BE CAREFUL WHO you Listen to!! They May Not Get It!

The delay in posting has been the result of putting a proposal together for a major contract. The buying influence at our prospect has repeatedly admonished us to "bring our 'A-game', we are up against the best!"

Part of my task was to research the competition. What I found was very interesting.

Here I am researching companies that claim to be the biggest, the best and the most advanced in one to one marketing, and in each case, "one to one" was simple personalization. This is even more interesting when you consider that the recipients comprise several distinct segments, all of whom would benefit from a tailored message, and the "sender", whose bio was required, was different in each mailing. These mailings are to retirees; a very diverse group ranging in age from 55 to 85. A 55 year old individual has a completely different view of someone who is 85. This needs to be leveraged. But here are these giants of the industry, providing personalization.

The moral of the story is this: you may think you are talking to an expert in one-to-one marketing, but y0u may not be. Don't let them tell you that one-to-one is cost prohibitive. It's not. Of course, there are instances when it isn't appropriate and you certainly should use it just because you can. See my post on the Relevancy Continuum for how I feel about this.

To quote (well maybe paraphrase) Zig Ziglar: "To sell to John Brown, put yourself in John Brown's shoes." If your message would be more effective utilizing relevant communications, use relevant communications.

Any thots?

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.

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.