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!).

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

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!

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!

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!

As you probably know, we are really intrigued by the idea and use of social media as part of your direct marketing strategy. Last month, we attended the BlogWorldExpo. Wow! Talk about ROI – we attended several great sessions each and learned from some of the social media pioneers on how to successfully integrate social media into the DM toolkit. We thought that the savvy direct marketers who read our monthly newsletter might be interested in some of our key takeaways from the conference.

Here are some interesting points to ponder as you determine how to get started:

• Creating a company blog allows you to demonstrate and discuss your core strengths to both your existing customers, as well as to potential prospects. And it allows them to effectively interact with you — thus, allowing you to build stronger customer relationships.
• You can effectively build your customer base through building a community online. At the same time, you are also building the reputation of your business through an effective and thought-provoking blog.
• You can add to your profitability by effectively leveraging your blog and building your online community.
• Utilizing social media to create open and honest dialog with your online community will help to create credibility for your company. It also can establish you as the company with the expertise that serves a particular industry best.
• Social media is transparent — so be aware of this. If your corporate culture isn’t healthy, sooner or later this will come through loud and clear to your online community. On the other hand, if you have a healthy and positive corporate culture, this will also come through and will be of huge benefit. Through your online community, your customers will have a better chance of understanding what you are all about — and this builds customer loyalty.
• Finally, use controversy in your posts – but never use it to evoke anger. Your posts live forever! Don’t write anything that you think that — when calmer minds prevail — you’ll wish you hadn’t.

We hope that these ideas will help you to begin to consider how you can build social media into your marketing strategy. We feel pretty strongly that by embracing this channel today, you’ll be setting yourself up for success in the future. Now that we’ve learned so much about it, we wish we’d begun years ago.

We’ll update you from time to time on how social media is helping us to build our business, in the hopes that we may be able to spark a Big Idea for you and your business. Conversely, if you’d like to talk with us about how you may begin to integrate social media into your company’s strategy, just give us a call at (503) 206-5255. We’d love to help you build your online community and create profitable customer relationships.

Think back to the holidays last year when your Aunt Rachel came up to you and said, “Now what is it you’re doing these days, dear? Are you still responsible for all of that (insert proper expletive) junk mail in my mailbox?”

Uh-huh. That’s what us Direct Marketing types get all of the time. Well, a new study has just been done by Commtouch (as reported by DM News). And guess what . . . this holiday season you’ll be blamed for Junk e-mail, too. Yep, Commtouch’s study reports that spam has now reached a whopping 95% of all email sent . . . 95%! The article reports that Commtouch’s “report, entitled ‘Email Threats Trend Report for the third quarter of 2007,’ found that as image spam declined, new kinds of attachment spam such as PDF and Excel spam increased. Pharmaceuticals and sexual enhancers were the most popular spam topics, at 30% and 23%, respectively.”

No wonder e-mail marketing still has such a bad name. But, here’s the deal: When you use e-mail effectively, this is one of the best and cost-efficient channels available in our multi-channel toolboxes. E-mail marketing can be used to supplement direct mail or telemarketing campaigns or it can be used on its own. Either way, we’ve seen this channel respond beautifully when deployed correctly.

So, as direct marketers how do we compete against the 95% of messages that are Spam? We think that there are definitely some best practices to follow when considering an e-mail marketing campaign:

• Templates: As you design your creative, the use of templates is key. This creates familiarity and emphasizes your colors and branding. You need to keep your messages fresh, however.
• Personalization: This is a proven best practice. Using personalization can increase response rates 4-6%. People tend to read the message when it looks as though it was created specifically for them.
• Drive traffic to your website: By utilizing your website, the customer can learn more about your offerings. However, ensure that they end up on a landing page that is relevant to the message.
• Unsubscribe button: Follow the tenets of CAN SPAM to allow those who do not wish to hear from you to unsubscribe easily. This is not only important — it’s the law.

For more on how to create successful e-mail marketing campaigns, we’d be happy to share our white paper on the subject.

And, as the holidays approach, start planning your elevator speech for your family. It’ll make it much easier to deal with post-holiday-dinner decongestion.

As savvy direct marketers, we know that one of our basic principles is effectively targeting to the right audience. Without this, our campaigns will never be a success. Well, we all need to remember those ‘basics’, even when we venture into a new marketing area, such as Viral Marketing.

Recently, this was discussed in an article from WebProNews.com: Viral Marketing Not As Contagious As Thought.

From the article: “When it comes to viral marketing only 15 percent of advertisers reached the goal of prompting consumers to pass along their messages for them in the past year according to a new report from JupiterResearch, “Viral Marketing: Bringing the Message to the Masses.”

Even with the popularity of social media sites like MySpace and YouTube, viral marketing campaigns are consistently proving ineffective in delivering and sustaining a brand over time, mainly because of misdirected tactics.”

Why do so many social campaigns fail? The article cites a common tactic of targeting “influentials” in the hopes of sparking viral behavior. Unfortunately, all too often, the same message is presented to the same group of influentials, regardless of product/brand. Lessoned learned: just as in all other direct marketing channels, different segments respond very differently.

Social marketing experts are starting to figure out that they need to carefully target their market and then make sure that the message is spot-on. It’s only when those things work together that the social marketing campaign has an iota of a chance of going viral.

An example of different behaviors that should be considered when employing a social marketing campaign: “The report found that relatively older online users are more likely than relatively younger users to forward advertising messages to friends or tell friends about ads. With young audiences showing an increased use of social sites, relatively older audiences show an increased use of email, video and should be included in viral marketing campaigns.”

So, it’s key to understand media and channel preferences when planning a social marketing program. We’ve learned that these three things are key to social marketing campaigns:

1. Understand your target market
2. Match your message/offer to your target market
3. Understand media and channel behavior to optimize the campaign

Sound familiar? We direct marketers have the tools, the expertise and the ability to target our audience. We know how to test and how to ‘tweak’ offers/messages until we get the right combination. And, we’re starting to get a handle on channel preferences. Not to pat ourselves on the back, BUT…We direct marketers are ahead of the game. Let’s bring our direct marketing skills to the world of social marketing. Let’s show them how it’s done.

And, to help you in this task, let us know if you’d like the RRW Advanced Segmentation Game-Plan. It contains helpful tips and outlines our approach in customer segmentation and targeting.

Social Marketing is quickly becoming the leading edge of Direct Marketing today. We thought you’d be interested in this case study about an up-and-coming winemaker in South Africa who has built an extremely effective marketing strategy around Social Marketing.

Stormhoek Winery is forecasting sales of an astounding 350,000 cases of wine this year internationally — up from 10,000 sold locally last year — and this increase is solidly due to the success of owner Graham Knox’s social marketing campaign. This article states that “Knox — a former advertising whiz — knew he wouldn’t sell wine in an already saturated market by putting pictures of the product on billboards or in magazines. ‘Wine is social, people like to talk about wine, so we needed to figure out how to get people talking,’ he says. ‘Since ancient times word of mouth has been the most powerful means of communication.’ “

So what was Knox’s strategy? He enlisted the help of Hugh McLeod (aka the most influential blogger in Britain), and used social marketing to build awareness. Here’s how he did it: “In between designing quirky cartoon-style labels for Sauvignon Blanc and Shiraz, McLeod began blogging about Stormhoek, realising how easy it could be to create a buzz in cyberspace, which would then translate into profit. He offered a free bottle of wine with a personalised label to the first 100 people in the UK, France and Ireland who would include Stormhoek in their blogs.” Brilliant! Simultaneously, the winery started sponsoring “geek dinners, providing free wine in the hope that people would go home and write about it. They did. The idea spread like a virus and soon Stormhoek was the drink of choice among the smartest, most tech-savvy crowd in the UK.”

Social Marketing is here to stay. By creating a buzz around our products and services, we can enlist the power of our most loyal customers to more effectively sell them. It’s an idea whose time has come and we predict that those who embrace it quickly have the opportunity to reap some great rewards. Consider Knox’s answer to the question, ‘Is this the future of marketing?’ ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘It’s interactive, it’s inexpensive and it has a more potential reach than anything else.’

RRW has written several posts in our Direct Marketing Blog on this topic. They may spark some good ideas.

Targeting Essential To Viral Marketing
Social Media: Will it Replace E-mail?
Why do you blog?
Making Social Marketing Mobile
Using Web 2.0 to Expand Reach
Using Mobile Marketing for Social Networking
Social Shopping: The Next In Thing

We welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your marketing strategy. Just call us at (503) 206-5255, or visit our website.

One of our most commented-on blog posts last month was one that tackles the age-old question of: How important is customer retention? Did Sprint Nextel do the right thing when they ‘fired’ some of their most needy customers?

RRW holds a strong belief that business strategy must be based on customer profitability. We’re forever preaching to our clients that it makes no sense whatsoever to implement programs that acquire unprofitable customers. And, we’re always trying to push them to direct retention efforts to customer segments that are highly profitable.

Yet, we continue to be amazed at how few companies really have a handle on value or customer profitability.

On the other hand, we are huge proponents of top-notch customer service. We believe that if you treat your customers right then they’ll respond in turn with high loyalty. Heck, they may even become evangelists and spew your praises to all of their friends and family, if you treat them the right way.

That’s why it’s been so tough to develop an opinion on the recent Sprint decision to dump some of their high maintenance clients. This article in Washington Post, however, firmed up our opinion. Sprint Nextel Defends Cutting Customers.

We believe Sprint made the right decision, IF you’re only looking at the decision in terms of profitability, or even from a service perspective. Those 1,000 or so customers that Sprint Nextel chose to cut were making 40-50 calls each month to customer service. Clearly this wasn’t the right fit (and they may just be kinda wacky to begin with–who has the time to make 50 calls a month??). Handling those calls was certainly detracting from legitimate customer issues.

However, look at all the bad press that this customer-firing incident has caused Sprint Nextel. When you consider that, overall, their subscriber base is more than 50 million customers, how much impact could servicing 1,000 pesky customers really have?

Then, balance service requirements to handle 1,000 wacky customers against the bad press generated from this incident.

Did they do the right thing, overall? The jury is still out, in my opinion. And, it will always be tough to balance the need to retain customers against the requirement that customers be profitable.

We’ve spent some time thinking about ways to obtain that balance, and have put together an Idea Paper that illustrates one way to focus retention efforts only on profitable customer segments. It also includes some other retention tactics that you may find interesting. Let us know if you’d like these ideas. We’d be happy to share.

Of course, if you’d prefer to chat with us directly about your marketing strategy, just call us at (503) 206-5255, or visit our website: www.rrwconsulting.com for more info.