Managing Customer Experience: the next big thing?

I am a big believer in management guru Peter Drucker saying "What gets measured gets managed". When it gets down to tracking a company's success, too many businesses tend to rely on market share, profitability, EPS growth or repeat purchases only. Don't take me wrong, you still need to track these down, but as one brilliant Berkeley Marketing guru asked: "Do you think your partner is loyal only because he's having diner every night at home? So, does the number of repeat sales indicates that your customer is loyal?" At least for the first one you must admit he's got a point.

Nowadays, customer experience is one if not the main ingredient of customer loyalty which translates into market share -- as loyal customers are the best brand advocates, profitability and EPS growth i.e. the way most businesses would define success. Then what are you doing about it?

If you're still in doubt, take the coffee business as an example. Who has been insanely successful in this business? Starbucks and Nespresso success stories -- follow the links for more -- can attest about it.

As Shaun Smith, author of Managing Customer Experience, details in his post, there are 10 best practices to create real business value:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focusing on your most strategically important customers
4. Finding out what these customers truly value
5. Being clear about what you stand for
6. Delivering the promise at every touch point
7. Providing branded training to ensure that employees understand the brand story
8. Designing CEM before installing CRM systems
9. Measuring the customer experience
10. Aligning KPIs with the customer experience

This is heavy duty, but social media -- as you can see in the Starbucks video in the link above -- is becoming instrumental in that regard.

I'll leave you with the five barriers to measuring customer experience, from mycustomer.com:

"Customer experience isn’t just about giving customers a good time. It’s about understanding just how good a time (or not) you are giving – and making adjustments"

1. We rely on magic numbers
2. We don’t really listen
3. Measuring word of mouth is hard
4. We have too much functional data – too little insight
5. We don’t look beyond the obvious and the superficial

Online leads: do you act timely to respond?

Reading an interesting research summary in HBR that I wanted to share.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, the time taken to respond to prospects stimulus online can significantly change the ROI of your web presence. As this research shows, many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. As HBR states:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% within one to 24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- and 23% never responded at all!

As companies are investing significantly to get prospects out of the web, they should have a much better turnaround, don't you think?

Reasons not to do so include retrieving leads from CRM daily rather than on the fly, sales forces focusing on their own generated leads and rules for leads dispatching not effective enough ("fairness" can be damageable).

Where are you with this? Better know where your marketing ROI is headed sooner than later.

Happy Easter.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

How to measure your brand's online influence?

Several tools are emerging to help you do this, and Inc. touched on this in an interesting post about it and even providing in their opinion the 11 best web analytics tools. They come back on how Web Analytics 2.0 is defined:

1. The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition
2. To drive a continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects
3. Which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)

Inc. concludes like this:

"Measuring online influence can be useful—and has potential to reinforce your social-media strategy (hey, it just feels cool when you get a high score)—particularly for growing brands looking to utilize technology to make their jobs easier and more effective. However, it's not for everyone." -- Dave Smith, Inc.

Another post on GigaOm from Georgina Laidla highlights the 5 Ways Brands Influence Social Media Strategy:

"It’s not just the way organizations engage through social media that matters: the portrayal of a business brand in this space is affected by a range of factors."

And the factors she lists

1. Network & Tools - the tools and network you use say something about your brand
2. Types of engagement
3. Who's making the update?
4. Degree of integration with other offerings
5. People your brand follows, friends and fans

preaching for an evolving approach.

At the end of the day, there is in my opinion no option for all of us to engage into measuring our brand's influence online. We better get starting ASAP and make our plans on how to do it. This is what I am doing already for the brand I work for which faces an interesting challenge to do it with one voice globally. Your feedback and experiences are more than welcome on this blog.

2010: Resurgence for Digital Media in the Wake of the Recession

I mentioned previously this interesting research from Comscore, and I wanted to highlight more general trends about digital media coming out of it.

Comscore outlines that the digital media industry responded with significant growth across various media platforms to the wake of the recession. As they say: 

"Industry innovations brought an unprecedented number of options to consumers as digital media continued to weave itself even tighter into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives." -- comScore

Key findings about consumer trends, highlighted in the report, include:

• Following 2 years of depressed consumer discretionary spending, the economy showed signs of improvement, leading to positive growth for the e-commerce market. Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent versus the previous year. Travel e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $85.2 billion, while retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending jumped 10 percent to $142.5 billion for the year.
• Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spending more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.
• The U.S. core search market grew 12 percent overall in 2010, driven by a 4-percent increase in unique searchers and an 8-percent increase in the number of search queries per searcher.
• U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23 percent in December 2010 versus December 2009. Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.
• In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video, a 12-percent increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8-percent increase.
• Major milestones in mobile were crossed during the year as smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold. Approximately 47 percent of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.

In short, businesses should consider these aspects of Digital Media in their strategies to be successful in the coming years:

1. e-commerce
2. Social Media Presence
3. Search
4. Advertising 
5. Video on line as convergence with traditional TV continues to blur
6. Mobile media for both consumption and as an alternative e-commerce platform

Social media marketing: build a lasting methodology

Here is an interesting post about optimizing your social media marketing from David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Experiment.

Justin Bridegan, Marketing Manager MECLABS Primary Research said, “One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is creating a lasting methodology that works.  Time and resources continue to be two of the most difficult challenges social marketers face.”

Justin’s key takeaways:

1. Start small and test – “You don’t know what you don’t know”
2. Having a solid social marketing methodology in place will allow you to focus on real obtainable goals.
3. Determine the most effective offers for your campaigns including: Contests, incentives and promotions
4. Weigh Quality vs. Quantity with your offers, and remember the need for balance in your engagement
5. Successful campaigns don’t always equate to revenue, but can be one of many contributing components

Related resources on Marketing Sherpa

Free Inbound Marketing Newsletter – Case Studies and How To articles about social media, SEO, and content marketing

New Chart: Social Marketing Maturity and the Social Marketing ROAD Map

Social Media Marketing Research: Rolling up my sleeves and getting social

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Most-Tweeted Blog Posts of 2010: Facebook case study, social media marketing human factor, antisocial media, and more

How does your marketing compare to best in class?

A recent research from Aberdeen about Marketing Asset Management gives an opportunity to compare to the best in class.
Aberdeen uses 3 key performance criteria to compare:

1. 44% of the sales forecasted pipeline generated by marketing, as compared to 2% contribution for laggards organizations,
2. An average 9% reduction Year-over-year cost of market asset creation, as compared to a 6% increase among laggards,
3. 15% average decrease in year-over-year time-to-market of content of all types and formats, as compared to an increase among laggards.

To achieve best in class performance, you need to

• Allow all geographies and business units to customize marketing content with proper control
• Centralize asset approval and distribution to expedite time to market and improve content

Combining Email, Search, Social and PR for a Content Marketing Campaign: 6 Tactics to Generate Surge in Visitor Traffic

You know I'm a big believer in integrated marketing. Now that Social Media is making a surge in our marketing plans, I found this article on Marketing Sherpa interesting as it summarizes what we should do better:

"

Marketing teams often focus tactics and goals in a particular channel, overlooking how these channels can complement one another. With a bit of planning, a campaign can harness the strategic value of email, search, social media and other outlets for a single purpose. See how an online luggage retailer created a premium report based on a survey of e-newsletter subscribers and captured 5x more blog traffic.

"

Their blog traffic increased 518% Y/Y and additionnally the report’s landing page had a 16% lower bounce rate than the site’s average, 29% of report downloads came from referring websites, 22% of downloads were referred by search engines.

The tactics used:

• Tactic #1. Use search metrics to research potential report topics
• Tactic #2. Build an online survey
  
• Tactic #3. Send survey request to email database
• Tactic #4. Host report download on a dedicated landing page
  
• Tactic #5. Pitch report to media outlets
• Tactic #6. Use social channels, even if you don’t have them
  

Feel free to post back your own experiences here, I'd be happy to hear about it.

P.S. link related to this bcase Creative Samples from Suitcase.com’s premium report marketing campaign

Online Ads more effective than TV for offline CPG Sales growth and brand building: +9%

A recent study published by ComScore and its research partner dunnhumbyUSA, shows that consistent online advertising can actually lift retail sales in the CPG industry by 9% over a 3 months period and contribute more to brand building than TV ads (+8% over a 12 months period according to an Information Resources, Inc. report.).

"These early results confirm the ability of online advertising to successfully build retail sales of [consumer packaged goods] brands on par with the impact of television advertising. It is likely that the more precise targeting ability of the Internet – especially in terms of accurately reaching the desired demographic segment – is a key reason for its effectiveness. That is meaningful in and of itself, but when you take into account the fact that online advertising is generally less costly than television, these results take on even greater significance," said Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman of comScore

Let me know how does your marketing-mix looks for the remaining part of 2009, you may bend it to more of the web?

Customer equity to drive your marketing ROI

During my Lotus years, I've been given the opportunity to meet Mike Zisman our CEO at the time. One of his statement stayed with me since then: "The purpose of any enterprise is to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Product an services are only a means to that end." It sounded a bit simplistic initially, but my experience in several companies since then reinforced my conviction of the importance and truthfulness of this statement.

During my marketing journey, I discovered the notion of customer lifetime value (CLV), more complex to comprehend and so effective to coin what your marketing focus should be and furthermore how to present it to your team. It also allows to present to CEOs and shareholders the real value ($) of customer loyalty.

Here comes customer equity that definitely coins the term that best represent all of this. You now can think of CLV as an an additional equity to the shareholders or the brand ones.What if you could revise Marketing ROI and fine tune your marketing course of actions based on this equation coming from Roland T. Rust in Advertising Age : "The ROI is simply calculated as the projected increase in customer equity minus the discounted [marketing] investment divided by the investment."

But how do you calculate customer equity with real numbers? Now we're talking ;-)
Well, a number of tangible and intangible enters into this and I do not necessary agree with Roland Trust in his article. I'd refer you to Customer Equity Calculations dedicated site, and will come back on this later on. To approach it, just think of customer equity as the total of the discounted lifetime value of all of its customers. I know, not that intuitive.


To be continued ...

Let's support sales performance

Several years ago I discovered Sergio Zyman in Paris when he was conferencing for his new book "The end of marketing as we know it". He's not bringing some rocket science to marketing but effectively highlights and helps us focus on the do's and don't of an effective marketing. As a matter of fact, he left me with this quote that I keep in mind at all times:

"The sole purpose of Marketing is to sell more to more people, more often and for more money." -- Sergio Zyman

In light of this quote, I'm always focused on filling the gap between sales and marketing, making sure sales reps are perceiving added value from marketing activities. If you do not enjoy good business relationship with your sales counterpart, start asking yourself what is to be changed in your deliverables. Marketing success is about increasing revenue and lowering cost of sales. Whether in Marketing 1.0 or Marketing 2.0 it makes no difference.

I'm bringing this up as I recently read some interesting numbers about Sales performance Benchmarks, and I wanted to share with you the striking ones out of this survey from 1,300 companies across all industries:

• Only 60% of sales reps are making or exceeding quotas.
• Only 37% of firms report they have implemented a formal sales process.
• 63% of revenue comes from existing business, while 37% comes from new business
• Only 38% of companies have what they would call "forecasting accuracy."
• Most have close rates of under 50% of proposals written (average=48%).

This Lewis Green post says it all:

"For at the end of the day, our bottom lines and the value of what we do are measured in sales, not direct mail campaigns, sell sheets or packaging....I also believe that sales and marketing staffs should be in one department and should work closely together on every step of the process, from understanding the customers, to strategic marketing and sales planning, to closing sales" -- Lewis Green

Fellow Marketers, we're in charge on this. Let's make it happen.

Mobile Marketing: use it carefully, but use it

I was attending Ad Tech Paris yesterday, a good way to capture on-line advertising trends. Among other interesting sessions, I was appealed by the mobile advertising one called "Mobile advertising – the long and winding road" coordinated by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF). Speakers, see picture from left to right, were Marc-Henri Magdelenat -- Screentonic, Minh Tran -- Nokia Mobile Advertising, Patrick Parodi -- Amobee & MEF, Richard Saggers -- Vodafone and our moderator Gilles Babinet -- Eyeka.

They covered a lot of ground to explain how important was mobile advertising among our marketing tactics and how unique was its approach. Not to forget for instance that permission marketing in this space is mandatory, nothing is more personal than your phone, right? Mobile Phones are the only new device that people carry all the time since watches were introduced. Some do even sleep with these! Keep in mind as well that consumers are actually paying to receive adverts so we should keep ads short and relevant. And finally, coupons on mobile phones -- yes, bar codes on your phone to present to the store you're in or close to -- are far easier to use for consumers than traditional ones or even web ones, especially when coupled with your location.

Having experienced the mobile industry at Sun Microsystems myself, when marketing the Java platform, I could not agree more to the effectiveness of mobile marketing. Europe and Asia are for sure ahead of the curve about it, as mobile devices connected to the Internet are spreading fast there. The UK even have a dedicated web-zine about it called Mobile Marketing Magazine. Amazing!

But I think some key aspects were eluded during the conference. Mobile phones do have key attributes that can nurture marketing ROI:

• Authentication: we know who you are for sure,
• Payment: your Telco provider can charge you for what you buy or consume with it, opening an opportunity for Telcos to become trusted party for e-commerce,
• Impulse and web 2.0: as you carry your phone with you all the time, nothing would be more natural than to use it for an impulsive buying decision and to channel back your opinion to the brand right away.

Not to mention that within the next 3 to 5 years, mobile devices will become the primary Internet access for consumers, as Japan experienced already. The user experience will significantly improve as well, check the iPhone introduction by Steve jobs here in Marketing 2.0 to get a feel for it.

Marketing 2.0 minded marketers cannot ignore mobile marketing when planning for the next campaign. Consider it for sure in your mix, but very carefully as this could be a double edge sword.

Increase Marketing effectiveness: use behavioral targeting

It's been around for quite a while, the late 90's. But as privacy and technical issues are going away, marketers should consider behavioral targeting in their on-line advertising campaigns.

For those who just missed it, behavioral targeting is the ability to deliver ads to consumers based upon their recent behavior viewing web pages, shopping online for products and services, typing keywords into a search engine or a combination of all three. You can have some more details on behavioraltargeting.com and behavioral targeting 101 on iMedia Connection.

Microsoft recently added it to its offering -- read Microsoft adds behavioral targeting - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com -- as Yahoo did before as well -- read Yahoo! behavioral targeting.

Interestingly enough, AdAge Digital highlights that Behavioral Targeting becomes The New Killer App for Research. Some even put forward some effectiveness performance:

"The behavioral targeting ads increased ad awareness by 51%, while content targeting resulted in only a 33% boost." -- Snapple

As Marketing 2.0 is all about considering your customers and prospects literally as Stars, this should be no surprise to you that I wanted to stress the use of it as a "must have" advertising tactic. Relevant context is king.

Marketing 2.0 is real-time: Google after the $20 billion US radio advertising

It's now effective, last Thursday Google began limited test of radio advertising. The system resulting from Google's earlier acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting (Jan 2006), extends the AdWord platform with the ability for advertisers to create and manage radio advertising campaigns as an additional channel to their web campaigns. Sounds like integrated marketing made easy.

Google covers 800+ radio stations in the US targeting 5,000+, 87% US territory coverage, 19 of the top 25 markets and reports 300 Million impressions weekly.

It operates in 4 steps - read more in Donna Bogatin's blog from ZDNet:

"Step 1) Station inventory management system and studio log.
Step 2) Google links electronically with stations to search for inventory that fits advertiser criteria.
Step 3) Inventory is paired with advertiser requests.
Step 4) Google delivers automated order to radio station and reserves inventory."

Check out AdWords Help Center for some more.

My immediate reaction is to relate to integrated marketing of course, thinking that over time we'll have a choice of web based platform to pilot our integrated marketing campaign in real-time.

When you combine this idea with local search marketing, GPS rapid growth and mobile phone as marketing devices, we're getting closer to 1:1 marketing for the masses - remember Minority Report's changing billboards ads?

And finally, it looks like real-time advertising campaign measurement and adaptation is making its way beyond web advertising to encompass radio and I'm pretty sure TV in a short while.

Marketing 2.0 is all about integrated and measured marketing with the ability for a brand to react real-time to its audience behaviors. No longer can we have weekly or monthly meetings with our media planning agencies to figure out what to do next. Marketing 2.0 is real-time.

Do you master Marketing 2.0 metrics?

Dear fellow marketers, this is the time to check if you're on top of all the trendy acronyms that one must master to deal with the new media. Here is an interesting list I submit to your expertise:

• CTR: Click-thru rate
• CPM: Cost per thousand
• CPC: Cost per click
• Conversion Rate
• ROAS: Return on ad spend
• Value/Cost
• Value/Click
• CPL: Cost per lead
• CPS: Cost per sale
• CPA: Cost per acquisition
• Advertising revenue per visitor
• Visitor to browser ratio
• Shopping cart abandonment
• AVO: Average order

Who's saying marketing is not about measuring the outcome of the investment we're making? I increasingly meet Marketing Executives that are working around the clock to produce meaningful dashboards to their management. Search Marketing is no different and probably paves the way for other kind of marketing activities, especially advertising investments.

The trend though is to focus more on CPA than CPM as after all we're measured on the incremental business we can bring back to our brands. ROAS is a tricky one, I'm leaving you with the formula -- the ROAS provides the amount of revenue responsible from the campaign per dollar invested. For example, an ROAS of $1 means that you are generating $1 for every $1 in ad spend:

ROAS = ((Impressions * CTR * Conv rate * Avg sale) – Campaign Cost)/Campaign Cost

Work your spreadsheet for an interesting Marketing 2.0 journey.

Do you measure buzz about your brand on blogs?

Buzz Trends is something hard to measure. Marketing 2.0 is no exception to the marketing ROI demand we are all increasingly facing. If you don't, that should be a sign that your job is at risk ;-)

Most of you are probably already using Technorati trends and Google trends to have a feel for it and be able to create nice slides for your management. Again, if you don't, check them out right now.

I wanted to highlight this very interesting set of tools coming from Nielsen BuzzMetrics: Trend Search, Featured Trends, Conversation Tracker, BlogPulse Profiles. This is totally dedicated to the blog universe and very easy to customize. The Key People analysis, which has its own RSS feed, clearly shows who's making the buzz among top U.S. personalities (John Kerry took the front seat on Oct. 31st from rank 25, you must surely know why).

So now that we have some measuring tools ramping up to help us make our point, let's make Marketing 2.0 a measured integrated marketing approach. A question remains though, how do you translate positive buzz measurement into actual opportunities or revenue increase? I guess I'll have to work on it quite rapidly.

In the meantime, enjoy your week-end fellow marketers.

Traditional marketing is at risk, US Q1 spend plummets

Fellow marketers this is serious news. We need to react strongly and bring back CEOs and their staff confidence in marketing - especially in marketing 2.0- up again. According to Blackfriars recent announcement, US Companies did spend 54% less in Q1 than budgeted. Their Q1 index was the lowest in two years and the spending categories reflect traditional marketing mindset. What strikes me again is that on-line marketing spend totals 26% of all marketing spend, and uses mainly Internet advertising (nearly 58%). PR suffers (5% actuals vs 9% budgeted) when advertising gets the bells and whistles (34% actuals vs 22% budgeted). When all marketing 2.0 professionals are highlighting why embarking customers as co-marketers a.k.a. focus on customer centric marketing, is a must, when CEOs are complaining about marketing ROI, why in the world would we reinforce traditional advertising? Do we want to get Dell'd?
We also should be aware by now that isolated advertising does not lead to more sales. Advertising needs synchronous PR and on-line relevance/positive resonance to get a chance for our message to be well accepted, especially nowadays where an average individual is exposed to several thousands messages a day. We know best tactics for quality demand creation are Free trial demos, Webcast/Webinars, White papers and blogs. We know Integrated Marketing is the only effective way to execute - if you still wonder, I guess the shortest way to success left for you would be faith. We know a concise marketing dashboard with ROI driven metrics is the only possible way to articulate marketing value to our CEOs.
Knowing all of this we should never ever see such numbers and CEOs complaints again. Let's make sure we put our money where our mouth is: focus our marketing spend on appropriate tactics. And let's use our communication skills to demonstrate to our CEOs that marketing in its latest development a.k.a. marketing 2.0 is the way to accelerate companies growth.

Blogs, Webinar and Free: best rated tactics for quality demand creation

Generating buzz seems to be the holy grail quest for marketers nowadays. But when comes the time to report to your management "how did it go?", we're expected to show some business opportunities, leads, and influencers logged into our tracking systems The number of seminar attendees won't make it anymore. ROI, dashboards and key success metrics have been populating our marketing plan increasingly over the last 5 years.
So, what would be the most effective lead generation offer you could leverage in High-Tech ? This should pop-up as an on-going question from your staff each time you plan for a new campaign. Here are some numbers coming from a MarketingSherpa survey, issued in June '06 that I wanted to share with you (see chart).
Surprise, surprise, blogs have joined for the first year the top rated marketing tactics when it gets down to prospects entering their details in your database. At the same time, sweepstakes -- the beloved T-shirt and iPods -- are still getting high response rates but unfortunately doesn't translate into quality demand creation. So your transformation rate, or to put it differently the effort to result ratio doesn't look good for marketers in our industry using sweepstakes as the main tactic. Webinars, on the other hand, seems to get a good performance review which reinforce the on-line effectiveness of marketing compared to traditional tactics. Finally, especially of you're selling software technologies, free trial demos is the #1 tactic for qualitative results.
All in all, these numbers, coming from our peers being surveyed, are supporting the major claims we've been expressing in Marketing 2.0: Free is a good offer and on-line customer co-marketing is the way to go.