Customer World

Why Retail loves email?

Many retailers seem to think so. During this past holiday shopping season, e-mail marketers were out in full force.

According to the “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008” report, from Smith-Harmon, promotional e-mail volume accelerated in October and reached a peak in December when retailers sent consumers a monthly average of 14.6 e-mails.

Smith-Harmon’s analysis of the top 100 retailers revealed that 90% of them increased the number of e-mails they sent during the holidays.

“Retailers ratcheted up their e-mail marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers’ dwindling spending dollars,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Mail: Online Marketing Strategies. “That was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”

Nevertheless, for retailers with large advertising budgets, e-mail campaigns represent only a tiny fraction of their marketing budgets

“E-mail marketing still accounts for only 1.5% of direct marketing budgets in the US,” says Mr. Grau.

Next generation marketing services companies

In an era of disruptive technologies, changing landscape in the relationship between brands and consumers, a multi-channel environment where customers tend to get information and build trust about the brands or products that they own or want to buy in more new ways than one, most marketing services firms have been left behind in the past. What does it take to build the next generation marketing services companies? Here's a very interesting perspective by Adam Needles and something that I have been writing about in this blog for a couple of years now. Take a look:

What are the key pillars of a next-generation marketing-services agency?

There are five key characteristics that will mark successful marketing agencies in the near future:

Integrated, multi-channel suite of marketing communication capabilities: Marketers must understand the combination of mediums that are most effective for reaching their target customers and brand communities; marketers must also realize this will change over time.  This means that marketers need agencies that can execute campaigns across an ever-changing combination of mediums and do so in a coordinated fashion; moreover, it means that recommendations for the ‘marketing mix’ need to be driven by real client/brand needs, not agency agenda.

Balance of strategic capabilities with strong tactical execution: Agencies are often asked to manage scale campaigns while ensuring that they are executed at every point and via every channel with perfect, ‘ground-level’ tactical execution.  This means that successful next-generation agencies must have a blend of talent — both communication medium experts and business/marketing/brand strategy experts — that can make sure the complete spectrum of a client’s business needs, from the highest level down to the lowest, are fully covered.

End-to-end results measurement and closed-loop client analytics integration: Next generation agencies must be fully integrated with their clients’ information systems and be able to supply real-time marketing performance measurement data, across mediums, directly into their clients’ closed-loop analytics platforms. Measurement and analytics also need to be focused.

Sophisticated, underlying technology platform:  Whether it is for driving execution management for integrated campaigns or it is for improving measurement and integration with closed-loop analytics platforms, a sophisticated, underlying technology platform is a critical component of next-generation marketing services agencies.  In fact, technology infrastructure must be as much a priority as hiring smart people at agencies. 

Holistic focus on both brands and brand community: Agencies are in a unique position to help bridge what is often a highly inwardly-looking perspective of marketers and brand managers with the outside world – helping to better connect brands with their brand communities.The core objective of any agency’s set of services is to support the marketing of brands.  This means that agencies need to be hyper-focused, as never before, on the impact of their programs on both brand equity and on brand revenue.

Look like the current marketing services firms have a lot to do and rejig, if they want to remain relevant to marketers in the near future. The faster they do it, the more successful they would be.

Five levels of customer experience maturity

Here's a lovely article by Jessica on how customer experience is set to become the cornerstone for successful companies of tomorrow. According to me, the actionable items - going beyond lofty beliefs and intention, that need to be taken have been summarized very well in this article. The questions companies need to ask themselves are simple and easy to get answers for, in terms of how well they do on these parameters.

The key point is companies need to answer these questions from a customers' point of view rather than from their point of view:

1. Did the interactions meet your needs?
2. How easy is the company to work with?
3. How enjoyable are these firms to work with?

Key strategies( according to Bruce Temkin,  vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research), for building long lasting customer experience are:

• Obsess about customer needs, not product features: Adding this gadget or that widget may look cool, but if the "innovation" confuses the customer, the entire purpose is lost. Temkin encouraged the audience to engage in a "LIRM"-ing process: listen, interpret, react, and monitor. These elements, he said, are critical to developing a program to capture the Voice of the Customer.
• Reinforce the brand with every interaction, not just communication: Every employee in the company needs to understand the brand message and the brand promise. Every interaction should be based on this promise, a promise that must be insulated from damage when times get tough and cuts need to be made.
• Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function: Customer service is everyone's priority, not just that of the contact center. Call it "customer experience," "customer advocacy," "customer insight—anything, Temkin pleaded, that avoids dumping it into a siloed department. "The customer experience team cannot be another ‘function,' " Temkin said. "The group has to remain as a support to other parts of the organization." The leader of this group, he added, can be anyone — the CIO, the CMO, the COO — but the person cannot be more than two levels under the CEO. More important, whoever leads the group must possess enthusiasm about the cause — and be a champion for it.

To truly evaluate where your company's initiatives stand today, here's a scale to measure and improve your customer experience plans:

• Level 1: Interested (19 percent) - customer experience is important, but funding and upper-level support is minimal.
• Level 2: Invested (22 percent) - customer experience is important and initial programs are being put in place -- but the effort is still not connected with profitability for the organization.
• Level 3: Committed (11 percent) - customer experience is critical to the company and executives understand how it's connected to fundamental results: It's not customer experience for customer experience's sake.
• Level 4: Engaged (8 percent) - customer experience is a core part of the company's strategy and objectives.
• Level 5: Embedded (4 percent) - it's in the company's DNA, the essence of everything and anything the company does.