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Category Archives: Retail

Blurring of the Marketing/CRM Line

February 20, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

There is a significant blurring of the line between marketing and customer relationship management.  This blurring has enormous impact on the way we operate our businesses and engage with our customers.

We need to stop thinking about functions and start thinking about fans.

Traditional silos

Traditionally, marketing has been about defining market segments and delivering offers while CRM was about knowing the fine-grained details of your accounts.

Even though we call it CRM, it has been, for most companies, about the sales funnel more than customer relationships; leads go in, revenue comes out.  Marketing sat above that funnel.

Expanding roles

Marketing is expanding and is less about segmenting the potential customers you don’t know and much more about finding prospects to know and interact with as marketers, before they enter “the funnel”. CRM, meanwhile, is being used to continually interact with customers in new ways of cross selling and upselling that used to look like marketing.  Where does marketing end and CRM begin? It’s very blurry.

Technology/strategy breakthroughs in recent years and changing consumer patterns allow each end of the marketing-to-CRM spectrum to continue to widen even as the difference between them blurs. This, in a nutshell, creates friction between applications, databases, departments, business owners, platforms, and ultimately prevents cohesive management of the spectrum.

Conflict

It manifests as battles over budget, politics over positioning, and conflict over control. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it isn’t for companies that recognize the benefit of seeing this spectrum as turning customers into fans.

Turning customers into fans must be the over-arching goal of any 21st century company that wants to stay relevant, build trust, open lines of communication and find success despite turbulence and a constantly evolving customer. Are you ready?

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Return on Relationship™: The New Measure of Success

February 15, 2013

By Ted Rubin 

Social media is quickly becoming a way of life… and a way of business as more and more companies are realizing they need to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. We can’t, however, expect to do “business as usual” and succeed in building an eager audience around our brands.

If you want to continue to reach your market in this social media age, the marketing focus needs to be on building relationships, and metrics need to expand beyond ROI (Return on Investment) to include ROR: Return on Relationship™.

–Return on Relationship™…simply put the value that is accrued by a person or brand due to nurturing a relationship. ROI is simple $s and cents. ROR is the value (both perceived and real) that will accrue over time through loyalty, recommendations and sharing.–

Most measurements and empowerment stats that are used with regard to relationships (i.e. number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities) are not financial assets, but that doesn’t mean they are worthless. Instead, these are leading indicators that a brand is doing something that is creating value that will be with you for the long term and will drive ROI if developed and used effectively.

So how do you build and strengthen relationships with your audience (as a whole, and as individuals) to increase your ROR?

1. Listen

If you want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to first listen to your consumers so when you do speak, you get it right. What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?

2. Make it be about THEM

First think about and first address what matters most to your audience. Give them a platform to show you what they need, want, are interested in, and expect. Whatever matters most to them should become what matters most to you! We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand. Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.

3. Ask “How can I serve you?”

Taking the “ME” mentality one step further, when we are advertising instead of building relationships, we are focused on what our consumers can give us instead of how we can best serve them.

Your consumers will recognize in a heartbeat if you are simply trying to get something from them – and they will not stick around. It’s not that you aren’t allowed to want anything from your consumers, it’s that there must be a give to go along with every take. If you truly want to make an impact, aim to always put more energy and attention in your “give” column than in your “take” column. It will pay off.

4. Aim for Ongoing Engagement

Building relationships is about starting meaningful dialogue and taking the time to thoughtfully and genuinely engage in ongoing conversation. Relationships focus on getting to know your consumer and giving them reasons to stay engaged — not just getting them to react. This needs to be all the time… not simply campaign or initiative based. That is the biggest mistake being made today by marketers and brands… with consumers, and especially with influencers.

5. Know the People in Your Audience

Short and simple: if you are only focused on the money, you risk completely overlooking the people. Don’t make that mistake! If you don’t know who your people are, you might as well toss your marketing money down the drain.

Relationships ARE the new currency – honor them, invest in them, and start measuring your ROR!

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Meeting Your Customers Where They Are, Anytime, Anywhere

February 13, 2013

by Chris Taylor 

Many made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the competition. Continue reading →

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Just Who Owns the Customer, Anyway?

February 7, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

As technology expands rapidly to manage customer experience, a subtle shift is under way in who gathers and uses loyalty and other data to manage the customer relationship.

No one needs to remind us how quickly the nature of shopping and customer experience is changing. We see signs of it everywhere and need look no further than the startups, pattern of acquisitions and alignment of technologies reported in the tech press every day.

The big question

There’s a second shift happening that might not be quite as apparent as those news reports. It involves manufacturers creating ‘direct to consumer’ capabilities that open the door to the question, “Just who owns the customer?”

This is being driven partly by infrastructure spend by the biggest product companies that serve fashion, sports and fitness, grocery and every other major category. Technology now allows for personalized, one-to-one marketing relationships from the biggest manufacturers down to the individual consumer.

This side of e-commerce isn’t about the money, necessarily – that will remain mostly in the hands of the front-end of retail. It is more about additional touch points that build trust, relationships and communication that complement retailer activities.

Retailers playing catch up

This leaves the retailers needing to follow through on the brand-building investment of their suppliers. Many retailers are still slow off the blocks when it comes to customer-facing technology. That will need to change quickly to keep pace with rising customer expectations of convenient, in-the-moment offers and loyalty rewards.

Just who owns the customer will be decided based on who has the best system to manage the new model and set and meet those expectations.

Join us on February 12 for the webinar, The New Event-Driven Marketing: Success with Real-Time, Omni-Channel Engagement.

 

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Sense and Respond: Event-Driven Marketing

January 17, 2013

By Jeanne Roué-Taylor

The concept of “sense and respond” has been around for years, but it’s a relatively new concept for marketers. Times are changing very rapidly, and the rise of mobile, social and far faster cache memory applications gives the field a whole new way to interact with customers. It is an ability to sense the environment and respond immediately.

This isn’t the kind of interaction that a call center handles, or the idea of ‘touch point management’. From a process perspective, sense & respond gets much closer to the customer than ever before.

From a technology perspective, it means being able to move the marketing function out of a database-centric world and into a real-time, location-aware, flow-based marketing opportunity.

This new world is both context aware and cross channel at the same time. It differs from traditional marketing, even its most recent developments, by focusing on interaction optimization more than just the nuts and bolts of interaction.

Operational real-time

Most companies, including startups, lack the ability to assemble and respond to context fast enough to change customer behavior.  Unfortunately, real-time too often means gaining important information in the moment but doesn’t go the extra distance to meeting the customer in the moment.

What’s more, many of the systems implemented in the last three to four years are already outdated in their approach. They are not operationally real-time.

Truly operational, real-time sense and respond takes interaction to in-location, in-store or even in-basket levels of timing. It means having innovative analysis of what to expect and sensing a combination of factors in the moments they occur.

More of the same

If we stop for a minute to consider how much has changed in the recent past, we can easily assume that the change will continue and the opportunity for greater context and interaction in real-time is only going to grow. Likewise, customer expectations will shift to a demand for rewards in real-time – wherever they are and for whatever they’re doing.

Anyone who isn’t taking advantage of sense and respond will see their competition pulling away in the very near future.  Time to get started.

Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar on 2/12, Event-Driven Marketing: Success with Real-Time Omni-Channel Engagement.

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Getting Real About Real-Time

January 10, 2013

By Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Real-time means something a little different to everyone. The term is too-often used to describe getting information on what happened up to the moment, a rolling report of the history of something – like customer purchases, staffing costs or inventory levels. It’s like asking what time it is. There’s only an accurate answer for that one-dimensional question at one moment, then time moves on.

But what if real-time can mean something much different? In the event-driven marketing realm, it does. We’re going through a transformation of the meaning of real-time driven by the increasing ability to know what’s happening simultaneously across a customer – their history, their location, our location, inventory, pricing, and more.

Hoping the needles move

Real-time’s new definition is about being able to anticipate the scenarios that move a customer to make a purchase, taking advantage of distributed inventory, rescuing an abandoned shopping cart and driving business to the web and store. It isn’t a dashboard to watch and hope the needles move. It is a way to anticipate and act in the actual moments that matter the most.

There’s a historical component to this kind of real-time, but it’s part of the context, not the answer.

But redefining the term isn’t enough. It has to be backed by event-driven marketing that connects all of those dots and provides a measurable advantage over the competition.

To learn more, download a copy of our whitepaper, “The New Event-Driven Marketing“.

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Moving Far Beyond Mad Men

December 20, 2012

By Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Retailers have gone miles beyond the traditional print, TV and radio marketing of the Mad Men era, for sure, but even the more recent digital campaign-based marketing isn’t the best way to gain loyalty while maintaining profitability.

I’ll tell what works best, but first let’s take a look at how we got here.

Don Draper style

Traditional marketing was about coming up with the best tag line and finding the best audience and channel for delivery. Mad Men’s Don Draper is the perfect traditional marketing guy/ad man (there were very few women). Don is masterful at getting into the heads of the paying client with a promise that he will get his message into the heads of the end customer.  Even with focus groups testing those messages, it was an enormous leap of faith for the firm’s clientele.  It was all about selling an idea and less about proven execution.

Costly setup

Computing brought us beyond Mad Men and gave us the ability to watch for signs of a receptive audience. Those signals, or triggers, are certainly a step beyond Don’s famous tag lines, like London Fog’s, “Limit your exposure.” Campaign or old-style trigger-based marketing delivers personalized, relevant content based on the best knowledge in advance.  That sounds like a great idea but is hampered by structure and slowed down by potentially costly setup and execution.

Getting a trigger wrong means sending messages people don’t want. Missing the timing means marketing into thin air.  Because triggers are structured and reactive, campaign development is based on a cycle that has several steps: Identifying triggers, creating responses, testing and evaluating, operationalizing and then optimizing campaigns.  Traditional trigger-based marketing doesn’t bring the speed necessary to for today’s business.

Getting it right

There’s a new and better way that’s gaining ground with some of the best marketers in the business. The modern Don Draper operates in real-time and with event-driven marketing instead. Events are simply ‘things that happen’ (or don’t). Powerful systems can anticipate combinations of events and fire responses in real-time that can take into effect an unlimited number of factors. Events include location, sentiment analysis, inventory levels, previous purchases and more. These are highly dynamic factors that can’t be correlated in traditional systems.

Event-driven is the marketing answer to mobility, social, cloud and big data. It is a true differentiator in an increasingly complex marketplace.

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TIBCO Loyalty Lab 12.3 release enhances real-time offers and increases value and convenience for shoppers

December 12, 2012

We’re proud to announce an exciting update to our unified marketing platform that allows enhanced real-time offer targeting and qualification capabilities. In response to the feedback we’ve received for more precise and relevant targeting that helps marketers learn more about each customer while providing those customers a more relevant and convenient shopping experience, Loyalty Lab released 12.3, available to all existing and future clients.

Capabilities include:

  • Real-time API enhancements
  • Basket profiles and targeting
  • Brand targeting and qualification

We’ve worked to make implementation as simple as possible. Read on to learn more about each of these improvements.

Real-Time API Enhancements

Marketers can now ensure real-time processing of threshold point calculations and reward issuance, so customers can access benefits as soon as they are accrued. Transactions are sent in real-time from a store’s POS system to TIBCO Loyalty Lab Reward and evaluated. The POS system instantly receives a response with any points, rewards or certificates earned as a result of the transaction. The customer then receives a receipt with their current points balance and rewards earned, and can access their benefits right away ­­– online, in-store or via their mobile phones.

Basket Profiles and Targeting

This latest update also gives marketers greater control over which customer transactions qualify for a reward through pre-defined conditions.

Marketers can set up shopping basket profiles with conditions based on specific tender types used or minimum quantity of items purchased. For example, an offer can be created within the Loyalty Lab Reward platform which establishes that all members making three purchases of a specific brand with an AMEX card will be issued a $20 rebate.

This gives marketers more control over conditions based on the contents of customers’ baskets. Targeting can also require or exclude specific products or brands, in addition to product categories.

Brand Targeting & Qualification

Now, marketers can also more effectively target customers and qualify offers based on brand purchases, right down to individual products. We designed this enhancement to offer more granular targeting and extra control. Marketers can leverage this capability for cross-category selling, which is extremely useful for new product introductions.

For example, an established beauty brand has launched a new lipstick. They can create an offer that awards a coupon for 5% off the purchase of this lipstick, with the qualifier that customers must purchase any item in that brand family.

With these enhancements to the Loyalty Lab Reward platform, the possibilities are endless for marketers looking to extend relevant offers to their customers. Contact us to learn more.

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The 12 Days of Christmas – Loyalty Lab Style

December 6, 2012

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

With Black Friday behind us and Christmas just weeks away, retail establishments across the world are in their busiest time of the year. Are you maximizing the surge in holiday business? With that in mind, here’s our carol for you:

12 Days of Christmas, (Loyalty Lab style)

On the first day of Christmas, my system gave to me:
My customer’s undying loyalty.

On the second day of Christmas, my system gave to me:
2 mobile apps,
and my customer’s undying loyalty.

OK, OK, you get the point. Let’s just skip to the final tally:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my system gave to me:
12 million tweets a tweeting
11 market segments
10 systems talking
9 clever campaigns
8 real-time offers
7 million web hits
6 retired systems
5 ways to sell
4 million page likes
3 months of forecast
2 mobile apps
and my customer’s undying loyalty.

So even if you don’t get everything you want in your stocking, we at least hope your customers turn into fans ­­– and you become a marketing hero in 2013!
Happy Holidays from the Loyalty Lab team…

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Not Your Mother’s Holiday Shopping

November 29, 2012

Last week, Michael Greenberg, Loyalty Lab’s director of global solution strategy, penned an article in DM News about the holiday season. A veritable Superbowl for loyalty marketers, the holidays are, as Michael puts it, the time to “roll up our sleeves, cross our fingers, and set our plans in motion.”

Well, the dust has settled following Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. But the madness is far from over now that the holiday season is in full swing. Titled “Not Your Mother’s Holiday Shopping,” the piece details the ways in which loyalty marketers should be reassessing their strategies in order to stay ahead of the game —  specifically by putting a major emphasis on mobile, which has become a huge force in the commerce game over the past couple of years.

And, looking back on the opening shot of 2012 holiday shopping, it’s clear that Michael’s assertions about mobile are right on track. According to IBM, mobile traffic was up 28.5%, while overall online sales were up 20.7% from 2011. Mobile accounted for 16.3% of all online sales, with a 58.6%-41.4% split between mobile phones and tablets.

Convinced, yet? While 2012 may be rolling already, Michael’s top 5 tips for bulking up your mobile marketing strategy will have you well on your way to a killer season in 2013. His main points:

1. Don’t skimp on mobile development.

2. Stand out from the noise (and from the glut of mobile apps already out there).

3. Take an offensive and defensive position — protect your best customers while successfully going after your competitors’.

4. Ask your customers for feedback.

5. Start planning for 2013, on December 26.

Read about all of these in more detail over on DM News, and get geared up for next year! Pay extra attention to how your initiatives perform this year, and to what your competitors are up to. What does your holiday game plan look like? Tell us in the comments!

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