Below is an excerpt from CAREER-CHANGING TAKEAWAYS, Denny Hatch's recent book that covers 99 categories of marketing, business and life—including business, direct marketing, advertising, brands, copywriting, direct mail and email, hiring and firing, life rules and marketing rules, P.R. and publicity. Click here to find out more.
CRM is marketing jargon for "customer retention marketing" or "customer relationship marketing." That's the gibberish spouted by number-crunching business school grads and MBAs. If you are in marketing, your business is to create customer relationship magic.
1. If you nickel-and-dime your customers, you will be punished
Example: After making the trek to Cézanne's studio in Aix en Provence and seeing Mont Sainte-Victoire, which the artist painted many times, I got off the dime and made a reservation for the blockbuster show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Cézanne and Beyond."
As 15-year dues-paying members of the museum, we (my wife Peggy and I) are entitled to free tickets for special shows. When I reserved online, the tickets were refused until I gave them a credit card for a $5 fee. Instead of looking forward to the show, I feel ripped off. Now when museum fundraising letters arrive, they are thrown out unopened.
To be specific, if you offer something free and some insecure member of the management team says it's O.K. to remove the "r" from "free" (which means you are charging a fee to allow access to the freebie), think again. You'll get flack from two sources: your customers and the FTC.
2. Are your employees empowered to make decisions? Do they own their jobs? If not, why not?
Example: I finally got bored with The Wall Street Journal and—after spending several thousand dollars on a print subscription over the years—decided not to renew, opting instead to pay much less for the online edition.
On Jan. 6, 2009, a woman from the circulation department phoned and started calling me by my first name and touting all the wonderful improvements and a great subscription deal. "How much?" I asked. "$99 for a full year, six days a week, and that includes the online edition."
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