Customer Retention In a Down Economy
Customer retention is a great area of focus when times are tough.
Since many marketers have cut back on spending during the current recession they increased efforts in less expensive areas like customer loyalty programs.
Talk to your customers
When you think about how loyalty programs are implemented you must focus on dialog that takes place across all channels. You can look to reach customers in different ways than you did before the recession.
Segment customer with testing discounts
Offering discounts to different segments by being more active with promotional activity, both added value-added discount offerings and facilitate customer dialog through different channels.
When the economy takes a dive you can try to get feedback from customers to discover what issues they have like shipping charges for online purchases by honoring discounts if they find the same product through competitors at a cheaper price.
Find what’s unique about your brand
Retailers and marketers without existing loyalty programs in place are taking a serious look at encouraging customers to buy direct through Website. This is something that can be tested and improved with customer feedback.
Marketers are now becoming more focused on the overall customer experience when times are tough, because their customers stick and come back to the brand.
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Small Business Marketing
Small business marketing includes most of the businesses in the US today.
The opportunity is unlimited but the risks are higher since small business is volatile, nomadic and hard to define into segments.
The largest component of the small business market is the micro-market and these are businesses with fewer than 4 employees. This group makes up the largest share of the small business market.
The differentiation of the micro group from the from the larger segment is important when approaching because micro-businesses are often part-time.
Before approaching this group you need to test your offers with smaller segments and if you make selects that are too large without testing your results could be skewed. Worse than this is to roll out a large promotion with the wrong assumptions. During the early stages of testing it would be great to exclude micro-business from the mix.
Know Your Customer
When selecting new lists you should always profile a snapshot of your best customer by recent purchases, frequency of purchase and how much money they spend and than include demographics as far as age, income, and geographic location. You should be able to match up your current customer lists against cooperative databases. You can also analyze the size and type of business that buy your products.
This process shows the relative penetration of, these markets within various employee ranges, this will also point you into the SIC if your analyzing business to business lists and cross them against your database to find the customers that give you the best ROI.
With this most valuable data you can then target your prospects who behave like your best customers minimizing the risks and maximizing the profitability of your prospecting.
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New Asset Mobile Direct Marketing
The potential to reach customers through mobile devices is tremendous.
Cell phone or mobile direct response is quickly becoming a great way to increase response of both digital and traditional direct marketing.
Direct marketers are excited about the personalization opportunity that mobile marketing offers. There is good opportunity when using other direct marketing channels include direct mail, print advertising can become interactive in seconds through mobile cell phone devices.
Your Marketing Plan
Your campaigns should be organized in a marketing plan set objectives and goals, estimate your average lifetime value of a new customer and have back-end products and services that you can sell for increased profit potential.
A newer technology is mobile bar-codes your customers would use their cellphone camera to launch a Web site or initiate a phone call or text message.
Dell had great success with leveraging mobile media to reach small business owners this audience is likely to have Internet access on their mobile device and are more likely to be college educated and work full-time.
This audience is growing each day because of developed nations like China. India and Europe could include a 15 billion web searches via mobile phone.
When planning a mobile marketing campaign:
- Make things simple for prospects or customers and give them something of value in return for opting in
- Prospects are more likely to give an email than a cell phone in a opt-in offer
That could be a promotional offer, a chance to win, always test different tactics and learn about what works and what doesn’t. Testing will improve response rates, conversions and return on investment.
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Oppotunity Seekers Mailing Lists
There’s different kinds of authors…
the kind that write a book and have no back-end, others that write a book to sell a product and the one’s that write one book and have no back-end.
So you can go to authors that have no back end and tie up the rights to use their buyers if they sell direct response either by direct mail or online. The topic of the book that people are buying is the lead for all kinds of other more expensive products or services.
Authors don’t know how to market
You can go to authors and make deals for their products that you could sell to other companies that are looking for value added products something that will make them look different than the competition.
You match up the authors book with a product or service with the exact same synergy and it becomes the offer. If you write a book about sex and fitness, sell it as a premium to someone selling exercise equipment to middle aged baby-boomers. A book looking younger with whiter healthy teeth cold be sold to a dentist.
You can go to authors and make deals for products that you could sell to other companies who are looking for value added differentiating products.
Front end sellers
Investment products like tapes, podcasts and seminars these are all the front end are products and we find people selling investment books and newsletters and you would ti-up mailing list with attendees of financial seminars and the investment seminar buyers we would make available to people that sell the books.
Reactivation is powerful
Every business that has buyers and sellers and a number of subscribers or members that lapsed and need reactivation. This becomes a separate profit center since you can reactivate so you’re trying to figure out who has a market or a list of buyers, prospects, members, subscribers, or email list enthusiasts that have made an impact and loyalty to the person.
Then you try to find somebody who has a product or service that would be beneficial to that market and you have to make sure that the valued and desired.
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Author Biography: My professional direct marketing experience began in magazine circulation management from this I honed my skills in list purchasing, testing, and analyzing. I learned the importance of direct response planning and budget forecasting and most importantly, providing a follow-up with back-end analysis, fulfillment of orders and inquiries. I also gained some valuable job experience with Jackson National Life Insurance as Marketing Database/Direct Mail area and with Alumni Association of the University of Michigan as Membership Manager.
Sincerely,
Tim Little
“Direct Marketing Strategies” How DUNKIN’ DONUTS’ takes Direct Marketing To Next Level
How Dunkin’ Donuts’ makes its brand unique in a ultra competitive market!
How to make yourself unique when you have two of the most successful world franchises McDonald’s and Starbucks breathing down your neck for more market share.
Dunkin Donuts sells more than a billion cups of coffee per year in a very competitive market. Direct response advertising
gives Dunkin Donuts the perfect opportunity to talk to it’s customers about their unique selling proposition (USP) quality and great value.
Their USP is to serve the freshest most delicious coffee and donuts quickly and with courtesy. This is how you set yourself apart from the competition.
Developing loyalty with price in a poor economy
Dunkin Donuts is not only involved in CRM loyalty and digital marketing but also mobile, online social media and online promotions. One of the strongest areas of success is Dunkin Donuts leap into mobile direct response marketing with built in SMS platform which has been able to test and pilot it’s direct marketing.
It has new platforms uses for customizing local offers in real time and distribution via opt-in mobile marketing.
The mobile marketing also gets their foot in the door with social networking and communications. With specialized online software Dunkin Donuts was able to be either online or mobile in which a person can reach out to friends and colleagues and tell them they’re making a Dunkin Donuts run.
Using mobile coupons to redeem special offers that can be redeemed by employees at Dunkin Donuts by showing the coupon stored on cell phone.
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Social Media
Currently Dunkin Donuts is online with social media and has more than 1 million fans on Facebook and about 40,000 followers on Twitter this is ran by Dunkin Dave that has developed a personality and style that keeps loyal customers coming back.
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Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition – Direct Marketing Strategy
How to set yourself a part from the 1000 other Websites selling the same widget
What does Wal Mart, Domino’s and Lenscrafters all have in common that sets them apart from their competition?
A Unique Selling Proposition
Wal Mart is always the lowest price, Domino’s is 30 minutes or its free and LensCrafters glasses in about an hour. Because they were the first to discover they own the proposition. Their position may not always be true but people believe it and they all raised the bar for their competition and now the competition must meet customers high expectations of their position.
Why should your customer buy from you?
With the unique selling proposition (USP) it will help the cusomer to clarify what your selling position is or the proposition is, but the integration is where it becomes the powerful tool. Integration into the headline of your Website and customer emails.
Making product innovation and things like that are unique for your product or service, it’s hard to do. you must find the ability to differentiate your product. It might be in the service area. It might be a guarantee.
You should brainstorm with the company founder or company staff this is your focus group with the owner and the staff. This is your questionnaire that you can use in determining a USP the company USP.
So, you might conduct a focus groups. Get their perspective of what the USP is. Try to get the perspectives from owners, sales, production, operations, accounting – all departments if you can. Ask the question, “Why dopeople do business with you?” Then, you see USP form there for the owner and the staff.
These are questions that help you solicit answers about a USP see how we’ve taken it and broken
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Time to start planning your strategic direct mail marketing campaigns.
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“Direct Marketing Stategy” – Segmentation
Segmentation
Your customers expect and demand a focused message relating to their needs.
Today’s competitive marketplace demands relevancy if your message doesn’t connect with your prospect in less than a second than your marketing message will go to waste.
Know Your Customer
Knowing who your customers are and what they need is a requirement to compete in today’s competitive online world.
What makes direct marketing different than other forms of advertising is database marketing both online and off.
Marketers that are able to successfully measure, segment and analyze the thousands of customer transactions in optimal ways
will a realize significant competitive advantage.
The proper use of customer information and segments will benefit both you and your customers.
Customers should perceive the information and offers they receive from your company as a benefit.
Build relationships with your prospective customers.
How do you build a relationship with your customer?
Through the segmentation of your marketing database. You can start with personalization of the data that you collected about your prospect over time and through tracking their behavior.
Not too long ago, I was shopping for music online. I even put a track or two in my shopping cart, but decided to leave the site before placing the order.
When I revisited the site a few days later I was offered a discount on three other Frank Sinatra hits from the 60’s and I was provided additional information on iTunes. This was an unexpected benefit and made my shopping experience easier.
Finally, the other day I received an email from iTunes offering me the whole Frank Sinatra collection in Las Vegas if I acted immediately.
This business is providing me a valuable service based on my purchasing selections and targeting my music preferences by segmenting my behavior and historical transactions on it’s Website.
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