Do Business Well

External Activity

<CROSS-CHANNEL CONTACT HISTORY (MAIL, TELEPHONE), PENDING SUPPORT ISSUE, FIRST AND LAST SUPPORT CALL AND EMAIL, SUPPORT LOG/EVENT HISTORY, PRODUCT RETURN HISTORY …>

Data generated from your direct mail, telemarketing, customer support, and product return operations can be a critical part of measuring true customer value, cost to serve, and cost of customer contact and conversion. Linking this type of external data with your email marketing system will enable you to spot—and avoid— potential problems. Imagine, for example, that a customer has sent you an email complaining about a product defect. If customer service doesn’t let marketing know about the problem, marketing might send the already-angry customer an email offering the latest add-on to the product he or she is complaining about. Continue Reading »

5 Comments »

What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:

• Consumer requests contact. A customer might sign up to receive a personalized monthly newsletter or send an email asking about a new product you’re selling. When a new subscriber signs up for eHarlequin.com’s newsletter program, she immediately receives a welcome message confirming what she’s signed up for and ensuring that she will know how to modify her personal preferences if she should ever decide to change the content she wants to receive. When eBags receives an email inquiry from a customer, a skilled customer service professional looks up any relevant information and answers all My eBags membership, product, or order-related questions by email within 12 to 24 hours. An inbound email from a customer regarding an order the customer would like to return even triggers a series of follow-up emails that are automatically delivered within a few days of each other. These follow- up emails ensure that the customer’s product return is picked up, and that a replacement order is processed satisfactorily.

Continue Reading »

5 Comments »

One of the unique characteristics of doing business online is the ability it gives you to measure and track the success of your marketing programs. Yet success, as we have seen, can be difficult to define. At the center is the continuous-feedback loop of tracking, measuring, seeking insight, and informing the program— a process based on both science and art. Science because we apply analytic techniques to the huge amounts of data and information in order to structure it and understand our customers‘ responses and behaviors. Art because lasting program success also depends on creative, out-of-the-box program design and interpretation inspired by the insight that we gather from the data. Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

Unlike a traditional, direct marketing campaign, an Internet direct marketing program is a tightly integrated combination of marketing service, technology, and 24-7 operational support. Separating these three components by, for instance, engaging a marketing services group, building an in-house operations team, and purchasing offthe-shelf products is a definite possibility, but the lack of tight integration may limit the level of sophistication the program can achieve. Continue Reading »

3 Comments »

Should your company build its own email marketing programs from scratch? Should you buy and install software products and hire and train your own email marketing staff? The answers may not be obvious. With the advent of a host of new Internet business models the real issue is whether or not you should outsource the entire operation to an email marketing service provider.

Traditional offline wisdom says that outsourcing happens late in an industry’s life cycle. But online, it’s just the opposite. Thanks to the Internet, there are a number of new models of technology and service outsourcing that can save your company time, resources, and money. Outsourcing critical business functions that are not part of your company’s core competence has become the accepted way to rapidly expand your infrastructure and gain access to best-of-breed technology and service. Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

Back to the car of the future—the one with the Internet connection and onboard GPS system. Car manufacturers will no longer be just in the business of making and selling cars. In fact, that could end up being the smallest part of their business. If it were up to GM, they’d establish a relationship with you to service all your car transportation needs. They would pick up your car once a week and have it cleaned. They would offer you a car if you needed to travel to a different city and, of course, they would have someone pick up and deliver your car curbside at the airport. They would finance your car and, naturally, service it. They would even offer you the seasonal car program providing a convertible during the summer and an allwheel-drive in winter. Continue Reading »

3 Comments »

Data security and encryption: Data security is one of the central issues of digital marketing. Because the Internet is a public highway, the information which travels through it can be picked up and read by anyone who has the knowledge and capability to do so. If security measures have not been taken to scramble the data, or code it, the information is totally unsecured. In many cases, people don’t care about data security. When you send an e-mail message to a friend, you usually don’t care if someone intercepts it. It’s no different than someone at the post office opening up your letter, or someone listening to your conversation on a cellular telephone scanner. You take that risk. But when you want to send a confidential e-mail to someone in your company, or give someone your credit card number on the Internet, it’s a different matter. You want to send a secret message which only the recipient can unravel and read. That’s where data encryption comes in. Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

Once you’ve identified customer benefits, you must determine if, indeed, enough customers exist to make yourproduct/service profitable. That requires market research.

There’s a tendency to think of market research as something very sophisticated and complicated, involving long surveys, regression analysis, and similar sorts of exercises. But market research is really a matter of learning two things:

1. Whether enough potential customers exist to enable your product or service to achieve the growth you’re looking for_;
2. Whether the industries you are going after are on the upswing or the decline.

Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

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 »

4 Comments »

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. Continue Reading »

4 Comments »