By Roger Luxton, Alterian.
A few years ago marketing seemed comparatively easy. There were fewer channels, less accountability, and decent sized teams. Marketing seemed as though it was the ideal job. However, marketers are under pressure like never before, expected to deliver more with often less resources. The smart marketing teams have recognised the need to bolster productivity by shifting away from ad-hoc communications and toward clearly planned and automated engagement programs for activities such as customer welcome, upsell or retention. From my experience seeing a number of customer engagement agencies, marketing Sersice providers and clients try to set up automated programs, I offer five golden rules for success.
1. Plan the Journey. The first step is the most important, it’s about ‘white boarding’ the phases of a journey. Importantly both the route that you’d ideally like to follow, but also all those points where the customer might decide not to respond, reply or engage with you. Planning for all eventualities and deciding on communications or tactics required at each stage will make it easier to implement. Often this planning can benefit from the expert input of agencies or partners.
2. Choose the Right Technology. Once you have the plan together, it’s about using the right technology to automatically manage the different phases and analyse performance. After all, if each journey requires human intervention then it isn’t going to be practical without a bigger team. Ideally, this technology should be easy to use by a marketing campaign team, rather than just a technical team.
3. Start Simply. I’d also strongly advocate not being too ambitious too soon. Much better to build a slightly simpler journey, with plans to learn and evolve, rather than trying to create a 100 phase program straight away. By being realistic it will be faster to be set up and start creating early pay back. Equally, if you have a few different programs you wish to run, start off with one or two, and then roll out the others as your first ones start working.
4. Measure Results. As soon as a program starts, the ability to measure performance will be critical. To obtain a clear scientific assessment of the new program versus your previous approach, use control groups. Put 50% of new customers through your new customer program and the other 50% receiving previous types of contact. Keeping a clear sight of the results and adapting activity is vital.
5. Adapt based on Customer Behaviour. As well as overall results, it is equally important to understand the behaviour of different groups of customers. Are they engaging as you expected? Do certain segments behave differently? What implications does this have for your program? As you start to assess and analyse this behaviour, you will inevitably look to adapt your plans accordingly, making it even more relevant for each segment and individual.
If you follow these five golden rules, you should be able to deliver a better customer experience and undertake more activities, whilst generating a better return on investment. Do you have any other rules to live by?
Posted by Roger Luxton, Principal Business Solutions Consultant, Alterian
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