Your customers are going online but so are your competitors. Like you, other companies, including your competitors, are vying for their attention.
If you have done your homework, you would have identified your best customers and worked out how much they are worth to you and why. Consequently, the very ones that you want to retain become the most lucrative targets for any campaign. As e-marketing gets easier, CRM managers must resist going after their best customers all the time. Repeatedly, customers receive different offers via multiple channels or the same offers via multiple channels. Besides being potentially confusing to the customer and service staff (who are usually unaware of half of these offers), they feel abused and overwhelmed.
When using multiple channels for communication, adopt a complementary approach rather than a channel independent one. Integrate and focus your marketing activities to optimise and maximise your campaign effectiveness.
Not only will your customers appreciate it, you can also save huge amounts of marketing dollars. With a clear customer communication and management plan, and today's CRM software and the net, there is no excuse for not communicating with your best customers in a coherent, timely, relevant and consistent manner.
Personalisation is key. With customer expectations increasing, gathering information must become the responsibility of every customer-facing staff.
Customers do not have a problem giving you data if you use it intelligently and respectfully. Tracking and recording customer preferences, purchases and interactions offer tremendous insight and an understanding of customers' behaviour and what they want. Enrich it with data mining techniques to narrow your focus, help shape better predictive models, and improve the effectiveness of campaigns. And, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities will emerge. It is important you use this data to personalise products, services and interactions and engage your customers in a mutually profitable and rewarding relationship.
Exploit technology. Enhance your experience online. Customers decide when and how they interact with you. Getting them to interact frequently with cost-effective channels such as the web, depends on your ability to continuously deliver value through these channels. Create the optimum navigation path to products and services that add value to customers.
Make this an interative process; constantly learning and adapting. If your site interacts well with your customers on a personal level, they will return.
Priyatha Menon is CRM manager at Cathay Pacific