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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.
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