The Importance of Customer Service

August, 2008

Excellent Customer Service: It’s so important…

As you know, RRW focuses on direct marketing. Yet, in order to make any direct marketing project successful, so many other pieces of the puzzle need to be in place.

For example, if, say, you have horrible customer service, then no matter how awesome your direct marketing campaign may be–no matter how many calls you generate–your sale will never happen if the prospect is treated poorly when they call you.

Hence, today’s focus on customer service.

Zappos: An example

Some months ago, we wrote about the corporate culture at Zappos in our Direct Marketing Blog. In a nutshell, they make doing business fun! They also empower their employees to keep their customers happy. Zappos has taken customer service to a level that most firms can only dream of.

Well, I continue to be amazed and impressed by this online shoe retailer. I found this article from Harvard Business that explores one innovative reason why Zappos is able to maintain and cultivate their culture of excellence.

They are so committed to retaining committed and dedicated employees that they are willing to bet $1,000 on each new hire. From the article:

“After a week or so in this immersive (training) experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)”

What a novel and smart idea. I’d be willing to bet that the $1,000 is a drop in the bucket if you consider money, sales and time lost if a non-engaged employee is working with your clients. And, remember that we’re talking about customer service/call center jobs here. That $1,000 is a lot of money to all of us and a big chunk of change to these employees.

I think the challenge here is to think about new ways that we can change our business. How can we go outside of what others are doing to reach new levels of excellence?

RRW Marketing Info: Our way of providing value

While it’s certainly not on the same level as offering each of you $1,000, we’d like to invite all of you to check out our revamped library of white papers. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and writing, about current and upcoming trends in the direct marketing industry, and we’d love to share the info with you. Of course, if you’d like to chat about your specific direct marketing challenges, please call us at (503) 206-5255, or for more information on the company, visit our website (which has also been newly revamped, by the way!).

Understanding Generational Traits

July, 2008

A key dimension to customer segmentation

It’s so very important (and quite interesting, too) to understand how generational attributes need to be considered when marketers are developing campaigns. If your goal is to make sure that your message resonates with your target audience (and let’s face it, that’s a key goal for any direct marketing program), then you absolutely cannot ignore generational attributes.

I thought I would share two perspectives on two different generations.

The first perspective on using generational attributes in marketing comes to us from Precision Marketing: Marketing messages ‘irrelevant’ for over 50s (must sign up at their site to read entire article). It discusses how so many marketers are missing the boat when it comes to targeting the mature market.

“The mature market is being neglected and misrepresented by marketers, with over 60 per cent of the over 50s believing that advertising aimed at them presents them as infirm or immobile.”

Contrary to many common beliefs, the research also showed that online shopping is the preferred channel for Seniors.

So, if your market is an older one, you absolutely cannot ignore interactive and social marketing. You also need to remember that this group considers themselves vital and full of life–not infirm. I guess 50s are the new 30s!

And, then from the opposite side of the scale, this Q&A from USA Today provides some insight on how to market to Gen X and Gen Y’ers (more commonly known as Millenials). The title says it all: Avoid hard sell when marketing to younger generations.

If your market includes people born between 1965 and 1994 (14 to 43-year-olds), you need to understand that this is a cynical group that needs to be educated (they love blogs). You need to prove that you understand what you’re doing and be authentic when you do it. Nothing can smell like hype or ’sales’.

“The essential thing then to understand about selling to the new generation of younger adults is that they are Web-savvy, blog-friendly, and, not only do they see through the spin, it turns them off. Your pitch to them has to take all into account.”

Hopefully this information about two huge generational groups will provide some insight as you develop offers, creative and messages.

We’d love to send you more info on the generations!

We’ve put together an overview of the living generations. It provides a description of what each group looks like and is a handy snapshot, almost a cheat-sheet you can use to get quick insight into each generation around today. We’d be happy to send you this Generations Overview.

Let us know if you’d like it, and we’ll send it to you immediately. As always, our White Papers are provided at absolutely no cost

E-Marketing Segmentation

May, 2008
It’s more important than ever

Marketing Sherpa recently held their e-mail marketing summit in Miami. On our Direct Marketing Blog, we reported on all 12 of the key takeaways from this conference because we found them so compelling.

We wanted to highlight one of the key takeaways in this months’ newsletter to bring this point home: It’s time for e-mail marketers to start including segmentation as part of every campaign. The side benefit–with e-mail the results can be analyzed so quickly that you get the instant gratification of knowing that your analytical work is, indeed, working.

Key Summit Takeaway: Segmentation grows on e-mailers: With marketers feeling better about getting their emails into in-boxes, it wasn’t surprising to hear them talk more about the next steps of executing successful campaigns — like subject lines, body copy and segmentation. The issues of segmentation and relevancy were — by hook or by crook — party to nearly every discussion heard during the three days. And an increasing number of marketers are splintering their lists into up to 12 or 14 different files.

The focus has shifted to relevancy and the importance of segmentation,’ says Jayne Lytel, Executive Director, The Early Intervention Network. ‘It’s almost more important to have a smaller list than to have a huge list that is not performing as well. I plan to go back and clean our lists and segment it better, while not taking the one-size-fits-all approach.

We have a Game-Plan that may help

And, we’d be happy to share!

We’ve spent a lot of time developing our segmentation strategy that has been successfully implemented with some key clients. We’d be happy to share the RRW Advanced Segmentation Game-Plan that provides our tactical approach on developing and implementing a winning Customer Segmentation strategy.

Let us know if you’d like it, and we’ll send it to you immediately. As always, our White Papers are provided at absolutely no cost.

Or, if you’d prefer to chat about your segmentation challenges, give us a call at 503 206 5255 and let’s see if RRW can help you out!

New Venture for RRW!

March, 2008

We wanted to share our new adventure–one that we’re sure brings lots of value to the direct marketing industry. In a nutshell, we’ve enhanced our analytical capabilities and are proud to introduce a brand-new website that highlights these RRW Solutions.

We really felt that there was a lack of a service that could bring analytical services to direct marketers of all shapes and sizes, big and small, featuring analytics that are fully customized and some off-the-shelf products. Hence, we launched Analyze Your Customers that focuses on three core areas:

1. Customer Profiling
2. Modeling for Profit
3. Custom Segmentation Solutions

Customer Profiling Services
We’re especially proud of the Customer Profiling package we’ve created. We deliver a comprehensive report package that analyzes your customers in terms of consumer attributes such as demographics, purchase history and real estate characteristics. For businesses, we report on size, type and other key business traits.

It’s an economical way to get important insight about your customer base.

A sample page follows, but we’d be happy to share a complete report sample that will show you exactly what you’ll receive with this industry-leading profiling solution.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about this new service. And, of course, if you have any analytical projects in your pipe-line, give us a call at 310 206-5255 and let’s see if RRW can help you out!

Direct Marketing Segmentation Ideas

January, 2008

As we work with our clients, it becomes more and more apparent that having a segmentation strategy remains very important. RRW believes that if you employ a creative, yet practical segmentation strategy, you’ll reap some serious benefits. Today, we wanted to give you an overview of our thought-process on this concept. In our humble opinions, if you use analytics, smart business sense and tactical/practical deployment, you’ll implement segmentation that will measurably boost your direct marketing results.

Here’s our (abbreviated) Checklist for Effective Direct Marketing Segmentation:

1. It’s all in the Analytics! It’s important to have an analyst who not only knows statistics, but who also has an excellent grasp on real business needs and objectives. Oftentimes, we’ve seen our customers engage really intelligent statisticians who don’t understand what the business is attempting to accomplish. This is a recipe for disaster and a lot of wasted time and money. Statistics alone don’t get you a lot. Additionally, if you have to take your valuable time to figure out how to utilize them — or force them to fit your business scenario — it equates to a lot of lost effort and frustration.

2. Make It Actually Work. Sometimes, if you don’t plan correctly, segmentation systems are too complicated to actually use. I know, logic tells us that we are too smart to allow this to happen — but we’ve seen really bright people who didn’t put enough forethought into how they were going to use their segmentation schemes, and were actually stymied as to how to make them work once they were delivered. Start simply — and ensure that you’ve mapped out the important business factors that will drive your segmentation schemes. Ensure that you’re not over-customizing or making your system overly complex because, we’ve seen that when this happens, the segmentation systems sit on the shelves and never get used because they are so difficult to understand and implement.

3. Now, Use Your Segmentation Schemes! Now that you’ve gotten the insight from your business-savvy analyst, and she’s provided you with a system that is simple — yet accurate — it’s time to have some fun! Perhaps you’ll start with tweaking a couple of your creatives to better speak to those segments that are found to be most highly profitable. Look at who your customers are and figure out how to best get your message to them — and to have them react to it in a positive way.

It’s really that simple. If you put some thought into who you use and what direct marketing problem that you want to solve through the creation of a solid segmentation scheme, you are going to be able to more accurately speak to those customers and prospects with the important messages about your products or services. We’ve seen some great successes with our clients when we’ve worked with them on building intelligent segmentation schemes. This can prove to be highly profitable — because you are marketing intelligently and using the right messaging for each customer segment.

If you’d like to read our full white paper on this subject, we’d be happy to e-mail the RRW Advanced Segmentation Game-Plan to you immediately. Or just give us a call at 503-206-5255 to discuss your specific segmentation strategy. We’d love to help you develop your own game-plan.

Happy New Year to All!