CRM and Email Marketing

Since CRM (customer relationship management) is supposed to mean any one or any system that interacts with customers one would logically think that email marketing would be an integral part of any CRM solution.

But it isn’t.

Email marketing has been around as long as email itself has.  Yet most companies who do email marketing for customer retention (up selling and cross selling) or acquisition (acquiring new customers) do so blindly using third party lists or hobbled together lists.   Some may use Templates found on Microsoft’s template section of their website.  Others use a variety of software or internet based solutions — and there same to be a plethora of them out there.

Most companies seem to use the axiom:  throw enough mud on the wall and some of it is bound to stick when sending out corporate marketing emails.

No tracking of the ROI (return on investment).  No knowing if you are “ticking off” your best customers.  No knowing how many hit the SPAM filter.  No knowing how many people get multiple emails from you (annoying them).  Bad email marketing hurts every other aspect of CRM, and does more damage than good.

This is mass emailing.  My friend, Sundeep Kapur (other wise known as the Email Yogi) has been an email marketing guru since around 1999 and he has outlined “Seven Stages of eMarketing” in a  Whitepaper – available, with just a simple request.  The first is exactly what I outlined above:  mass marketing with the hope someone, somewhere will read it.

I don’t want to “give away” everything in Sundeep’s excellent paper, but suffice it to say that email CRM isn’t any different than CRM in general — know thy customer.  You must target your existing customers and potential customers by market segment (customer segmentation), by demographics, by buying history, etc.  None of this is rocket science, but it is all hard work — that results in qualified leads that generate new customers.

The more you can customize the email to the prospect the better.  And if you can make it FUN even better still!

Customer segmentation allows you to target your email messaging.

Once you’ve created an email offer, newsletter, etc. it is a good idea to set up two separate tests with similar, but not identical, offers.  The test audiences must be the same segmentation for this to work.  Try to make an offer that requires a response (buy in) before the scroll down point (above 400 pixels in height) and if this is the first email one of those should be an opt in to get more emails from you.

Design the email using HTML and a plain text file.  If you start getting fancy with CSS or flash — even Java — many email programs won’t read it properly.

When CRM and email marketing work together it is a beautiful thing.    Email marketing can also extend into social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) via RSS and SMS.

Sundeep works for my old boss, NCR — a leader in retail and hospitality solutions.   Software solutions vary based on your own corporate needs (and budget).  RWD uses Constant Contact.  The design of emails is pretty easy, but it isn’t your standard Windows “look and feel” so there is a learning curve and difficulty if you want to copy or paste from it into another program.   They do offer a free 60 day trial, so if you are new to email marketing take a look at them and try them out.

More mid-range companies might look at Gold Lasso.   The UI is also not the easiest to use, but they do have some analytics thrown into the mix.  Also good in the mid-range and even enterprise (big) company range is Responsys.  JupiterResearch awarded Responsys the highest combined score in “market suitability” and “overall business value” among all enterprise-oriented email service providers.  It also ranked high with Forrester and Gartner (in a niche category).  The Enterprise level also includes the market leader, Cheetahmail (now part of Experian).

Cheetahmail is the most entrenched, and it is very feature rich.  The UI (user interface) suffers from some of the same issues as Constant Contact and Gold Lasso.

In a future blog I’d like to delve into how well email marketing soltuions tie into legacy systems (the back end CRM, ERP and industry specific apps which hold the wealth of customer data) — both from a push and pull perspective.

The World is Upside Down

This blog spends a lot of pixels on the topic of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).  How can companies manage their customers.  How can we keep current customers loyal and retain them?  How can we find new customers who will be profitable and love us and stay with us?

Simple answer?

You can’t.

You don’t really manage customers anymore — if you ever did.  Perhaps the idea was always unreasonable.

Customers are people.  Newsflash.

People are unpredictable.  People are not, by nature, loyal.  If they were the divorce rate wouldn’t be at 50%.

People only care about what they care about NOW.  Today.  If you are selling Christmas trees to Jews they won’t care.  They don’t use them (well, some do but not many).

Customers buy what they WANT to buy and the key today is not in trying to manage your customers but in understanding who they are, what they want (or need) and making it easy for them to be in the right place at the right time with the right story.    Story is key here — because customers need to be able to find what they need when they need it.

And it needs to be simple.  Simple for customers to understand what your widget is.  Easy for them to understand why it matters to THEM (not you, they could care less about you) and then make it easy for them to get to the end result of what they want.   Intuitive (like a iPod, like a GUI (graphical user interface) versus a c: prompt).

The customer is now in charge of the world.  Realize it.  Embrace it.  So now more than ever is “know thy customer” and realize that while you need them, they don’t need you.  Unless you give them a reason to need you.

CRM and Unified Communications

My last blog focused on how Unified Communications (UC) can empower the contact center by directing nontraditional call center calls to the center.  Most people think of UC as a way of combining multiple contact points for one person to a single point of contact (thus John Smith’s office phone, cell phone, email, IM, etc. can all be directed to “ring” on his cell phone).  This is the common way UC is explained, and it can be very valuable — but it can also result in TMI (too much information).

Everyone may be created equal, but we can’t give all of our customers, peers, bosses, and the world at large equal access to us or we’d never get any work done.  We need to prioritize who can contact us and how.  Thus with UC we can identify specific people (our boss, our spouse, our key customer) to reach us at our #1 end point (maybe that cell phone) while other important people get directed to voice mail — or as I pointed out in my last blog — this is a perfect opportunity to now direct those folks to a contact center where an inside sales rep or pool admin can hopefully handle their needs in one call (OCR = one call resolution).

So there is a natural marriage between UC and CC (contact center).

Where does CRM come into play?

CRM (customer relationship management) has become such a muddied term.  It has become far too generic.  To some it does mean contact center software (and it can be that), to some it means the software or software as a service (SaaS) that outside sales reps use to keep track of their accounts, where they are in the sales cycle, etc. — and that is a good definition. . .but CRM is much bigger than that.

CRM is really broken into two broad categories:  “front office CRM” and “Back office CRM.”

Front office CRM are the applications that actually touch the customer directly — the voice on the phone in the contact center, an internet interface where they can place an order, customer service (again online or over the phone) or the live customer service rep (CSR).  Any part where the customer is directly interfacing with your company is a form of “front office CRM.”

And a logical touchpoint for UC and CRM to link.

The holy grail of the contact center for years has been OCR – one call resolution.    Any problem that isn’t resolved in one call, or any sale that can’t be closed in one call (“we have an internet special where for the same price you are paying today you can add XYZ. . .”) costs lots of money.  Any customer service call that takes too long or requires “follow up” also begins to alienate your customers making them more inclined to leave you for another firm.

UC can dramatically improve the goal of OCR — whether that “one call” is a phone call, an internet access or even your face to face outside sales rep.

It all has to do with the “hand off.”  Inside a contact center this can be done with intelligent routing (which is really what UC is in a larger scheme of things).  We route the call to the most logical, not the first available, agent.   With UC we are now moving beyond the barrier of the contact center and able to route the call to best person no matter what department they work in, or even WHERE THEY ARE physically.

Setting up skills routing takes time, but the rewards are immense both in customer satisfaction and in cost reduction.

All of this so far focuses on the connectivity between front office CRM and UC, but back office CRM can increase this cost reduction by quantum factors.  Using a data warehouse (or perhaps data mart) to identify your most profitable customers you may choose to always route them to a specific department or person — not blindly treating all customers the same but giving platinum treatment to platinum customers.

By contrast your lower value customers (in margins) can always be routed through an IVR (interactive voice response) unit and routed to newer agents. . .  The dirty little reality in sales is that there are some customers that are not worth having because the amount of work they require (and work = expense to your company) may mean you actually lose money by having them as a customer.  Back end CRM identifies who is profitable and thus worth retaining.

One to one marketing is a myth.  We do not market to all of our prospects and customers in the same way and we shouldn’t.   Back end CRM’s information on customer profitability can help determine who we route to whom in our dynamic, unified communications world.

This blog is speaking in generalities — as if we had all the money and time in the world to link all of these disparate systems together.    The good news is that many of these systems are already begining to be linked — Cisco with Salesforce.com, Aspect with Microsoft,  Avaya and SAP, Nortel offers integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and implemented Dynamics internally.   The idea is to take advantage of the technologies you may already have in place such as a legacy  Siebel implementation maybe using AT&T’s Siebel Solutions offer) to improve relations with your customers and business partners through a streamlined “one call resolution” that goes far beyond the silos of “outside sales,” “engineering,” “customer service” across your business.

How do Twitter, Facebook and other Social Networks impact UC?

Unified Communications — the holy grail of both traditional networking companies (Cisco, Avaya, etc.) and some not so traditional network firms (Microsoft) has the lofty goal of bringing together your office phone, voice mail, home phone, cell phone, email and instant messaging into one point of contact.  You (as the end point) decide who can reach you at whatever access point you are at, through a central phone number or ID.  You can also identify who cannot get to you (for example that pesky sales rep goes automatically to voice mail, SPAM filter or admin).

Unified Communications puts the receiver in control of who can reach them and how they are reached.

Unified Communications, aka UC, has great possibilities to make time more productive — no more phone tag, no more voice mail hell of trying to reach someone for a deadline and failing.  It really is a time saver, can be a deal saver — and has the possibility of being an enormous money saver.  (You can have a central phone number but let many workers telecommute while still having the professional “front end” of your central business phone gateway).

UC is NOT UM (unified messaging) which centralized the voice and electronic mail together.  It is much, much more than that.  Yet not only has UM muddied for most what UC is and is not, now along comes social networking which has muddied it even more!

Twitter is a quick burst “push” technology that lets its users post what they are doing.  Others can follow these “tweets.”  Facebook and other social networks lets you keep up to date with your friends and LinkedIn lets you network with business associates you know, or whom you should know.

Let’s face it — UC and social networking are all forms of communications.

Do they dove tail somewhere in the middle?  Are they diametrically opposite?  Is one the death knell for the other?

They dovetail.

UC allows the recipient (end point) to determine who can reach him/her, how and when.

Social networks allow the sender (send point) to broadcast messages to individuals or groups.  There is no way to immediately reach the sender (even with a tweet or message on Facebook there is no way to determine when the sender will see it let alone respond to it).

So UC is the ying to social networking’s yang.  Opposite, yet complimentary.  One is casual and end points access it when they have the time and the need and the inclination.  It is a “pull” technology.

UC is more professional and allows the end point to be reached as needed (instantly) by those who should have that access as allowed by recipient.

I’m a user and huge fan of both technology camps.  UC keeps a busy person spinning many activities at once more in control — which in this world of constant demands is a refreshing technological advantage.  Unfortunately UC has been slow to catch fire — perhaps due to the economy or the inability of vendors to clear articulate its true value.  Given time UC is a natural winner.  It simply needs to be explained, cost justified and exploited.  As with everything:  what is the value to the customer?

Enormous.

The Irony of it All

My last blog posed the question:  “Is Microsoft the next Dinosaur?”  My point was that most companies have a lifecycle, just like products do and people do.

Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline — it is really up to Microsoft.  The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the “early days” (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid.  He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer.  Microsoft tried to win the search engine war — and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.

But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked: 

Is Microsoft Following GM’s Road Map?

Analysis: GM’s bankruptcy marks the end of an era. Is Microsoft repeating the automaker’s mistakes?

J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld

// Jun 3, 2009 6:00 pm

“Microsoft has faced a few serious bumps over the last 10 years but came out fine. . .Knowing the work Microsoft developers put into their products, I believe they are the saving grace of the company — as long as they are allowed to hear the voice of the people. This is an area where I’ve seen a problem.”

I worked for AT&T at the hey day of Bell Labs.  We had the brightest, most awesome minds around — just like Microsoft does today.   Microsoft ca be its own best friend or its own worst enemy.  Only time will tell.

Happy 2009!

Times are tough.  Businesses large and small are shutting down or looking for government hand outs.   Will GM and the other auto manufacturers survive?   Are we facing a depression??  Job loss is rising and it seems that daily we see new layoffs reported.    It is even rumored that Microsoft may lay off up to 17% of its workforce.  Link.

I’m not picking on Microsoft, simply highlighting the situation that our economic down spiral is just that — when one thing goes bad it impacts another line of business. . . from the mom and pop restaurants who lose customers, and thus so do their suppliers to the big firms who are household names.

Yet I started this blog saying “Happy 2009″ and I really am optimistic.   As FDR said so many years ago “All we have to fear is fear itself.”

There have to be opportunities — and with the new Obama administration about to take over it seems there will be a number of attractive areas.   Obama has promised global Internet access — so the network providers have a golden opportunity to come out of this downturn quickly.  The new administration is also very pro “green” — so if look for environmentally friendly solutions in your field.   The other attractive markets?

Government itself as a customer (federal for now, as the local governments who rely heavily on property taxes are “hurting”) and health care.  Baby boomers are aging and putting more and more stress on health care.  Again, the new administration is very interested in universal health care.  Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton, slated to be our new Secretary of State, was in charge of the Clinton Administration’s health care vision about fifteen years ago.  Back then I was working closely with the Chairman and CFO at Adventist Health System Sunbelt, and the CFO was on Hillary’s committee.  A lot of the visions then (electronic patient records that are patient-centric, not owned by individual doctors) are part of the vision yet today.

Tom Daschle has been named as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the new administration.   In his book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, he  discusses price controls (meaning health care providers need to find a way to improve quality to reduce costs).    Daschle is a big fan of Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) which has a two tier approach — everyone has access to a base level of health care and you can pay for private access if you so desire.

Time will tell what the Obama administration will do, but the time to begin exploring how you can take advantage of the new opportunities is now.  Welcome to 2009!