Do Business Well

If you want your customers to have a consistent experience and develop a loyal relationship with your brand, you must clearly define your organization’s communications and relationship management responsibilities. Normally, marketing is responsible for managing an email direct marketing program, but it is not the only part of your organization that will engage with customers. Customer service, support, sales, and perhaps even e-commerce groups may also communicate with your customers independently.

To avoid any confusion, I propose that if your company is communicating with thousands, perhaps even millions, of customers, you put your marketing department in charge of managing and coordinating all customer communication, regardless of where it originates, and that the “relationship czar” discussed earlier be responsible for this initiative. Marketing’s role in the engaged organization is to ensure that your company’s email communication have a consistent voice, that they are focused on servicing the customer and effectively coordinated across all points of contact. To do this requires the following:

• Identify and define ownership and control of all customer communications functions
• Define interdepartmental guidelines, procedures, and processes for coordinating and managing customer dialogue
• Define objectives that align all departmental communications goals behind shared organizational interests
• Critically evaluate and streamline all responsibilities as they relate to customer dialogue

 

Internet Marketing as a profit center

In most organizations, the sales department is responsible for revenue while marketing is a cost center, focused on brand building, product positioning, demand generation, and so forth. But when marketing becomes responsible for managing ongoing dialogue and building relationships with members, prospects, and customers, it also becomes responsible for a powerful alternative source of new revenue. It may not be appropriate for every organization to try to benefit financially from every connection with its members or customers, but for some it certainly won’t hurt. In fact it can become a great service for their customers.

Palm, for instance, allows its third-party software and hardware developers to communicate with the Palm customer base through the InSync Online membership program. Developers can reach customers with highly targeted and personalized offers and information about the products and services they are selling. To the developers, InSync Online has proved to be a cost-effective way to communicate directly with an audience that has asked for relevant information. For the InSync Online member, the offers and information delivered by Palm are valuable, keeping them up-to-date on the exciting new products and services that are constantly being developed. Each InSync Online member specifies the categories that he or she is interested in and only receives offers and information in those categories. Palm charges developers for access to InSync Online members, and the revenue goes a long way toward offsetting the cost of operating the program.

When considering whether to make your email direct communications operation into a profit center, you need to factor in the nature of your business and the brand relationship your organization has with its customers. Victoria’s Secret, for example, does not sell access to its customers. It decided that it would not permit any communication that could possibly dilute the Victoria’s Secret brand relationship. As a result, when customers give Victoria’s Secret permission to communicate with them by email, they are confident that they’ll be hearing only from Victoria’s Secret and not from anyone else. In fact, customers may well consider it a breach of trust if they suddenly began to receive emails “brought to you by Victoria’s Secret” with offers from other companies.

One of the dangers of a cost-effective, rapid-reaction tool such as email is that it can easily be used to realize short-term revenue goals rather than to maximize long-term performance, compromising your company’s customer relationships in the process. Imagine for a moment that your sales organization is not meeting its quota for the quarter. It might be tempted to use email to broadcast a special offer to all your customers designed to squeeze another round of sales out of them. While even relatively low response and conversion rates can bring in significant revenue, a knee-jerk program like this will probably compromise your goal of building a lasting dialogue with your customers. A small percentage will probably buy something, but the rest will experience the message as annoying and irrelevant. In the engaged organization, your sales organization’s goals must be aligned with your corporate goals of maximizing the long‑term value of your customer base. Although every sales organization will have quotas, it should be evident that pitting short-term tactics against long-term goals is a decision you need to make very carefully.

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