Posts Tagged "CRM"

An article titled “The Future of Mobile is Now” caught my eye in a destinationCRM.com newsletter I received today. It was a report from a conference called CRM Evolution 2009 being held in New York this week.

The article describes a session at the event whereby a speaker excitedly described the application of mobile technologies to field sales, to bring greater connectivity to the sales leg of CRM (marketing and service being the others).

Of course he is absolutely correct, but I’d like to suggest he expand on his ideas for mobile applications. He cited these in his talk:

• Voice to text transcription
• Voice queries paired with GPS
• Intelligent hardware (e.g. a phone going into silent mode if it knows you are in a meeting)

I think mobile applications for sales professionals could easily extend into the marketing arena, helping accelerate the sales cycle.  I’ve just begun talking about mobile marketing methods facilitating the customer life cycle, from engagement, to acquisition to retention, a process which translates more or less directly to a typical sales cycle.

Virtually all field salespeople enjoy a certain amount of latitude in marketing their products or services to customers directly, and mobile marketing methods present an easy, effective and highly automated approach to what I have called “active direct response” marketing.

For example, using any common sales force automation system, a sales rep could execute an email to all contacts asking them to opt into receiving messages via mobile on any number of topics; new products or services, company news/information, promotions or limited life offers, notification of travel to an area or a conference/event where customers may also congregate, and many others.

It’s this type of thinking which could greatly accelerate adoption of atypical mobile applications for salespeople.

I have been thinking about the holy grail of any marketing technology – generating measurable improvements in sales – but within the context of the mobile channel.  Technologies and services have long since been established of varying complexities which enable such tracking in channels like the web and call center, but mobile seems like virgin territory in this respect.

With many marketers just beginning to dip their toes into the mobile arena, and many sitting on the fence waiting to see how things shake out, anything which helps draw the critical connection between mobile marketing activity and business results should accelerate adoption of the underlying technologies.

Short of developing their own solution tightly integrated with internal systems, or purchasing potentially costly third party software and similarly stitching it into transactional systems, marketers would seem to have little choice but to rely on channel centric metrics, such as reach, open rates, and click throughs to measure and justify mobile marketing efforts.

Leveraging the Integrated Customer

This led me to imagine using customers as the glue between mobile marketing activities and logging business results.  What I call the “Integrated Customer.”

For example, many businesses rely on frequent and repeat purchases by their customers.  Be it a product with a limited lifespan that requires replenishment or a routine service, many businesses continuously market to their customers to maintain demand and stay top of mind.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these businesses may find mobile more appealing than email given the Epsilon survey’s email response data I referred to yesterday on the blog.  Mobile has the capacity to connect in a more relevant and timely fashion than email to influence consumers to purchase.

I see two keys to creating an Integrated Customer to enable the tracking of mobile marketing activity from message delivery through purchase:

• Provide incentive to customers to notify you upon redeeming an offer at the point of sale, ideally within a short time window, via text messaging.
• Assigning some dollar value to that transaction, like an expected average price or average market basket value, that can later be matched to inbound purchase notifications, to derive value and return on investment calculations.

First I will tackle the incentive part.  For example, a multi-site retailer could promote a loyalty program in its catalogs, on billboards and on its website, whereby customers opt in to receive limited life offers for redemption in their stores (such as a discount on certain items or a coupon).  These offers are periodically broadcast to opted-in customer mobile devices, containing unique codes which each store knows are associated with the discount program.

This retailer is really smart, and so has identified segments of its customers by lifetime value, allowing it to tier its loyalty program so that highly valued customer receive greater incentives than those of lesser value.  The discount codes are similarly aligned.

The retailer is also smart when it comes to having a strategy behind its loyalty program.  It knows the average value of a typical market basket, the purchase migration behaviors of customers among different lines of products, and has designed its incentive offers to grow basket size and encourage logical product bundle purchases.  There is a planned sequence of offers to be delivered to each segment, essentially a “best next action” the retailer is proposing to its customers.

Customers are told upon signing up for the program that this is not a one-time affair; it is part of the retailer’s ongoing efforts to serve its customers better.  To that end, customers are incented to text in their discount codes to a short code, along with the keyword RewardMe when making an eligible purchase.  Why would customers do this?  Not out of the kindness of their hearts.  Because it pays.

The loyalty program’s offers have a limited shelf life, say two weeks, and expire only to be replenished when a discount code is submitted as part of the above process.  A customer always wants to be sure to have an eligible reward handy to make a purchase and therefore will have just one reason to redeem their discount codes for “fresh” ones – when transacting at the point of sale.  There may be outliers, but the majority are likely to behave in this fashion.

The transaction is registered by the mobile marketing services provider when redeemed, then aligned with the expected value of the interaction, which was configured by the marketer at the onset of the program.  The marketer knows what offers were redeemed successfully, by product and customer segment, and can draw instant value and return on investment calculations.  The utility of the proposed “best next action” can also be assessed and refined based on the results.

Sounds like an application will killer potential value, and it didn’t require integration between mobile channel marketing execution and internal transactional systems.

Today I read this August 24 article on CRMDaily.com featuring CRM vendor commentary on how their solutions are meeting the challenges of marketing in a recession. As someone who worked in the crm analytics arena the last time the economy went through a recession, I am all too familiar with the challenges associated with doing more with less, and focusing greater attention on retaining high value customers than acquiring scarce new ones.

The major differences today are two additions absent in the 2000-2001 time period – social media and the mobile channel. The former is emerging as a highly influential, community centric entity that offers consumers great power and commercial interests little control. While businesses struggle to understand and harness social media, the latter key difference – mobile – is a bit easier to grasp as it is more analogous to other interaction channels like web, call center or point of sale.

Where mobile differs, however, is in the behavior of consumers in the mobile channel given device dependencies and the highly personal nature of mobile communications, both of which place a premium on managing the mobile customer experience effectively. Get it wrong with consumers once, and you may not have another chance.

Traditional CRM vendors appear to correctly view mobile as a key interaction channel, yet like their forbearers at the start of the 21st century seem focused more on functions and business model than on process or experience.

If anything has been learned since the last recession it is that CRM is much more about business process than software. Similarly, taking advantage of the mobile channel requires a view toward managing the entire Mobile Customer Experience, from the way a consumer is targeted to the way information is collected and presented through the types of applications optimized for mobile devices.

One of the challenges facing brand marketers is the distance between themselves and their customers, which is a function of the brand or consumer packaged goods (CPG) business model. A distribution or value chain exists to bring branded products to consumers and includes many entities, with the last mile typically owned by either retailers or wholesalers.

Brand marketing has thus focused on panel or other research and development of product attributes to be communicated en masse to an audience as targeted as media allows. What’s fascinating about the mobile channel, among many things, is how it can help brand marketers move closer to their customers than ever before, develop relationships with them, learn about their behavior and use this insight to drive increased consumption of the brand’s product.

This Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capability enjoyed by B2B marketers almost exclusively to date can now be extended to Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers. Unlike media that relies on consumers to observe advertisements on billboards or flyers, or even digital media like email and web which requires access to a computer, mobile media allows brand marketers to initiate contact with and develop an ongoing dialog with their customers directly.

The “on the go” consumer, with their mobile device or phone turned on and ready to submit and receive messages or other content, has been shown responsive to incentives and messages designed to drive interaction with brands. The first step, ironically, is for the marketer to utilize traditional media to communicate a short code and keyword that enables consumers to opt into receiving communications from the brand. Thus begins a relationship which creates a data asset that builds over time, providing previously impossible actionable insight into a brand’s customers.