WE ASKED:
“What percentage of business marketers’ total communications budget for
2002 went to customer relationship communications?”
YOU ANSWERED:
Client side marketers: 20%
Agency side marketers (their clients): 21%
So what tactics are marketers using most in their customer relationship programs?
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Mobium analysis:
There’s hope. Based on hundreds of results, marketers will spend a
significant amount of their communications budget on their customers. In
fact, 21% is more than we expected and may reflect the economic times more
than a wide scale embracing of customer hugging. Many companies may be
buttressing up communications to customers to leverage their existing
market share while shifting money from acquisition efforts.
Never the less, the top three tactics of event marketing (17%), customized
communications (16%) and interactive web communities (12%) are being used
by 45% of the business marketers who responded. Such a wide use of these
activities suggests a movement toward more personalized two-way
communications.
On the other hand, with all the talk and all the software systems being
sold, we were frankly nonplused by the mediocre usage rate (9%) of CRM.
Perhaps we’re learning, once again, that communications is more than
software even when it can slice, dice and julienne databases and
synthetically personalize messages up the ying yang.
But most interesting and most significant to us is the variety and breadth
of tactics business marketers volunteered beyond the nine choices we gave
them. We received over 35 additional activities, suggesting that in the
b-to-b world at least, marketers are experimenting beyond the conventional.
Including going back to tried and true face-to-face and voice-to-voice communications. Here’s a partial list of some of their activities:
| • | Face-to-face communications like phone call campaigns (imagine that?) |
| • | Personalized relationship building |
| • | Email marketing |
| • | Cooperative partnering programs with customers |
| • | Internet portal for customers |
| • | Customer account report cards |
| • | Sampling opportunities |
| • | Onsite visits |
| • | Strategic partnerships |
| • | Tradeshow outreach programs |
| • | Special customer newsletter inserts |
| • | Rocking back-and-forth in the fetal position as you wonder why your customers don’t like you (we don’t suggest this one) |
The bottom line
Successful customer huggage may be more about communicating with and
treating customers in a special way that’s different from the way you
interact with “the market” than it is about which technology or tactic you
use. In fact, integrating a variety of tools that uniquely deliver that
feeling of being special and that move one-time buyers to multiple
purchasers to loyal customers to brand advocates may be the real issue. And
that may explain the diversity of communication activities being used.
Whatever the reason, we join you in the human huggage. Embrace your
customers. Embrace change. Hug on, tune in and hang out.
A warm embrace from us: Congratulations to the winners of the autographed copy of Al & Laura Ries’ new book “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” We hope you put it to good use. We also hope you enjoyed our online booklet “Hugging your customers in the face of Business Communications Change”. Thanks to all our CRM savvy survey takers.