the basis of what nudges and steps are required first, and then adding in channel selections based on the customer's own journey, second, we can create single-minded, focused, multi-channel strategies and campaigns. </div>
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This is the next generation of marketing. It's called Total Customer Engagement. It gives us the tools to leverage 3D segmentation and digital insight to deliver the kind of supreme engagement previously only delivered by the local family shop keeper. </div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-36378270238440061312014-05-02T13:23:00.000+01:002014-05-02T13:23:05.987+01:00Who are The Inheritors?<div data-mce-style="color: #000000;" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU5ztS-vAstkYq1buTWLn3XfJn5uzNE9B5Eecqh4vlYc9tMvtSRAJBOfUzt_MGMBudJJ-o7WLijDGiLnEjNwbYhn4NuHNhQcUlbLeRZ4iKYY3VDRZdKOelClH29lkl_8KGhEAYzgEEl3RK/s1600/Jamie-Barnett_HIGH-RES.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU5ztS-vAstkYq1buTWLn3XfJn5uzNE9B5Eecqh4vlYc9tMvtSRAJBOfUzt_MGMBudJJ-o7WLijDGiLnEjNwbYhn4NuHNhQcUlbLeRZ4iKYY3VDRZdKOelClH29lkl_8KGhEAYzgEEl3RK/s1600/Jamie-Barnett_HIGH-RES.jpeg" /></a><span data-mce-style="font-weight: bold;" style="font-weight: bold;">Guest blogger - Jamie Barnett, Planner</span></div>
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Working with Underwired's Planning Director Ivan Fernandes, Jamie helps develop digitally integrated strategies and CRM programmes to address its clients' challenges and goals. Jamie started her career client-side at Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco before moving to the UK in 2011, where she jumped the fence to go agency-side working for brands such as Heineken UK, Iceland Foods and LoveFilm. Jamie has an MBA in Marketing and Brand Strategy and a degree in Graphic Design, Psychology and Communications.</div>
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Although it’s not exactly as William Golding had originally written in Lord of the Flies, we are all holders of a modern day conch – using it to wield as much power as we possibly can. Every day we spring out of bed and enter into society armed with our mobiles, iPads, laptops and cameras. A metaphorical extension of ourselves, our smart devices give us a kind of power similar to that felt by Ralph, Jack and Piggy on the deserted tropical island.</div>
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Instead of just consumers, we’ve now become creators and curators of content, challenging the traditional relationship with brands that has existed one-way up until now. Instead of just one conch, brands now have multiple conches, sounding off simultaneously via multiple social platforms, as well as those from consumers. This impacts the noise to signal ratio. Naturally, this new dynamic shifts power and challenges the traditional brand relationship with consumers.</div>
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With all of these conches now in the picture, the question then becomes – who really has the power over a brand’s communications – the brand or the consumer and does it really matter?</div>
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<span data-mce-style="font-weight: bold;" style="font-weight: bold;">Wag the dog</span></div>
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As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book The Tipping Point, consumers can play a pivotal role in a brand’s rejuvenation and in creating viral movements. They can keep brands honest and create momentum for campaigns and competitions. But as with cases like Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, is it the dog wagging the tail or the other way around? I think, brands should take the consumer’s power into consideration and tailor it accordingly.</div>
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In a way, it’s a bit like giving a classroom full of students a single story starter and letting each pupil generate their own narrative. A colouring book with a new box of crayons and no rules about staying within the lines – the framework is there, but the outcome is unpredictable.</div>
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<span data-mce-style="font-weight: bold;" style="font-weight: bold;">A happy marriage</span></div>
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The basis for my opinion stems from the notion that direct interaction with a brand (and the opportunity to help shape its culture), authentically integrates that brand into a consumer’s lifestyle. In an era where marketing and advertising are ubiquitous consumers are tired of being marketed to – they want to be a part of the process, not just the end result.</div>
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They want to help create content and ‘own’ a piece of a brand that lends itself to their constant strive for self-actualisation. In a consumer becoming a creator and / or curator of content, the brand becomes integrated into a consumer’s life either as a memorable experience or as part of a re-occurring ritual – not just a product or purchase. It’s at that point that a consumer is most likely to become brand loyal increasing their value to the brand significantly. By allowing consumers to post, tweet and publically engage with a brand, they become increasingly invested in it and as a result the brand becomes a stronger part of popular culture.</div>
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However, that being said I do still believe in having a long-term strategy and vision as well as adhering to a brand’s guidelines and heritage. One way to ensure a healthy balance of the two is to create a comprehensive CRM strategy based on a brand’s consumer preferences and behaviours – facilitating interaction at each stage of a consumer journey. Not only does this allow brands to evolve organically, but in many cases it allows them to reach audiences that they didn’t know possible. As with any happy marriage, it’s a give and take and an exercise in listening and responding in kind.</div>
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<span data-mce-style="font-weight: bold;" style="font-weight: bold;">Beautiful harmony</span></div>
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Whilst technology and social media have forever changed the dynamic between consumers and brands, it’s how a brand responds to this change that will make or break its success in the marketplace. Instead of trying to quiet the army of conches, or being the loudest conch in the room, brands should look to skillfully conduct them all to create a beautiful harmony and a solid relationship that will keep a brand current and relevant throughout the years.</div>
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So… what does your b(r)and sound like?</div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Stefan Bocoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05159550800417385454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-60623186101322493172014-03-14T10:18:00.001+00:002014-03-14T10:22:04.442+00:00We’re in the Age of CRM, so what’s next?I recently spent the day at the Institute of Direct & Digital Marketing, teaching marketers from the NHS, entertainment, travel, financial services and education sectors about eCRM. The format of the day's course deliberately – because of the variety of industries – avoids detailed best practise, as one size clearly cannot fit all. The focus is on the framework. More particularly on three frameworks: customer journey planning; capability assessment and prioritisation; and business case development. This is well-trod ground for me, I've been teaching this course for around ten years, and I lecture on this to Hult International Business School's Masters Degree Program.<br />
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One thing that I've observed over the last few years of teaching eCRM masterclasses is that the recession which started in 2008 kicked eCRM – and CRM – way up the agenda. Provable marketing has taken over. And the clients we've worked with who started out at the geeky end of things are now the marketing directors, precisely because they have been able to demonstrate the commercial results and advantages of rigorous marketing strategies.<br />
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During this revolution, creativity seems to have taken a back seat to data, segmentation, analytics, infrastructure and million pound notes. Retention programmes must resonate with a brand's consumers and customers. They have to sing in harmony, and where possible enhance and amplify, the creative direction set out for the brand.<br />
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This creative direction, the tone of voice, look and feel and integrity of vision and values, is the context and instruction for how all communications must work. By focusing on the practical, technical, commercial and process aspects of marketing it's a shameful reality that occasionally these things get lost in the drive for results and ROI. Creative thinking provides the glue for all of marketing. Over the last few years, as CRM has blossomed, the most successful programmes have been produced by clients and agencies that have deep creative capability - not as lead, that's for the brand agency, but as interpreters. Why? Because interpreting brand values for the kinds of channel eCRM now makes use of – social media, email, mobile, direct – takes clever interpretive abilities that are execution-oriented. The great creatives take the grand work of the advertising partner and deliver it to individuals on the ground, during the customer journey, matching it to the consumer's transient need states as they travel along the relationship with the brand.<br />
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CRM is established as an equal partner to advertising, where it has effectively become the engine room of marketing thinking. It took eleven years. It's time marketers looked up and worked out what the Next Big Thing is.<br />
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I don't think it will be any surprise that it's already shaping up to be about partnering, collaborating with and accompanying customers for their entire lifetime, in every channel, in ways that are relevant and – critically – appropriate. CRM implies retention, data, direct, pushing customers along the journey we have defined for them. The new approach requires creative engagement enacted by the brand following the customer, not the other way round.<br />
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It requires multichannel or omnichannel thinking, holistic relationship building. It's called Total Customer Engagement and it's been here already for a few years. It is the next big wave. When you've got eCRM or CRM sorted (and you will need to have it nailed down before you can start) you can take a few short steps to transform it into the next big driver of your business as the economy dusts itself off.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-38966996529163997222014-03-13T10:20:00.000+00:002014-03-22T15:26:55.116+00:00Underwired redesigns Travelodge website<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Travelodge
has re-launched its website, designed by Underwired the specialist eCRM and
customer engagement agency and delivered by the brand’s in-house IT team. The
new website provides customers with significantly improved functionality and
ease of use. The project is part of Travelodge’s £223 million brand investment
programme which is being rolled out this year. </span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">The
new look complements Travelodge’s new room design which launched earlier this
year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">The
website delivers improved functionality to ensure customers are able to find
and book what they need quickly, whether directly or via the company’s mobile
site. Travelodge’s website receives 1.2 million customer visits every week and
sees up to 1,500 bookings made every hour at peak times. By simplifying and
clarifying the home page, the new website ensures that customers get a quick
and straightforward experience – all designed to make the Travelodge
journey easier, increase sales and reduce drop-outs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Jason Holland, Creative Director, Underwired</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">, said “Travelodge is one of the most iconic
hotel brands in the UK and we are thrilled to have been able to work together
on this exciting website redesign. The website makeover is part of a significant,
nationwide brand investment programme for Travelodge and so it was vital that
we really got under the skin of what the new website needed to offer customers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“The journey involved in taking the brand through
its website redesign, which is integral to Travelodge's business, has been
fantastic and is a major step towards making the customer journey much simpler,
clearer and leaves the user with a positive and memorable brand
experience.</span>”</span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Catriona
Kempston, Travelodge Sales & Marketing Director, </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">said:</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;"> “The Underwired teams’ eCRM expertise
and track record made them an obvious partner for us as we continue to roll-out
our £223 million brand investment programme. The refreshed website offers
customers a whole host of new functionality at their fingertips, as well as a
fast and easy booking journey with lots of great visual content.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">The
new website communicates some of the latest changes to the Travelodge
proposition, including the company’s food and beverage offering, as well as the
new bed - the Travelodge Dreamer - which is being rolled out across the
company’s hotels.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">The
new site also features an enhanced corporate section for business customers,
following the company’s three-fold growth in corporate business custom. The new
features include a dashboard, which allows business customers to rebook
frequently used hotels and add a corporate rate to their search results.</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Travelodge
pioneered the art of selling budget hotel rooms online when it became the first
UK hotel chain to do so in 2001.</span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-83150869855574636812014-01-02T16:38:00.000+00:002014-01-02T16:38:14.736+00:00Navigating Big DataTesco famously has ‘segments of one’. Which is lovely of course - but they had to buy a data company just to make sense of the data so they could get there. Most of us don't have that luxury. But it doesn't mean we can or should ignore data, even if it looks like it might become unwieldy.<br />
<br />
Some brands haven't yet realised that the power in a brand/customer relationship has shifted from the marketer to the marketee. Clearly however social media and the ability to share every thought, spoken or unspoken, with friends and peers and even the whole wide world means that the brand perception is out in the wild. It's been let loose. No longer is the way your brand is represented in your control. It's in the expressions of passion, ire, indifference and ephemerality of the digital ecosystem: Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, Vine, even email. It's transmitted by mobile, stored on the web, and available to the world.<br />
<br />
Your job as a marketer is to understand that this revolution has already happened. And to take advantage of it. If you can do it successfully you can catch up with the wild thing your brand has become, and even gain competitive advantage while your peers wrestle with boards who just don't get that they're no longer in control.<br />
<br />
Scary thought?<br />
<br />
So what do you need to do in order to flip the situation around? Well, part of the problem is the notion that we can regain control. I don't think we can. What we can do however is map how consumers behave, and indeed how their attitudes will shape how they behave in the future. By going down this route rather than trying to gather the brand in, you can extend the brand into the customer's territory, give them more control by enabling free interpretation of the brand's essence. And that takes not only courage, but data too.<br />
<br />
Customer insight is the product of data. The three dimensions of segmentation (what we call 3D Segmentation) are:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Demographic - who the customer is;</li>
<li>Behavioural - what they do and have done;</li>
<li>Motivation - why they do it. </li>
</ul>
<br />
Demography is slow moving, so we use it as a kind of snapshot to describe people. It means we can target them accurately. Behaviour is retrospective, but we can observe behaviours and trends and make extrapolations based on probability and this gives us propensity models. This means we can target them efficiently. The final dimension is about motivations, attitudes and 'need states'. Sports brand ASICS leverages this in its MyASICS loyalty programme: by understanding why a runner runs, we can talk to them in terms that resonate… the desire to be fitter, or to win, or to raise money for a cause. By talking to its customers about those things that address their motivation, ASICS creates extreme loyalty, increasing sales. Worldwide. And MyASICS is served by a website, and emails, and mobile. All of which feed back data so we can hone the programme.<br />
<br />
These days the various digital channels are so well established that the mechanisms that allow you to track a customer in their journey in one can easily be joined with the mechanism in all the others. It means we can effectively create a joined-up process to track a customer across all digital channels as they weave about their daily lives. This ability extends even to the real world - we work with clients who have incorporated data from electronic point of sale (EPoS) systems into their customer view, so we can attribute till sales to pay per click (PPC) campaigns and journeys via every imaginable digital touch-point.<br />
<br />
And it's not that difficult, and you don't need to buy a DunnHumby or a data team to do it. The concept of rapid prototyping has been very successfully applied to creating online customer labs and pilot programmes. For instance, brands like Bupa have used it incredibly effectively to build online communities at very low cost before making decisions about major investment (my agency, <a href="http://underwired.com/">Underwired</a>, created Bupa's <a href="http://carewelluk.org/">Carewell</a> using this rapid prototyping approach – saving the client around £150,000).<br />
<br />
Forget the Single Customer View and its squillions in Capital Expenditure; rope together several separate systems based only on those components you actually require to do the job of proving return on investment (ROI) and use it to monitor customer behaviour in response to the insights you generate from simple data analysis. In my experience six or seven segments gets the job done - segments of one are for when you're already at the outer extremes of wringing profit from data and not when you're mid-shift towards putting your customers at the centre of the brand universe.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-86872165706227175192013-12-06T09:54:00.004+00:002013-12-06T10:36:07.878+00:00Last night I found myself crying in my car at the traffic lightsMandela was my hero. For a significant part of my youth I campaigned - in the way teens do - for a cause I believed in.<br />
<br />
I became politicised when I was 12. I spent my teens marching for CND, and with the Anti Nazi League. On Saturdays I was usually either on a march or outside the South African embassy. Mandela was my, and our hero. I spent time in wooden-floored halls listening to men with thick accents in balaclavas.<br />
<br />
I wore an Artists Against Apartheid patch on the sleeves of my coats and got terrible stick for it at school, though I didn't help myself by being vocal about my views. I painted AAM panels on leathers and I wrote to Katherine Hamnett when she designed an AAA T-shirt and wore the one she donated when I did sponsored events proudly.<br />
<br />
My focus for my white London teens was the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Mandela a beacon for justice, humanity and tolerance in a Thatcher-riven, suss-driven south London youth with black friends when mixing was pretty unusual.<br />
<br />
Last night I found myself listening to a programme on the radio about the Hindu concept of renewal, when it was interrupted withe the long-expected news. And I cried, there at the lights, in my car. Mandela, humanity personified: thank you.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-61425687341466821732013-11-18T11:09:00.000+00:002013-11-18T11:09:20.861+00:00Do One Thing WellMarketing is a collection of lots of activities, all working or acting together, sometimes in concert, to fulfil several roles. These include brand awareness, prospecting, engagement, conversion, retention, generating advocacy and so on. Often we want all our marketing to do all of these things. But the reality is, great communication is about being single-minded.<br />
<br />
This singularity of purpose is obvious when it comes to a TV advert because you've only got thirty seconds to make a point. For instance,doing an advert which first makes the consumer think "ooh, cute puppy", then offers a discount, then states how many sheets there are on a toilet roll and then finally a message to visit the website to sign-up for points, alongside the obligatory Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat logos, would of course be ridiculous. It’s the same with a magazine display advert. For each one it either needs to be about the brand or a single call to action. Simple.<br />
<br />
So, why do we not treat email like this too?<br />
<br />
There are two dimensions to this way of thinking. The first is really, really simple: the more stuff you ask the email recipient to read, evaluate and discern their choice of call-to-action response, the less they will be able to respond. This is because there is more choice, more confusion, and more time is required.<br />
<br />
Inevitably, in these instances, people will either choose the middle option (basic Goldilocks psychology) – which tells you nothing about their real values or propensities – or they will defer the decision altogether (which in sales terms is a 'no'). So you should make the choice simple: do, or don't do. Or: pick this one or that one (that's the assumptive version).<br />
<br />
Email marketing should therefore be short, to the point and present only one or two choices. This will maximise impact and increase response rate. You will also be seen to be efficient, clean, straightforward and direct; the simple choice compared to your competitors. Think of the emails you get from Apple (if you're a customer), which are single-minded and clear to the point of asceticism; which is ironic really given how much an iPad costs.<br />
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I mentioned a second dimension. We’ve already talked about how any given email needs to have a single purpose and therefore simple, easy to parse content. However, now we need to consider the role of an email in a long-term email-driven relationship. This adds ‘time’ into the mix.<br />
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This is where we dive into the principles of customer engagement strategy or ‘CRM’, where each email is designed to move the relationship on from where it is, using knowledge gathered from where it was, to where you want it to go next. In other words, we know that to build a logical customer relationship takes a series of incremental steps, and CRM-oriented email campaigns can do this really efficiently. But, because each of these steps is discrete and purposeful, it is imperative that each step is delivered as effectively as possible. Each message must be single-minded in its purpose of preparing the customer for the next contact. For instance, the sole purpose of one email may be to make the customer think you're nice. This might be by saying, "thank you" after a purchase. This is a good tactic, because if the customer thinks you're nice, they're more likely to read your next email.<br />
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So, single-mindedness must be an attribute and quality of every email you send. Each email can do many things and have many messages in it, but none will be effective. By doing one thing well, you will get the best response to an email, and ultimately the best possible result for your email marketing campaign.<br />
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<i>(Reposted from the awesome <a href="http://www.quora.com/Is-Social-Media-more-so-a-function-of-e-Marketing-or-CRM">Quora</a>)</i></div>
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Depends on the goal, and who is spending the money.<br /><br />CRM is (should be) about understanding where the customer is on their journey through life, with some appreciation of the trajectory they are on (in terms of behaviour, demography and attitudes, possibly defined momentarily by where they came from and how they are currently influenced); in turn this allows marketers to decide what to say next to influence their behaviours and attitudes to develop additional value.<br /><br />With that approach, social media is or could be (ideally you should test several channels to see which one delivers the behaviour change most effectively) one possible channel to deliver that 'next message' in the intertwined customer journey and brand journey.<br /><br />Looking at it like that it becomes straightforward to set KPIs and measure results. This in turn makes briefing experts and suppliers very easy – they no longer have to be particularly creative, nor do they have to compete for budgets against other channels, because their role is tightly defined and they have to recognise they are just one of many touchpoint executors with (sets of) defined goals.<br /><br />The other way of doing it is to try and box some stuff into 'e-marketing'. If you're not yet at the stage of evolution as a business or as a marketer that you are able to think in strategic terms then social becomes tactical and is all about the creativity of the idea <i>in creating competitive advantage for the supplier in increasing its share of the budget</i> of the various other e-marketing activities.<br /><br />I really hope the first approach is the one your firm is aiming for ;)<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-56227108301177547152013-09-17T09:56:00.000+01:002013-09-17T09:56:18.112+01:00Total Customer EngagementSocial media seems to have changed the way we look at things as marketers. I’m not saying social media is the centre of anything - certainly it shouldn’t be seen to be important as a channel in its own right, but it has shown brands that the consumer has a powerful say. The voice of the customer has been given weight, and in fact the advent of social media has brought into sharp relief the fact that what the customer says can propagate rapidly, sometimes changing the course of brand perception.<br />
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The customer could even be said to have power over a brand’s destiny that is out of the marketer’s hands. The notion that brands may have to react to the preponderance of opinion, gathered in the social sphere in plain public view (as opposed to hidden in one to one correspondence or at the dinner table or in the checkout queue), is novel and for some quite startling.<br />
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Digital has delivered a real shift in power, and we as marketers are having to react to - and not drive - this. Marketing is no longer about telling, it’s about listening. As, of course, it should be.<br />
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Listening is enabled by digital channels and these are of course not constrained to the social channels like Facebook, Twitter and the others. Listening is facilitated at every touch point, from B2B’s cornerstone of reverse IP lookups to Google’s AdWords, from the landing page to the shopping basket, through eCRM and the email or mobile-driven comms we use to engender loyalty and ultimately advocacy (back to social). Digital has empowered us by giving us the ability to understand how customers behave throughout their digital life, and map that to touch points and moments of truth as they apply to the intersection between their lives and our brand stories.<br />
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But marketing is much more than just digital. Consumers’ lives are not wholly lived online. Some of the critical touch points happen out there in real life, in store, at venues, walking down the street. So it is imperative that as marketers we understand that we need to meet our customers, create those intersections, wherever and whenever they are most appropriate.<br />
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This idea of Total Customer Engagement requires joined-up thinking. It requires an understanding not only that customers have behaviour, but that they have behaviour that shifts over time and according to venue, digital or not. And this plays back to the central power shift. As marketers we must recognise that the customer journey is not a journey we put our customers into (though of course this thinking does stem from the more perceptive eCRM agencies), it is a journey we need to identify - that the customers are on in their own right. Our job is to understand their needs states, their attitudes and their paths, so we can meet them. Our role as planners is to map them, and to target our comms cleverly, both in terms of venue or channel and the appropriateness of message type given their mind state at the moment we engage.<br />
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The power has shifted from the brand to the customer, therefore we can no longer broadcast and hope. We have to be precise and this requires two things: the ability to gather and interpret data (whether digital or not), and the ability to serve a coherent brand story in whichever channel is most able to serve the purpose of a relevant interaction. In turn, this requires us to be able to manage multiple marketing disciplines - and that may indicate where the real shift in thinking lies.<br />
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As marketers we can no longer afford to think in terms of social, or digital or traditional marketing. We have got to think about customer marketing. We need agencies and suppliers who are happy to work together, not as specialists with specialist strategic offerings, but as coherent deliverers of a unified customer journey, one which matches the customer’s pace and place.<br />
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Total Customer Engagement is a new way of thinking about marketing - one that Forrester identifies in terms of marketing as mediation rather than execution. It’s the way of the customer. And it’s the way of the future.<br />
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Everyone talks about Big Data as if it were some kind of technological nirvana. The reality is you can gather data from a whole lot of sources and stick it all together more or less by hand, if you need to. In practise, Big Data is shorthand for the notion that if only you could mine, interpret and extrapolate all the data you could get you'd have some kind of joined up living solution to customer engagement, almost a mindmeld between your brand and a collective representation of your customer base in its entirety. Nice.<br />
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The reality is that data is an enabler, something you can make use of - not something that should make your decisions for you.<br />
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So how does this pragmatic approach work? There are a number of critical steps to take you from having on the one hand a commercial goal and on the other some customer data. First, make sense of the data. Customer insights start with understanding what kind of data you have. In our CRM terms this information breaks down into three broad groups:<br />
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Demographic - who the customer is<br />
- Gender, age, life stage<br />
- Location<br />
- Income<br />
- Status<br />
- Family make-up<br />
- Education etc.<br />
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Behavioural - what they do<br />
- What they have bought<br />
- When<br />
- In response to what<br />
- How much do they spend<br />
- How long is their 'customer lifetime'<br />
- What channels do they use<br />
- When do they respond most<br />
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You can see already that by combining some of this information you can infer quite a lot about the way you might want to talk to some of your customers. It is obvious that you can start to create segmentation based on demographic and behavioural data. However, this approach to segmentation may help you to be efficient (behavioural) and accurate (demographic) in who you talk to, but it often does not tell you what to talk to them about.<br />
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Taking the classic example of customers of a prize-based fantasy football league, segmenting by these two dimensions might lead you an easy segmentation based on whether the customer buys one or twenty teams (behavioural) and jump to conclusions about their financial status (demographic).<br />
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3D segmentation adds a new aspect, motivation, to the mix. If you can divine what motivates your customers then you can speak to them using motivation-based segmentation and that may actually provide the cut through that's required in a highly competitive environment.<br />
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Motivation - why they do it<br />
- Need state<br />
- Environmental factors<br />
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This dimension can change based on changes in the other two dimensions; for example changes in family make-up or life stage may radically alter someone's drivers for engaging with your brand.<br />
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In the case of the fantasy football league, by looking not at behaviour or demographics (which didn't appear to correlate) but by motivation, through the simple expedient of a brainstorm with everyone we could find near the meeting room we reached an insight we could test - first by checking the correlation with the behavioural data, second by sending a brief questionnaire to a standard sample. The insight was that customers bought principally because they were either motivated by passion for the game (bought a single team) or by the desire to win the prize pot (bought twenty teams).<br />
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By using this simple insight we created two segments serving two types of (relevant) content. These were then split into time-based sets based on where the customer was in the product lifecycle (new joiners, mid-season etc.) so we had six or seven simple segments.<br />
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Revenue went up 93% in 90 days. The client was The Sun.<br />
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The job of data is not to confuse or confound. The job of data is to allow you to extract simple insights that allow you to run singleminded campaigns that tap into your customers' motivations so that they want to engage with you. As we start to think beyond the age of CRM and focus on rapid growth, it is imperative that Big Data doesn't become an encumbrance. Data should be there to provide insight so you can get on with the engagement - because how you engage with your customers is the only thing that will drive your success.<br />
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In the olden days (pre-1995), when customers knew the name of the person serving them and vice versa, life was good. Then along came the internet. People stopped going out for a drink to socialise, catch up or find a friend. We were told then that the power had to transfer to the brand, or at least the vendor. Marketing became about how you presented your brand and how you attracted people in. All the while customers were losing focus on what was attractive and turning their attention to what met their needs best… and online met their needs pretty perfectly.<br />
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So what are the best decisions that need to be made to address this change? First ask yourself: can we compete without going online? If your answer is ‘no’ then you need to assess how best to target your customers and by what means.<br />
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Social media, used largely (at least in my own life) to work out where to go for a celebration, catch-up or a noisy bit of fun. In other words, the perfect media platform to reach customers to start / maintain relationships. It’s pretty simple to make work in fact: get to know your customers by observing their behaviour (on your website, in response to your emails and/or tweets) then make sure you use those channels to say things that they want to know or hear.<br />
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However, social media isn’t the only option available. Email – today’s postcard – cost pennies to generate and send, even in relative bulk. For this kind of approach of course you need data. You could gather this at the point of sale and add it to a centralised database – which would be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. By offering some kind of value exchange when you visit the website - perhaps a free drink next time you visit - you will be able to further your data capture which will allow you to create targeted, timely and relevant campaigns to drive sales and support your ongoing relationships.<br />
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Where once in the golden days a bartender would know each customer by sight, today, bar owners can know the customer through digital tracking. The internet has enabled a one-step removal of customer engagement and, in turn, this means bartenders can engage with many more customers than before. As you can gain much more information through this channel than if you were to try and speak to each one on a busy evening. Twitter, Facebook and email will become your friends – and your new way to make new friends – because by being your customer’s friend you’ll take them back to the good old days, and this could be the difference between fading away and reinvigorated, transformational growth<br />
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Today’s question: we’ve arrived in the digital age, everyone’s online, Blue Nile’s cleaning up on diamonds, and the whole world seems to have gone social media mad – so, should we jump on the bandwagon too? For the small family jeweller, or even the large high street family jewellery chain, it’s a question that has taxed business owners and marketers with increasing frequency over the past few years. Indeed, now that the smart phone accounts for nearly as much online traffic as PCs, and the website is almost every retail chain’s largest single store, it’s a question that has gone from one that might have been shelved until now to one that may well be business-critical imminently.<br />
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So what are the basic decisions that need to be made, how do we decide what to do, and how should we prioritise? The first is simple: the decision is based on a simple set of questions, all around threat/opportunity. Can we compete without going online? Can we gain any benefits from going online? And to answer this, the process is relatively straightforward. You need to ask yourself how you relate to your customers.<br />
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For example, are the majority of your customers one-off purchasers? If so, are they really? In other words, do they buy on several one-off occasions (wedding, birthday, Christening, Bar Mitzvah, anniversary)? And if so again, is there something you can do to keep a relationship going? Of course, retailers already do a lot of good things, from a great in-store experience, knowledgeable and engaging staff, appropriate (via self-selecting customers) range of products ... but how do you follow this up and keep in touch? Digital channels may provide one answer of course, as email – today’s postcard – costs pennies to generate and send, even in relative bulk.<br />
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If you have a few hundred customers it’s fine to do this by hand, because you can do this instantly and more or less from memory, but again digital’s power here is the ability to divide customers up into groups (husbands, over-50s, partner’s birthday in October, anniversary in May) and automatically send the right message to the right person at the right time. Simple segmentation like this can mean compelling messages, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach most retailers seem to take. In fact, an approach like this uses the power of digital to re-create the personal service-based relationships of old.<br />
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For this kind of approach of course you need data. The big retailers have this down pat and collect data at point of sale (age, marital status, reason for visit, products looked at and bought, birthday etc.) and add it to a centralised database (which could be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or as big as a Single Customer View database integrated with your EPoS system). You can augment this data at the till, or by leveraging your website. To do this you might consider asking customers to visit the site and they’ll get some value exchange, perhaps free engraving next time they buy, or a free trinket (first of a collectable) for their daughter, or the chance to win something. This kind of simple value exchange gives you an opportunity to learn both about the individual and about your customers in general. This in turn gives you data from which you can start to make decisions and of course, the data with which you can create targeted, timely and relevant campaigns to drive sales and support your ongoing (if infrequently manifested) relationship.<br />
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One benefit of a relationship supported and bridged online is that you can use it to ask questions about your strategy. For instance, if you’re trying to work out if your customers might buy if you built an e-commerce site, ask them. You may be surprised, they may tell you things you never knew (“we browse in your shop because it’s friendly but we buy from your competitors online because it gets delivered to the recipient gift wrapped.” or even “My family used to come to the shop but we moved away and only get there once a year, we might buy more often if we could do it from home!”), but of course you do have to ask in the right way. Most people like to be asked their opinion though, as the implication that you value their opinion confers a sense of belonging and ownership. Your website is the perfect venue for this, especially as a simple survey can be extremely cheap to produce and promote.<br />
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The benefits may not immediately justify spending thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) on a serious e-commerce strategy. But, by creating relationships with your customers, by using cheap and easy channels like email to help bridge the long gaps between visits to your shops, you can easily develop loyalty and brand fealty, at a very low cost.<br />
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By the time you have hundreds of thousands of customers, and you start changing the purchase patterns – say frequency, or order value – of swathes of them by a few percent, you could be talking millions in incremental revenue. Even for the independent family jewellers, the difference between a declining, ageing customer base visiting spontaneously and a loyal, engaged customer base who increasingly use the internet to keep in touch, make decisions and use the web to book appointments to view and choose wedding rings, may even be the difference between fading away and reinvigorated growth.<br />
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It was a tragic day and a clear sign of the times when a British institution like Blockbuster finally shut it’s doors. I’ll never forget the day my mum took me into the store to purchase Beauty and the Beast (a classic I might add) on VIDEO for my Birthday; something she had to pre-order because it wasn’t available elsewhere. Clearly, I’m showing my age, but the memory still makes a distinctive point - we needed Blockbuster in our lives. Disney is very important to a five year-old.<br />
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Fast forward twenty years and I enter that famous store again, this time for another classic: Reservoir Dogs. “Sorry, we don’t have it” the shop assistant replied. Angered by her indignation, her shrug, and by the fact there were 47 useless copies of Bridget Jones’ Diary strewn around the store, I realised Blockbuster had finally become disillusioned by what its customers wanted. It was also clear that I no longer needed the store; for Disney or Tarantino, it didn’t matter. Streaming became the way forward and quite honestly, I’ve never looked back.<br />
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A dissatisfied customer I may be, but the point that it makes is that in the last five years the consumer power of our UK high-streets has now shifted from retailer to customer. Blockbuster no longer had what I needed - availability of films, knowledgeable staff etc. - so I went elsewhere. Understanding what your customer needs and what your USP is, is essential for maintaining customer loyalty. Adapting your retail channel to suit these needs is also vital because consumers appreciate retailers being considerate to their needs.<br />
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So who’s next to go? I’m hedging my bets - or should I say hopes - on WH Smith. Here is a store which epitomises all of the issues above. It’s expensive, it has no USP - does it sell books, sweet or arts and crafts materials? And the staff seem adamant on selling me a giant bar of Dairy Milk every time I purchase a lottery ticket. The staff are generally unfriendly and mostly unhelpful and their website seems to offer the same service too as its far from intuitive; so why oh why has it survived at the forefront of British retailing for so long?<br />
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As digital books sales with the likes of Amazon and Kobo continue to rise how much longer can WH look to hold on?<br />
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Underwired, the leading eCRM and Customer Engagement agency, has been shortlisted in the Recommended Agency Register (RAR) Awards.<br />
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The awards recognise the agencies that have been highly-rated by their clients and to date, over 14,000 customers have rated the agencies they work with. The awards are a reflection on an agency’s ratings across a number of areas including Creativity, Effectiveness, Value for Money, On Time/On Budget and Client Service.<br />
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This news comes on the heels of an incredible year for Underwired, which now counts Marks & Spencer, Mitchells & Butlers, Travelodge, British Land, ASICS worldwide, East Coast Railways and the Financial Times among its clients. Less than a year ago the management team led by Jason Holland and Felix Velarde took the agency independent, and in the past month Underwired has won over £1m of contracts.<br />
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Jason Holland, Underwired’s co-founder and creative director, said “This reflects Underwired’s culture of partnership and collaboration, and in particular the rapport the client services team has built with our clients. We do business-critical, highly strategic work, and that demands genuine trust. That’s built on a foundation of value for money and doing stuff right and on time – but it’s also partly a reflection of the passion we have for the work we do with our clients.”<br />
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We went through a recession, and while we weren’t looking, the world of marketing changed. We discovered as an industry that making certain that marketing governance is based on sound principles is critical in a recession. Digital marketing, with its granular tracking and ability to follow a customer from first contact, means you can observe his or her behaviour while they consider their first purchase and beyond. When digital marketing is joined up correctly, you should be able to establish precisely how much value you generate for every pound that you spend. And this accountability, during the recession, meant a degree of comfort that marketing actually was working. In other words, we gave credence to – and then priority to – marketing which has built into it a chain of custody.<br />
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The traditional view of brand marketing was centred around the way the business wanted to engage customers. To some extent, in the early days of internet-based marketing, this notion of brands built around customers’ needs was lost, at least temporarily. It became ‘build it and they will come’ – a conceit founded on the novelty of the medium: indeed, when I set up my first digital agency there were around 250 servers on the World Wide Web. Attendance and engagement could be reliably assumed.<br />
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The idea of a brand built around what the customer wants has of course changed as a result of the mediation of the internet. The customer is still at the centre of the business’s universe, but this position has evolved. Marketing, once predicated on understanding demographics, motivation and behaviour, can now be said to pivot about which channel the consumer is (or may be) consuming at that precise given point in the customer lifecycle when they are considering a step in their dialogue with the brand.<br />
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In simple terms, where once we considered marketing to be about mapping the progression from one medium to the next (TV followed press and PR, followed by Direct Marketing) this new age means we map the customer as she travels from mobile to Facebook, email to website and via SMS to shop.<br />
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In turn, this must be mapped against the decision-making cycle: first contact to second, peer review then press review, comparison sites, reminder banner, examination of features, emailed offer then shopping basket. We end up with a two-track series of events, joined at critical touchpoints which define the medium in which we pass on a specific, perfectly-timed message.<br />
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This form of marketing planning is necessarily going to be slightly different from segment to segment (a young mum’s media consumption is going to be radically different to that of a Baby Boomer), and from product to product. But the framework is sound, and applies as much to a high-value B2B proposition as to an FMCG brand – in fact we’ve used it for products as diverse as McCain oven chips, ASICS sportswear, Travelodge and the FT. What it delivers is a rational, measurable chain of custody from first contact to value. From this continuous sequence comes your brief for the messaging at each touchpoint, a detailed resource requirements list, indeed a foundation for micro and macro KPIs.<br />
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This new post-recession type of marketing is called Customer Engagement Marketing. It takes the power of the brand, dethroned by a combination of recession and digital renaissance, and refocuses it on the customer. In essence, it recognises that the customer is now the centre of everything, and that our job as businesses is not just to design our products around them but to design our marketing around them too.<br />
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We ran a campaign for an FMCG client a while ago, in which we emailed a segment in the customer database using very specific messaging – it was relevant, timely and well-designed. The click-through rate (CTR) of 88% was staggering in anyone’s book. I’d like to say every campaign we run gets that kind of result, but occasionally we crash and burn too. Anyway, wow, what a great result. But what does it mean?<br />
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The digital marketing industry seems to be founded on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) of variable – if not downright dubious – quality. If you judge any of the industry awards you will know that half the entries benchmark against industry standards which in a lot of cases appear to have been made up on the spot: “Campaign X achieved a CTR of 12.3%, beating the industry standard 8% and therefore deserving of a Gold.”<br />
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This is where I have the first of my issues: even if there *is* an industry standard click-through rate, does it really apply to your campaign? Our campaign got an 88% CTR because it was highly targeted to a known audience expecting the email with a fantastic proposition. If it had achieved 12.3% or even 24.6% it would have been a failure. The truth is that no matter what the CTR is, one thing it is not is evidence of anything that isn’t either subjective (“I say, that’s awfully good isn’t it?”) or comparative (“Blimey, did much better than last time!”).<br />
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The second of my issues is that all these benchmarks aren’t evidence of sales. And hard revenue really is the only figure that ever matters (and before you ask about brand consideration or sentiment, these are both abstractions of sales – higher brand consideration may imply higher resulting sales, though you’d have to test it to find out if it’s really useful). So what is the *evidence* behind the assertion of success? How do you track from the planning phase through the campaign, to the reality of the effect on sales?<br />
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Well, it’s pretty easy in e-commerce. Straight-through processing (which is what the financial industry calls tracking the customer from first contact to order) in digital is quite simple these days. Ad tracking (display, affiliate, PPC and natural SEO) is relatively easily linked to website analytics, thence to email service providers (ESP), back to websites and even passing through couponing and promotion systems. It’s been done plenty of times by the big brands, and even small brands can buy integrated services. So if you’re an online retailer it’s pretty straightforward.<br />
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If you’re an FMCG brand you can still do it, although you may need to be a little more sophisticated about it. For example, this might mean matching your customer segments to commercially available purchase data and running regular surveys to track buying patterns in your base and cross-checking them against buying behaviour. If you’re a retailer you can find mechanisms to collect customer data and purchase behaviour at Point of Sale and match this data back to the single customer view.<br />
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The trick here is to get real data about whether your campaign actually worked, as opposed to seeing floating KPIs that may or may not indicate the same thing – but which provide no scientific basis for decision-making. How many times have you seen “successful” campaigns stopped? There’s a simple reason: there was no evidence to show they generated a profit. If there had been and they had produced £26 for every £1 spent, nobody in their right mind would stop them. Evidence is critical. Myth or reality? Evidence-based marketing is the only thing you should be *allowed* to do!<br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-77055806439895674642013-01-16T14:56:00.001+00:002013-01-16T14:56:19.426+00:002013 will be the year of Total Customer EngagementThe year ahead will be marked by a number of really interesting developments in how we engage with our customers. One that has caught up with us – and which marks a sea change – is the advent of the Generation Y customer base. Gen-Y uses mobile as its main medium of interaction; if you’re not using mobile to engage with younger customers then you’re probably missing the biggest trick available, though it has been a very slow start since the trend first became apparent five, or so, years ago. Just in passing, to give you an idea of how trends break, let me illustrate this briefly…<br />
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Imagine your customer base is, potentially at least, a million strong. And say on day one a single person uses mobile as their main device for browsing the web, and every day that number doubles. By the end of the first week, 64 people use mobile. By the end of the second week that’s 8,192. That’s the point at which as a business you might start thinking there’s a trend. In actual fact it only takes another seven days and that’s your entire customer base. If you didn’t engage in a mobile strategy after two weeks, you missed it. Trends accelerate in an exponential curve – and in the internet age a trend can look slow for a few years, when in fact the numbers are doubling every month. Mobile is one of these, and if you target people born after 1982, that means you’ve got to jump, now!<br />
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There’s another trend that’s been a few years in the making, but in 2013 it will have gathered a critical mass, and it’s going to affect you – like it or not. The trend is for Total Customer Engagement. In plain English this means joined-up marketing, the opposite in fact of the “silo” thinking that has driven marketing during the first couple of decades of digital.<br />
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Most companies today have a web strategy, which may include e-commerce. They will also have a nascent social media strategy, a Google Adwords programme, and maybe an eCRM programme serving segmented comms to different sets of customers, split by value, behaviour, demographics and motivations. All of which have given businesses learning and insights into how they engage with customers using ‘new’(ish) channels. What’s lacking is integration. The sea change in 2013 requires a fresh way of thinking about customer engagement, which puts the customer at the centre. The trends feeding this are the shift in the balance of power from brand to customer, driven by the shift towards peer decision facilitated by social media, and the power of collective reviews.<br />
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So how does a business tap into this before it’s too late to do anything about it? A shift of focus is required, meaning the marketer needs to understand where the consumer is going to be, on- and off-line, when they are at a moment when they are likely to change their view of a brand, ideally positively. If you can identify that, Customer Type A is likely to be on a mobile, using Twitter, when considering whether to shortlist your brand, then you can target them with the right message at the right time and in the correct format. By mapping where the customer is at each critical point in their relationship with you, and mapping a rational sequence of nudges to take them from pre-custom to loyal customer, and then creating a matrix of comms against medium for this map, then you have a plan for engaging them. This Total Customer Engagement plan gives you as a business several things: a plan that can be tested, benchmarked and improved; a brief for your team and their suppliers so they have specific tasks to achieve against your business’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); and a framework that can be adapted when new trends become apparent.<br />
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This kind of approach is essentially multi-channel and channel-neutral. It’s also measurable and of course by its very nature future proof. By investing in developing this kind of (actually very simple) framework and marketing architecture, it will protect you against the overwhelming trends that are often nearly impossible to spot early, but which end up rather too quickly having strategic impact. Do it now, before it’s too late!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2399595536025862641.post-90937784090315611372012-12-11T15:31:00.000+00:002012-12-11T15:31:01.125+00:00Innovative marketing thinking shows results<br />
FMCG marketing is hard isn’t it? As brands you don’t even aim your marketing to the people who buy your products from you – you’re doing the work you might argue you want the retailer to do. In addition, you’re also competing with retailers’ aspirations to become brand owners themselves, with Tesco recently launching its own non-Tesco branded ice cream and pet food.<br />
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The indirect path to sales means that traditionally it has been difficult to gauge the success of marketing activity. Because you spend three hundred thousand on a television commercial and your sales are three million, it would be useful to think your ROI was ten to one. But there are so many other factors (and costs) - PoS, real estate, press, sales promotion and so on. Attribution is nigh-on impossible.<br />
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In the age of digital, it has been frustrating that Brand Consideration, the old advertising-oriented KPI, has remained the principal yardstick for marketers. Why so disappointing?<br />
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Digital provides the ability to track everything in a communication journey - or to be more accurate, it provides the means to track every movement a consumer makes online. So we can see when they clicked on a listing in Google, visited the brand website, opted in to emails, opened, clicked and selected a voucher, redeemed it... it’s what in the finance industry is called “straight-through processing”. It means you can keep custody of a customer all the way through their journey along your online marketing process. In marketing terms this is pure eCRM.<br />
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Now, if you’re a retailer the end of this journey is a sale. You can then say with utter confidence “I put in £1, and £26 came out. People with kids are highly responsive, 19 year-olds are a waste of marketing money, so let’s stop spending money acquiring them.” But if you’re an FMCG brand and the grocer is your customer and consumers theirs, to get attribution you need to exercise a bit of creative thinking.<br />
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First you need a benchmark. You need a database of your consumers, you don’t need many, ten thousand is plenty. And you need to have some real general population sales data, segmented into meaningful customer groups. You can buy this from Nectar or Dunnhumby. You then need to segment your own customer data exactly the same way so it’s comparable. On day one you look at purchase behaviour in your base versus that in the same segment in the general population. Run your eCRM marketing campaign. Then ask the same people about their behaviour. If the behaviour in your base has changed and that of the population hasn’t, then you have effectively isolated the results of your marketing activity - you actually know what effect you have made on sales.<br />
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We’ve successfully done this for a number of major brands. If you could increase footfall by 11% or purchase frequency by 3% imagine how much extra revenue you would be generating. FMCG marketing may be indirect, but with a little creative thinking it sure can be lucrative.<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Thinking_Digital&loc=en_UK" onclick="ga('send','event','Subscribe', 'Email', 'Clicked');">Subscribe by email</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3