Guest Blogger Mark Klein: Marketing's Impact on Customer Loyalty in 2011
Customer loyalty is more precarious than ever. As a result, marketers must rethink their approach to customer interaction and engagement by finding new ways to get closer to their customers. Here are six predictions for the evolution of one-to-one marketing over the next year, and why marketers should pay close attention to each.
1. Prediction: Variable Data Publishing (VDP) prices will drop as more printers become comfortable with the technology and how to price it.
Certainty: VDP (or Variable Information, as some now call it) is absolutely essential for true one-to-one marketing.
2. Prediction: More companies will shift a significant percentage of their marketing budget from acquisition to existing customer marketing as customer retention comes closer to customer acquisition as marketers' number one goal.
Certainty: One-to-one is much easier to use when marketing to current customers for retention efforts than for customer acquisition.
3. Prediction: Consumers will become even more dissatisfied with 'spray and pray' marketing and spam, and will primarily patronize vendors that use more relevant communications.
Certainty: Marketers should consider whether to be happy or ashamed that progress toward true one-to-one is driven by our customers, not by marketers themselves.
4. Prediction: Price competition on the Internet will increase the number of often-unprofitable one-time buyers in the active files of many companies, from the current average of 42 percent to 46 percent next year. However, more marketers will recognize that capturing that critical second sale is a significant, actionable revenue opportunity.
Certainty: The low end of your customer spectrum needs one-to-one every bit as much as your better customers, maybe more.
5. Prediction: Senior management will put greater pressure on marketers to increase the performance of their campaigns. The first relief valve will be more automation of routine marketing tasks to free up time for focusing on creative strategy; the second approach will be more use of predictive analytics.
Certainty: Without automation, one-to-one is not feasible; without analytics, one-to-one is not possible.
6.Prediction: The number of companies that use predictive analytics for direct marketing will grow by 15 percent or more; this double-digit growth will change the marketplace and Customer Marketing Management will become a recognizable product category.
Certainty: The number of companies using true one-to-one marketing will grow at a slower rate, because the big obstacle will continue to be lack of knowledge about how to apply the analytics.
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About the Author: Mark Klein is founder and CEO of Loyalty Builders Inc. He blogs at http://www.loyaltybuilders.com/blog
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