When I first got into Marketing, it was product-focused. As market technology became more prevalent - first as Database Marketing, then as CRM - the insights forced a shift to becoming customer-focused. And that made sense - and produced a lot of revenue.

I’ve been pondering the customer-focus with the advent and expansion of social media. Advances in crawling, text mining, and aggregation tools have brought us as close to one-to-one marketing as we’ve ever been. So that got me to thinking, if we truly know who the customer is, then isn’t it time to tell them about our products?

Think about it. We became customer focused because we didn’t know much about the customer. Now that we know so much more, perhaps we should try to sell them something too. After all, if we know so much let’s just tell them about our products and services.  Just a thought.

For more inquisitive insight, visit me at the DMA in October- Booth #1204

About six months ago I returned a call to a customer who asked to speak with me.  This customer works for a small agency that typically buys various types of data from AccuData.  The call went something like this:

Customer:  “I’d like to keep working with AccuData but a competitor is offering a loyalty program if I go with them.”

Me:  “I certainly would like to keep serving your company, tell me about the program.”

Customer:  “It’s a points program and I can cash in points for things I want or that my company needs.”

Me:  “Can you please give me an example?”

Customer:  “They have a cookie of the month club…”

Buying direct marketing services = cookies? 

It struck me then that as far as loyalty programs go, the bar had been set fairly low in the direct marketing services business.  This was the spark that kindled the eventual development of AccuPortal, a set of services and benefits we’ve just launched to help our reseller customers.

Click here to read the press release.

We wanted to build something that would materially help our reseller customers thrive as well as reward them for their business.  AccuPortal offers our customers proven sales and marketing tools and data cards – all of which can be customized and private labeled.  The system offers professional sales training as good as anything offered by any of the well known sales training consultants out there.

Beyond this, we’ve introduced the industry’s first Money-Back Data Guarantee and AccuCash, our own loyalty program.  But AccuCash pays just that – cash, not cookies.

I’ll report back on progress we’re having enrolling members and maybe we’ll be able to get a customer or two to offer up a case study or two to demonstrate how this tool increased their business.

Consider a general store from the 1800s – the kind of store you might have seen on the Frontier in early 1800s. In those days, this was virtually the only place you could buy supplies. When you walked in, you’d find piles of blankets, bags of wheat and bottles of “snake oil.”

The shopkeeper would know you because it’s the only place in town. He would know what you bought, how much you bought and how you paid — he even knew your family. In fact, the clerk knew ALL about you because you lived in a small town and bought everything you needed at the store; furthermore, the shopkeeper was a prominent figure in town, right in the middle of all the town gossip.

Of course, there were no computers but he DID have a ledger book, which held the account balances for everyone in town — in those days, folks were able to buy on credit just like we do today. But this was a smart shopkeeper and there was much more in the ledger. I’ve seen several 1800s-era ledger books. One held a variety of notations about customers, like their likes and dislikes, their children’s birthdays, even a notation about a customer’s horse that had died (“might need new tack”).

In essence I was looking at a 1800s-style customer database and a really comprehensive 360-degree customer profile. But more importantly, the shopkeeper was able to interact with each customer on the shop floor, using all the information available in real time.

Three points:

1. What many of us are trying to do today — craft personalized communications and understand our customer — is literally a concept and practice that has been around as long as merchants have been doing business.

2. What changed over time was the scale of commerce and hence the complexity of what we now call “database marketing” or “CRM” across thousands and even millions of customers.

3. Although the technology needed to collect and manage data at this scale developed, particularly since 1995, marketers have generally NOT been able to make the data usable on the shop floor. The “marketing data” was typically not made operational because of a missing link between the data in the back-end marketing database and the shop floor. In the case of the general store the linkage was there - because the shopkeeper managed the data in the ledger and interacted with the customers.

Here is an example of how this linkage can work today, although VERY few companies are doing it:

I recently boarded a plane, as I’ve done hundreds of times. The flight attendant approached me just after takeoff to offer me a small bottle of champagne and thank me for attaining elite flight status. Wow! Now of course I had received a mailing from the airline — the direct marketing team had done their job well. They knew I achieved the flight status, ran a “trigger” campaign, and mailed me a nice thank-you note. I was able to board early due to my flight status, which of course is great. But emotionally, these benefits paled in comparison to that little bottle of champagne and the in-plane thank you.

In this case, the airline extended its customer data, and my flight status in particular, to the airplane and created an in-plane program to make the data operational. This is hard to do and I only had this experience once. But some companies are all about developing real-time, operational database marketing programs. Casinos for example (maybe I’ll talk about this in another post).

How do you do it?

In most cases, the marketing database exists, as does the customer facing POS and other systems. What’s missing is simply the linkage between the two and this is where web services come in. Today it’s quite straightforward to develop web services that link “back-end” customer databases to front line systems.

This approach allows data-enabled operational programs like:

1. Distributing coupons online or through the mail and then monitoring redemptions in real time, providing data to yet other real-time CRM trigger programs

2. Creating data-enabled experiences on planes, hotel rooms, restaurants

3. Linking to social media campaigns, like recording Facebook enrollments and reacting via email in real time.

This is really fun stuff.

Wow, 2010! The New Year has always been my favorite time of year for business –it’s a time of renewal and excitement for the future.  We all get a fresh start on January 1^st.

Or do we?

The boom is over – and boom-time companies, executives and marketers are done if they don’t have what it takes to survive in the new economy.

Most economists believe the country is out (or nearly out) of recession and that we’ll see some growth this year.  But recovery isn’t the only story we’re likely to hear about in 2010.  If you are a student of business history you know there is something very interesting going on – something that has already reshaped industries across all sectors and will continue to do so all year long.

Frankly, for some companies it wasn’t hard to make money during the boom.  While some companies and executives certainly did better than others, success was evident in abundance.  New ideas were easily embraced by investors and consumers.  The bar for marketers was low – everything worked and delivered sky high ROI!

Not anymore.  Now it’s time for the real stars to emerge.

Companies without a clear competitive advantage and sound management won’t make it.  Marketers can’t just throw money at the problem; products and services must have compelling value, quality marketing and delivery to succeed.

If you don’t believe me think Pontiac or Circuit City and countless other mid-sized and small businesses whose storefronts were shuttered all over America.  I’ll wager that many of the superstar CMO’s from the past decade won’t make it in the next.  Now it’s about strategy, planning, sharp pricing, distribution, etc. and these things are hard.

Now is the time to get smart – while you still can.

There are a host of great service companies, including AccuData that can help.  Now is the time to reach out, challenge your thinking and see if you can find better services at better prices.  If you don’t use services, you should seriously consider it.  Service companies can spot trends across industry sectors well in advance – they deal with hundreds, even thousands, of companies.  It’s sometimes easier to spot opportunities from this vantage point.

I promise that your competition (and your colleague down the hall) is thinking hard about this.  They are making a move.  You don’t want to be standing still when they run past you.

It’s interesting to me to see what direct mail I’m getting these days.  I’m getting more of it than I have for about a year.  Signs of a recovering economy?  Maybe I’m just a sucker for mail and I’m tagged in everyone’s database?  

The more I read about the slow demise of direct mail, shifting marketing dollars to online media and the drama unfolding in Washington related to the U.S. Postal Service the  more I scrutinize the direct mail I get.   What am I getting?  Who is sending it?  Are mailers doing anything interesting to improve response rates and ROI?

Since much of the pressure on direct mail is due to a shift in marketing spending to email from direct mail, AccuData has no stake in the outcome.  We sell data and services around direct mail.  We also sell data and services around email as well as mobile and other emerging channels.  We’re multi-channel, channel agnostic.  But as a direct marketer with 15+ years in the game direct mail is something I love.

So I’ve been keeping some of the interesting mail I get and I’m going to blog about what I’m seeing.  For now a few high level observations:

- Most pieces are just sad.  Paper so thin I can read the letter and see the offer (if there is an offer…yikes!) without even opening the envelope, nothing new, no personalization.  Cost cutting all the innovation out of the mail.

-An exception was a recent piece I received for the Visa Black Card.  I’m not sure the product works for me (no airline lounge benefit) but a well crafted piece.  I opened it and read it all the way through.

-A few mailers doing amazing things with data and personalization.  I’m stunned how few companies think about mail like they might email and leverage inexpensive ways to inject relevant data and personalization into their packages.

The industry talks about deteriorating response rates and ROI.  There are many factors driving this.   But I see a stunning lack of innovation and effort as key components of the problem.  Marketers with a good product, thoughtful targeting and creative, solid DM fundamentals and some innovation are doing well if not VERY well. 

Please let me know if you have recently received a really good direct mail piece.