Internal Technologies: Are They Driving Or Enabling Your Marketing Efforts?

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Many organizations have adopted various technologies (i.e. Email, internal database systems, contact managers, etc.) to help them with their sales and marketing efforts. However, without proper planning and implementation, it is very easy for these technologies to operate out of control, where they can hinder marketing activities or drive marketing efforts in the wrong direction. In this article, we will analyze some of the popular technologies and discuss how they should enable the sales and marketing activities within your organization.

Corporate Web Sites: In a rush to create a mark in cyberspace, many companies have rushed the creation of a corporate web site without any clearly defined marketing goals. In many instances, the results were a hodgepodge of corporate collateral materials pasted together into an electronic medium. The resultant sites were ‘non-functional’ as direct response mechanisms, and therefore lead to added costs for the complete re-engineering of the sites.

Properly invested time during the planning stages of your corporate web site will yield a functional site that has a clearly defined goal. Lead generation, direct sales, competitive cross-grades, upgrades, identification of unregistered customers, awareness building, and technical support represent several of the more popular functions that a focused Web site can accomplish.

Internal Database Technologies: With the prestige and empowerment surrounding terms such as data warehouses, customer profiling, and data mining, it is understandable for an organization to attempt an immediate change from palettes of registration cards to a sophisticated internal database overnight. While the transition is absolutely in the right direction, unbridled use of data warehouses and segmentation can easily lead to a path of inefficiencies and frustration.

Plan on a database structure that is relational in nature and allows you to track customers and the individual transactions that they make with your company over time. In the case of a software publisher, the capture of product SKU’s and version numbers will facilitate highly profitable installed-base activities such as upgrade and cross-sale activities. The combination of inferred-pricing based on SKU’s, multi-purchase history, and the date of purchase will allow for file segmentation by RFM: Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value. These three components will allow stratification of your house file from "Best" to "Least Best" so that your installed-base activities can be sent to your most profit-producing customers. Avoid getting caught in the game of over-analysis where your customer file is enhanced and profiled into volumes of non-actionable information and file segmentation that is too small to perform any reasonable marketing activities.

Contact Management: A popular technology demanded by many sales people, contact managers and personal information managers can easily get unruly without careful implementation. Here is a quick acid-test to give your own sales staff -- when the contact manager is reminding the individual to make a call or complete a task, is it a singular reminder, or is it 50 stacked reminders that keep on getting ignored with the Snooze All feature? Or, unless you’ve automated the procedure, is your internal data warehouse also getting the benefit of updated name and address data collected by the sales staff -- or are the localized contact databases getting a life of their own? When it comes to contact management software, a key element to successful enterprise-wide implementation of this technology is discipline. Without discipline, it is very easy to turn these sophisticated reminder systems into ineffective tools which are feverishly fed with information that hinder timely follow-up.

Email: Many firms have gotten on the band wagon and are capturing Email address information for performing regular communications with their customers. A few simple steps in the early stages will help you avoid disaster and negative PR with this powerful marketing technology.

Broadcast Email messaging to your customers should be kept brief and to the point. It is very easy to frustrate your installed-base by carpet-bombing them with too frequently with content-heavy Email messages. Implement a coding system or a database relationship between the Email address and your main data warehouse, in order for personalized messages (Netmailer by Alpha Software) to be sent to specific individuals based on prior purchases or specific requests made to your organization. Ask permission, up front, if the collected Email data can be shared with other vendors, which will build the foundation of a future Email rental program for additional revenue. Also, use the broadcast Email messages to direct the individuals back to your web site or your 800 number, to create closed-loop communications with your customers.

Fax Response Systems: This technology can easily become counter-productive to your marketing efforts if the menu structures are unwieldy or if information is not kept up to date. Try the system yourself and see how easy it is to retrieve information. Are new press releases and product information available at the top-level of the menus? Are complete directories easily accessible?

There are many sophisticated technologies that are available to us as marketers, right at our desktops, thanks to the advances in PC software and hardware technologies. With proper planning and some common sense, these technologies can truly empower us to expand market share and build stronger relationships with our customers.