The Platinum Rule

Many people is small business operate according to the Golden Rule; they treat every customer according to the way they want to be treated. Relevancy Marketing empowers an organization to operate according to the Platinum Rule: "Treat every customer according to the way they want to be treated."

In the past, I worked for a business that was big into CRM. It was a sales and service company serving the business community. A hand-written thank you card went out after every sale. The new owner visited every customer at least once a year. They stayed up day after day to bake cookies at Christmas and the 4th of July that were expensively packaged and then hand delivered. A follow up call was made after every service call. And some customers though it was great! Some laughed at it, though. And some distrusted it! This was clearly a case of operating by the Golden Rule instead of the Platinum Rule.

Virtually all CRM programs can accommodate collecting the information required to operate your business by the Platinum Rule. Surveying your client base will give you virtually all the information you need to understand how the individual wants to be treated. Or, if you operate in a business to business environment, how the client company wants to be treated.

Though the Platinum Rule is focused on the CRM or customer retention side of Relevancy Marketing, it can easily be employed in a customer acquisition mode as well. By consolidating the responses of your current clients, you can develop a fairly accurate picture of how most of your customers want to be treated. Could this be the Silver Rule: "Treat my prospects according to the way the majority of my customers want to be treated."

You may find that knowing how your customers want to be treated can revolutionize the way your company presents itself to the world. You might want to ditch the automated attendant. You might want to invest in a more useful website. You will likely decide to change the frequency and format of your marketing communications.

direct+marketing marketing one+to+one+marketing relevancy+marketing customer+acquisition customer+retention

Anecdotal Data

As we begin the process of Relevancy Marketing, we begin to add the data that will us to determine what is relevant to a specific client or prospect. While CRM and database marketing rely on historical and modeled data, Relevancy Marketing generates it own data.

At the beginning of that process is anecdotal data. In other words, what the company thinks they know about a particular customer or prospect. For example;

1. Rank this customer, from one to five, in terms of how recently they have done business with us.
2. Rank this customer in terms of how frequently they have done business with us.
3. Rank this customer in terms of how much volume this customer has done with us.

This is an RFM analysis for those paying attention.

other questions might be,

• Rank our account penetration of this account, that is how effective have we been at selling to all the users of our products or services in a particular account.
• Rank our account saturation for this account. This is the number of product/service lines we sell to an account- are they buying everything they can from us?

All ranking should be done on a scale of 1 to 5. This allows for distribution in quintiles or groups of 20%.

Other anecdotal data:

Business to business:

• SIC Code or Industry Type
• Geographical data
• Company sales volume
• Number of employees
  

Consumer:

• Geographical data
• Lifestyle info- what do they do for fun
• Income
• Homeowner Status
• Marital Status
• Birthday
• Anniversary
• # of Children
• Children's name
• Children's birthdays

This data is going to be used in three ways; we will use it to segment our list, and we will use it to develop a profile of our customer and we will use it when we test the effectiveness of our marketing.

It may appear that some of this information may be very private, and it is. As you begin to collect this data you need to become very conscious of security. How you store it is another potential challenge. I recommend Excel or some other spreadsheet at this point.

Collection of this data should involve anyone who might be able to contribute. If your company has sales reps, they should provide info about just their customers, thus breaking up the task. Print out a customer list and have them rate 10 percent of the list daily of 10 days. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible. But speed is important. This should be completed with a two week period. The data entry should be complete within and additional week. You may need to hire a temp to accomplish this, but at this point speed of execution is critical.

Concurrently, data from the first mailing should be entered as well. Mail pieces with undeliverable addresses need to be purged or corrected. Responses need to be entered as well. Simply add a column in the spreadsheet for First Mailing Response and put an x or a data in it. We'll use it in a bit.

I guess I should mention that if you have access to historical data in your system that you should use it only if you can get at it quickly and without outside help and you can get it into the spreadsheet with the rest of the data. Your relevancy marketing database should include more than just current customers, but prospects, suspects, etc. Again, at this point speed of execution is more important than accuracy- that will come.

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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