Today’s guest post is by David Pountney, General Manager at DT Melbourne.
40 odd years ago David Ogilvy referred to direct mail as his “Secret Weapon”. The secret didn’t last long; once the marketing fraternity realised it was cheap and effective they turned it into a gatling gun, discharging it every opportunity and earning the channel the affectionate term of “junk mail”.
30 years go by and mail goes electronic, providing an even cheaper and easier route to market. The gatling gun becomes almost automatic and email rapidly becomes referred to as “spam” by the very people it’s trying to resonate with. Email providers develop spam filters to help protect their customers from sloppy marketers.
10 years on, the marketer now has a full arsenal of weapons of mass distribution thanks to a proliferation of digital channels including email, SMS, app notifications, Facebook, Twitter etc and we are starting to see a similar trend. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is beginning to filter posts from brands, showing content to only 16% of fans for any given piece of content. Even 47% of iPhone customers deny their phone’s ability to receive push notifications to them by brands who want to reconnect.
Wherever there has been an advancement of technology for marketers to connect to their audiences, consumers revolt against over use and adopt tools and methods to neutralise their existence.
As direct marketers we have come in peace under the guise of CRM and Social: we have promoted a peaceful message under the guise of “Right Message, Right Time, Right Person” but rarely have we executed accordingly. Most commonly we push out the message we want to tell, when we want to tell it to some of the right people but we’ll throw some wrong people in too because, you know… it’s cheap and you never know they might buy it.
Marketing through the RaDaR
A couple of weeks ago I hung on every word of a presentation from Nate Elliott at Forrester Research as he ripped into the Paid, Owned and Earned model as one that suited the needs of marketers in terms of setting budgets but completely ignores the role of channels from a customer perspective.
Instead he proposed a RaDaR model with which to view the marketing channel landscape, with Depth at the heart, Reach on the outside and Relationship in between.
While he argues that channels at every point of the RaDaR have a role (and some across the entire RaDaR), new age marketers are starting with Depth (of experience) at the heart of everything they do and leveraging Relationship and Reach once that core experience is in place.
Of course he was preaching to the converted but it struck me that while ‘Relationship’ is in the middle of ‘Depth’ and ‘Reach’ on the radar, historically relationship channels have been most heavily influenced by a ‘Reach’ marketing approach, not an experience led one.
The shift from CRM to CXM
In this age of low cost, fully automatable digital channels, we as marketers need to take a breath before unleashing all hell on consumers. Data plays an important role as we shift from the attention economy to the intention economy, but how it is deployed will make or break experiences and ultimately the relationships we are trying to develop.
In the same way that Google factors a quality score into its AdWords auction model to prevent a situation where size of budget dictates experience alone, brands need to develop a quality score of their own for every direct communication to ensure that they are focused on adding value to their customer base as well as extracting value from it. Over time that quality score can be used to test the health of the base at a customer and segment level, quantify the historical value exchange and even be used to inform targeting itself.
Direct communications were a secret weapon. Today they are all too commonly deployed to maximise reach at the expense of depth. We are facing the biggest change in the marketing landscape in over 40 years, as we seem to increasingly ignore the fundamentals of building relationships through the use of CRM programs by solely focusing on selling. It’s time to rethink how we use direct channels, elevate the importance of experience and establish a CXM focus that will in turn deliver long term profitable customer relationships.