Walgreens is after me big time. They pursue me day and night using an omni-channel array of technology and messages. They know an awful lot about me and they aren’t bashful about using it. My purchase volume or my margin must be in the top tier or they must be concerned that I might easily defect to CVS or Rite-Aid. Either way their aggressive stance documents the upside and downside of retailers using big data for relationship marketing. There’s a Walgreen’s across the street from my house. They geo fenced me. Every single time I leave the house, I get a text message inviting me into the store. I am one of the 83 million Americans with a Balance Rewards card, which yields a $5 credit for each $100 worth of purchases and countless pre-loaded discounts at the point of sale. I use the mobile app to renew my medications. They text me, call me at home and work plus they ping my mobile number with all kinds of reminders. They developed a simple, easy-to-use click-to-reply RX renewal function and they email me frequently to proactively renew my prescriptions. They offer me the option to manage my meds online and Read more…
Social CRM has become a buzzword. But don’t believe the hype. Social CRM is very early in its evolution from a big idea to a practical tool for marketers. According to Paul Greenberg, “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” Everybody suspects that brands can interact meaningfully one-on-one with consumers through social networks. There is a yet-to-be-found nexus between traditional CRM and social networking that will yield more robust data profiles leading to more meaningful relationships between brands and their followers. Combining an explicit expression of interest (an email opt-in) with the more casual attention (a like) or inferred interest (a social profile), potentially identifies different consumers needing different persuasive approaches or offers. Ideally, combining social activity with demographic and behavioral data will give marketers a nuanced and segmented view of customers with which to craft more potent messages, offers and cadences. Getting a 360-degree view of customers and understanding who is Read more…
Data is the new black. Touted as a silver marketing bullet, data and scientific thinking will guide creativity in an evolving social and mobile universe. This is the rationale underlying the launch of OgilvyAmp, essentially an aggregation and rebranding of the data wonks buried among Ogilvy’s global offices. This is a great PR move, which exaggerates Ogilvy’s IBM-driven capabilities and differentiates the WPP agency from the rest of us who manage and analyze data for clients. Yet in spite of these press-worthy moves and the widespread availability of proven data collection, mining, processing and automation tools mainstream marketers aren’t walking the walk. So why would rational competitive marketers underutilize tools that could make them smarter, faster and richer? Here are 6 stumbling blocks. Math Phobia. Most of us suck at math or are still traumatized by residual math anxiety from school. Couple this with the general feeling that math constrains creativity and you have an attitudinal bias against using the data at hand. Talent Deficit. The top math guys don’t work in marketing or advertising. Agencies, marketers, e-merchants and publishers are constantly trolling for hard-to-find analysts, modelers and database marketers but come up short. For math savants, advertising is baby Read more…
Customer loyalty, like love, can be fickle and fleeting. Every brand craves it. But few really achieve it. It’s time to rethink the ways brands woo their best customers. Building and sustaining loyalty is part stimulus-and-response, part value exchange and part emotional experience. The quality of the relationship rather than the number of transactions is the barometer for loyalty. The dynamic mix of rational and irrational elements must be considered in the context of macro factors, like a recession, or micro factors, like an awful in-store experience. Even though the average household belongs to eighteen programs and actively participates in seven of them, consumers are ambivalent about loyalty programs. They like what they like on their own terms. Enthusiasms wax and wane. They want to hear from brands – but not that often. They are governed by a WiiFM (what’s in it for me) mentality, even for brands that are near and dear to their hearts. And even long-standing loyalty can be derailed by aggressive price offers. Digital, social and mobile channels creates new and creative opportunities for brands to communicate and interact with loyal and potentially loyal consumers. This, in turn, empowers fans to interact, respond and share. Everyone Read more…
Asynchronous triggered mail is intriguing. The idea is that rather than blast out an email to a targeted list (the spray and pray approach) that consumer behavior drives email dispatch. So rather than send a million emails on Tuesday morning, you deliver the same million emails one-by-one over the course of a month. Based on using pixel tracking, brands determine which sites or behaviors are related to their product or service and which actions might infer interest in their brands. They make a buy, much like re-targeting on these sites, but rather than trigger a display banner ad or a social media unit, the action triggers an email. Yahoo and Gmail already do a version of this tactic by mining email accounts and triggering text messages and interstitial ads based on the content of the email consumers’ receive. Almost half of all email is opened on mobile devices where conversion is notoriously low. Open rates in general hover around 30%. And there is really no optimal day/ time combination to maximize email response. So the idea of adapting email as a one-to-one tool is appealing. Asynchronous delivery, also called email on-demand, has the potential to change the perception of this Read more…