CRM technologies
As we begin to add posts in 2011, we stepped back to look at our business and our blog. We realized that the two are perfectly aligned. Although the majority of our focus is within the SAS product suite, our focus is marketing analytics and operations.
Given that, it is time for us to expand our commentary. So, in the coming weeks you will begin to see more content regarding some of our other technology partners including Teradata, Netezza and Unica.
If you have a question about a particular technology or topic, we'd love to hear from you. Comment below or email us a hello@afhood.com .
Developing an effective contact strategy
There are few things that seperate the good marketers from the bad. In our opinion contact strategy is one of those things that few organizations understand and all should consider. When you are trying to decide who you should contact, through what channels and how many times, here are a couple of things to think about.
1. Not all customers are created equal - Nor do they have the same appetite for your marketing efforts. We recommend you spend time looking at your customers and how many times you contacted them in the past. A good cluster analysis will begin to help you understand that some groups prefer 10 'sale' messages and 2 'partner' messages before opting out. Put this cluster with other customer breakouts and you have the basis for your contact strategy.
2. Not all messages are created equal - As we eluded to above, you can not simply look at the recency and frequency of your messages to determine how much is too much. You need to understand the message types or objectives. Customers have varying appetites for your credit card solicitations and that appetite is much different from your best customer sales messages.
3. Implementing your strategy may be harder than developing it - So now you know what you want to implement. Customer segment X gets Y transactional messages a month and Z surveys a month. But how do you insure that they only get what you've prescribed? There are a variety of ways to accomplish this with either process changes and / or technology solutions (One of our favorites is Unica's Optimize.).
If you are considering a contact strategy for your organization, we would love to help you understand your customers and improve your communications.
4 tips for integrating CRM technology
If you have worked with marketing technologies for any length of time, you've encountered this problem. How can we integrate our CRM with the rest of our organization? How does CRM interact with our call center, website, applications, database, loyalty system, etc., etc.
We've been there.
Throughout our travels, we've picked up a few tips. Hopefully they'll help you.
- Tight integration is dangerous. Just don't do it. - Marketing technology changes faster than fashion. Today's latest and greatest is quickly replaced with tomorrow's new market maker.
- Integrate through marketing concepts not technical application specs. - Abstracting technologies through the use marketing concepts like 'campaign', 'offer', 'contact history', 'registration', 'enrollment', etc. Define what these mean for the organization and build a data structure flexible enough for all applications to contribute to those concepts.
- Databases and services are the lifeline. - Long term success hinges on ease of use and flexibility. Simple services allow for plug and play scenarios. Well designed databases create environments that record interrelated transactions based on their role or concept. This makes business people happy. They can measure, analyze and predict without spending precious hours compiling, cleaning, and organizing data.
- Think replaceable. - Always remember that what you are adding to your technology stack could be replaced in a year and you will need to re-integrate something else. How much of your current work will be thrown away? Minimize the one-time development and maximize your efficiency and cost savings to the organization over the long haul.
We like to think we aren't integrating technology. We are simply making all of our applications play nicely together.
There is much more to this topic, but these 4 tips can minimize your stress for ears to come.