Latest article for chiefmarketer.com, talking about planning for dynamic content and personalization before the next site redesign. With web services, the possibilities for embedded dynamic content and personalization are now within reach. The biggest problem I’ve been seeing is a lack of flexibility in the current site design of larger companies.
You can read it here.
I grew up on the East Coast, and have lived on the West Coast for 18 years. So when I spent 2 1/2 years commuting to Indiana, it was a great experience for a marketer to see another view of the American consumer. I was left with a greater appreciation for the role of Wal-Mart in the typical consumer’s life, as well as a deep appreciation for the diversity found in my current city of residence, San Francisco.
Why the reminiscing? Because I just spent an hour wading through marketing materials from the Fred. Newell CRM Conference that took place earlier this month. Suddenly all of the database marketing/email/campaign management providers sound very, very similar, all promising more loyalty, more sales, higher ROI, more insight, etc. It reminds me of the ads for apartment buildings in Indiana, where everything had a pool, workout facility, clean units, a new kitchen, parking, and easy access to freeways. You had to filter based on location, then visit everyone in a region to figure out the differences. I quickly began using price as a proxy for quality to cut through the clutter.
Clearly there is a major challenge for marketing execs at retention marketing solutions (i.e. me) to better differentiate from competitors. Feel free to comment or send me feedback directly on the topic.
I’ve seen a flurry of metrics-related articles recently that generally show direct marketers and other data driven marketers don’t track their metrics closely enough. They don’t follow lifetime value, or don’t measure churn, or don’t know conversion rates of email, or one of a million different KPIs that we could manage our businesses with.
Well, that’s OK. As long as you track something that relates to your basic assumptions about why your customers care about your company, you’re ahead of the game. Don’t get me wrong…all of the metrics mentioned above are incredibly important (especially the changes over time) but ultimately they are resultants and trailing indicators.
Have a point of view about why your customers care about you and do business with you, then measure the things that tell you the most about your point of view. Anything else is nice, but not the end of the world if you don’t track it.
One company I know was very interested in average sales per customer in various relationship marketing programs. Some programs worked better than others, and their efforts were focused commensurately. However, it wasn’t until months had gone by that they realized the underlying cause of the sales differences was the presence of certain big-ticket category purchases. Suddenly their understanding of the business changed, and they tracked % of activity in key categories by program, plus which campaigns drove the big ticket purchases. This focus has transformed their business and their metrics now focus on the long term drivers of value, namely activity in a select few categories that best predict larger lifetime value.