Got Milk? - The Indian Dairy Context.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Implementing CRM
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The last mile just got longer! Contd..5
Cute brand messaging will need to be extended to laborious number crunching and analysis. Customer relationship management will be important not only in the high value B2B businesses scenario but also in the low product value (read low brand switching costs) B2C scenario. Re-purchase has become the new and critical benchmark to monitor brand marketing success.
The role of the marketer is growing and is going to be far more revenue-led than in the past. No longer is it considered enough to create fantastic brand experiences pre-purchase, or even to ensure conversion at the purchase point. In fact, that is just the beginning. The last mile just got a lot longer.
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Sunday, September 2, 2007
Direct (esp. electronic), where is it headed?
SPAM has done a lot of damage to this reach-out method and is continuing to take a heavy toll. Very few agencies or marketers have been proactive about permission marketing and are in fact pushing too hard on merely trying to reach out to without understanding the long term damage to the brand caused by way of un-clustered, unsolicited, unimaginative and unintelligent bombardment of mails.
The recent survey findings of eROI, yet again highlight the need of relevance of content and delivery of message as two of the most important factors effecting the edirect trade. While the survey predominantly looks at US, the
Relevance of content: The ease and low cost of this reach out technology does not warrant a barrage of email. The age old logic of communicating only when the content is hot holds true now more than ever before. The prospect needs to love what he gets, period. Linked and exclusive knowledge / white papers are a must. Don’t do it for the sake of completing a task on the marcom chart.
Everyone on the Db is not interested in everything you want to say. The best of Db cannot yield results if it is not used diligently. Segmentation of your installed databases to depths which might appear silly is the way forward. Segmentation restricted to designations, product purchase information, and geographies is passé. Look at interest areas, responses to previous communications by way of click thru, time spend on the communication etc. to ensure relevant communication in the future.
Need to have a “call to action” in the communication! Measure the ROI. This is not about brand awareness, this is about conversions. Do not send out a communication which does not have a measurable call to action. And do operate with a pre-decided success measurement matrix.
Delivery of content: Focus on this. Your best designed and targeted communication is of no use if it is not designed for delivery. Your email needs to be coded to deliver across various email clients. Spend time to understand and master filters. This is going to get more and more serious an issue with organizations and mail portals increasing the security levels and with sender verification system coming into fray.
To me, delivery is above everything else and will tend to separate the successful agency / marketer from the novice.
And go back in time: Go back to an exposure on printed direct mailers. Suddenly the prospect is taking the printed document very seriously. The communication stays on the table longer and gets passed around much more than the perceived cheap spam email.