Kirthi Kalyanam

Monte Zweben

<article-ideainbrief class="article-ideainbrief">
 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">The Idea in Brief</h4>
 <div class="ideainbrief-contents">
 Most customers don’t want to hear from your company most of the time. If you’re bombarding them with frequent promotional messages, you’re probably generating more resentment than revenue. But there are fleeting moments when customers do want to hear from you—when their lives, or their perceptions of your company, change. If you don’t contact them at those moments, you risk losing them.
 How to seize those rare moments? Use dialogue marketing—a database technology that enables you to “listen” to customers’ needs and respond with just the right message, at just the right time, and through just the right channel (e-mail, phone call, Web offer).
 Unlike CRM systems that send out periodic promotions to large customer segments, dialogue marketing responds immediately—to individual customers. For example, a shoe retailer can reach out to a valued customer just as she’s fresh in the throes of sandal fever—or has gone an unprecedented six months without buying a pair of pumps.
 As gaming giant Harrah’s and computer peripherals maker Logitech have discovered, companies that use dialogue marketing rise above today’s unwelcome marketing din. They become not just the voice customers hear—but the one they listen for.
 The Idea in Practice
 <h2>Dialogue Types</h2>
 Deepen your customer relationships using these four types of increasingly sophisticated dialogs:
 <ul>
 <li>Foundation dialogs manage the customer life cycle. They include new-customer promotions, service follow-ups, and win-backs for defected customers.</li>
 </ul>
 <ul>
 <li>Level I dialogs attract bargain-minded customers. They include invitations to special marketing events, announcements of newly arrived goods, and advance notice of markdowns.</li>
 </ul>
 <ul>
 <li>Level II dialogs deepen customer loyalty. Harrah’s, for instance, tells customers when they’re “only one visit away from our Total Diamond reward level.”</li>
 </ul>
 <ul>
 <li>Level III dialogs consist of on-site interactions. For example, customers key their identities into smart shopping carts, then receive personalized messages on screens scattered around the store.</li>
 </ul>
 <h2>Creating Your Dialogue Marketing System</h2>
 To develop your dialogue marketing system:
 1. Identify communications you make with customers in a batch fashion—for instance, product catalogs or promotional coupons.
 2. Ask what events could trigger those communications to make them timely, such as a change-of-address request or an ominous absence.
 3. Prepare a distinct message for each customer situation. For example, customers submitting a change of address could receive a promotional offer for a product that would be useful to someone who has just made a household move.
 4. Increase customer involvement by adding a call to action to each message. For instance, a retailer sending a postcard announcing a designer trunk show asks the customer to indicate whether she will attend and, if she plans to attend, whether she would like to try on samples in her size (which the dialogue marketing system already knows).
 5. Prepare a message for each possible customer response to your previous message. For example, create a series of increasingly urgent messages—such as reminder e-mails or phone calls from a salesperson—when calls to action go unanswered. Example:&nbsp; 
 An airline’s dialogue marketing system notices that a steady, high-value customer hasn’t booked a flight in several months. It alerts a sales representative to call the customer. When the customer complains of poor service, the representative logs the details into the system. This triggers the creation of a written apology signed by an executive, accompanied by an incentive to return, such as automatic upgrades. When the account remains inactive, the system sends the customer an incentive-reminder email the following month. Another month passes, and a senior customer-service manager phones him. He finally buys a ticket. The system sends him a message tailored to “saved” customers.
 </div>
</article-ideainbrief>Promotional messages don’t work if customers aren’t receptive to them. To boost the odds of being greeted by eager eyes and hungry ears, marketers ask questions that target their audiences. Who should receive the message? What should the content of the message be? How should we deliver the message?

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Reprint: R0511G
Marketers planning promotional campaigns ask questions to boost the odds that the messages will be accepted: Who should receive each message? What should be its content? How should we deliver it? The one question they rarely ask is, when should we deliver it?
That&#8217;s too bad, because in marketing, timing is arguably the most important variable of all. Indeed, there are moments in a customer&#8217;s relationship with a business when she wants to communicate with that business because something has changed. If the company contacts her with the right message in the right format at the right time, there&#8217;s a good chance of a warm reception.
The question of &#8220;when&#8221; can be answered by a new computer-based model called &#8220;dialogue marketing,&#8221; which is, to date, the highest rung on an evolutionary ladder that ascends from database marketing to relationship marketing to one-to-one marketing. Its principle advantages over older approaches are that it is completely interactive, exploits many communication channels, and is &#8220;relationship aware&#8221;: that is, it continuously tracks every nuance of the customer&#8217;s interaction with the business. Thus, dialogue marketing responds to each transition in that relationship at the moment the customer requires attention.
Turning a traditional marketing strategy into a dialogue-marketing program is a straightforward matter. Begin by identifying the batch communications you make with customers, then ask yourself what events could trigger those communications to make them more timely. Add a question or call to action to each message and prepare a different treatment or response for each possible answer. Finally, create a series of increasingly urgent calls to action that kick in if the question or call to action goes unanswered by the customer.
As dialogue marketing proliferates, it may provide the solid new footing that Madison Avenue seeks.

The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment

Reprint: R0511G Marketers planning promotional campaigns ask questions to boost the odds that the messages will be accepted: Who should receive each message? What should be its content? How should we deliver it? The one question they rarely ask is, when should we deliver it? That’s too bad, because in marketing, timing is arguably the most important variable of all. Indeed, there are moments in a customer’s relationship with a business when she wants to communicate with that business because something has changed. If the company contacts her with the right message in the right format at the right time, there’s a good chance of a warm reception. The question of “when” can be answered by a new computer-based model called “dialogue marketing,” which is, to date, the highest rung on an evolutionary ladder that ascends from database marketing to relationship marketing to one-to-one marketing. Its principle advantages over older approaches are that it is completely interactive, exploits many communication channels, and is “relationship aware”: that is, it continuously tracks every nuance of the customer’s interaction with the business. Thus, dialogue marketing responds to each transition in that relationship at the moment the customer requires attention. Turning a traditional marketing strategy into a dialogue-marketing program is a straightforward matter. Begin by identifying the batch communications you make with customers, then ask yourself what events could trigger those communications to make them more timely. Add a question or call to action to each message and prepare a different treatment or response for each possible answer. Finally, create a series of increasingly urgent calls to action that kick in if the question or call to action goes unanswered by the customer. As dialogue marketing proliferates, it may provide the solid new footing that Madison Avenue seeks.

The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment

Summary.

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