Do Business Well

Peppers and Rogers (1997) highlight how effective use of the Internet can greatly facilitate the following relationship marketing issues:

Using the technology to achieve mass customization of the marketing message — and even the product itself. Mass customization can range from minor cosmetic choices (e.g. the choice of car colour, trim and specification online) to a collaborative process facilitated by ongoing dialogue (e.g. Motorola can manufacture pagers to 11 million different specifications).

Developing the learning relationship. By this, Peppers and Rogers mean a continuous two-way dialogue which allows the offering to be adapted to meet specific needs. It can be achieved by means of online feedback forms, analysis of queries to customer service facilities, or through use of increasingly sophisticated software that analyses customer site-searching behavior before purchase.

Offering an incentive for the customer to engage in the dialogue. It must also be easy and convenient for the customer to engage with the company, so lengthy registration forms are often counter-productive. The best incentive is good, free, up-to-date content.

Acknowledging the privacy of the customer and the other demands upon their time. This means communicating only with customers who have requested information, and making it easy for customers to ‘opt out’ if they wish. It also means guaranteeing not to pass on customer details to other companies in the form of online mailing lists.

Gathering data for personalization

Rowley (2001) notes the following methods of collecting data:

• The customer provides information in response to a request.
• If you want to find out what motivates your customers to buy from you, just ask! Tried and tested research techniques such as questionnaires or focus groups can be administered online.
• The practice of registration can be adopted, whereby access to certain sites (or parts of sites) is permitted only to individuals who have completed an initial registration form.
• Customers provide information about themselves during engagement in an online community. Building relationships through online communities, but it is worth noting here that transcripts of community dialogues can be analysed for research information.
• The customer provides information as a by-product of a transaction. This can be as basic as contact telephone numbers and postal addresses, but also enables a profile of the customer’s purchase choices to be built up over time. Amazon uses this technique to good effect by providing recommendations of books based on analysis of order history.
• The customer search path through the Web site can be tracked. Even if an actual purchase does not take place, the server log file can be analysed to determine the sites that a user from a specific Internet Protocol (IP) address has visited. This enables the attractiveness of the site to be assessed based upon where referrals are coming from.
• The merchant uses cookies to keep track of the customer’s actions. One of the more benign uses of cookies lies in the personalization of Web pages so that individual customer greetings can be set up.

Rowley goes on to note that while the Web allows the collection of a vast amount of data by the methods listed above, this is merely the starting point. The raw data need to be stored (in a data warehouse) and then converted into knowledge (through data mining techniques) before they can actually be useful for decision- making purposes. Different sources of data may also need to be integrated before they can add value. This is therefore the core of a company’s marketing information system (MIS or MKIS). These difficulties are compounded when a company relies on a number of different channels (shop, mobile, PC, iDTV, etc.) through which to interact with its customers.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
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• 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
• Challenges of building online customer relationships
• Proposed outline Marketing Plan for Multi-channel retailer W. H. Smith plc
• Web Designing the Online Customer Data Model part 3
• Managing Stakeholder Relationship
• Redrawing Electronic Commerce Customers Marketing Organizational Boundaries
• Consolidation and Integration of Web Service Offerings, direct Email Marketing

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