Customer World

Driving relevancy in customer communication

CMO council has come-up with an interesting report that many marketers have faced as consumers themselves - irrelevant communication!  Many of these marketers talk about it but do nothing about it for their own brands or products. Here are some startling facts to think about:

• While 64 percent of consumers say promotional offers dominate both the email and traditional mail they receive, only 41 percent view these as must-read communications.
• 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant.
• The threat of customer churn and disconnection intensifies as 41 percent of consumers say they would consider ending a brand relationship due to irrelevant promotions.
• An additional 22 percent say they would definitely defect from the brand!
• Nearly three quarters of consumers have received promotions for products they have previously purchased from the company
• 73 percent of consumers would be open to receiving print statements if mailed materials were recyclable or part of a sustainability program
• Nine out of ten consumers open monthly bills delivered via traditional mail, compared to 72 percent who open bills delivered via email
• When given the opportunity to choose, 51 percent of consumers prefer to receive product or service promotions via traditional mail while 44 percent prefer email.

It's really true esp.for myself  as a customer(as the report highlights)- I have seen many companies calling me to buy the product when am already their customer!

There is a need for marketers to add a relevance filter to their customer management process. It's high time they start integrating the channels of customer interaction & communication to make this happen.

Data-driven advertising - How do we move it beyond the web?

I came across an interesting service platform Meme Machine which has interesting customer-focused applications using data.

Calling itself reactive advertising Meme Machine defines this platform as:

"Reactive advertising is a technology for dynamic customization how display ads look and behave in real-time based on what we know about each viewer and the surrounding factors for each exposure. So instead of one campaign having three different ads, we can run three million different ads, where each is unique for the person watching it. Real-time data and dynamic content are two of the things that makes the Internet really unique. Coming up with the basic ideas for a dynamic ad is just one piece of the puzzle and you also need an engine that can mix up the data and make sure that the right stuff is actually shown to the right people."

Meme Machine has a reaction library and has some cases like Scandinavian Airlines, Swedish Post etc. 

How do we really fuse data that's online, offline and transactional?

To make this more widespread & relevant to a consumer &  marketer, the question that came to my mind really was, how do we use offline data & behaviour for such a service in addition to online information that gets tracked. Imagine a variety of devices and vehicles that consumers today either read, watch, listen, carry along with them - radio( FM), TV, Mobile, Outdoor, Magazines, Newspapers etc.which is not tagged or data rich today.

I believe we still have a long way to go  & innovate here. Here in lies interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped. There must be different applications across devices & media vehicles that must bring this to life. The control, of course, must lie with the consumers to bring all of this together. The applications must talk to each other, pull relevant content, send proactive messages as things happen in each media vehicle or device or by interest tagged by consumers, to bring this conversation & experience to life with each consumer.

Multi-channel marketing poses new data challenges

The world of database marketing has changed since the time we knew it . There were only a few options as one knew it - lists - internal/ external, direct mail and telemarketing a decade or two ago. Today, for companies, customers come from different channels - social media, mobile, website leads thro' SEM or SEO etc. There is a need to track this customer data, organize them in a manner to know where they are coming from, is becoming increasingly critical. Before they know, many customers reach-out to companies from many channels available, in no time, which are available to them. This leads to multiple responses, follow-up and absolutely wasted marketing monies & more importantly a frustrated customer! Only when they organize and track this data across channels can companies do systematic campaigns & profiling of these customers. Not many companies are ready to handle this challenge. In my view, they are sometimes blisfully unaware of the problem and how to manage them!

It starts by building clear customer paths on how customers can potentially reach out to these companies, how they need to be tagged, scoring them by their interest and value, allocating them to an appropriate channel with clearly laid-out follow-up programs by channel. 

Deb Campbell of Clario Analytics has written a nice article on this topic:

Marketers still need to gather and keep the best data they can on their customers, understand them, segment them, track them over time, do some predictive modeling to market relevant to them and target new prospects most like them....Today, marketing channels are exploding all around us, not only with e-mail, search and display ads but also with all the social networking sites.

How does all this affect database marketing?

While the multiplication of channels can make tracking harder, and as a result make it more difficult to amend a database, you still need to know your customers’ needs and wants, and market to them one-to-one. Database marketing best practices haven’t changed as much as how you implement them.

You may have customers who are Internet-savvy and want messaging sent to them digitally. You have to target them, and those like them, in this way. Perhaps another customer segment prefers sales reps to contact them.Where database marketing pays here is that all this information can be captured.....

The solution is to keep your database as up-to-date as possible, with changes of addresses and e-mails, titles and positions. Track and segment your database at both levels, and target prospects with similar preferences and behaviors.

Going beyond transactional data to predict sales in retail - Tesco shows the way

I have often found a lot of interesting case studies and  lots of content around using a variety of internal sales & transactional data in retail stores to manage category, assortments, inventory planning and customer cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. What these data always many a time miss or don't factor is the external variables that account for customers to make decisions to buy or not buy. This could play a critical role in driving sales.These in fact play an important role in customer shopping behavior.

Some customer or environmental behavioral drivers like  whether it is a cold or a warm or a rainy day( and hence a decision to want to go to shopping or not), or sudden change in prices/promotions of specific products across categories in nearby shopping areas or stores, new choices of shopping destinations around the store, sports season etc. affect footfalls and purchases.

UK based Tesco has decided to use weather as an input to predict demand and therefore sales.After over 3 years of research, they have a software that identifies how shopping patterns change with every degree increase in temperature or every hour of sunshine! More here

My View: If information based decisions have to be made by marketers, the 'surrounding factors' around customers needs to be taken into consideration. It might well include traffic patterns, weather, attitudinal factors like health and welleness, enviromental concerns like green agriculture/organic farming etc. Marketers need to find methods to factor all these data into their analysis to forecast customer shopping behaviour.

Augmented reality - the fusing of data, search and advertisers

Here's an interesting cool mobile app released by layar, a company based out of Netherlands.

Basically the app figures out exactly where you are and in which direction you're looking, and then it presents additional data overlaid on top of the camera's image. Be it a bank's ATM that you may want to reach or imagine you reach a locality in your city and would love to find some houses to live here, just use layar and it will find you some houses, real estate agent too and you can call him right away!

Watch it live here:

I do believe it has limitations. It's not all pervasive at it looks:

a. You need an android phone
b. The service needs to be available in your country.This to me is a serious limitation. In a country like
    India, which has a huge penetration of mobile phones, it will serve a real need. In a world of connected
    information that's almost seamless, one cannot be selective in making such a service available. To
    me it must be simple enough to be downloaded and used anywhere in the world. The data on the web
    must be leveraged. This is really where most services fail. You can't have a product on the net and
    expect it to be available only in Europe, US and Netherlands.
c. It still needs the consumer to do something to throw this data thro' this browser. The novelty factor
    may die after some time. It needs to be embedded with what the mobile phone consumer does. I am
    sure this will improve over time.

I do think  applications like these will redefine the way consumers, data providers and advertisers will collaborate in the future.

When consumer information belongs to consumers!

There's a whole business out there on the web and offline world( direct mail databases, telemarketers etc.) where companies trade your information and make money by way of advertising. They place cookies( without your permission) on the web, track all the information you read, buy and click, use your registration information, get your subscription & transactional data and then bombard you with offers that you may not necessarily want or interested in. Finally, you get fed-up, the companies too get fed-up as there's a diminishing ROI in their marketing efforts and they start searching else where. Then comes a new Google and there's excitement again all round only to wither away after a couple of years! What happens if you as a consumer start trading your information.You as a consumer decide what information would you like to give out and get some returns out of it. That could be the future that's sustainable and  more importantly of value to you.

There are three parties who make money - first YOU, then a central customer information exchange(CCIE) that enables this and an advertiser who seeks to pay for people that they would like to build a dialog with ( remember, I am not using the word - sell, advertise or market!) 

Here's an interesting perspective Jerome brought my attention to:

Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files.

Bill Densmore has been thinking about this for 14 years. A career journalist who’s shifted to journalism research, Densmore is a fellow at the futurist Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Each of us has equity in the lives we live, he believes, and it’s time to cash in. His solution is the “information valet project,” a reordered media universe in which dozens of companies compete for the business of brokering our lives for the online news and commentary we covet.

He envisions it working something like this: You choose an InfoValet. It asks you what level of personal information you want to share with the Web sites you visit. At the low end that could basically be your name, rank, and serial number, and at the high end a laundry list of your needs and pleasures. Your InfoValet finds out what sites you want premium—i.e., nonfree—content from, and then it names a price. Its profit will come from charging you a little more than those sites charge it, and what they charge will hinge on the desirability of your “persona” to their advertisers. Densmore can imagine someone wealthy, acquisitive, and candid who’s so desirable he gets to travel the Web for pretty much nothing.
Read more.

My view:  Densmore has a  view of  how information from media can be monetized. It's a great idea & brilliant. But, we don't necessarily live to consume advertising information alone in everything that we do everyday, as we search for information. That sounds quite ridiculous and  ominous to me. Sometimes, I just seek information but necessarily don't need advertising tags next to it. Sometimes, I consume information to buy products, want to know more about some products that I read about or I saw in my friend's place and in this context & time, some advertising information necessarily will help me make better decisions. The context of consumer searching the information to me is important. Sometimes, many of these solutions are too web-centric. It needs have a fine balance between on-the-web and off-the-web linkage.

To me, consumers need to have the flexibility to join an information exchange where their membership entitles them to open or close their privacy information as they need it for that context. It must be their prerogative to build a world of links ( what ever they do - on the web and off-the-web) that is available, to the information exchange, as this will enable consumers to reach out to advertisers rather than the other way around. These are consumer info-banks that are owned and managed by consumers themselves.

Customer Centricity Unlocks Advertising's Future

I recently got to read an old post from Chief Marketer thro' Msquared Group and it has got some lovely insights on how marketing and advertising has to change to the new order.

My view has also been that fusing data-driven marketing and targeted advertising will be the future. The ones who will be successful will be those who practice it, not talk about it in forums and seminars. It requires a balanced left and right brain thinking. The ones who get it, will be the ones in demand and take marketing & advertising to the next plane.

Take a look:

Seeing the Opportunity in Data Direct marketing practices will soon become advertising's new religion—if you know who your best customers are, you can proactively reach prospects just like them through addressable media. Getting there will require collaboration between database marketers and brand advertisers.

Many companies have a wealth of customer information in their marketing databases. The best marketers have a single view of each customer across the organization's various channels and can predict the offers, media and even creative to which specific customers are most likely to respond. For decades, direct marketers have combined this insight with demographic, attitudinal and lifestage information to reach the best prospects with relevant messages through segmentation and database marketing.

Gain Customer Clarity with Multi-Faceted Insight

Data already residing in your customer databases can provide a lot of historical information on your customers, but it doesn't really speak to who they are as individuals. You likely have customers who bought the same product but exist on opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Or, you may know that two prospects are interested in the same product based on similar search terms, but you don't know enough about them to truly tailor your creative or offer.

This is the next plane of advertising optimization, where you not only know prospects are raising their hands with interest, but understand enough about them to truly tailor your approach. This consumer insight goes far beyond age, income and gender to include lifestage information like new home owner, new parent, young urbanite, young family or recently retired. It can include purchase behavior outside of that in your own database, offering insight into product category purchases and media preferences. Comprehensive media and advertising optimization takes place when this kind of information intersects with behavior to zero-in on the population most likely to respond and buy.

Deep Dive: Media Usage

According to Acxiom research conducted with data provider Mediamark Research and Intelligence, media junkies are:

• Twice as likely to buy from www.bestbuy.com and go to Banana Republic
• 76% more likely to have auto insurance with Progressive
• 50% more likely to say they intend to purchase their first house this year
• 77% less likely to be responsive to direct mail than the media moderates
• 20% less likely to be heavy newspaper readers
• 40% less likely to watch prime-time TV

If you want to drive the future of addressable advertising in your company make certain you know where all the gears are. Your advertising and database marketing teams can show you the way but only if they work together.

Getting IT to become customer-centric - Here's a 11 point plan to get started

Vince Kellen, a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium, a leading IT Advisory firm's 11 point plan to focus IT on customers resonated with me. I have been over the last couple of months writing about the need for IT to become customer-centric. In fact Forrester has been evangelizing the need for IT-marketing partnership. Here's his plan and they seem extremely perfect to me:

According to Kellen, once CIOs get their "trains running on time," they should build a multifaceted plan to reorient their IT shops around the real customer, the one that gives the firm money. The multifaceted plan can involve the following:

1.Establish a culture of customer service within IT.

2.Within IT, build intellectual capital of deeper customer issues, not just intellectual capital into technology architectures.

3.Bring this intellectual capital as a value-add service to the other parts of the firm, including marketing, sales, logistics, and service.

4.Start fostering innovation. Contribute to, if not lead, R&D in customer-centric IT.

5.Prioritize improvements in parts of the IT infrastructure that can address the technology or business process shortcomings, especially customer data quality and data integration.

6.Revamp IT processes that support the real customers and improve IT support service levels.

7.Help the firm identify gaps in the customer's experience and how IT can assist in closing those gaps.

8.Build an IT organization that is quick, flexible, adaptable, and reconfigurable so it can move fast on topical customer-facing initiatives.

9.Invest in the personnel and organizational development needed to make this happen.

10.Put into place strong usability and customer experience analysis methodologies that can uncover real issues with the customer experience and can develop real solutions.

11.Work with the other executives and ensure the IT plan is not only aligned with the business and customer strategies, but that the IT plan is actually challenging these plans and improving them.

 I have seen the benefits multiply with clients whom we work with in the last few years. It's time to get started now.

Why build a marketing database?

In an interesting post Jay Budford writes:

At the DMA Conference in Las Vegas this week, I heard a common question.  "Why set up a Marketing Database?  We have a CRM platform." 

Then I begin to ask the questions.  How long does it take to get data from IT to complete the data processing for your marketing campaigns?  How difficult is it to utilize business intelligence to develop campaign triggers or report on marketing results? Where does the marketing information reside in your CRM platform?  I often hear "by the time our business intelligence group receives data and completes data analysis the relevance of the marketing opportunity discovered by our market research has passed!"  The reason this is happening is simple;  you have data management occuring at the enterprise level in order to run the back-end of the business, not specifically marketing data that captures the essence of the customer interaction required for integrated marketing activities. We service several Fortune 500 clients, those with a true marketing database are able to successfully execute campaign management, triggered marketing and deliver great marketing ROI.  Those of our clients that rely on enterprise level information management are only able to manage campaigns as "one-offs,"  the results often a fraction of those with a true marketing database.  It is a simple question with a simpler answer, in order to optimize marketing ROI you must have a database built for that purpose.

My View: I can't agree more with Jay. Many of the clients we work with have similar issues and have found solutions similar to what Jay has written about. If companies want to really do customer-focussed marketing right from prospecting to acquisition to retention to growth, you need a marketing database.

Else,  they will pay only lip service to such an intention and will never really execute them at all.

How could we leverage those patterns from a marketing and experience perspective?

Here's an interesting perspective on relationship visualization by threeminds.

The key point that's being made is that now-a-days data, files, transactions, access and usage by customers is a lot more real time.  How can one get to know the behaviour and relationships between various dimensions to take action faster then ever before.

Use of all this information & data has to to get a lot more simpler, easier and flexible. That's where execution will move & get focussed in the next couple of years.

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.