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.
*** Metrics
Revolution
September 15, 2004 CMO Magazine
"Companies are beginning to realize that it's important for their marketing
strategies be aligned with their business strategies." This is a
pretty unusual statement coming from a CMO, I mean, isn't marketing a strategic
function? I guess things may have changed, but one thing is for sure, if
you want a seat at the strategy table, you may need something like Six
Sigma Marketing to get you there.
**** Show Them How Much You Care
September 4, 2004 Target Marketing
Magazine
One of the most powerful ROI generators in the retention
marketing toolkit is the simple Thank You. Done with some imagination
and the right timing, Thank You's are huge incremental sales generators.
Don't coupon your best, most active customers; that's a sure way to lose money
through subsidy costs.
Instead, thank them and watch your profits soar.
****Survival Data Mining for Customer Insight
August 23, 2004 Intelligent Enterprise
A lot of the questions in database marketing really start with this simple
concept: when is a customer no longer a customer? You have to be able to
define the probable end of the Customer LifeCycle
because this sets up the context for every other decision you are likely to make
- if profitability is the prime concern. Survival analysis is a first step
if the end of LifeCycle is clear; if not, you'll need to use one of the LifeCycle
Metrics instead.
**** Focus on the ‘Sweet Spot’ of Your Customer Set
August 20, 2004 DM News
Most of the problems I see people having with Relationship
Marketing / CRM have to do with segmenting
and targeting customers. When you want customers to "do
something", it is not effective to segment them with demographics, you have
to use behavioral metrics. Once segmented,
focus on customers "in the middle" - where the potential for ROI is
highest.
****How to Compute Customer LTV
July 28, 2004 DM News
Arthur Middleton Hughes tees up again with a simple explanation of how to
calculate LifeTime Value. I agree with him, it's
pretty darn simple, and I always wonder why people have so much difficulty with
it. Besides, no matter how you calculate it, what matters in retention
work is the LTV of a segment or customer relative to another; the
absolute number is only useful to determine the allowable cost to acquire
segments or customers.
*** Getting loyalty programs right
July 22, 2004 SerachCRM.com
Hmmm - lots of info on what can go wrong with a loyalty program but not much
help on what to do about it. Check out the article below for some
suggestions, and call Kobie Marketing if you
need some help either making your existing loyalty program profitable or
creating a new one. It is possible to build financial models that will
drive program profitability if you know what you
are doing.
*** Promotions and Loyalty Can Play Nice
July 1, 2004 Direct Magazine
As a matter of fact, the most profitable loyalty
programs target specific customers for promotion and drive significant ROI,
- 252% in this case. All of the
"challenges" presented in this article (such as what the author calls
the "echo effect", which is really subsidy cost) are easily addressed
and managed by using simple
customer models to target behavior.
**** It's All About Behavior
June 18, 2004 DM Review
This article is a great overview of customer analysis at a high level by an
experienced slicer-dicer. He sure makes it sound like a lot of work!
And it is, if you start at the 10,000 foot level. The fact is just about
anybody who has access to transactional customer data can create simple
customer marketing models and use
them to increase profits.
*** 11 Ways Search Engine
Marketing Is Like Direct Marketing
June 8, 2004 DM News
Those of you who know my work can just skip this article, we started on
this idea in 2000 when looking at search audience quality, and I got into it
more specifically here. For
those who don't think all this has basically been done before, check the article out. The most important
statement for you folks is this one: "When I give a speech to online marketers, many are intrigued that so much of what they live and breathe has been articulated in direct marketing terms for over half a century
already."
'Nuff said. Read the article, then if you want to know more about how what
he is saying affects search marketing directly, read this
one and this one. Interested in the global idea of "internet = direct marketing" and
what that means for you in the future? You probably want to click
here.
**** Net Worth
(B2B Customer Valuation)
June 1, 2004 Direct Magazine
Absolutely fabulous piece by the very smart Ruth P. Stevens. All you
B2B'ers out there who don't think it's possible to measure and manage customer
value, guess again. Read about how the best in the biz make it
happen. It's not easy, but it's not nearly "impossible" either.
Get
the book with Free customer scoring software at:
Booklocker.com
Amazon.com
Barnes
& Noble.com
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Out Specifically What is in the Book
Learn Customer
Marketing Models and Metrics (site article
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