Direct Marketing

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Observation
Accountant’s figures
Produce answers –
information for decision
Observation
Record response quantity
and quality
Comments found to be
positively useful
Receive report and
recommendations by mid-
year
No transgressions reported
Observation
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Direct Marketing
1. Sell the existing range of products, with the new revamped
basic product, to achieve the target sales (a figure in £s is
included here) within the calendar year.
2. Grow the customer base by 10 per cent; that is 40 new long-term
customers by the end of the year.
3. Establish the new media, with interactive TV and Web site
operating in the next six months.
4. Achieve a profile at the end of the year that places the percep-
tion and image of this firm and its products above your direct
competitor (list of attributes, benefits, features to be agreed by
end January).
5. Take a stand at the main – category – sport exhibition.
6. Raise the awareness to 80 per cent by the end of the year among
those that play, spectate or train in the sport, of the purpose of
your business and the concept – products/services – it
provides.
Illustrative marketing objectives and marketing activities
Table 3.1 on pages 34–39 gives illustrative marketing objectives
and marketing activities based on the illustrative business objec-
tives above.
For a full discussion on how to determine the most appropriate
marketing communications for any situation, there is another
Kogan Page book that covers the subject, Strategic Marketing
Communications by P R Smith, Chris Berry and Alan Pulford. The
book offers the SOSTAC process (Situation, Objectives, Strategy,
Tactics, Action, Control), which should be adopted before devel-
oping options within the resource limitations, with senior manage-
ment support and with everything in place before any activity is
started.
Chapters 4 to 13 in this book cover the marketing activities –
the ‘T’ for tactics of the SOSTAC mnemonic – just for direct
marketing.
OPERATIONAL SUPPORT: DIRECT MARKETING
‘MUST HAVES’
Customer relationship marketing (CRM)
CRM gives the right information so you can match your products,
How to Decide Which Direct Marketing Activities to Use
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your media and channels in highly targeted campaigns to deliver
unprecedented results. CRM allows a detailed analysis of
customer buying patterns and behaviour so it is easy to create
perfect cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. CRM retains
customers by giving an understanding of their preferences, adding
real value to the sale by making a bespoke offer based on predicted
lifetime customer value. CRM allows you to profile your
customers, with which knowledge it is easy to target more effec-
tively. CRM captures data, cleans and enriches it by cross-refer-
encing every source from within a business. This gives a leading
edge on competitors.
Informatica, a CRM and e-business software and hardware
supplier, offers business models. It has found that people are
unsure what to do with information they collect for CRM
purposes. People need help with knowledge management to
decide outputs – who requires what information. CRM, once
configured, can help with:
■ contact management;
■ sales;
■ e-mail response management;
■ supply chain management;
■ inventory management;
■ operational management;
■ sales automation – e-sales in particular;
■ customer service support – both for call centres and the
Internet;
■ marketing automation – feeding back marketing activity such
as advertising, banner ads.
Experian uses Informatica to manage 780 million consumers in 18
countries with 1,500 product outputs available to clients regarding
direct marketing (and consumer and business credit ratings).
Borders uses Informatica to manage 700,000 book titles with over
10 million books, music and videos in stock.
E-Business has the ability to leverage data, integrates all sources,
cleans and enriches, reads Web data, supports B2B, has near real
time analysis and the outputs are scaleable. It allows targeted
marketing. Advertising, catalogue, commerce, personalization,
registration and transaction servers are supplied.
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Direct Marketing
CRM has suffered from a bad press recently. Alan Mitchell
writing in Marketing Business (November 2001) says the basic CRM
theory is as robust as ever, but the problem is fourfold:
■ Not all the software is yet fully capable of giving a rounded
view of each customer.
■ Consistency from the customer perspective through the use of
CRM has not been achieved.
■ Assessing lifetime customer value in both financial and non-
financial terms has still to be developed to a useful point.
■ Company culture has not changed into an acceptance of CRM
other than from early financial expectation.
A central database
Originally, card index systems were the database. Even in the
1990s, City staff were still typing out letters and envelopes from
cards held in the index every three months, often taking days to do
this. There is plenty of software available now (ACT, Excel, Access,
etc), which allows a firm to keep a central database and multi
access. Each customer has centrally specified data and individual
and historic data. The centrally specified data will probably
contain information such as name, birthday, communication
details, financial data. Individual information will be specific, such
as frequency of contact, hours and days when best suited to
contact. Historic information may include order history, payments,
etc.
In a professional firm with clients, centralizing the database
allows everyone access. It also allows everyone to see who is the
key point of contact and with whom in organizations the responsi-
bility for a contact is delegated. Who is to make contact is deter-
mined according to contact plans. For professional firms the
history of individuals and moves to new firms can be tracked.
Maintaining contact is particularly beneficial as individual
customers move up in hierarchies and move to new companies.
Keeping in touch with old contacts can result in new business with
the new firm. This is particularly beneficial if the brand values
have been established in early years and the contact is then tasked
with finding a service supplier for the service you supply in their
new firm. This is helpful for professional firms in a niche, when the
How to Decide Which Direct Marketing Activities to Use
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client merges with a similar body and one of the professional
support firms has to go (a current activity – in 2001 – with firms of
solicitors). Maintaining relationships may just sway the balance in
favour of the firm that is known to those at the top rather than to a
firm that has not built relationships.
The knowledge management tool
Knowledge management can be used to provide timely key infor-
mation or intelligence about a customer and the matched
product/service to a salesperson. General application of knowl- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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