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?

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.

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

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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