Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Moving From Marketing to Insight
September 12, 2008

Last time, I provided eight steps to improving your marketing in this tough economic climate, drawn from a white paper from The Peppers & Rogers Group. This time, I want to focus in on one of the conclusions from that list. It is the need to move from “data” to “insight.”

It’s pretty much a no brainer. The more insight you have into customer behavior, the more relevant your communications will be and the more profitable your marketing will be. But many of the best practices cited in white papers and case studies seem so out of reach to all but the biggest companies.

They don’t have to be. That’s where a little ingenuity comes in. It just require the ability to look at the principles involved and say, “How do I accomplish a similar (if more modest) goal on a smaller scale?”

Bring Your Ingenuity

Here’s a good example. The white paper reports,

According to a CustomerSat survey released in May 2007, sales and marketing executives have a looser handle on the reasons customers stay with their companies than they did five years ago. This is despite the fact that more customer data is available. More than 71 percent of all sales and marketing executives surveyed in the report have “no process” for identifying lost or inactive customers, and 68 percent have no process for predicting how customers will behave before switching to a competitor.

Okay, what can you do with this information? Maybe you aren’t going to download your entire customer database to a data analytics firm and have them do a data asset analysis. But you can send out customer surveys on a regular basis or after each job and keep tabs on the pulse of your clients.

For example, one printing service provider uses personalized URLs to execute customer satisfaction surveys at the end of each job. It starts with fully personalized postcards that direct recipients the survey using their own personalized URLs. Each invite contains customer’ contact information and mailing address, job-specific personalized URL, and description relevant to each job.

Once a week, data on all active print jobs is pulled and variable card files are composed and mailed. Incentives, such as dining gift cards, are provided as incentives to respond. On average, the printer produces 86 cards per week and achieves an average 93% response rate. As a result, it has been able to track the satisfaction of its client sand address areas for improvement when necessary.

An incidental result is an increase in print jobs, which the printer attributes to the fact that customers feel that the company really cares about them and takes their comments seriously.

(Source: Print on Demand Initiative Case Study Database)

Practical, Realistic—Doable

This is a very real, very practical application of the principle of getting to know your customer. If you can’t afford to send mailers after every job or every visit, send them monthly. Send them quarterly. Or just send them to customers who haven’t done business with you in the past six months or a year.

Whatever you do, the point is to do something. Start looking to understand your customers—not just market to them. It takes a little extra effort, but it will reap dividends in the long term.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at info@digitalprintingreports.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, Web-to-print, and personalized URL applications, visit Digital Printing Reports. You can also keep up with all of my posts on EBS, The Inspired Economist ("Greening Print Marketing"), and other blog sites by following me on Twitter.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on September 12, 2008 | Comments (0)