Database : Customers Rule

Evolving your marketing approach with Integrated Customer Marketing

Given my attitude, the airline’s traditional cross-sell and upsell marketing attempts only compounded my frustration. However, if the airline had my attitudinal information “baked” into my customer profile, the content and tone of communications could have been tailored for relevance.

2. Adopt a Customer-Centric Mind-set
Adopting a customer-centric mind-set falls under the category of “easier said than done.” Most organizations still operate with a product- or brand-centric mentality. Their marketing efforts are company-centric vs. customer-centric.

To produce the best results possible, marketers must shift to a customer-centric mind-set. Assess current marketing communications starting at a high level. Ask yourself: Are you pushing offers to customers in an attempt to drive results, or are you basing your contact on customer insights to create the most relevant offers?

3. Tackle Internal Challenges, and Drive Change
ICM is difficult for multibrand organizations. Why? Because individual brands are often accustomed to marketing in an independent fashion with little regard to a customer’s needs beyond their brands. Tough questions have to be addressed. For example, you need to determine who really “owns” the customer and how communications can be governed in a way that benefits the organization while optimizing the relationship with the customer.

Additionally, competencies across the marketing spectrum must unite to tackle internal challenges and truly drive change. Technology and creative resources need to collaborate around interactive execution. Analytics and technology resources need to work together to maximize business intelligence. Creative resources and analytics must collaborate on communications planning. Strategists need to align with operational resources to bridge the gap between brilliant strategy and tactical execution.

4. Change the Context of the Playing Field
The collective DNA of the marketing community is not conducive to integration. But ICM execution changes the context of the playing field. With ICM, mass marketing, direct marketing and loyalty marketing serve as valuable inputs into the customer portfolio and enable integrated customer marketing execution. Organizations must change “siloed” behaviors and acknowledge the unique contributions of these fields. The ICM approach incorporates all three disciplines to create a clear vision.

5. Focus on Results
While structure and alignment regarding results measurement are absolutely necessary when implementing strategic marketing plans, it is a common reason why organizations often struggle in their strategic marketing programs. Alignment should center on the following:

• A clear definition of what success looks like.
• An enterprisewide method for assessing and measuring customer value.
• An enterprise measurement strategy, to capitalize on potential value.

It goes without saying that analytics are the “secret sauce” to the measurement requirement. But analytics have to go beyond high-level insights on a PowerPoint slide to effectively drive results. The analytics discipline has to step out of academia and into the operational spotlight. Driving marketing programs from the core of analytics is an essential ingredient for ICM execution.

Properly leveraging analytics means influencing every aspect of customer interaction, which can manifest itself in many different actionable and literal ways—from targeted direct communication with a customer to an improved call center interaction, to the ability to serve dynamic, personalized content while a customer visits your Web site.

Lastly, without comprehensive strategy and planning, the best-laid plans fall flat. ICM calls for strategic planning to serve as the guiding light.

Ed Forman is vice president of professional service in the Commercial Database Group at Merkle, a database marketing agency with headquarters in Columbia, Md. He can be reached at (443) 542-4000 or eforman@merkleinc.com.

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