Do Business Well

• Multi-channel strategies to drive loyalty

As noted above, multi-channel strategies can put severe strain on a company’s data collection and analysis processes in order to get a unified view of customer activity through which to personalize its marketing campaigns. The benefits of getting it right, however, are considerable in terms of the competitive advantage that could be gained.

For example, Peppers and Rogers (2001) describe the ‘unprecedented’ opportunities presented by the combination of mobile technologies and one-to-one marketing strategies. They use the scenario of a traveling customer looking for a hotel room who enables his or her mobile to locate a convenient room at the right price. The hotel then responds with a tailored offer based upon the traveler’s previously expressed needs and preferences. Services like this are just the tip of the iceberg. The authors believe that today’s reliance on proprietary mobile networks will soon evolve into a more open architecture enabling customers to and choose specific features at will from many service providers, intensifying competition and stimulating further innovation in this dynamic area. Chapter will cover this topic in more detail.

Peppers and Rogers (ibid.) claim that in such an environment, the demands for customer information are bound to raise concerns over privacy. This topic is briefly mentioned in an earlier section. Here it is worth noting that these authors predict the emergence of w entities called data aggregation agents (DAAs) that will address the privacy by by consolidating and controlling outside access to a customer’s personal information. In order for this to work, a customer would choose a DAA when sing up for a mobile service, then register basic profile and preference information to receive customized content. Each time new services are added, they r be linked to the original DAA without the customer needing to resupplypersonal data. The DAA is therefore continually learning more and more about customer, who becomes locked in by the convenience. So for companies king to build customer relationships, the information held by the DAA can drawn upon to anticipate the needs of favoured customers and hence offer customized products and services. The ability to do so will increase loyalty while ensuring that marketing resources are targeted on the ‘best’ customers, meaning of course those deemed to offer most potential for profit.

• Partnerships for online relationship marketing

In order for relationship marketing to be effective, companies cannot rely upon departmental solutions that address only one part of the customer account relationship. Increasingly, with the growth of inter-organizational networks on thecustomer communication is no longer just one customer talking to one price. To provide the kind of service that improves the chance of customer y, companies need to co-ordinate their partners and vendors through nets that facilitate the sharing of information across company boundaries. Associated data warehousing and data mining tools facilitate the gathering, analysis management of information necessary to formulate and implement marketing dies. Kalakota and Robinson (1999) suggest considering partners andvendors to be part of the firm’s extended enterprise, and this means sharingcustomer communication issues with everyone in contact with the customerthrough integrated applications such as customer service, field service, sales andmarketing. They note that the practical organization of marketing functions and within such inter-firm networks may be complex. Decisions need to be taken on where responsibility lies for particular tasks, to avoid duplication and customer confusion. Open policies of information-sharing mean that a whole host of issues have to be addressed concerning the ‘ownership’ of customer data, notwithstanding the technical difficulties inherent in integrating computer systems belonging to different organizations. The approach is referred to as ‘all-to-one’ marketing by Luengo-Jones (2001). Such integration is often the most critical issue currently facing ‘clicks and mortar’ firms in developing a successful online strategy.

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Challenges of building online customer relationships

• Online Relationship Marketing
• Marketing planning stage: implementation through the marketing mix
• Internet Marketing, as the voice of all customer communication, Ecommerce the power of Networking
• Business to Business (B2B) Relationship Marketing
• Building Online Communities
• Marketing planning stage: evaluation and control of strategy
• Where to run for help? Email Marketing, Web Hosting Providers
• Managing Stakeholder Relationship
• Starting in the Middle and Working Our Way Backward and Forward Simultaneously
• Online Income Ecommerce Technology, Smile over the Web, Internet Marketing

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