Special Report
This report features special insight into how a selection of finance directors intend to navigate their companies through what is sure to be a tough year for UK business. >> Back to Finance Director Outlook 2009 special report
All about the customer |
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| Written by Yolanda Noble, Chief Executive, dsicmm | |
| Monday, 19 January 2009 | |
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A joined up approach to one-to-one communications with customers and prospects seems to be key to effective marketing in a slow economy.
In the past, many Directors of Finance used to consider marketing expenditure a waste of money, and would seek the first opportunity to reduce marketing budgets. During the course of this decade this attitude has fundamentally changed as finance and marketing departments have begun to work much more closely together.Well-publicised examples from the recessions in the early to mid 90s and just after the millennium have taught FDs that it is precisely the organisations that continue to market during a downturn that obtain a very serious competitive advantage for doing so. However, that doesn’t mean that in the current climate money should simply be thrown at the marketing department. Marketing efforts need to be properly joined up across the many available online and offline media now available, and FDs are increasingly demanding that marketing initiatives provide some form of tangible measurement of bottom-line value. Joined-up customer communications used to be something of a pipe-dream. Database experts could establish an all round view of each customer, but the processes of translating this intelligence into joined-up communications was often unwieldy or unaffordable. However, high-speed personalised printing has become affordable for all customer communications rather than just the high-value ones (the latest technology has managed to take some 40% off the cost-per-print compared with 3-4 years ago). The ability to create a tailored set of contents for each customer’s envelope has become very sophisticated. Statements have now been recognised as a powerful advertising medium in their own right. And finally, pioneer organisations have established the initial proof that personalised content on the website improves customer retention, satisfaction, cross-sales, and ultimately profitability. Recent developments in variable colour printing – where content and text can be altered for each document printed – are revolutionising the extent to which this collaboration can happen. Research from early 2008 confirmed the close correlation between the personalisation and relevance of customer communications and the levels of customer satisfaction achieved. Now that variable colour printing is of high quality and affordable, customer are being offered reports that are tailored to each customer, and which are branded up to the intermediary. Digital print means that there is now no need for minimum quantities. And because the technology can now operate at high speed, the economies of production scale required to keep things affordable are also easily available from commercial printers. The new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed. Here the process can become very interesting – we know of at least one finance firm that is using personalised colour to collate each customer’s portfolio of reports into a single quarterly publication, which then encourages the customer to visit a personalised version of the firm’s website, where they can access all their details online. All through this process, targeted additional product advertising is served up to the customer with the aim of increasing their value through product offers they are likely to be interested in. The search for imaginative new ways of reaching the customer has gone further. The latest area, which is only now coming into play, is transpromo - using bills and statements as a medium for targeted advertising. Research amongst pioneers of this technique has shown that targeted adverts on bills or statements, when combined with a supporting leaflet or brochure in the envelope, produces response rates not far off stand-alone campaigns. This is critically important, as the medium is currently ‘free’ to the marketer, in that these communications have to be sent to the customer anyway. Some organisations, however, have woken up to the fact that this medium has a value for marketing and are introducing some form of cross-charge within their firms. So, personalised colour print has become more affordable, and new channels such as transpromo have opened up to marketers. A further key development is the growing bond between direct mail and web response.
A study published by Response One in early 2008 clearly proved that, as far as new customer recruitment is concerned, the most effective advertising medium for driving online responses with a serious intention to purchase, was not email marketing, sponsored links or social network advertising, but personalised direct mail. |
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