Extended service plans often are though of as centers for producing short-term profits. Yet, when designed properly, they can also help foster customer continuity that translates in lasting relationships.
Eliminating sales friction, as noted by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, encourages customers to buy more by reducing the thought and effort that needs to go into the buying process. Finding these areas of friction also is a way to identify processes that keep marketing from becoming more agile.
Extended service programs are often designed and run for maximum operational efficiency. As a result, good marketing often falls by the wayside. With modest investments, companies can modernize their ESP programs and realize significant gains in revenue and profits.
In a competitive environment, marketing needs to be more agile, in order to respond to competitive threats and new opportunities. In order to support this, our customer data also needs to be more agile, while still preserving the quality and integrity of the information.
We live in an age, in which the number of channels and devices continues to grow steadily. More outlets provide the opportunity to reach larger audiences, but at the cost of increasing complexity. Look for new technologies to allow marketers to design and deliver cross-platform communications more easily.
Analytics can (and should) be used to match content to customer needs and propensity. This provides a ready mechanism to increase the relevance of marketing and therefore boost response rates and sales.
Any time we ask a customer to do something to complete a sale introduces friction that slows or stops the conversion process. Combining QR codes with PURLs is an effective way to eliminate some of this friction and boost conversion.
Analysis of social networking data is becoming ever more important for marketers, yet much of the information is restricted to basic statistics. Fortunately, there are a lot of interesting and powerful open-source applications that permit more useful and valuable analysis of social networks. This article provides a sampling of a few.
In marketing, there seems to be a pendulum that perpetually swings between centralized marketing decisions and between decentralization. Marketing governance is one way to find a middle ground between these two poles.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about open-source, non-relational data platforms that were beginning to become important for marketing analysis. In particular, I singled out Hadoop as an application that we had begun to work with, as many of the data sets we deal are large. I made the following prognostication: My view ... Read More
Being customer-centric is the cornerstone of modern marketing practice, but focusing solely on customer information and insights can limit our audience under certain circumstances. Paying attention to product data can be just as important.
Many marketers believe the CAN-SPAM Act regulates only email messages. But a broader reading, reflected in recent court opinions, suggests that it may apply to many other channels, including popular social media sites.
Householding consumers has become a staple of database marketing. Yet, fundamental changes in demographics and behavior, coupled with the falling costs of direct marketing, provide reasons to rethinking the practice.
How do consumers perceive the value of extended service plans and how do these plans shape perceptions of product quality. A recent study by Fulcrum sheds light on these and other questions.
Incremental models are a powerful tool for selecting customers for promotion in a way that maximizes the value generated, but they are not easy to build. This article explores some of the challenges and ways around them.
