(Welcome to Loose Cannon, a staff-written editorial focusing on issues of interest to the direct marketing community. To respond to this week’s editorial via e-mail, please send your message to [email protected].)
Unlike most New Year’s resolutions, which require a personal commitment of resolve and discipline, for 2002 my goals are attainable only with the help of the direct marketing community.
First, I am committed to writing at least one successful fundraising story about a non-profit company that is not related to the Sept. 11 events. A great deal of money has been raised for the heroes and victims of these events, but people are still suffering from breast cancer, AIDS and a dearth of quality programming on public television.
I resolve to retire the chestnut about the corner grocer with his shoebox of customer preferences being the acme of CRM. This will happen when marketers train their frontline employees well, and give them the same incentives the corner grocer had to maintain good relations with customers.
I promise to write at least one piece about email’s increased efficiency. This will come from legitimate opt-out mechanisms in email messages, as opposed to having the requests bounce back as undeliverable. Marketers will then not have their right messages, delivered at the right time to the right individual, lost in a sea of irrelevancy.
I will not write any more layoff stories. In their place I will write about companies taking loyalty guru Frederic Reichheld to heart and using legacy information from retained employees to generate additional revenue.
I will cover stories of venture capitalists being excoriated for throwing money at “new economy brats” while ignoring the basics of due diligence or direct marketing. Somewhere along the line someone has to take responsibility for expecting 25-year-olds with blank checks to behave like 55-year-olds. (Yes, others have written stories along this line, but I’m still peeved.)
Before the year is out I will write at least one piece analyzing direct marketers’ efforts to capitalize on American consumers’ peacetime dividend, as well as campaigns directed toward returning military personnel.
And yes, I will lose 15 pounds.
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