CRM

Overheard - Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing isn’t just mobile Web sites. It also includes banners, short codes (like the codes you send text messages to when voting on American Idol), ads in phones’ video programming and even little two-dimensional codes (like bar codes) that when photographed, send mobile customers to Web sites. Josh Bernoff, Don’t Screw Up Your Mobile Marketing Opportunity

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is mobile marketing.

Overheard - Web self-service

“More and more organizations are finding that, while a dedicated customer service staff is still an integral part of any company, customers can do a fine job answering questions and service issues for themselves and for one another.” Barney Beal, SaaS CRM vendors get serious about Web self-service features

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Web self-service.

Predictive modeling - rolling the dice in the real world

“Predictive modeling allows for more informed marketing decisions and more effective resource allocation. Instead of blasting the same offers to everyone, you can target multiple offers by segment or focus on particular customer groups based on current or potential value.” Colleen Ryan, Predictive Modeling: Turning Data Into Insight

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is predictive modeling. It’ s used a lot in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Colleen Ryan does an excellent job explaining how predictive modeling works. While it might seem like voodoo, it’s really mathematical. Remember learning about probability and outcome back in sixth grade? Well, in the real world, its not just about rolling a pair of dice.

Or maybe it is.

Maybe trying to predict outcomes of any kind is still just…gambling.

Loyalty cards - a way for retailers to get into their customer’s heads

Attention, grocers: Get rid of the cards and just put stuff ‘on sale’ again. Then you’ll get my loyalty. Justin McHenry, Not a Fan of Supermarket Loyalty Cards

Today’s WhatIs.com word of the day is loyalty card program. Justin McHenry says:

“The only point of the card is to hold me hostage, in the sense that I don’t get the “savings” unless I’m willing to let them track my every purchase and willing to take on the extra hassle of carrying the card on my keychain or shoving it into my overflowing wallet.”

Justin is annoyed at having to carry the card to get the discount — but a lot of people are more focused on how opting in to use a loyalty card gives the retailer way too much personal data.

After all, the data that’s collected from those cards could be shared with “partner” companies.  Or the cops in Arizona might come knocking at your door because you’ve been identified as someone who purchases a large number of sandwich baggies — a sign you might be a drug dealer. (True story)

I have to remember that the plastic loyalty card from my big-chain grocery store is not the same as my local farm store’s loyalty punch card.  My farm store issues a  little paper card that I hand in when the card is filled with “X”s to get a $10 gift certificate.  Punch cards reward the faithful.

Today’s loyalty card programs are not designed to reward the faithful — they are designed to help retailers gather incredible amounts of data about their customers.  They use the data for supply chain management, for marketing and to figure out ways to change customer behavior.  A loyalty card program is expensive to run.  It requires a lot of storage for all that data and sophisticated data mining tools to pour through the raw data and turn it into useful information.

The next step will be adding RFID to the cards. Some stores are already testing it out.

Here’s a scenario from Information Week:

The RFID-enabled loyalty card can identify a customer as he or she walks through a store. The chip in the loyalty card transmits to a nearby reader when the customer is within 8 feet of the reader, triggering an avatar to appear on a nearby computer screen. The RFID reader identifies the information in the loyalty card and feeds the data to the avatar, which welcomes the customer to the store in an animated fashion. Based on the customer’s historical purchases, the computer will send a Short Message Service message with store coupons to the customer’s phone.

It kind of boggles my mind how much information I’ll be giving away freely in exchange for seeing “-$4.25″ on my grocery receipt.

Surprise marketing - turning a transaction into a relationship

When I picked up my car on leaving Vancouver’s Listel Hotel last week, I found a gift-wrapped package on the dashboard with a card on it wishing me a safe journey. Wrapped in purple crepe paper were two meal-sized chocolate-chip cookies. A fun treat on the run? Of course, but so much more. That simple gesture went a long way to assuaging my annoyance at paying $24 a night for parking. Rick Spence, Surprise marketing tactics endear

Today’s WhatIs.com word of the day is transactional marketing.  Most marketing is voodoo to me, but I sort of ‘get’ transactional marketing. It’s like Davies Hardware Store when I was a kid.  My mom and I would go in on a Saturday morning and the sales rep (who drove a school bus during the week) would come up and greet us and help us find what we needed. We paid and left.  Our whole relationship with Davies Hardware was right there at the point of transaction.

I like that. I miss that simplicity.

A few months back I ordered a sweatshirt at Lands End with a Guiding Eyes logo.  A few weeks after that I started getting emails about pet products and several catalogs in the mail clearly aimed at dog lovers.  I wasn’t just a customer, I was a target.

Clearly, I’m not just valuable to Lands End because I bought something, I’m valuable because my name and demographics and areas of interest can be sold.

Marketers wrap up all this nonsense under a nice-sounding label.  They call it ‘relationship marketing.’  Relationship marketing is supposed be all about customer retention.  The idea is that by gathering as much data as they can about you,  the company can serve you better.

Unfortunately there’s no real relationship in relationship marketing.  Lands End was not being helpful to anyone but themselves by passing my data on.

But there IS a marketing technique they could have used right there at the point of transaction that might have helped them to build a relationship with me and capture my customer loyalty.

It’s called surprise and delight marketing.

According to Joseph Ferrara,  the keys to a successful surprise and delight marketing effort are

• a genuine “no strings attached” giveaway
• value that exceeds expectation
• creativity
• giving at a time of immediate need
• providing an emotional positive experience (a wow response)
• making it personal

I’d also add “Given at the point of transaction.”

What if, instead of just sending me more dog catalogs, Lands End had targeted my order as “dog related” and included a dog biscuit with my Guiding Eyes logo’d sweatshirt?

Wouldn’t that have been cool? Not only would I have been surprised and delighted — I would have been way more forgiving that they passed my name on.

Overheard: Overlay ads beat out pre-roll ads for viewer’s attention

In a study released Thursday, Google and MediaVest used NeuroFocus findings to show that overlay ads appearing in YouTube videos grab consumers’ attention and boost brand awareness. Mark Walsh, Google: This Is Your Brain On Advertising

With revenue from YouTube ads falling short of company expectations at an estimated $200 million this year–mostly from display ads–the pressure grows to find new ways to monetize the Web’s largest video site.

I had to look up overlay ad.  They’re semi-transparent overlays that cover the bottom fifth of the screen and then disappear after 10 seconds. If you click the ad, a pop-up with a full commercial plays right in the main player. At the end of the commercial — or when you click the close icon — the original clip resumes playing.  Overlay ads come in two flavors, video and plain text.  If marketers were observing my brain waves, they’d see that my emotional response to such an ad was favorable.  Unlike a pre-roll ad, you don’t have to sit through a commercial to see the content.

Today’s word is neuromarketing.

Overheard: Calculating ROI in B2B advertising

As short as a few years ago, B2B marketers were limited to search and targeted email marketing. Now you have RSS, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, wikis, mashups, widgets the list goes on. The big opportunity here is for B2B marketers to have a lead nurturing platform in place and then start layering on these tactics to keep the conversation going with potential prospects. Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing: Thought Leadership with Paul Dunay

First, you have to have a lead nurturing platform in place. One that allows you to segment lists, send specific messages, score activities and profile behavior of those that have expressed interest in your company. Then you can bolt on more search traffic, and then you can serve special ads to those in your database.

You gotta know what’s happening on your website if you EVER hope to be able to calculate an ROI. Second, once you have that in place you can begin to layer on more types of media syndicated podcasts, third party wikis, external blogs and see if your database is going there and interacting with these sites were you are placing your content.

Overheard: In blogging, it’s not the individual — it’s the network

Individual blogs are not very interesting in themselves. What is important is how they link to each other to create a massive network. Professor Henry Farrell, as quoted in In which I muse about what “Oracle blogging” means

Overheard: Salesforce - GoogleApps marriage takes place in the cloud

When it takes just a mouse click to open Gmail and have the message saved with the prospect record, it won’t take long before Gmail becomes the default email system for most Salesforce users… For Google, the combination brings Google Apps into big enterprise accounts and also expands its footprint among smaller businesses. For Salesforce.com, it expands the reach of its Salesforce application and further validates its Force.com integration and development platform. But more importantly for both of them — and for the rest of us who are committed to the on-demand model — it puts extra weight behind the gathering trend towards running business applications and computing in the cloud. Phil Wainewright, Salesforce and Google team to conquer the enterprise

I’m not so sure about the first statement I grabbed from Phi’s excellent post — but I’m pretty sure he’s got it right about us looking back and seeing this as the beginning of the tipping point for enterprise computing in the cloud.

Overheard: Google platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

“Google could parlay its search and advertising technology, market dominance, and its infrastructure prowess into a powerful engine that runs and monetizes thousands or millions of externally developed applications.  Force.com platform. It allows developers to write applications, mostly CRM-oriented, in a variety of languages that can run natively on the Salesforce.com software platform and data centers.” Dan Farber, Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service

I like this analogy. Hadn’t thought of Salesforce this way before.