| Marketers face an
unprecedented challenge to meet and exceed customers'
expectations for superior relationship management while
shareholders and executive management demand budget
accountability and increased visibility to customer
value, customer activities, and customer trends.
Customers expect to be recognized, identified, and
engaged, if not rewarded with points or "special"
acknowledgements at every interaction point with a
company. The good news is customers expect to be
"marketed;" the challenge is delivering superior
relationship management, personalized product and
service delivery, and relevant messaging while
extracting greater value from each customer.
The recent technology explosion has caused an
upheaval in marketing departments across the globe.
Pervasive access to information elevates the marketing
department's visibility by corporate outsiders,
competitors, and customers as well as executive
management, internal operations, and service
departments. But while the combination of data
warehouses, search engines, and advanced modeling and
reporting technologies appears to provide a 360-degree
customer view, marketers are faced with performing all
of the marketing planning, product and program design,
tactical execution, and performance analysis in time
frames that have compressed from weeks and months to
hours and days.
Marketers are challenged, unlike ever before, with
urgent demands to produce and serve offers and messages
through an ever-expanding network of channels, partners,
and media while maintaining a high-value, relevant,
measurable, customer-centric dialogue.
Demands for urgency, productivity, personalization,
and accountability require marketers to leverage new
marketing technologies while assessing the current
marketing department's functional design and individual
marketer's roles.
Marketing Urgency, Start at the Speed of 'E'
There is no more starting gun to announce the start
of the "holiday" season or the "upgrade your computer"
season as marketing is now "always on." Thank QVC, HSN,
eBay, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart for creating the market
impression that something is always on sale and there is
always a deal to be had if the customer just does enough
research.
Expert marketers and their agencies and constituents
have evolved systems and processes that build and
execute product offers and promotions to meet the
instantaneous demands of fickle consumers while fending
off savvy competitors. But new marketing channels do not
afford extended planning cycles, nor do increasingly
nimble and savvy competitors allow companies to sustain
differentiating offers for extended periods of time.
But the changes aren't only time-related. While
customers were quick to adapt to new marketing channels
for promotion and product awareness, few companies'
marketing departments were prepared for the enormous
demands posed by online campaigns, let alone
coordinating promotions across all channels
simultaneously. Clearly, advances in technology have
brought about an entirely new set of marketing hurdles.
Marketers and the companies they represent must now
be prepared for instantaneous customer demands - a
simple push of a button can discount an entire product
line, swamp a call center, or empty a warehouse. With
these kind of technology-driven changes to the marketing
landscape, it's only fitting that there have been so
many recent advances in marketing technology.
In just three years, marketing departments' message
volumes have exploded. Figure 1 shows how for just a
single channel, messages per customer have nearly
doubled from 1,132 in 2000 to 2,210 in 2003. Projections
have the volume nearly doubling again over the next
three years.
A marketing automation software suite, such as
DoubleClick's Ensemble™, provides a collaborative work
environment for all marketing constituents within a
corporate enterprise, as well as for all external
marketing vendors and partners such as advertising
agencies, third-party print production houses, and call
centers - the entire marketing network.
By connecting a company's entire marketing network,
this type of marketing automation solution provides
technology for continuous and automatic selling at every
customer contact point. As a result, each customer is
served a strategically targeted offer in every
interaction, regardless of channel. These interactions
are part of an enterprise-wide corporate plan with
specific investment, revenue, and growth objectives.
A Marketing-Centric Focus
This new category of marketing technology is designed
to help marketers achieve their ultimate goal of
identifying, quantifying, and ranking opportunities;
designing and executing campaigns; and managing and
measuring responses simultaneously across all channels
and interaction points in a closed-loop process.
This common marketing view is shared by all marketing
team members, vendors, and constituents while marketing
and enhanced customer information is accessible
enterprise-wide for use in reporting, analysis, and
customer-centric applications. The platform is designed
specifically to reduce the burden of repeating frequent
individual marketing tasks, such as "selecting best
targets likely to buy "X" by providing a process flow
approach (see Figure 2).
This subsection of a campaign process shows how offer
and channel allocation, customer and prospect selection,
response and nonresponse management, quality surveys,
and reporting are all treated as individual steps in a
repeatable process. Each section and subsection can be
reused and shared by other members of the marketing
team. Additionally, each process contains performance
metrics that determine pass/fail criteria for selecting
what is the best offer to match to which customer group,
while selecting the appropriate channel mix for
execution and follow-up.
Marketing Automation Design
These types of solutions were designed to reduce the
task-level work that previously was performed across
multiple specialized software systems.
Marketing departments no longer have to create
specialized customer lists just for direct mail programs
and separate lists for email programs. They allow you to
allocate customer offers, messages, and content all
based on your customer profiles and channel
availability. Available offers are decided by an
advanced model-based decision engine as well as by
business rules.
An Offer-Centric Platform
A marketing automation solution, such as
DoubleClick's Ensemble, centers on matching the right
offer to the right target audience while continuously
and automatically reinforcing offers with highly
probable customer prospects. This multichannel process
design ensures offer consistency across all customer
interaction points while automating cross-sells,
up-sells, and customer relationship building objectives
in each customer contact. No matter how complex the
customer strategy may be, the marketing workflow
framework can support its seamless execution across
multiple customer contact channels.
This type of solution also allows for customer
profiling, offer matching, and continuous offer
performance optimization by embedding advanced,
model-based decisioning into its marketing process
design platform. And if your marketing department is
already invested in advanced modeling or reporting tools
such as SAS, SPSS, Microstrategy, or Business Objects,
Ensemble's open system design easily works in tandem
with virtually all marketing automation systems,
providing you with a competitively superior marketing
arsenal.
Automating Routine Campaign Decisions: Predictive
Segmentation
Predictive segmentation dramatically reduces the time
required to identify best prospects, highest performing
offers, optimal campaign components (i.e., creative,
price, etc.). Traditional model building requires expert
systems, specialty skill sets, and prolonged data
preparation and experimenting, which results in a
prohibitive cost per question. So many companies and
marketers choose to simply ask fewer questions or rely
on instinct to make program and campaign decisions. New
technology reduces the cost and time burden per question
while providing equivalent results. The result is the
ability to test many more business hypotheses and
multiple customer scenarios, and to free marketing to
test more concepts and variations. About the Author
Michael Hoffman is president and CEO of ClientXClient, a CRM
advisory and CRM execution services company. ClientXClient
helps companies optimize yield per customer. He has worked on
customer-centric and database marketing initiatives over the
past 15 years on behalf of hundreds of Fortune 1,000 companies
specializing in financial services, diversified services,
retail, catalog, and publishing industries. He was a senior
executive with Experian,
ClientLogic,
DoubleClick, and Customer
Analytics. He can be reached at
MHoffman@ClientXClient.com
More News & Reviews
Copyright 2005 CLIENTxCLIENT Contact:
info@CLIENTxCLIENT.com
Call: 908.350.3012
|
