Today’s marketing isn’t monkey business

By Kieran Kilmartin, Group Marketing Director, Portrait Software

Today’s marketer could be forgiven for lamenting the days of yore, when you spoke - in advertising, editorial or point of sale - consumers listened or at least they had to really work at avoiding your message.

Now we have marketing with recession-style budgets, increased competition, ad-fatigue, media fragmentation and ad-numb audiences; plus declining outbound response rates and increased scepticism leading to increased opt-outs, physically and mentally, to direct marketing campaigns. 

If consumers were an old girlfriend they’d have restraining orders on marketing – ‘no messages within a 500 m radius’. The truth is marketers now have to be smarter, faster with a laser-accurate message delivered at the precise moment of relevancy, which typically is not when you want to talk to consumers but when they want to speak with you. Now the science of marketing, data-driven marketing, and the insights it provides paves the way for the ‘art of marketing’ and getting your message in front of customers.

Enter today’s marketing hurdle number two – aware of the importance of individual consumer data, you’ve gathered data from every facet of your business. You can see certain events seem like triggers for purchase; like life, work and usage changes (financial institutions have used this for years). However you know the best time to communicate is when consumers instigate the contact, so the window of communication of the most relevant message or offer has narrowed to be real-time or just-in-time – timing is everything.

Welcome to the world of individualised, real-time marketing where the winners are those who use analytics and event triggers in real-time to deliver this moment’s most relevant message or offer through any customer touchpoint. Key skills and processes in the journey to your place in this world include embracing analytics, automation, customer-centricity and engagement.

Step One – Get Analytical
You have to Know (with a capital K) with certainty what is currently working and not. Apply analytics as a critical lens and first step toward eliminating inefficiencies and processes that are not working. By identifying what actually works best on which consumers at what time can paradoxically reduce budget spend while revenue increases.

Step Two – Get Automated
Cutting program waste is only the initial step. Individualised campaigns in the extreme means a single campaign for each person – no one would imagine trying to do that manually, yet many marketing resources are dedicated to executing campaigns. If the infinite monkey theorem is true (given enough time, a hypothetical chimpanzee typing at random, as part of its output, almost surely would produce one of Shakespeare's plays) then by giving the chimp a secondary school education he could execute campaigns just as well. Use technology to automate campaigns and better spend your time understanding the consumer – processes are more efficient and less variable in execution, workflows are streamlined and waste removed.  The latest generation of marketing campaign management systems allow marketers to manage multi-channel campaigns in one place and deploy centralised activity reporting and tracking. 

Step Three – Get Customer-Centric
Make the move from batch oriented, mass-marketing campaigns to a practice that enables you to react faster to customer needs and achieve mass personalisation of communications - but this doesn’t mean more ‘merged’ email blasts. Instead, distinct customer’s needs are the driving force, with communications crafted around the individual, rather than a population. This means communicating on the consumer’s terms. To this end, marketers must focus upon defining and automating best practices for the customer lifecycle (on-boarding, cross-sell, renewals etc), and then deploy at the individual level so that no customer falls through the cracks. The use of “event triggered marketing” techniques is one of the easiest and most critical ways you can achieve this individualised action, delivering real-time, just-in-time marketing. 

Step Four – Get Engaged
Your customers have choices, especially in times of recession when competitors are hungry for your business.  They can easily move from one provider to the next in order to secure what they believe to be the best service, price or product - building an engaged and lasting relationship with your customer is paramount. To do this, you need to take a step back and reach out to customers not solely via “outbound” channels, such as email or direct mail, but also via “inbound channels” where and when the customer is actively contacting you.  In these inbound engagement channels, such as the call centre, branches, IVR, and web site, companies can now deploy new real-time decisioning technology to sit behind their existing customer facing systems to enable them to offer up the most relevant message or offer, for each individual customer at the moment of interaction. The result is not only improved customer retention - this new method of engaged “inbound marketing” has been shown to produce response rates 10-15 times higher than those achievable via outbound marketing.

And it does work, according to the Aberdeen report ‘Trigger Marketing: Timing is everything’, leading organisations engaged in data-driven marketing achieve a 81 percent year on year increase in customer profitability and report 95 percent above-average performance in precision marketing effectiveness.

Or do you still want to monkey around?

Kieran Kilmartin is the Group Marketing Director at Portrait Software. Portrait Software seamlessly integrates the world's most advanced customer analytics, powerful inbound and outbound campaign management, and best-in-class business process integration to drive real time customer interactions that communicate precisely the right message through the right channel, at the right time. www.portraitsoftware.com