Do Business Well

Forget thinking about your role as a marketer as a day job. When your website is up, or you send out an email, customers expect you to be open for business. They expect to be able to tell you what they want and get a response right away. The engaged organization actively communicates with and responds to customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And real time is the only time. As the marketing function moves away from the onetime campaign focus of the past to the continuous communications focus of the Internet, the new marketer has to be able to demand real-time access to data, information, and results. To be successful, online companies are trying to support the new demands of 24-7 marketing—and the effects are rippling across entire organizations. Here’s what customers expect and the impact of these expectations on your engaged organization.

The Internet enables new forms of collaboration

Thanks to the Internet, organizations now use the Web to collaboratively share and access information internally and externally without regard to physical location or time. In addition, service organizations have developed Web-based tools that enable them to interact with clients in real time while planning, executing, and tracking their marketing programs.

Laura, an account manager at the email marketing service firm responsible for the Palm InSync Online program, was on the road when she received an urgent message that Palm needed to send out an immediate email to their InSync members. They were about to announce an exciting new product and realized that notifying their InSync members slightly ahead of the general announcement would be a good idea, giving their loyal customers a heads-up so they, in turn, could spread the word. From her hotel room somewhere in Chicago, Laura used her laptop computer to log on to the email marketing tools her firm has developed to run programs such as InSync Online. She loaded the message, targeted it to the appropriate member segments, performed an automated quality test, then got on the phone with the client and asked him to approve the message. Once she had the thumbs-up, Laura scheduled the message for midnight delivery and went to bed. The next morning she logged on again to run a report of the response the message was generating and emailed a copy to Palm. Not only had Laura remotely administered the message; she had coordinated and validated her efforts with the client in real-time—all on the Web.

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