Remember Your Customers

Customers want that type of personalized attention too. If, for example, you know they're a teacher or a dog lover and you provide services especially for them, they'll support your company. But how can you take on such a big task with all your other obligations and expenses? Thanks to the net's capabilities, companies can largely automate the process. Exchange Applications provides technological solutions that allow companies to look at a customer's spectrum of behavior, both offline and online, to better tailor marketing messages. CEO Andy Frawley explains how to get started.

Get a Picture of Your Customer

The first step is to use software to take a look at the most important pieces of customer information. "Try to find the high impact pieces of information," Frawley says. "Understand recent purchases across channels, recent communications, external data - how they're behaving, what their credit ratings are." After that, companies will want to get a handle on a customer's history. "What have they bought over the last two or three years? What offers have been made over the last six months?" Frawley suggests that companies find out. "Is the customer happy? Are they asking about buying more products or are they complaining? Learning all this represents a tremendous opportunity to increase customer value - or to destroy customer value if done poorly." By synthesizing a customer's history with present behavior, businesses have a road map to the future. They know what markets they're trying to reach, and they can try different approaches.

Follow the Money

Once a company has analyzed customer behavior, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty: Which customers are worth spending time on? Wooing an unprofitable customer may be throwing good money after bad, while catering to a profitable customer may well improve your bottom line. "Understand not only the revenue from a customer but also the profitability of a customer. Understand the revenue less the cost of goods sold, as well as the cost to service a customer, to market to a customer," Frawley says.

If it costs your company a lot to sell to a customer, it may be that the time spent selling could be more profitably used elsewhere. "What you see in businesses is that a frontline employee - a bank teller, for example - thinks someone is a very good customer who in fact may be an unprofitable customer. Somebody who comes in and spends a half hour talking to them every Friday morning may have only $1,000 in their checking account," Frawley says. It may sound callous to favor one customer over another, but when resources are scarce, it makes good economic sense.

Can't Test? Don't Do It!

Companies may also waste time and energy on marketing gambits that ultimately don't work. It's all too easy to get so caught up in planning that no forward moves are made.

"We encourage people to aggressively test their way to success," says Frawley. "Don't try to analyze the situation forever, but get into the market, try different personalization techniques and approaches, cross-sell or up-sell programs - whatever the case may be. And be able to measure it because if you can't measure it, you're just shooting in the dark." The web is fast, so your business must be faster. Luckily, marketing online is cheaper than traditional marketing. Don't be afraid to test all sorts of approaches. The money you spend now can pay off big on the bottom line.

Once you have a picture of your customers, it's your job to decide what messages you'll send. By really looking at the customers who make you money, you can decide which way you want to head. Many small business owners worry about spending the time and money it takes to examine customers. But would you head off on a drive to a strange city without a road map? Marketing to customers without information on who they are makes even less sense.

One of Dale Carnegie's first rules in How to Win Friends and Influence People is to remember people's names. Someone who knows you've gone to the trouble to remember them is more impressed with you. So why should it be any different for marketing?