Turning customer data into gold: How eCRM is transforming direct marketing

22 August 2010  |   Many companies have mountains of client data that’s just sitting there. This can be information collected about their customers, including demographic info (age, marital status, socio-economic details), preferences and interests, sales histories, behavioural data… and more.

Fortunately, with online tools, this data can be transformed into a real goldmine for marketers. Through electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), you can make your e-marketing communications much more relevant, interesting and effective. But is this really worth bothering with, if your current spray-and-pray marketing seems to be working?

Well, research shows that incorporating details like the customer’s name, age, gender, buying history, interests and message frequency preference into your marketing messages can increase response rates by over 300%.

Sounds good? Just follow the 5 Ps of e-marketing and you’ll be on your way to tapping your data mountains for gold – and really improving your marketing’s ROI.

The 5 Ps of e-marketing: Personalised. Pertinent. Practical. Powerful. Prompt.

As advertising’s less glamorous but more intelligent and focused cousin, direct marketing has recently been evolving. It’s “2.0” spin-off, electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), is a highly sophisticated way of talking to customers. Here’s how eCRM can lift your e-marketing to a whole new level:

• Personalised  |  Think of eCRM as direct marketing for the 21st century – with a particular focus on digital channels, and their immediacy, cost-effectiveness and efficiency. Through analytics, segmentation and profiling you can have practically one-to-one communications with customers, on a mass, automated scale. Direct marketing involved looking at past purchases to determine whether a customer might be interested in something new. Now eCRM integrates that historical information with current behaviour – a powerful combination! Consider a customer who bought a car from you three years ago who reappears on your site, and browses around your current stock list. His search activity indicates renewed interest; maybe his service plan is about to run out. You know he’s looking for a new car right now – so market to him and make that sale!
  

• Pertinent  |  Integrating traditional customer relationship management with information on the recency, frequency and monetary value of your customer’s interactions is powerful enough. Factor in behavioural data too (like which pages they’ve viewed on your website, or what links they clicked on from an email) and you’ve got some really powerful stuff to work with. You can produce highly relevant content based on what your customers are interested in right now.An online retailer like Amazon.com does this extremely well. Their website generates automatic recommendations based not only on which products you’ve bought through them previously, it also generates suggestions according to the products you’re searching for and reviewing during your current visit. All this makes for a pleasurable user experience – often the recommendations are pretty helpful. Instead of being bombarded with generic offers, the user is presented with products that are much more relevant. Remember too that a lack of behavioural data can be just as telling – if nobody’s clicking on the links in your emails, your content isn’t relevant to them… time for a review.

• Practical  |  Marketing across a variety of platforms, including email, web, mobile, and SMS means your customers can get your messages on the device that they prefer. Enable social media sharing for maximum viral marketing. You can collate data across all of these platforms, helping you assess the effectiveness of each and build very detailed customer profiles.Set up a preference centre on your website so that customers can choose how often they want to hear from you, on what topics, and via which media (SMS, email, etc.). That way they’ll look forward to your company’s messages and are more likely to act on them. Social media is not only an opportunity for your content to go viral, you can also measure who is visiting your site from social media channels – use this information to set up landing pages with special social media friendly offers.
  

• Powerful  |  The effectiveness of your e-marketing is so easy to measure and act on immediately, with powerful, detailed, real-time analytics and engagement just a click away. In the past it was all about reporting; now it’s about acting on real-time data, right away.Assess in real time how your latest campaign is being received. A bank launching a new credit card product can spot at what point potential customers are giving up on the application process. Tweaks can be made to address this, resulting in a higher number of completed forms, or a database of incomplete ones that can be passed to the call centre for follow-up.

• Prompt  |  You can respond to and interact with customers immediately – capitalising on their interest and increasing conversions. With eCRM you can set up messages that are triggered by a specific customer online behaviour. For example, when an online shopper abandons her basket, strike while the iron is hot with a follow-up email to encourage her to return and complete the purchase. Alternatively, when new customers sign up for a service online, as well as receiving a welcome email, the system is triggered to send a series of informative email messages at prescribed intervals. These could include information about other services and additional useful, relevant content that makes customers aware of more ways in which that company can help them.

No more spray-and-pray marketing

Knowing who your customers are, what they’re interested in and how they are behaving means you can send them messages that are relevant and on target. Your messages are focused, your spend is more efficient – and you’re a step closer to that 300+% response rate increase.

To find out more about eCRM and how you can use it in your business, why not give the team at Ensight a call?