Automated Marketing Communication

Automated marketing and customer communication processes can vastly improve a company performance and efficiency.

Customer needs, desires, behaviors and purchasing decisions are complex. They can rarely, if ever, be fully captured by neat mathematical equations, simulation models or statistical data points. Because of this, customers are still masters in the customer-company relationship.

Recent data management advancements, and phenomenal improvements on the Internet, have enabled automation to impact marketing communications.

The Internet allows new ways of communication both among companies and between clients and companies.

But, where is the promise of automation in marketing? What’s the best way to leverage these trends in your own organization?

Here are some examples of how Ubix, Inc helps companies utilize Automated Marketing Communication to increase their profits.

1. Touches Program

Major capital investments such as a car or home can be a big decision. Ubix works with production homebuilders to stay in touch and inform prospective buyers about the home builder’s unique value proposition, product offerings. In the process we support sales by getting feedback from the investigator about his or her interests, situation and needs and how the home builder can best serve them.

2. Order conversion

Selecting products from the myriads of options available on the Web can be overwhelming. Ubix, Inc. can help technology and life-sciences organizations increase Web order conversion rate by extending incentives, offers, and referral opportunities by integrating them into the order process.

3. Current Customer Base: Repeat business

It is said that it is ten times easier to sell to a current versus a new customer. Ubix works with organizations in diverse industries to promote repeat business. Through staying in touch with the customer and learn about changing needs with related opportunities to be of service. Another related opportunity is to sell renewal of services.

3. Loyalty programs: Referral reward

A number of our clients in the homebuilder market are implementing referral reward programs. These programs provide incentives both to the referrer and the referral. The role of automated communication is to fully automate the operation.

4. Tradeshow follow up

Sizable investments are made in attending tradeshows yet often the return is less than optimal. In fact, one often hears participants complain about the lack of follow up even after having visited the booth and left contact information. Through automated communication the clients can maximize their results by getting back to every identifiable tradeshow visitor, learning their interests and capabilities, and proposing a next step in a potential relationship specific to prospective partner’s profile.

5. Communicating with Partners:

Ubix works with high-tech organizations that recruit channel partners as part of their tradeshow program. For example they can support clients in maximizing their results by getting back to every identifiable tradeshow visitor, learning their interests and capabilities, and proposing a next step in a potential relationship specific to prospective partner’s profile.

6. Online learning, certifications, and product updates

Ubix works with an organization that provides management training to major corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions on a world wide basis. Our client delivers the training by certifying thousands of facilitators in host organizations. Our role is to build and operate a web based facilitator training facility – providing streaming video educational programs, online certification, and distribution of product updates.

7. Dashboard: Monitor and improve

A customer’s lifecycle may comprise several distinct phases such as prospect, contract, buyer, etc. Automated communication provides a central facility where you can monitor the key indicators in each phase of your automated communication initiatives. We can think of this as a dashboard – a place you review activity levels, drill down to underlying details, and direct required actions such as assigning a sales or support rep to follow up with a customer.

Customer Life cycle Management-What Is It and how important Is it to your business?

Customer Lifecycle Management, or CLM,

is often misunderstood to be the same principle idea as Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. Customer Lifecycle Management, however, has a key difference from CRM – the added factor of time.

Approaching CLM must be done slowly, as there are a lot of different facets to consider when trying placing the term into its full perspective. Managing the Customer Lifecycle has many different metrics which need to be taken into account, but the overall theme of CLM properties is time. Your entire customer lifecycle must be properly measured throughout its duration, and can be examined on an individual customer or against a mean average. This includes things like purchase history, which includes recency frequency and quantity; gross amount of money spent on acquiring and retaining the customer through marketing dollars, resources spent generating each sale, as well as post sales service and support; and the duration or longevity of that customer’s relationship with your business.

The end result of all these metrics will likely show you what you’ve been told many times before – a customer costs far more to acquire than it does to retain. This is the idea behind CLM – managing your customer lifecycles to maximize customer retention and profitability rates. This key concept of CLM through CRM practices can be the difference between your business succeeding or not, as every organization’s most important assets are its customers.

We’ll explore some key factors that tie CLM and CRM together – and others which set them apart. The importance of understanding the principles of CLM and how it can have a huge positive impact on your small business will also be discussed, along with steps you can take to make sure your business thrives with it’s CLM and CRM initiatives well into the future.

A good start to understanding CLM is trying to understand where it fits in with the overall vision of CRM. Do you need to have CLM before you can benefit from CRM? Or is it CRM that you first need to understand before embarking on discovering true CLM? Well, the answer is in fact neither – CLM and CRM can both operate simultaneously and independently of one another. Let’s explain:

CRM – Customer Relationship Management

is the overall corporate philosophy of managing your relationship with each customer in order to provide a better overall customer experience. CRM, however, can wane in and out and be selective, practicing on some customers but not others. It can also be a practice of one department but not others, fluctuating at all the contact points within the organization. Perhaps you’re practicing CRM with a few of your biggest clients, because they are worth exponentially more than all your other customers combined. Whatever the reason, CRM can be selective and not at all static, as it’s more of a practice than a measurement.

CLM – Customer Lifecycle Management

is a static entity, and is more based upon a single measurement (which incorporates multiple metrics) than a philosophy. Without practicing CRM whatsoever, a company can take various measurements of its customer lifecycles and find ways to improve, or ‘manage’ them better. CLM is also non-departmental, in that it by definition incorporates all interactions with the customer throughout that customer’s life. The other key facet of differentiation between CRM and CLM is the element of time. CLM is always a measurement over time, whereas CRM can be an act at one particular contact point with the customer.

Measuring CLM Success

Measuring your gross change in customer lifecycles can be as complex or as simple as you like, depending on what type of accuracy you need. In some cases it can take years, even decades to get all the metrics measured and compared – in others it can be done in 6 months. It all depends on the type of business you’re running, and for most small businesses the simpler, the better.

First, you need to segment your customer database into as many variables as you want to measure. The most important thing to remember when determining how to segment your customer database is that time is the most crucial factor in CLM measurements – so none of your segmentations should be one-time transactions, other than as a starting point to measure positive CLM success from. Separating your customer database into various groups such as repeat purchasers over time, frequency of those repeating purchasers, overall life span of each customer (first transaction to most recent) and more will all play a role in helping you better understand the state that your CLM success is at currently. Once you have these measurements taken, isolated and secured in a data silo which won’t be removed after your CRM implementation, it’s time to get that CRM practice up and running!

Now is the tricky part – You’ve implemented a complex philosophy of practicing corporate CRM, augmented by a powerful hosted CRM software solution which meets the needs of your front and back office employees. Now you need to wait to see how your CRM philosophy effects your CLM measurements over a period of time. The only rule to how long you must wait before taking this measurement is that it cannot be sooner than the frequency with which the top 10% of your repeat purchasers have made purchases from your company. For preliminary results, measurements also should begin no later than the time lapse between purchases for your slowest repeat purchasers, though CLM measurements can continue throughout the lifetime of your business for continuous results, which can show new windows of opportunity to positively change your CLM metrics.

Now you compare the CLM measurements from before and after your CRM implementation. Did your customers purchase more frequently, more recently? Did they have larger overall transactions? Were they less costly to your business in terms of service and support? Did they respond better to marketing initiatives? Has your Total cost of Acquisition per customer shrunk, or grown? These are all questions to start asking yourself, after which you should get a fairly accurate idea of the ROI your CRM implementation is generating for your business. Most hosted CRM initiatives start generating positive ROI within 6 months of implementation – many even faster than that, so you should have a good idea if your CRM philosophy and CRM provider’s solutions are a good fit to your particular business and customers.

The End Goal

CLM is a complex set of measurements taken over time to fully understand how your customer lifecycles work, and learn ways to improve them to make them more profitable. You won’t understand all the complexities of CLM as it relates to your business until you more fully understand the actual lifecycles of your individual customers – the nuances that set your customers apart from your competitions, and the nuances of your business that draws those particular customers back to you time and time again. And after you start to understand these things more and more over time, you’ll begin to devise new and creative ways to maximize your CLM success, one customer at a time through a properly devised CRM solution.

 

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