One-to-one communications
Relationship marketing starts with something straightforward: a list of your customers. There's nothing more important. They buy from you; they keep a roof over your head and put food on your table. 20% of them bring you 80% of your revenues, and it's six times easier to retain one that gain a new one. (Retaining just 5% of those you lose could double your profits.) One-to-one communications - talking to each customer as an individual - is about building and maintaining that list. Profitably.
Even if those customers aren't on the web, a web-based database is a great place to keep them. A web application - Redpump's designed several - lets your people add each customer contact to a single, consolidated customer profile. And if they are on the web, those customers build these profiles themselves. (It's behind Salesforce.com's success and Amazon's gigabytes of consumer preferences.)
A database with a web front-end is the ideal one-to-one communications platform. It doesn't have to be big or pricey. All it has to do is make sure each communication, every campaign adds to a customer relationship. And building one takes six steps.
First, create the list. A one-dimensional spreadsheet of names and numbers. Look at the list, see the patterns in the data. It may give you ideas for smarter ways of connecting with them. But before anything else starts, you need that list.
Second, web-enable the list. Add on multiple tags and descriptors that define the data - metadata. Make the information in it real-time, imported in from other sources. Your list becomes two-dimensional and up-to-date.
Third, do something with it. Write that campaign with variants for each segment, execute that strategy in proportion to the prevalance of each customer type. With all responses directed into the list. Your total brand equity can be defined as what the people on that list think of you.
Fourth, remember it for next time. Attach every response to the customer making it - let him do it in real time over the web if possible. Your spreadsheet has become three-dimensional, a database. Customer relationships, not lists of contacts. Not enough response? Do a different campaign. Change your marketing strategy.
Fifth, look for patterns. What's the shape of the database? Does any aspect of customer behaviour correlate with any other attribute, like age or gender? If teenage girls talk to you Saturday afternoons while young couples do it Wednesdays, you've got the basis for two separate marketing campaigns. Each aimed at a different group, but with the same objective: persuading people to buy more.
Sixth and last, build the relationship. Let each customer response define how you communicate with him next. (Ten campaigns customisable in ten ways means ten billion possible combinations of each communication, enough to give a custom response to everyone on the planet.) It's become four-dimensional: length, breadth, and depth enabling a managed conversation with customers over time. And it'll make every customer feel like your only customer.
Most call this Customer Relationship Management, but however you label it, it's one-to-one marketing using a database to define communications. Next: campaign creation.