TRACK EVERYTHING!! The Key to Long-term Success.

Marketing communications generally serve four purposes: they

• sell something;
• ask for something;
• provide information;
• build brand.

Strategic Relevancy Marketing creates a fifth purpose: to gather information. In the absence of ample data about your recipient, you can use Relevancy Marketing to gather it.

There is a sage piece of sales advice I always tried to follow when I was in sales; "ABC; Always be closing." In marketing communications you should be prepared to always be testing. Track everything, and track it on the recipient level as well as the project level. Tracking on the recipient level provides information about the recipient. Of course, this will only work if you are communicating in a campaign, not a one-off basis. What is the recipient responding to? Is it a postcard or a newsletter? Is it an offer for an up sell, or something new? Are they asking for free information, and what is it about?

You have to create your communications with asking these things in mind. If, you send out a newsletter, some of the primary articles may require going to your website for more information. And if you do that, you probably want to require a password (specific to the recipient) to get it. You could also do this with a microsite and email delivery of the content. If you are communicating with a smaller group, you may want them to call, then, write down who called and what they wanted. Track everything.

After a few months of communicating and tracking, you will begin to have data that is very useful. Some recipients may not respond at all, downgrade them to a quarterly postcard just to stay in touch (or drop them altogether). Those recipients that respond the most frequently, get more specific offers, and may telephone follow-up. You have their attention, and more importantly, they trust you, you have credibility with them. You might even have enough information to do a kind of RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary).

So whatever you do, always be testing. And, always be gathering info. TRACK EVERYTHING!

Sell MORE!! Use Relevance.

Creating relevance for the recipient of your marketing communications requires good data. I'm stating the obvious. Relevance takes the form of images, text, layouts, etc. But really, there is another form of relevance involved.

Relevance should also take the form of the offer. While we can use relevance to create interest and credibility, when we are selling something, we use relevance to offer a product or service that has value to the recipient. In other words, while it is possible to sell ice cubes to Eskimos, wouldn't you rather sell them blankets or boots. You can sell your ice cubes to your recipients in Arizona. (There is less sales resistance, lowering costs, and more demand, meaning you can improve profitability.) Relevance allows you message to do this. And, if you couple your data with variable data publishing and digital printing technologies, you can change your message and your offer on the fly.

At this point, you can use the same "mailing" to up sell, cross-sell or simply sell to prospects. There are efficiencies to be had by marketing this way. More importantly, by fine-tuning the customer/prospect mix of your "mailing", you can achieve your optimum balance between customer retention and customer acquisition.

Just remember, as you begin to homogenize your data, that data is the hinge-pin of Relevancy Marketing. If you are not prepared to engage in the kind of marketing I outlined above, you may be in the future, so keep your data pure. This can pay huge dividends.

Get Started

One of the centerpieces of Relevancy Marketing is to get started. Relevancy Marketing is designed to move a company, who by virtue of their place in the market, a lack of staff or a corporate culture that prevents it, from no, little or ineffective marketing into a long-term strategy of increasingly customer-centric relevant marketing communication.

Since these organizations lack the historical focus on this type of marketing, we can expect very little in the way of reliable customer data. This consequently leads to a lack of well developed knowledge of who the customer is for the purposes "database marketing".

As a result, the first step of any relevancy marketing campaign is to do a mailing. This may seem contradictory, but I submit that continued complacency is worse. The concept goes like this:

Quickly collect a list of all current and past customers, prospects, chamber of commerce lists, vertical market members, etc. This list may seem next very low quality and it is, but we are going to use it to collect data. Have the list NCOA'd, that is updated to reflect change of address orders, cleaned, and duplicate entries eliminated.

The mail-piece should be a 4-1/4 x 6 postcard, with very generic information on it (but including a phone number). This card is the mail equivalent to a 12-second "elevator speech": we are, we do. This card should be mailed at a first class postage rate, which, when presorted equals or is less than mailing the same piece at bulk rates. It also acomplishes something else that is very important. You will also get the cards with any remaining bad addresses back at no charge. You have begun to collect data!

The trick is not to get hung up on anything. If the list universe is over-thought, or the message over-thought, you will stay right where you are- doing nothing. Just get something out.

This mailing accomplishes four critical things:

1. we are starting,
2. we should generate some leads,
3. we will end up with a very clean mailing list,
4. we have begun to develop momentum.

While that mailing is being prepared and mailed, the next step begins: the collection of anecdotal data.

What is Relevancy Marketing?

Relevancy Marketing is like a heat-seeking missile for your marketing. It primarily uses direct marketing as its communication vehicle, but all forms of marketing can effect it. The concept goes like this:

Many small businesses are of necessity so engaged in the business of the moment, that they do not have the ability to develop long-term marketing strategies and translate those strategies into tactical practice. This is problematic for many reasons. Keeping customers is done in a reactive manner, and in many cases the business may not be given an opportunity to react before it is too late. Therefore, there is more pressure to gain new customers, which requires a significantly higher investment, leads to lower profitability, can effect customer service, driving more customers away, generating additional pressure to gain new customers. And so on.

Relevancy Marketing seeks to correct this by moving a company from the above type operational structure into a proactive mix of CRM (customer relationship management), database marketing and high-relevancy communication with the goal of becoming very aware of what the customer needs and wants from the company they are doing business with. The company can engage in a measured growth strategy with enough data to project growth.

Where Relevancy Marketing differs from CRM and database marketing alone, is that CRM and database marketing are the end result. Therefore, the enormous up-front investment of time and money required by these technologies is eliminated. Relevancy Marketing requires a commitment to engage in campaign based direct mail, however. And it requires a commitment to track both results, as well as the data generated by the results.

Data gathered by these activities is used to both build the CRM database as well as develop a profile for database marketing purposes.

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