Is 'customer-centric' just a concept put into practice by the early adopters...or is there a point soon where we'll see quicker adoption of real data-driven 1:1 marketing?
Is it a data/data modeling issue? Is it an analytics issue? Is it a ROI issue? Is it a content issue? Is it due to internal resource constraints? Is it due to lack of subject matter expertise? —R.E.
The Voices of Email had this advice:
Tricia Robinson-Pridemore: Customer-centric messaging is the same “behavioral” “interactive” messaging paradigm we’ve been chatting about for years. It’s being done by some F100 and Web 2.0 organizations. F100 companies are running it out of marketing and Web 2.0 companies manage it out of their technology/customer behavior/e-commerce groups. The two biggest reasons it isn’t more widely adopted are data synchronization and strategy. Customer data is all over the place in organizations. Stored in multiple databases, e-commerce systems, web analytic systems, and *still* often in flat files (a.k.a. Excel spreadsheets). To make that data useful and in any way operational, email systems need to talk to that data where it resides or marketers must synchronize and consolidate that data.
The other current spoiler for customer-centric messaging is lack of strategy. In a recent JupiterResearch survey of email marketers, the number one most important challenge they cite when working with email is “defining an email strategy.” If determining a strategy for email is tough for them imagine what making a real data-driven 1:1 marketing strategy is like? Although important, technology will only be as successful as your messaging strategy. Find the right partners who have creative, experienced experts to help build your messaging strategy and your technology implementation.
Chip House: I think we’re seeing true customer-centric communications now. Just think about the real-time, transactional messages that are driven by customer actions (buying something, signing up for something, or going somewhere). Going deeper here includes email messages triggered by information captured via web analytics data, such as product category visited, or a shopping cart abandon. Certainly there are barriers to scaling this type of customer-centric communications into some organizations and business process, but if there is a reason we don’t see broader adoption I believe it has to do more with the fact that it takes a concerted effort for marketers to actively leverage and integrate the available technologies and data to drive highly-relevant communications. In the end marketers need to spend more time with their database experts and focus on developing “one view” of the customer, and reacting to the customers’ wants and needs and behaviors. Too many marketers resign themselves to sending another weekly email focused on the “specials” highlighted in the Sunday circular.
We could really write books around this topic, so I’ll stop there. The answer is that in the world of technology, the CMO and the CIO have to start working closely together to leverage current technologies.
Chad White: In retail email marketing, I see a lot of broadcast emails. And to a certain extent that makes perfect sense—sales notifications, for instance. But there’s plenty of room for a lot more tailored communications. Offering more niche newsletters is a huge step toward 1:1 marketing. Only 28% of major online retailers offer more than one newsletter, according to the 2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study. For example, Barnes & Noble offers 21 different email newsletters so people can get content and promotions about just the kinds of books and music they enjoy. Giving customers the ability to express their preferences is a relatively easy way to boost relevancy without diving into behavioral analytics, which may be beyond many retailers’ current capabilities.
While expressed preferences can get you far, to get any closer to 1:1 marketing retailers will have to rethink what they consider to be their inventory. They need to move from a product-centric view, where goods are the inventory and retailing is about finding customers that want those goods, to a customer-centric view, where customers are the inventory and retailing is about supplying the goods that your individual customers want. To do that, retailers will need to consolidate all their far-flung customer data first.
Have some good advice that we missed? Please add a comment and take part in the conversation.
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