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: Continue Reading »

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An appreciation of lifetime value (LTV) is key to the theory and practice of marketing and customer relationship management. However, while the term is often used loosely, calculation of LTV is not straightforward, so many organizations do not in fact do it. Lifetime value is defined as the total net benefit that a customer or group of customers will provide a company over their total relationship with that company. Modelling is based on estimating the income and costs associated with each customer over a period of time and then calculating the net present value in current monetary terms using a discount rate value applied over the period.

There are different degrees of sophistication in calculating LTV. Option 1 is a practical way or approximate proxy for future LTV, but the true LTV is the future value of the customer at an individual level. Continue Reading »

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A basic part of managing lists involves facilitating subscriptions entry of customer profile details and also unsubscribe. This facility will typically be set up to occur automatically via the web site. It should also enable adding e-mail and other profile details collected offline, such as by phone and events. You should assess the package to see whether it enables you to import these details readily from other packages such as Excel. This is a basic capability, and most packages will enable you to tailor profile fields you add into the database.

You will need to decide whether to collect e-mail addresses and profile data via your web- site content management system or customer database management system, or through a data collection module which is part of your e-mail package. Continue Reading »

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A key role of modern marketing is that of a management `mindset’ implemented throughout an organization rather than confined to a particular department (Payne 1995). This viewpoint regards marketing as a guiding management philosophy or ‘attitude of mind’ that puts the customer first, and it is commonly described s a ‘marketing orientation’. It is a much broader view of the role of marketing an has been envisaged in the past, and it cuts across a wide range of organizational functions. Successful adaptation of a marketing orientation requires effective management of all stakeholder groups (this means people with a particular — although not necessarily the same Continue Reading »

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