CIOReview | | 9 JUNE 2024Strategies Employed to Personalize Customer Interactions and Provide Tailored Experience through Your CRM SystemWe create sets of offers and incentives. I like to think of them as treatments based on what we know of our customers on two levels: 1. Their segmentation, specifically which level of engagement with our brand best describes their shopping at this moment and 2. Their shopping history, specifically what items they buy most frequently.We design our treatments to reach out to each customer segment at a frequency and, with messaging consistent with our goals for that segment. Do we want these customers to shop more frequently? Do we want these other customers to maintain their shopping? Most, but not all of these segment treatments will include some sort of 1:1, personalized selection of product offers. That's where shopping history comes in. We use a third-party agency to score a huge bank of available offers against millions of people and rank the relevancy of each offer to each customer, then allocate the best offer set to each customer in that treatment.Experiences from Successful Direct Marketing CampaignsI can answer in general terms across multiple recent retail companies. Overall some truths are consistent across geographies and different company situations. What I expect to see for successful direct marketing is 10-20 percent of an overall audience responding to a campaign at scale, i.e., taking action and making a purchase. I want to clarify what I mean by at scale. Any direct marketer can achieve any rate-based metric you want. Think 50 percent response is the benchmark? Then I can narrow my audience to a group that has a 50 percent chance of responding. Is that group at a scale where I am making an impact for my company? Maybe not. When I say at scale, I mean marketing a CRM-based campaign across a very broad group of customers, including lapsed customers, less engaged customers, new customers, etc. It's very easy to focus on only your top customers and think you're a hero.Challenges in the Realm of Online Marketing That Current Services Are Unable to SolveI'm surprised at how little innovation there has been on how digital coupon offers work. The same vendors that were providing this technology ten years ago are the same options we have today, and I haven't seen the technology evolve much at all. At the same time, other customer experiences have changed UX/UI dramatically.Emerging Trends or Innovations in Direct MarketingI think SMS text messaging is still in the early stages of customer adoption. I think that medium will become more effective. I think in-app and push notifications have so much more potential but there has been a reset because of privacy. I think the most exciting trend will be the demographic shift as generations that are more comfortable with interacting digitally, shopping online, and receiving personalized treatments, become the majority of adults.Advice to ProfessionalsYes, and it's more about the core of direct marketing than it's about technology: Direct marketing is about the offer or temporary value. It's about immediacy. What's the reason for this interruption? Brand marketing can and should be about building an image and creating that unique positioning in a customer's mind over time. While direct marketing has to be consistent enough to fit within that positioning, it has a different purpose and different permission from the customer. Brand marketing can and should be about building an image, creating that unique positioning in a customer's mind over time
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