The most annoying marketing e-mails I get aren’t spam, but rather messages from a store where I cheerfully handed over my contact information.
Slightly more than a year ago, I bought $40 set of salt and pepper shakers as a wedding gift. Granted, the number of times I will ever need to buy $40 salt and pepper shakers in this lifetime are limited -- as the kangaroo in the bar says, with prices like these -- but the e-mails I’ve received are welcome.
Or so I thought. Alas, this marketer managed to screw up by not applying basic target marketing segmentation, such as recency, frequency and monetary considerations. It’s been about 13 months since I made my one and only purchase from the store. Under many circumstances this would classify me as a lapsed customer, but the rules seem to have been bent during the current slowdown.
This marketer hasn’t noticed. There’s been no "We haven’t seen you in a while" note. No "Here’s a ‘Come back to us’ offer" message. Wasn’t e-mail going to be the medium that offered detailed customization in every contact?
It would be too bad if the low cost associated with e-mail makes marketers lazy, allowing them to eschew personalized messages in favor of blasting out cookie-cutter mass communications to their entire files. It would be downright worrisome if marketers in the electronic arena are ignoring, or not realizing the need for, basic segmentation techniques.
Furthermore, if these executives managing online channels are younger than their offline counterparts, and are not being trained in classic RFM segmentation techniques, the industry is flat-out losing a golden training opportunity – to say nothing of sales.
RFM has survived in the face of neural net, linear and logistic regression and a raft of other techniques. It would be a shame if electronic media kill it, and the benefits of versioning, through ignorance.
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