Retention and Relationships : Marketing Thoughts by Michael Greenberg

My latest at Chief Marketer.

I see 7 key elements in best customer management.  This first column focuses on the 3 basic ones:

Identify - Understanding who an individual customer is and what they have done and bought.

Communicate - Messaging an individual customer with relevance to their needs and prior actions.

Reward - Providing and promising incentives and benefits based on their activities.

I’ll spend time over the next few weeks exploring each of these areas in depth before the second column is published with the other four elements.

Word of Google and Salesforce.com’s discussions on incorporating Salesforce.com’s offerings into Google has much of the CRM industry buzzing.  Its not really a surprise, but any time two elephants start dancing, the mice start to scurry.

While Salesforce.com’s SaaS approach dovetails nicely with Google’s web based applications, adding the Salesforce.com SFA apps could be the piece that moves small and midsize businesses to the Google application set.  With Microsoft pushing Dynamics, everyone else is cooling to the idea of deep integration with the Office suite.

Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Walk over to your email marketing manager today and give them a pat on the back, because unless its your job, you have no idea how hard they are working these days.

Ever since reputation monitoring and spam traps became the main component of filtering technology, email marketing went from “segment and send” to a complex dance of response tracking, recency filtering, authentication services, and ISP relations.   Those 500,000 email addresses you had a year ago may be down to less than 100,000 mailable, low-risk customers.  An address that has not responded in 90 to 180 days may now be a spam trap in one of the many monitoring networks that most ISPs use to filter individual messages as well as IP addresses.

Behavior-driven relationship marketing tends to cut through this problem.  So before its too late (and you’ve been blacklisted, your IPs flagged, and dynamic blocks slammed in place with every mailing), start planning on how to shift most or all of your email to a relationship driven approach.  It may take some time to match the prior level of revenue generation, but until you start, you’ll never get there.

My latest at Chief Marketer.  Its the third in the series on developing a loyalty strategy proposal.  The three taken together provide a framework for addressing all of the key questions regarding a loyalty (or relationship marketing) program.

At its core, ROI isn’t that tough to figure out, but the secret sauce is estimating the impact on transaction size, frequency, and retention.  There’s nowhere you can find those numbers online, since every company has a unique mix of factors that influence the values.  Experienced practitioners can do that estimation for you.  If they don’t ask you what your plans are for employee training as part of the program, then be skeptical about what they tell you…