Messaging News - October 2008 - (Page 12)

TECHNOLOGY-WISE CUSTOMER forms to obtain feedback on existing products, as well as new product ideas. Manufacturers, for example, told the Economist Intelligence Unit in another recent study that online portals designed to achieve this would be among the primary ways they would seek to integrate customers into the product development process.” Lewis suggests that since customers are communicating in real-time with businesses, customers will expect businesses to respond in kind. “You may not necessarily have a live communication,” clarifies Lewis. “It may be scripted to a large degree. But it does mean that you have to take the data and what you know about that customer and intelligently apply it and offer a response to what they have asked. And that has to be done in real-time”. Lewis offers “Email can be 1:1,” acknowledges Lewis, “But it also allows for mass communications too. The technology has been there a long time to provide, at least on the content side, relevant messages to a million people simultaneously. You can customize a message to me, and customize one to you, and deploy them all at the same time, along with a million of our closest friends. But frankly, a part of the challenge is that it is so inexpensive, it is easy to just not care.” Lewis says that when he talks to CMOs their top concern is the user experience, and they know that to continue to blast their customer particularly through multiple channels is to erode customer loyalty and teach those customers to ignore their messages. “That is essentially what is going on,” he admits. “At some point we have to change the metrics that drives the marketer. We are never going to get rid of the so far ahead of us. They are looking for opportunities to engage with brands and with products and it is our opportunity and our challenge to use the technology in a way that makes sense.” The adoption of social media by customers is not surprising when you examine the demographics. Observes Lewis, “Look particularly at the younger generation and how their behavior is going to impact businesses. Look how they do business internally, as well as how they interact with their customers; it has huge ramifications for companies. What I find interesting is that consumer behavior is well in advance of how enterprises are responding to it. If you look at most enterprises they are still thinking in terms of email blasts. All of us, at least, have email and text messaging and often times IM, as well as Facebook accounts. “Your ability to create stronger relationships is inextricably tied to how well you are monitoring and participating in areas off your Web site, and out of your control.” —Stephanie Miller, Return Path, Inc. the example of how information provided to the customer—maybe regarding a purchase made or product shipped—had better be posted in real-time to your customer care center. “So, if there is an inquiry, they are able to immediately retrieve it, and correspond as if they know what is going on. Otherwise, you are not only looking at a lapse in customer service, but at higher costs, as they place inbound calls and you try to figure out what is happening. It impacts both your service and your cost structure.” The Social Role Email, according to Miller, was the first social media. “The promise of email was this one-to-one dialog and it was going to truly be an interactive experience that would allow consumers and marketers to speak to each other directly,” she says. “That was the promise of it. Email marketing as a philosophy for 99.9 percent of the email marketers out there—B2B and B2C—is not social. It has been used as a broadcast channel.” profit motive in companies, and I am not suggesting that we do, but we need to be taking a longer-term view. It is a marketer beware message. The industry has to change or your access to those customers is going to be greatly diminished. Miller believes that only in the last year and a half are marketers finally starting to move away from pure batch and blast into more of a lifecycle email marketing approach. “Honestly, as email marketers we have not done such a great job of embracing the social capability of email as a technology. It is really that combination of technology and philosophy that makes this work.” Miller comments that customer views today are so powerful and that consumers will go to 15 sites and do research before contacting a company. “They are completely knowledgeable, but this is not new. It is happening. There are huge masses of consumers and business professionals who buy that way, so we as marketers cannot pretend that this is ‘in the future’, this is now. In some ways the customer is There is some catch-up that needs to be done if enterprises are going to stay relevant and communicate with their customers through their channel of choice.” Is Email Dead? According to Return Path’s Fourth Annual Holiday Email Consumer Survey in January, “As people become more comfortable shopping on the Web, and using other channels like search, email is no longer the primary driver of e-commerce transactions. This year, for the first time, less than 30 percent of respondents to our survey indicated that they took advantage of email offers, down 20 percentage points from the prior year.” Does this mean that email as a marketers’ channel has lost its appeal? In Katz’s study, she contends that the next phase for email marketing is to build relationships over time and that the value of email should be measured beyond sales. Katz’s writes, “Coca-Cola’s consumer relationship marketing manager said 12 MESSAGING NEWS OCTOBER 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - October 2008

Messaging News - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer The Insider Threat: The New Era of Disaster Recovery Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing Botnets Go Marching On Dissecting Email Forensics Next in Messaging News “On Message” with Ben Gross The World is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - October 2008

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