Over 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
Showing posts with label CRM strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CRM strategy. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 November 2014
Monday, 18 August 2014
Multichannel is about persuasion
There 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
To make it effective, we need to understand the sequence involved:
“Thanks for shopping with us” – printed on the receipt, same day as last shop.
“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 ).
“Did you print this week’s voucher?” – a targeted ad on Facebook, Friday afternoon.
“In case you forgot, use this code” – SMS, Saturday morning.
“Do you have any vouchers?” – sales assistant.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”.
To make it effective, we need to understand the sequence involved:
“Thanks for shopping with us” – printed on the receipt, same day as last shop.
“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 ).
“Did you print this week’s voucher?” – a targeted ad on Facebook, Friday afternoon.
“In case you forgot, use this code” – SMS, Saturday morning.
“Do you have any vouchers?” – sales assistant.
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.
Thursday, 12 June 2014
It's the Art of Perfectly Timed Marketing
Guest blogger – Jen Talbot, Senior Account Manager
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.
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.
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?
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?
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".
Kronos vs Kairos
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:
1.Kronos
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".
2.Kairos
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.
The age of bombardment
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.
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?
When IS the right moment?
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.
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.
Kairos in CRM
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.
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'.
Kairos in practice
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.
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.
Conclusion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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".
Kronos vs Kairos
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:
1.Kronos
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".
2.Kairos
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.
The age of bombardment
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.
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?
When IS the right moment?
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.
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.
Kairos in CRM
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.
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'.
Kairos in practice
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.
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.
Conclusion
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.
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.
Friday, 14 March 2014
We’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
2013 will be the year of Total Customer Engagement
The 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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Thursday, 22 November 2012
The Chicken & The Egg
Which comes first, technology or strategy? I suspect most of you will say strategy – I bet, however, most clients actually do it the other way round. In the world of CRM and database marketing (whether it’s executed online or in mixed media), if I had an egg for every time a client delayed strategy projects while they go through procurement for the tech to support it, I’d have the makings for an awfully big omelette. Logically of course strategy should come first: work out what you want to do and why you want to do it, test the theory, then build the technology to support a plan that works.
Yet – and see if you recognise this – budgets consistently get spent on technology first. Sorting out the Email Service Provider (ESP) before working out what kind of segmentation is required, or what kind of multi-channel tracking is required, seems absurd. Going further upstream from that, spending large amounts of money on a Single Customer View (SCV) before working out how you’re going to monetise one also seems counterintuitive. I’m not sure of the rationale; is it that “if we have the technology, we’re ready for anything”? More likely in the days of recession, where a company has surplus cash but needs to cut costs, the argument for making a large technology decision means it can be moved to capital expenditure and accounted for on the tax bill.
But this means marketers are then constrained to playing catch-up, beholden to the decisions made based on the balance sheet instead of based on customer marketing requirements.
On a macro level it’s a bit like hiring an ESP to do CRM strategy – the answer will only ever be ‘use email’, never multichannel or SMS only; likewise, by buying the SCV platform or the CRM system before deciding on what you’re going to do and why precludes things like the advent of social, or whatever the next mercurial marketing channel change turns out to be. If you’ve invested in the big technology, you’re stuck with solutions that use it. Or of course you’re stuck with a white elephant, a capital expenditure project that sits in the corner waiting for you to realise the people with the manual have long left the company.
In fact, this is precisely what happened when CRM was invented. Huge IT installations were sold to firms that wanted to amortise spare cash, then never got used, and eventually when the ‘high-ups’ started asking questions CRM became a dirty word. That was twenty years ago, and today’s marketing decision makers must remember what happened else it happen again. And now that marketing and technology are intimately entwined, this kind of monstrous over-investment in IT without a clear strategy for what it will actually be doing for marketing can no longer be blamed on the egg-heads when it goes wrong. It’s now everyone’s responsibility, especially marketing’s, to make sure the investment is supportive, not directive.
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