Marketing Advisor Blog

Do you recognize a customer (when you see one)?

Every contact is an opportunity to start a relationship: whether it is online or instore, through an email message, a direct mail piece or a catalogue. First step to establishing a genuine customer dialogue is collecting relevant data.

We say relevant as you won't be needing people's entire life story from the get go.

Start with the basics and gradually enrich profiles with additional data such as: interaction scores, purchase behavior, Regency - Frequency - Monetary value, satisfaction & loyalty indicators, etc...

Although indispensable, you have to treat your database only as a means to an end and not as a goal as such.

Mobile marketing: from customer acquisition to customer retention and loyalty

Mobile commerce and communications enabler Netsize published a Mobile Marketing Survey report. The company surveyed 221 respondents from four regions (Europe, Americas, Asia Pacific/Australia and Africa/Middle East).

All of the participants were mobile marketing professionals and practitioners. 33% of the respondents represented a B2B business, 22% focused on B2C and 39% served a mix of the two. Most respondents (68%) were from Europe (note: Netsize started its operations in France first and rapidly became an international leading player in the mobile marketing and business applications market).

Netsize found that the vast majority of respondents (56%) currently use mobile to acquire new customers. But, according to the company, that will change as respondents follow through on their plans to boost customer retention and loyalty through mobile marketing (64%), streamline transactions (37%) and enable commerce and sales using a mobile device (37%).

The three crucial elements of a successful CRM or SFA system

In yesterday’s post we explained you why B2B CRM systems are not the best friend of sales teams, according to Leadfab’ric’s Koen De Witte. In this post we tell you how, according to him, B2B CRM systems…can become the best friend of the sales team.

Remember how we said that the main problem in today’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) tools is that they seldom or never add value to the customer interactions (if not, read the post here)?

How can that change? According to De Witte success can only be achieved by having another approach.

There are three main stakeholders that should be considered in this exercise: the customers, the sales people and management.

Why B2B CRM systems are not the best friends of sales teams

We recently sat down with Koen de Witte, Chief Weaving Officer of Leadfab’ric, a one stop shop for international B2B sales and marketing professionals that offers solutions to help their clients ‘weave’ eye-opening marketing acts with optimized sales execution.

In this post we tell you why B2B CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management) are not the best friends of sales teams, in a coming post we explain what should be done to change this in the view of Leadfab’ric.

When making an audit of your current sales management IT tools, you will probably notice that they are focussed on issues such as estimating future sales conversions or the performance of individuals.

It’s called sales force accounting and it is a very important part of sales management. Predictability and being able to see what’s coming next is what many managers wish to optimize. The only question is where the customer fits in all this? Right, nowhere.

How does my customer behave online: the Eloqua point of view

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

Calculating the value of the customer lifecycle: solutions and challenges

In a recent post we gave you an introduction to the customer lifecycle and promised to tell you more about the ways that value is calculated. That’s exactly what this post is about.

The value of the customer lifecycle looks at the investments we plan to make for the customers (retention, sales, promotion, customer service, whatever) and the return we expect from the customers. As we said in that previous post: the value of the customer lifecycle (CLV) has everything to do with the present and the future. It is the present value (expressed in your local currency) of the expected future cash flows from the customer.

The problem with calculating the CLV this way is that it happens from a global perspective (customer base) and it is difficult to use to calculate the value of the customer lifecycle on micro levels like a marketing plan. Also, CLV calculation models often find there origins in rather direct marketing oriented activities and are less useful for customer investments that are more difficult to calculate (think branding for instance).

Is your company ready for the pull customer?

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.

Improving the customer relationship delivers the best return

According to a survey of the ‘Chartered Institute of Marketing’, many marketers find that Customer Relationship Management operations generate the best results.

It’s an illustration of the fact that more marketers start to understand the importance and efficiency of improving the relationships with their customers but also of a more customer-centric approach.

Probably the results of the survey are influenced by the economic recession and a return to more conservative and risk-free forms of marketing, amongst which optimizing the return of marketing investment by focussing on existing customers.