Email Marketing's Wasted Opportunity
John Wanamaker's quip about half of his advertising budget being wasted could be coming back to haunt email marketers.
John Wanamaker's quip about half of his advertising budget being wasted could be coming back to haunt email marketers.
You may have heard, "Assign a 20-something to monitor your brand mentions on social media sites." This generalization could be highly damaging to a company's customer relationship experience, marketing effectiveness, and its bottom line.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger David Dalka: Social Media -- A State of Mind, Not an Age" »
One of the primary benefits of all the conversations happening online is the insight available as a result. Companies can "listen in" to what customers, prospects, analysts, and others are saying about their products or services, their competitors, trends, and more. The catch is figuring out what to track and who in the company should track it.
Continue reading "Social Listening: Who's Listening to What?" »
Anyone who tuned in last Thursday for the premiere of NBC's comedy Outsourced about an American company that outsourced its call center to India, was treated not only to some Indian stereotypes, but to some contact center misconceptions as well.
Ben Rappaport is Todd Dempsy, who returns from management training to find that the entire call center at Mid America Novelties has been laid off. He moves to India to manage the new contact center where he encounters a group of Indian call center misfits. He has his work cut out for him, and begins training them on crafting American accents and upselling "fake pooh."
Continue reading "NBC's "Outsourced" Perpetuates 5 Call Center Myths" »
Companies considering whether to advertise on social networks face a mixed market: Some consumers are leery of ads within social networks; others think social networks are the perfect place to advertise.
Legislative, technological and market forces have dramatically altered the direct marketing landscape. Larry Kimmel, the recently-named CEO of the Direct Marketing Association, shares his views on the key challenges and opportunities faced by direct marketing leaders.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: The Changing Face of Direct Marketing" »
A superior customer experience motivates most customers to buy more, stay longer, and refer friends or associates. So, yes, customer experience not only matters, it can provide a significant competitive advantage.
Continue reading "Does Customer Experience Really Matter?" »
In the marketing world, many people are focusing on how their brands and companies can take advantage of emerging social media channels. While that is important, email is still a dominant channel and should be given as much attention. The two platforms complement one another, and marketers need to think of email and social media as part of a holistic interaction strategy.
Continue reading "Email Marketing Grows Alongside Social Media" »
"The voice of the customer is an untapped asset," Bruce Temkin said during his keynote as the 2010 Allegiance Engage Summit.
According to Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, not many companies are using true voice of the customer programs, but those that do are at the forefront of customer engagement. He shared three essential elements for harnessing voice of the customer to help improve the customer experience: keep the big picture, master best practices, and make a difference.
Continue reading "Three Essential Elements of the Voice of the Customer " »
Companies deliver a defaulted, unplanned customers experience, then wonder: Why don't customers like us? The truth is, the experience many of you are delivering to your customers today is likely a blueprint of your organization chart.
In the new book "Coolfarming," author Peter Gloor likens leaders of the past to race car drivers, controlling every aspect of the group they lead, setting the precise speed, and steering the corporate car to where they thought it should go. Creative leaders, on the other hand, are like hot air balloon pilots, mapping a direction, assembling a team to help chart the course, and then enjoying whichever direction the course takes.
Continue reading "The 2010 Customer Champions Share Their Inspirations" »
Today may only be the first day of fall, and Halloween paraphernalia may be hogging some store shelves, but it's the holiday season that's already on the minds of email marketers everywhere. The question is, what's your holiday email strategy? Perhaps it's a daily deluge. Or targeted trigger campaigns. Something else?
To get a sense of just how frenzied the M&A market has been recently for analytics and business intelligence software companies, consider the following statistic that was posted in a story about the trend on FT.com on Sept. 20: IBM alone has spent $12 billion on 23 analytics-related acquisitions over the past four years.
Continue reading "How the Analytics Buying Spree Will Affect Marketers" »
Today we're happy to announce the newest group of 1to1 Customer Champions. These 15 executives embrace customer centricity and advocate for customers both internally and externally. Part of what makes them stand out is how they encourage their colleagues and co-workers to do the same.
Hiring has to be one of the toughest jobs out there. Consider the retail store: Most employees are part-time workers, often teenagers--and the ambassadors of the brand. It can a huge challenge to ensure that all of them are equally engaged. But if they're not, can the great service from some offset the poor service from one? Consider this example:
Continue reading "One Bad Apple Don't Spoil the Whole Bunch--or Does It?" »
In a recent conversation with a local real estate agent about her business, I heard her utter a familiar line: "It's all about location! location! location!" Only, she wasn't talking about my future housing needs. Rather, she was commenting on all the changes within digital marketing that are affecting her business. She emphasized how consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones for Internet information, whether to find a new Thai restaurant, a local plumber or, in her case, checking the listing information and mobile Web pages of local real estate agents.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Alan Edgett: Location-Based Services -- Where do you Stand? " »
The fate of brands is a topic of heated discussion these days. Some pundits say marketers need to relinquish control of their company's brand to their engaged consumers. They claim that consumers already have taken control through their use of social media, so why fight it? Others suggest that consumers can influence brand perception, but a company will always control its brand. I say the truth lies somewhere in between.
Brian Curran, recently-named as Vice President of Web Customer Experience Solutions at RightNow, shares how he's drawing upon his background as a customer experience officer at Best Buy and other companies and applying that to his current role.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: Lessons from a Customer Experience Officer" »
The social advantages of the Web have brought companies and customers closer than ever before. Many companies use online communities, contests, and other activities to encourage users to share their opinions about products, services, and brands in general. Some have extended this strategy to product design and even marketing and advertising campaigns. Mountain Dew is the latest company to see the benefits of customer involvement in every step of the product lifecycle.
Continue reading "User-Generated Content Moves to the Marketing Arena " »
We continue to talk about how the marketing landscape is constantly evolving. While all this change offers exciting opportunities, it is also accompanied by tremendous fear. Perhaps the most profound and provocative is the fear of losing control of the brand. It's a reasonable fear. Organizations spend millions of dollars building strong brands and, traditionally, marketers have been the ones in direct command of managing customer touchpoints and shepherding the message.
Now, the voice of the consumer is being amplified like never before. New channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter provide easy outlets for observations, opinion, and debate. Today's marketers recognize that their brands are increasingly controlled by consumers and the often fickle whims of the community. Consumers are commenting, complaining, or raving about brands 24/7. Now more than ever marketers need to react in real time.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Lisa Arthur: Have No Fear, Let Customers Control Your Brand" »
Every time a new something comes along, many rush to proclaim the demise of the old thing. It still happens today.
You'd think that by now people would realize that the old thing is more likely to change than become extinct. TV didn't replace radio; radio's role in entertainment changed. Video didn't replace photography. Heck, the incandescent light didn't even wipe out candles. And there are still people who use the horse and buggy for transportation.
Once upon a time there was certain symmetry to the flow of information between a buyer and a seller. There were, if you like, steps to the dance that were intrinsically understood and accepted by both parties. This symmetry endured even through transformative business cycles such as the dot com period. Sure, email and other technology-driven capabilities allowed new ways of enabling this interaction, but they still did not fundamentally disrupt the equilibrium of this age-old process. The advent, however, of social media, with its democratization of information flow and disintermediation of messengers, has introduced an asymmetry that is becoming truly disruptive.
Sure, there's plenty of chatter online these days, but there's also some great information being shared face to face and at events. Here are a handful of thoughts on customer strategy gathered from the road:
Continue reading "Heard and Overheard: Thoughts on Customer Strategy" »
Location-based marketing might not be a game-changer for companies, but it can definitely enhance organizations' social media marketing efforts.
With marketing budgets still tight, companies might not be willing to invest in location-based advertising. A new study from ABI Research, however, indicates that may change in the coming years. The study reveals that businesses will commit $1.8 billion on location-based advertising in 2015 as part of their overall marketing budgets.
Continue reading "Spending on Location-Based Advertising to Increase" »
I've always been fascinated by cultural differences in people's attitudes and behaviors. A prime example of this is the differences between how business meetings are approached in the U.S. versus Japan.
Continue reading "Delivering on Customers' Regional Preferences" »
This summer, our family vacationed in Italy and Austria. Travel, as I'm sure you will agree, is a very high-involvement experience -- exhilarating when things go well and pretty awful when things go wrong, particularly when you are traveling with family. In preparing for the trip, we relied on traditional guidebooks, as well as customer feedback from a variety of travel sites. In doing so, it struck me that the guidebook companies have diversified and leveraged multiple media types to truly engage with their customers in order to inform and enhance their travel experience.
One sentiment I've heard repeatedly is that delivering customer service via social sites is hard to scale. Some companies are trying to overcome that challenge by using a customer service capability they already have: dynamic routing in the contact center.
Today a call comes in to the contact center and in most cases it's routed to the next available agent based on the issue, the agent's skill level or type, customer value, etc. Many companies also use dynamic routing for email response and web chat sessions. The next step some companies are taking is to try to get tweets and comments from other social sites into the contact center queue.
Continue reading "Connecting the Dots Between Social Media and Customer Service " »
Social media marketing means many things to many people. And as social channels like Facebook and Twitter continue to transform the way people relate to the brands, retailers, and service providers they love (or love to hate), marketers need to look at what social media approaches deliver the biggest bang for the buck. Fans and followers have a value, and engaged happy fans may spread the word and even buy more or renew at a higher rate. But as marketers we also need to make sure our social programs are resulting in actual top-line business results like more sales and greater loyalty.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Allen Bonde: Making the Move to Social Commerce" »
Recent research shows that organizations are leveraging social media to retain loyal customers.
Continue reading "Marketers are Investing in Social Media to Build Loyalty" »
