Must Read Classic Articles
These articles are keepers for customer retention
oriented, Data-Driven marketers; they are selected primarily because they
provide very short-in-supply case studies, metrics, or process models for
relationship marketing, customer retention, or customer loyalty marketing on the
Web. This is an archive; for the latest check out the blog.
Triggering Higher Sales
March 31, 2003 1 to 1 Magazine
The cat's out of the bag, as they say. Ruth Stevens writes on event driven
marketing - also known as the Drilling Down method.
So it's not a big secret anymore, but I guess that is OK - people will still
have to figure out the "how
to" of detecting and triggering events.
Born Again
March 24, 2003 Direct Magazine
Oh man, is this classic. The Director of CRM for Hewlett Packard says,
"You can actually run a lot of CRM from an Excel
spreadsheet". People talking about Latency.
The customer LifeCycle. How to make CRM
work with what you have. About
moving from reporting to predicting behavior.
That customers don't really want a
relationship. What is it? A review of the current state of CRM
with a panel of experts, who say what I said more than three years ago when
nobody wanted to listen. Been there, done that.
When discounts drive customers away
March 17, 2003 Internet Retailer
You knew this, right? A great example of the small things that cause
people to abandon shopping carts. As a matter of fact, Bryan talked about
this same issue a month or so ago in
his ClickZ column. If you're going to use discount codes, make them
invisible to people who don't have them or you will suffer higher carts
abandonment.
Developing Effective Segmentation
March 15, 2003 Direct Magazine
I find many people don't really know how to use survey data, and it all ends up
being "nice to know" stuff without ever being actionable. When
you tie the survey data to behavior, as in done in this article, then you get
something you can increase profits with. What do I mean by behavior?
Use any of these simple models.
Seven Ways Database Analysis Can Help Your Prospecting Efforts
March 3, 2003 Target Marketing
So, you think database marketing is only for customers? Good customer
retention starts with smart customer acquisition, and your database is the
brains behind it all. Start with some behavioral
segmentation.
The 3 Rules of Donor Prospecting
February 7, 2003 DM News
Some straight up, easy-to-understand rules for improving donor prospecting, with
stats and numerical examples. Don't forget to keep track of the source
code! And after you acquire them, make sure you use a simple model to
maximize donations will minimizing costs, like this
non-profit did.
Advantages of Life-Stage Segmenting
February 7, 2003 DM News
Oh, so customer have life stages? I wonder if that has anything to do with
the Lifecycle? Of course it does; Life
Stage / Cycle marketing is at the core of Relationship
Marketing, which is not about being buddies with customers, but
understanding how needs change over time.
Popular Tastes
February 3, 2003 Direct Magazine
A bank loyalty program is turned from a dog into a star. Wasn't that hard;
all they did was enroll the right people and make the rewards relevant - just as
we did in this case study. But man, the
price tag was $15 million, or about $100 a customer. We did it for $20 a
customer in the case study. Does your
loyalty program need revising? Bring it on over to Kobie
Marketing and they'll take a look at it for you.
What
to Do Once Your Loyalty Program Is Up and Running
January 28, 2003 DM News
If you are familiar with loyalty programs this list will come as no big shock,
but loyalty programs are gaining steam right now, and this list may help with
your planning if you are new to the loyalty game. You can see the advice
about control groups in action by downloading
this loyalty case study.
Making
Customer Loyalty Relevant Regardless of the Channel
January 28, 2003 DM Review
In an amazing twist of fate, this article is written by someone from the same
company as the article above, and endorses what I would call a very dangerous
approach to loyalty. It wipes out the core "stored value"
concept at the heart of loyalty programs, and as such, turns itself into a
frequency program. That may be fine for your business, but it's not a
loyalty program; frequency programs have a
bad habit of simply making your best customers less profitable due to subsidy
costs. Make sure you understand customer
behavior before trying something like this.
Relearn the Rules of Direct Marketing
January 24, 2003 DM News
It really is amazing how some basic truths about direct marketing got so twisted
up in the dot-com years and used to justify everything imaginable. LifeTime
Value comes to mind as one of the most tragic victims; everyone just skipped
right over the Customer LifeCycle and ended up
with a pot of fool's gold. Likewise Relationship
Marketing morphing into CRM. Go back
to the classics and relearn what you were taught during this period; you'll
be much, much better off.
Why
Some Companies Succeed at CRM (and Many Fail)
January 15, 2003 Knowledge@Wharton
Bang up job on this un-biased study with no connections to the various
consulting groups or vendors. The research notes, among other things,
three distinct approaches to customer relationship management (CRM), each with
dramatically different results. And you know what? The most
successful people take an approach that sounds a lot like Simple
CRM.
Catalog
Still Matters in Internet Age
January 14, 2003 DM News
This is an extremely important article, not so much for the details, but
for the plain fact that it proves you really have to understand your
customers before you start monkeying around with your distribution.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen these stories play out. Whether
you are talking about customer acquisition or retention, the web / catalog combo
can be very effective if you know how to measure it properly.
Subsidy costs and channel cannibalization are the enemy. Do
you know how to measure them?
Making
E-Mail Acquisition Succeed
January 8, 2003 DM News
Well, soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise, making e-mail acquisition succeed relies
on the same truths required to make direct mail succeed. Don't know what
they are? Here's a short and sweet wrap-up that is on the money.
Free Shipping Helps Deliver
Happy Holidays for E-Commerce
January 3, 2003 DM News
This whole shipping charges thing gets my blood going. Consumers have
always hated shipping charges, but giving free shipping is a huge mistake for
long-term health, as buyers become reluctant to pay shipping ever.
You have to analyze and understand the buying behavior, and set shipping
accordingly. Flat shipping is really the best idea for the web, because of
the shopping cart confusion. Figure out what your average shipping cost is
and charge that or slightly above. You win some and you lose some, but the
upside - fewer dropped carts, surge in average order size - far outweighs the
downside. Our lab store has an average order size of $100 and most of the
product in the store is under $20.
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the book with Free customer scoring software at:
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& Noble.com
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