Retention and Relationships

As every serious marketer knows, the role of math, modeling, and statistics is only growing.  As I was recently perusing academic research and white papers on association rules, I was struck by how important my econometrics background has become.  I could follow the math and logic but I doubt more than 2% of all the marketing professionals I’ve worked with could also have done so.  As technology like on-demand CRM levels the application playing field, the winners and losers will increasingly be defined by strategy and tactics derived from superior insights.  Much like my earlier assertation that customer individuality will only increase, the importance of superior data-driven insight will only increase.

So if your children want to follow in your marketing footsteps, be sure they learn the statistics they will need to operate in the not-too-distant future of marketing.

My latest at Chief Marketer.

uTANGO has a business model built on a 30-year time horizon.  What if all companies took a longer view of their customer relationships?  Lifetime value would be more heavily influenced by retention, leading to changes in the allocation of marketing resources.  Plus acquisition spending would eventually come down, as revenue from existing customers begins to grow more quickly.

Its now time to find out how effective everyone’s relationship efforts were throughout the year. Confronted with a blizzard of offers, catalogs, ads, and products, consumer choice will come down to who can cut through the clutter.

The first test is Thanksgiving weekend, where companies are pouring email and direct mail into the hands of key customers (well, lets be serious, everyone is getting something).  I count inbounds from 46 different companies on personal accounts on Monday-Tuesday alone, plus direct mail inbounds from another 33 on the same days.  While deals still influence visitation if someone offers just the right item, nowadays the choice is heavily influenced by our relationship with the destination.  Its nice that some companies are reaching out to me now, but trying to relate to me once a year just has little impact on my decision.

The second, and more interesting, test is the email and direct mail they deliver in the 3rd and 4th weeks of December.  Who will try and relate to the gifts I bought last year, and point me towards similar categories?  Who see that I respond to coupons?  This is the fun part of holiday…I’ll come back to it in January and analyze.

Every marketer wants to keep a finger on the pulse of their target market.  I’ve long followed job openings to study how marketing organizations change over time.

But SEM data is a direct pipeline into the minds of your target audience.  Watching how specific keywords grow or decline in importance around a particular topic is fertile ground for spotting changes in your business.  For example, I’ve seen a significant shift in the interest in “loyalty” in relation to “CRM” in the retail world.  So it appears that retailers have figured out that CRM is a technology, while loyalty is a strategy.

Something to keep and eye on and ask your analysts to look at every once in a while.

Yes, I know…way too long between posts.  Here’s my latest article for Chief Marketer on the best investment you can make as a marketer.

In a nutshell, its investing in a true in-house analytics resource.

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.

There’s a fascinating study going around from the CMO Council that looks at how marketers are interacting with their customers.  To summarize, they’re not.

49% named CRM or database systems as their main information source on customers.  75% don’t have advisory boards or online communities.  30% don’t develop their own customer segmentation.  Plus, there are plenty of other insights on the CMO Council website.

From my perspective, every marketer should talk or listen to customers every week.  Whether that means walking onto a sales floor as a retailer, reading customer satisfaction survey responses, listening in to a call center, or participating in weekly account manager conference calls, keeping up to date on customer needs, concerns, and input is crucial.  Qualitative input helps balance the tendency to rely solely on quantitative input, which many of us practitioners have tended to fall back on.

My latest article for Chief Marketer.

Here’s an excerpt:

Everyone has customers who are more valuable than others. But why do you have them? Put another way, why did they choose to become a high-value customer?

It seems like an obvious question. But answering it is tougher than you might think. The answers get at the core of why you are succeeding (or not) as a company. Read more…

I had an interesting call with a company a week ago that has incorporated Fred Reichheld’s net promoter score deeply into their operations.

While I can’t comment on the strength or weakness of using NPS as a KPI, it showed how focused an organzation can get when it isolates one KPI and tries to maximize it.

Technology choices are based on impact on NPS.  Champion/challenger tests focus on NPS.  In fact, it seemed everything focused on NPS.  It was actually quite refreshing, because everyone there knew the most important goal of company, and every decision was made to improve result son one dimension.

This company has been very successful over the last five years, and I will guess its because they focus in on one thing, and everyone works their tail off to make it better. They don’t get distracted by the latest shiny object to cross their path…and just relentlessly optimize their single most important KPI.  Hard to compete with that.