Retention and Relationships : Marketing Thoughts by Michael Greenberg

If you haven’t already, its time.  Every marketer should be living and breathing life with an iPhone, now that Apple has opened up to 3rd party software developers.

Download a few apps from the AppStore.  After a couple of weeks, you’ll wonder why anyone needs a website anymore.  (Ok, that’s overstating slightly.)  Yelp, for example, is perfect for the iPhone.  As a new interaction medium, its the best thing to come along since the browser.  The ideas are already starting to percolate…

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.

Odd how sometimes there’s something so obvious in front of you and it takes months or years to recognize it.  Like a faucet in your kitchen that’s pretty ugly, and one day you realize its a simple task to change it and improve your entire kitchen’s appearance.

I’m seeing this in the technology world as well, where companies suddenly realize they’ve been using crappy technology for a while and there are better and cheaper alternatives.  Most people are familiar with this in the email space, where many companies existed in the early days that were pretty terrible.  Once someone took look around and saw there were plenty of better options, there was a shakeout of bad technology and the good companies took off.  I went through this exact realization in 2003 and switched from a really terrible legacy email service to a top notch one, and cut my costs by 70% at the same time.

Its amazing to me that more companies take more time to select a new application or service than to evaluate their existing capabilities.  In many cases they’ve already moved up the learning curve, know exactly what their business needs, and can move to a more modern solution that provides only what they need.  Instead of focusing on perceived gaps in their capabilities, changing out existing capabilities usually will produce a much greater ROI.

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.