THIS IS PART three of an excerpt from a chapter on relationship marketing, from the upcoming third edition of David Shepard Associates’ “The New Direct Marketing” (McGraw-Hill).
Different lifestyles require different marketing communication methods. Today, we must be focused on our customers’ choice of communication channels. Some will be used during the work week, others during weekends. Customers will have different preferences for inbound vs. outbound communications and marketing promotions vs. product usage or account status information.
Technological innovations have brought about the option of two-way communications and increased the “bandwidth” between customers and companies. We’re faced with a dizzying array of communications channels-there’s the telephone, e-mail, the Internet, fax and, of course, outbound mail.
Using traditional media, the marketer can control many communication elements including delivery timing, message content and the delivery channel. However, marketing programs that employ many of these new channels will only be able to control content in a reactive manner. Access channel preference and delivery timing will be determined by the customer in many instances.
The key to leveraging existing customer communication methods is being able to integrate information across the various contact channels and coordinate marketing activity among individual customers, channels and marketing programs.
Almost every company has set up information systems to support daily operations such as order entry, order status, point-of-sale purchases, account status, billing and shipping. They have also built customer databases that can be used to implement and coordinate marketing programs across traditional direct mail and outbound telemarketing channels.
However, new capabilities are required to accomplish this new type of marketing. The next-generation marketing databases, commonly called marketing operations systems, still provide the basics (maintaining customer and prospect data, strategic planning, marketing program planning, program implementation and results analysis). These systems also link directly to customer channels via “message broker” applications.
These applications fit into the information flow supporting customer access and support channels. In the case of telephone customer service, the rep inputs the customer’s data and a transaction is sent “downstream” to the operations system. On the way, the message broker intercepts the transaction, creates another marketing transaction and then sends the original off to the operations system.
The marketing transaction is used to make promotional decisions based on a number of criteria. Customers may have one or more marketing messages waiting for them in a message database. These messages are created by marketing managers who select lists of names from the database, just as they would for a traditional mail or telemarketing program.
Instead of assigning source code and “cutting a tape” for a lettershop or outbound telemarketing vendor, the marketer instead assigns a message code and delivery preference to the selected list and sends it to the message database system.The promotional “creative”-the message and, sometimes, graphics-is housed in a separate part of the database and referenced via the message code.
On the other hand, the customer may have met the conditions of an event trigger, such as purchasing a specific item or having a total order value over $150. The customer may also have met the conditions necessary to receive a marketing message as specified by a statistical model, which has the ability to predict future status based on present information. To illustrate, a customer may be making a second purchase and the combined values, specific products and timing of the purchases may result in this individual or company being classified as a potential high-value customer.
Surveys represent still another message a customer can receive. Using list and event-trigger approaches, the company may want to know something specific about the customer, such as attitudes toward environmental issues or satisfaction with their most recent purchase.
Once the message broker has determined the messages the customer is qualified to receive, it must decide which ones should be delivered and in which order. This depends on both the priority of each message and the channel on which the customer is active. A customer standing at a grocery store checkout will have, at best, the time and patience to receive a very simple offer or request for information. If the same customer is talking to a customer service rep, there is the opportunity to deliver a longer and more complicated message.
(Concludes next issue.)
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