Marketers Set to Strengthen Customer Focus in 2009
After speaking to several technology vendors at DMA08 last week about business trends in the current economic downturn, it seems as though either marketers plan to focus more on customers, or the technology vendors that provide their customer relationship tools are just remaining hopeful.
The bottom line is everyone agrees that it's more important than ever to allocate investments and capital spending on strategies that can be measured in the long term, such as customer relationships.
"We are seeing a trend away from broad spending and toward spending spent more correctly," said Denise Hopkins, vice president of Product Marketing and Development at Experian. "It's about making sense of if you're optimizing every dollar you're spending--understanding who the consumers are, how you will treat them, and doing it in a multichannel way."
Stephan Dietrich, president of Neolane, said that he sees marketers taking the multichannel approach to the next level and integrating the data across the channels. "We see a major shift in the organization moving from multichannel to cross channel."
H.A. Schade, director of products at Unica, agrees. He's seeing companies working hard to integrate their marketing channels. "The age-old pressures that marketing face are only becoming more important in the current economic times," he said.
At Nielsen Claritas, Michelle FauntLeRoy, assistant vice president of segmentation and product management, said that marketers really need to look at the long-term ROI. "They have to ask, 'how can I acquire customers who will give me long-term value?'"
Blaine Mathieu CMO of Lyris, said his company hasn't seen any drop-off in customers and plans on seeing continuous investments in the company's integrated email marketing suite. But Mathieu sees the marketing trends next year exploding beyond email to include SMS. "2009 is when we'll go into it in a real way. Marketers will continue to focus on doing cool, new stuff...there are untapped opportunities," he said.
Chris Cottle, vice president of corporate marketing at Allegiance, said he expects to see an uptick in feedback collection and management. "We'll see companies managing engagement like an asset," he said. "For a medium-size business, having a 1 percent increase can be millions of extra dollars."
Dave Lewis, CMO of Message Systems, advised companies to use this economic downturn as a chance to position themselves. "It's a time to build market share," he said. "If you're strategically making investments and you are spending money, you will do well. This is the time when you have to be more concerned about the customers."
And finally Epsilon CMO Steve Cone's thoughts should give us all hope. He said his company is doing more email business than ever before and he's seeing an increase in loyalty programs among his customers. "People never cut back in communicating with the customer," he said.
