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| | February 22nd, 2007 |
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| "The Difference" |
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| IN THIS ISSUE: |
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EXPANDED LIFETIME VALUE (LTV) PROVIDES INSIGHT ACROSS
MULTIPLE CHANNELS |
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Don’t kid yourself.
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| In today’s world, a lifetime needs to be defined. We always recommend that our clients’ marketing returns should be in-line with the way incentives are offered to marketing executives. The reality is our jobs are based on results in a 12-month period, broken down and built on four quarters. We are not given a lifetime to perform. Why should our customer strategies be built that way? Read more.
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| OBSESS ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS' EXPERIENCE |
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| A company cannot be customer-centric without focusing on the customer experience. Over the last year, we shopped well over 100 companies, examining the multichannel shopping experience in more than a dozen industries. It is our strongly-held belief that the primary determinant of business success and the central strategic issue of every company is the customer experience.
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As marketers, we all recognize that our customers are critical to our existence. That which a customer encounters at every stage of her interaction with a company shapes and ultimately dictates what she thinks of the brand. It is not simply a matter of one touch point, such as, "lower prices." It is creating an exceptional experience that leaves the customer feeling like she is dealing with a brand that understands her because her experience is in line with being treated "the right way.” Yet based on our research, it is not clear that most companies leverage off this principle by creating a consistent, exceptional experience for our customers. Customer-centricity and its practice should be found across all channels equally. While most understand the concept of customer-centricity, putting together a game plan to make that vision manifest is another story. However, ignoring it will be your largest obstacle to growth. Read more.
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| POSTAL REFORM |
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| We are all aware that due to the advent and iterations of communication devices, particularly email, the 21st century has brought with it an ever decreasing amount of snail mail. According to the DMA’s Talking Points on Postal Reform, we learn that because of this ongoing decline, the USPS will lose somewhere around $17 billion on first class mail volume, which represents 27% of its revenue. In 1999, the New York Times reported that more than 2 billion email messages are sent throughout the US annually, which is more than half the number of pieces of mail the USPS handles. Read more.
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| PERSONA MARKETING |
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| Marketsmith owns the persona marketing corner.
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| Think about your audience and what motivates them, and you will be engaged in the initial steps of persona marketing. What is persona marketing? Persona marketing is the identification of your customer beyond basic demographics, to reflect a more robust image of them in your catalog. In an effort to connect with various segments on a much deeper level while maintaining the mission of the catalog, variable printing persona marketing is employed by managing forms that are wrapped around the core product offering. Read more.
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MOBILE MARKETING— AN EMERGING CHANNEL WITH
GARGANTUAN POTENTIAL |
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| Mobile marketing reaches and communicates with customers based on an opted-in preference on the part of the consumer to have relevant content sent to his/her cell phone. For instance, let’s say a customer has opted to receive coupons from his favorite coffee house. While he is within a one mile radius of that shop, a GPS signal will automatically send an SMS message to his cell phone advising him of a sale or sending him a coupon for a free coffee.
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Simply put, mobile marketing capitalizes on “local,” the close proximity of a customer to a retail outlet, by delivering added-value to the customer with the goal of initiating a spontaneous purchase through the retail channel.
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There are over 2 billion voice consumers worldwide. This number exceeds the number of PCs by 1 billion, televisions by .5 billion and iPods by 1.7 billion. From a distributed device position, there are simply more mobile communication vehicles to carry a marketer’s message than any other device, and, cell phone popularity continues to rise. Mobile marketing is direct marketing to those consumers via mobile phones, PDAs or laptop computers. Although there is every indication that this channel is on every proactive marketers’ radar, significant domain knowledge is crucial before incorporating it into a mass marketing contact strategy. Experts agree that due to a fragmented market containing multiple network types, hundreds of carriers and thousands of different devices, as well as on and off-deck dilemmas, entering into the mobile marketing channel is not without its challenges. Read more.
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