One BigMissed Marketing

OpportunityMarketers who overlook the power of the phone are letting

competitors ring up sales instead.

Presented by

Page 3 Introduction

Page 4 Conversion Analytics [Infographic]

Page 5 Optimizing the Marketing Channel Mix

Page 7 A Highly Human Approach to Digital Marketing

Page 9 Marketers Debate Quality Versus Quantity in Lead Generation

Page 10 Channels Are Out. Impact Is In.

Page 12 Mobile Attribution Is a Work in Progress

Page 14 Lead Generation in 2015

Page 15 Customers for Life?

Page 17 Direct Mail Without Call Tracking Is Just Silly

Page 19 Marketers’ Twisted Cross-Channel Attribution [Infographic]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Marketers are hot on social, they rely on email, and they’re jug-

gling everything from display to outdoor to complete their campaign strategies. But one channel that’s all too often overlooked: the phone. In fact, companies that omit a phone number from their homepage risk losing 15 to 25% of their potential revenue, according to LogMyCalls. Further, 64% of marketers surveyed by LogMyCalls say that incoming calls are their best leads.

What’s more, marketers can use data from customers’ calls to improve their over-all channel mix. Tracking call sources and understanding what drove prospective cus-tomers to call, as well as the results of each call, can help marketers determine how best to adjust the channel mix and who they target.

Ultimately, optimizing the channel mix to generate the highest-quality leads is what will deliver the best results. Read on to get the insight you need to do just that.

Is it possible that we now have too many ways to reach customers? Individuals are connect-ed to global networks around the clock. An

eMarketer study found that the average adult spends more than five hours per day engaged with digital media—more time than is spent in front of the TV. Traditional marketing channels from billboards to cold calls continue to reinvent themselves and retain their place in the market-ing mix.

Choice is liberating, but it can also be op-pressive, and matching the right medium with the right message is only going to get more complicated. “Back in the late 1990s people thought we had channel fragmentation,” says George Corugedo, CTO of marketing software developer RedPoint. “They had no idea what was coming.”

The good news is that strategy and data analysis have evolved to the point where mar-keters can make informed decisions about the best channels for their target audiences. The bad news is that the ability to optimize the channel mix is going to be table stakes in the ever-escalating competition for custom-ers’ attention.

Here’s how to design a channel mix that delivers.

HAVE THE RIGHT MIND-SETDon’t follow the crowd. Energy snack maker Perky Jerky competes with global CPG brands that can dominate the airwaves and drown it out in conventional media. The brand’s goal is

4 key areas marketers can manipulate to master the ever-increasing array of customer touchpoints. By Jason Compton

OPTIMIZING THE MARKETING CHANNEL MIX

to highlight its taste advantage, so Perky Jerky focuses marketing efforts on getting physical samples into people’s hands. The sample bags are emblazoned with QR codes provided by NeoMedia, which guide consumers to the next step in the customer journey. “We can’t do a massively large traditional media campaign, so we spend just about everything on mobile and social that leads to sampling the product and then converting to a purchase,” says Brian Levin, chairman of Perky Jerky.

Know where your audience is. The population of high school students in the Midwest is in a demographic trough, so colleges such as Uni-versity of Wisconsin–Stout have been compet-ing for a shrinking audience. “The dip started in 2006 and we are expecting it to last two more years,” says Melissa Perez, marketing coordina-tor for the school’s undergraduate admissions office. Realizing that the single mailer that had been part of its prospect campaigns wasn’t enough to grab and hold the audience, UW-Stout added text messages, lifecycle emails, and hand-tailored postcards to remind high school students of upcoming visits by admis-sions counselors. The school was rewarded with a 107% increase year-over-year in high school student appointments.

Get a view across channels. Optimizing the chan-nel mix requires cross-channel insights. It’s impos-sible to understand relative performance if data and strategy for each channel are walled off. Public broadcaster WGBH revitalized its fundraising and is staying ahead of budget projections by linking its channels. “We were siloed,” says Cate Twohill, senior director of technical product development for WGBH. “Now, we use our broadcast invento-ry to promote local events and drive traffic to the website, where we can capture more information on landing pages and better track what [donors] are doing.”

Commit to a program of continuous evalua-tion. “The worst channel mix optimizations are done by the organization every year or two—

turn TV down, turn paid search up, come back in another 12 to 24 months and do it again,” says Conor McGovern, managing director of Accen-ture Digital. “That is not the path to success.”

RIDE YOUR WINNERSDon’t abandon a winning strategy, even if it feels quaint. SAP’s global VP of product mar-keting Jamie Anderson points to a successful Las Vegas casino which, despite a sophisticat-ed loyalty program with extremely detailed re-al-time data, doesn’t do any digital marketing. Personalized printed mailers are its chief stock in trade. “They understand that the customer al-ready receives hundreds of emails executed by great marketing automation systems,” he says. “The CMO told me that they want to send cus-tomers things they will pin to their fridge, some-thing tailored and relevant, so direct mail is their biggest and most impactful channel.”

Test email frequency. Email may be noisy, but it’s virtually free. B2C buyers in particular have come to expect a steady hum of com-munication. Rather than fret about fatigue, run tests to determine whether your spigot is active enough. “All of the ‘mainstream mall brands’ have gone to a daily email stream, so consumers expect a daily campaign,” says Ross Kramer, Listrak CEO.

Get found. Search marketing is a low-con-version grind and always will be, but it remains a crucial channel for capturing active buyers. Jake Sweeney Automotive of Cincinnati focuses its digital advertising budget on search engine marketing, reflecting the modern consumer’s wide, multi-source path to a vehicle purchase. “We still have our traditional roots and a lot of TV and radio advertising, and that’s the usual path the shopper takes: seeing the ad on TV or hearing it on the radio, then doing a search,” says Sarah Sweeney, the dealership’s e-commerce director. The dealership converts about 2% of search engine marketing (SEM) displays—in line with the digital industry average. And even that average flow is vital to keeping the sales pipe-line moving.

Coastal.com CMO Braden Hoeppner be-lieves that e-tailing success requires a blend of ethnography and analytics. His

Vancouver-based global company sells eye glass-

es and contact lenses to consumers in 150 coun-tries. Successfully sustaining that global reach requires a local approach with a personal touch.

WHAT’S YOUR PASSION IN MARKETING?My primary passion is at the intersection of cus-tomers and digital. I’ve spent most of my career in the digital realm, and I strongly believe in a range of approaches to find out what custom-ers want and need. It is the marketer’s challenge to uncover those desires—regardless of how they’re expressed or even if they’re expressed—and then develop solutions for them. Leveraging digital tools to help create those solutions pro-vides endless opportunity. Online eyeglasses are a perfect example. There weren’t a lot of people running around six years ago saying, “I want to buy my eyeglasses online.” It turns out that con-sumers really did want a different way to buy eyewear—a more affordable way, a more conve-nient way, a way with a greater selection—that disrupts the old way of doing things.

WHAT “RANGE OF APPROACHES” DO YOU USE TO IDENTIFY CONSUMER PREFERENCES?We constantly analyze customer and consumer data. We’re a big Net Promoter Score compa-ny, for example. It’s crucial for us to use a lot of digital tools, which we do on a daily basis. However, it’s just as important for us to talk to people on the street. We’ve done studies where

Coastal.com CMO Braden Hoeppner is all about data—but never at the expense of the personal touch. By Eric Krell

A HIGHLY HUMAN APPROACH TO DIGITAL MARKETING

The figure represents the increase in mobile traffic to Coastal.com’s website from

January 2011 to January 2012. “Like all e-tailers, we knew mobile was coming,” Hoeppner says. The

surge in smartphone- and tablet-equipped site visitors motivated a strategic shift, but not before Hoeppner and his team gained a better understanding of the surge’s timing. “As we investigated the data more closely, we saw that newly received technology gifts were being

turned on in the final week of December. That add-ed fuel to the longer-term shift. It also caused us

to pour a lot more thought and action into our mobile strategy throughout 2012, before

the next post-holiday surge.”

we took a dozen people from our marketing team, teamed them up in pairs, and sent them to a shopping mall to talk to anyone they found with glasses. Our people would ask questions like, “What was your best glasses-shopping experience?” and “What was your worst glass-es-shopping experience?”

We brought all of that research back and sat down together to gain a deeper understanding of how people buy eyewear and what frustrates them about the process. And then we brain-stormed ideas to address those frustrations and other issues we discovered. In the digital world it’s very easy to simply look at visits, page views, and clicks. You see these numbers in your an-alytics dashboard and you forget that there are actually human beings behind the data. We want to make sure we address the real needs of the people on the other side of the screen.

DID YOU HAVE AN AHA MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZED THE VALUE OF BALANCING DIGITAL AND REAL-WORLD MARKETING?It was more like an aha experience, and it oc-curred at a previous company. The company was B2B, but it maintained a massive consum-er Web portal for its business clients. Histor-ically, the website was designed for the B2B organization where all the revenue was com-ing from. But the fact of the matter was that end consumers, our clients’ customers, were using this website to get to our clients. One of my responsibilities was to communicate this to our business partners while selling them on the need to redesign the site to better meet the needs of end consumers. My argument was that the new site would benefit them: We will drive you more leads. It was a tough sell, and the site-rebuilding process was disrup-tive. Once we finally launched our new web-site and put our new marketing into place, we increased leads by 50% overnight. That expe-rience proved to me that when you put end consumers at the center of your assessment of the market, you uncover new things that you wouldn’t have uncovered otherwise.

HOW DO YOU INTEGRATE THIS PASSION INTO YOUR DAILY ROUTINE?For one, we’re collecting and analyzing a lot of voice-of-the-customer input—survey feedback and other customer analytics—on a daily basis. And, a key aspect of my role is instilling a cus-tomer mind-set into everybody. This involves education. It also requires me to challenge per-spectives. I constantly ask questions: “How are customers going to perceive that?” or, “How is this persona going to use that feature that you’re proposing for the website?” or, “Why did we post that to social media; who was that tar-geted to, and what were we hoping they would do in response?” It’s one of my responsibilities to continually challenge our team to always put the customer at the center of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Most marketers agree that lead generation has never been easy. But it’s been further complicated by the disjointed purchase

habits of today’s multi-device, multichannel cus-tomer. In the past the main priority in terms of lead generation for marketers has been to gener-ate as many leads as possible; but that’s proving to be much harder when businesses struggle to classify leads as, well, leads.

“The definition of a lead has definitely changed, simply because marketing is now on the hook to deliver specific types of leads with prospects at certain stages…,” says Scott Vaughan, CMO at marketing software provider Integrate. “Defi-nitions vary considerably, and it’s important to agree on a clear definition [of a lead] between

marketing and sales—and between you as a mar-keter and the source you are contracting with for lead generation.” So, is the idea that more leads are always better still valid? Often, no.

“A lead now needs to have some sort of mar-keting qualification done to it before it gets to sales; I think marketers need to be more and more careful about what they’re sending to sales, and marketing needs to be very cognizant of where their prospects are [in the funnel],” says Shelby Britton, senior product manager at Adobe. “If marketing is sending over better quality leads, they’ll increase the trust with sales and have a better relationship with sales.” Generally, a single, qualified lead can trump 10 unqualified leads. Of course, the relationship between quality of leads and quantity of leads isn’t as conflicting as one might assume. There are a number of factors that determine whether a business should priori-tize quality over quantity or vice versa. Some ex-amples include company size or campaign scale.

“Some companies or campaigns may need a large volume [of leads] that meets basic criteria, and then use the tools and techniques to nurture [by] using marketing automation, retargeting, etcetera. Other companies may need precise leads with specific titles or people in specific companies, otherwise known as a named ac-count lead-gen strategy,” Vaughan explains.

“There’s a place in the funnel where you bring in as many people as possible, and that’s called

Lead generation is rarely a simple conversation, especially when it comes to the number of leads generated versus the value of them. By Perry Simpson

QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY IN LEAD GENERATION

contact acquisition; and all the volume needs to happen there. Then, start nurturing those folks,” Britton says. In some situations, this sec-tion of the funnel becomes the priority, tipping the optimal strategy toward quantity and away from quality.

“Even for the most sophisticated and precise organizations, qualified leads will always be a percentage of total leads generated,” notes John Reese, SVP of marketing at CRM software pro-vider Velocify. “Because of that relationship, if your desire is to produce more qualified leads, in most cases more total leads must be gener-ated.” Reese cites specific situations, such as entering new markets, which might warrant the pursuit of large amount of leads. However, Reese says, even that situation doesn’t warrant deval-uing high-quality leads. “I believe quality should always be a consideration,” Reese says, “even when quantities are a priority.”

Of course, email still reigns in lead nurtur-ing, but some experts say marketers would do well to add some spice to their email messag-es. “If [people] aren’t opening your emails then you can’t start the conversation, but there’s a lack of creativity that makes people delete or not open emails,” explains Gundmundur “G.B.” Heidarsson, CEO at email intelligence company eDataSource. “Every fifth email I get is saving me money, or improving my marketing, or in-viting me to their webinar. There’s not a lot of intrigue there; nothing that keeps it interesting.” Heidarsson says that an overly stringent adher-ence to best practices is a likely culprit for the dearth of exciting and engaging email content. “Try new things,” Heidarsson continues. “Things won’t backfire that badly as long as you stay in ethical and legal boundaries. Think about your approach not what others are doing because its best practices.”

Becoming an omnichannel brand is more than simply giving an old multichannel strategy a new name. It’s much more than

simply mirroring a brand’s presence across ev-ery viable point of contact.

In fact, despite the name, the most success-ful omnichannel brands are the ones that stop talking about channels and focus instead on overall business impact. That means an end to channel-centric groups, each jockeying to claim their own unique impact on the bottom line.

It’s not a painless or easy transformation, par-ticularly for brands with deeply ingrained bad habits. “It can be a very expensive proposition, which is why we see that companies starting from scratch have a very different experience than retailers that have been around for 100 years,” says Ron Klein, director of the retail and consumer advisory practice at PWC Manage-ment Consulting.

Greenfield or legacy, every brand has the power to make an omnichannel transformation

The brands most successful with omnichannel marketing are those who think about outcomes, not channels. By Jason Compton

CHANNELS ARE OUT. IMPACT IS IN.

by focusing people, process, and technology around the modern, multi-screen customer.

OMNICHANNEL BEGINS WITH THE CUSTOMERThe most important person to consider in the omnichannel world is outside the four walls of the company, but should be at the heart of ev-ery action: the customer.

Customers have learned to demand continui-ty of service and consistency of messaging from interacting with the leading brands that already deliver it. That’s why so much omnichannel in-novation comes from the retail experience—as retailers labor to keep customers from defecting to other mer-chants, in such ways as by bringing prices into harmony between on- and offline outlets and by emphasizing per-sonalized service.

Indeed, successful omnichannel brands are using their data to understand consumer behavior across all in-teractions. Their goal in doing so is to reach customers with the right information in the channel where it will have the biggest impact. That applies to every tier of customer engagement, whether attracting leads, converting to purchase, building wallet share, en-couraging social sharing, or building advocacy.

Aligning communications and channel inter-actions with customer goals is an important first step, but the real journey still lies ahead. “So much of that was reactive, and misses the reali-ty that the millennial generation has taken con-trol,” says Tim Nelson, president of integrated marketing agency Tris3ct. “It’s not the business that’s omnichannel, it’s the customer.”

Omnichannel customers leap through stages

of contact and interaction in unpredictable ways. Channels typically considered reserved only for prospecting, or only for loyalty building, should be available to customers at all times, because omni-channel buyers don’t think in terms of touchpoints. “A best practice is to let the customer choose which channel is most convenient for him,” says Deb Woods, director of product management at Teradata. “Putting down bars or swim lanes gives the customer one more excuse not to interact.”

Aligning a brand to connect with and respond to customers across any channel at any time requires greater unity around shared goals, meaning that market-ing decisions—from budgeting and planning to sales and even fulfill-ment—need to roll up to the same authority. “Historically, the e-com-merce group would sit on the sidelines, but they’re increasingly part of the marketing organization and report to the CMO now,” says Jeffrey Wilks, head of client services for eBay Enterprise. “That’s a good thing, because it

brings more unity, purpose, and strategy to com-munication across the entire value chain.”

DESIGNING OMNICHANNEL PROCESSESThe first step in building an omnichannel brand is a commitment to consistency across all online and physical channels. That’s a challenge in many re-gards, from the obvious organizational alignment and technology issues down to such details as the differing skillsets involved in merchandising differ-ent channels. But segregating channels is no lon-ger a sustainable strategy, because consumers are choosing brands that reflect their omnichannel ex-pectations. “When you have inconsistency between

channels, you erode trust,” Nelson says. “Consum-ers will lean into brands that make it easy for them.”

A crude but effective test of an organization’s omnichannel readiness is to see if its website pro-motes membership-based offers such as loyalty programs and affinity cards to customers already enrolled. Continuing to hammer home messages long after they’ve been heard, received, and even accepted means that an organization is narrowly focused on offers rather than on using data to better understand customers’ behaviors, pref-erences, and reactions. “It’s annoying, and a tre-mendous waste, to be hounded about a product you already own,” says Josh Manion, CEO of on-line data firm Ensighten.

Instead of training customers to always expect new offers, omnichannel organizations put loyal-ty, direct marketing, and sales campaigns in align-ment behind the concept of customer value. They also work in concert to build engagement that’s not directly tied to purchases and discounts. “Old

loyalty programs were based around buying five products and getting a discount on the sixth. That’s very linear, straightforward, and, frankly, boring,” says Matt Wise, CEO of digital agency HelloWorld. “Let consumers play a game, or design an album cover that may appear on a TV ad. Show six-sec-ond videos and ask them to share posts.”

Working with HelloWorld, Schwan’s Consumer Brands used an omnichannel campaign to drive attention to the “Tailgate at Your Place” promo-tion for its frozen pizza lines. The outreach comes from integrated social, digital, in-store, and on-box promotions, and isn’t overtly focused on incremental sales. This finesse approach has al-lowed Schwan’s to convert more than 60% of visitors to sign up for an online community that runs through the end of the college football sea-son. “That’s double what we expected,” says Mar-cie Anderson, Integrated Marketing Manager at Schwan’s, “but we knew we needed to use a dif-ferent [tack] to market in today’s world.”

Nearly 86 million Americans shop on their smartphones, according to comScore. However, an estimated 40% of shoppers

use three or more channels before making a pur-chase—up from just 10% in 2002. That multichan-nel path to purchase makes it tough for marketers

who are trying to attribute which sales are linked to which channels—especially the increasingly popular, thus important, mobile channel.

“There are different ways to talk about attri-bution. First click, last click, etcetera,” says Jef-frey Barnes, director of marketing and predictive

Marketers discuss the daunting task of—and potential solutions for—tracing sales back to mobile campaigns. By Perry Simpson

MOBILE ATTRIBU-TION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

analytics at digital agency Huge. “Marketing-tech vendors are starting to be really open about the algorithms they use for attribution.” Barnes says that willingness to test varying attribution mod-els is proving to be necessary for marketers who want to accurately attribute sales, signups, and other desired actions to mobile.

But some marketers are erring on the side of caution. “I’ve spoken with a lot of advertis-ers, and many of them aren’t totally comfortable with mobile because it lacks a true attribution model,” says Chuck Moxley, CMO of mobile ad-vertising technology company 4INFO.

Even so, Juniper Research reports that busi-nesses will spend $7.4 billion in mobile messag-ing by 2017. As brands continue to invest in mobile, effective attri-bution for the channel will rise in priority. One challenge with mo-bile attribution is that cookies—though the industry standard for tracking customers online—are ineffective in the mobile channel. “Mobile doesn’t really have a persistent iden-tifier like a cookie,” says Mike Fyall, VP of mar-keting at mobile linking company URX. “Without cookies, the focus for mobile [attribution] has been on the [mobile-app] install.”

A mobile app download or install is, at best, a du-bious success metric, according to 4INFO’s Moxley, who suggests that an install is about as telling as a page view or an email open. “You have to distin-guish between vanity metrics and useful metrics,” he explains. “In the end, if you get one million clicks, that’s great and all, but did those clicks drive sales?”

Users often download apps simply to test them. But almost as often, users will ignore or remove the app soon after downloading it. “A lot of companies are set up to track where their app installs come from, but the focus is starting to shift toward reengagement,” Fyall says.

TRACKING BY DEEPLINKINGWhile some marketers track direct activities like installs, others measure activity through deeplinks to see where app users are earlier in their purchase cycle. “Look at the way [taxi service] Uber uses deeplinks to drive people from Google Maps to [its] own app,” Fyall says. “Uber can see that these people came from Google Maps.”

Although deeplinking offers new opportu-nities and solutions for mobile attribution, the practice has yet to provide the same level of data as the all-powerful cookie. “I don’t know how deeplinking will solve the cookie problem,” Moxley says. “If you’re logged in as a Google user

then the publisher will know who you are, but if not, then how do you know who the phone belongs to?”

Some experts say a holistic look at the customer journey will give marketers the best insight into mobile attribution. “There ar-en’t different answers for mobile,” says Emily Wengert, VP of user

experience at Huge. “There isn’t a moment where we only talk about mobile. It doesn’t make sense to be so channel specific.”

Whatever the future of mobile attribution may hold, marketers must keep the customer’s journey in mind.

“We’re all very fixated on attribution, but once you have an end-to-end process in place that tracks these comprehensive customer journeys, it’s not much further to look at your custom-ers’ lifetime value,” explains Mark Floisand, VP of product marketing at marketing software company Sitecore. “You have to look at how you marry attribution, customer acquisition costs, transaction value, and customer lifetime values to get metrics that reward more than just the initial transaction.”

Already, marketers are looking to or have started developing lead generation strategies for 2015. The team at Blue Fountain Media, a web design and on-line marketing firm, weighed in on how to craft the most effective lead-gen plans for next year—and beyond. In particular, the speakers homed in on three areas: strategy, content, and of course, po-tential customers. Here are a few of the more poi-gnant, pithy bits of advice from the summit, held at the Gansevoort Park Avenue hotel in New York.

STRATEGY: HAVING THE RIGHT PLAN“Part of a good conversion strategy is to respect that those at the top of the funnel might not want to be contacted or engaged [by marketers] right away. Let them browse before you contact them.” —Christina Shaw, CMO

“[Customer] wants, usability, viewability, engage-ment, and authority. That’s the formula for great SEO.” —John Marcinuk, director of SEO

CONTENT: CRAFTING THE RIGHT STORY“Marketers [and consumers] are moving towards engaging content with rich media. Use sight, sound, and motion.” —Ashley Kemper, senior mar-keting strategist

“Most people think of marketing automation as an assembly line. But it’s the ability to have a one-to-one conversation with customers at scale. Market-ing automation is really marketing personalization.” —Joe DiNardo, director of paid & social media

“Personalization allows marketers to show context that’s relevant at the right time—and that changes content in real time.” —Joe DiNardo

CUSTOMERS: CHOOSING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE“Marketers need to layer their information—demo-graphics, behaviors, and [popular] content. That’s when you find your customers.” —Jon-Michael Durkin, agency development manager, Google

“To identify your best potential customers, go be-yond demographics. Use pain points, influencers, touchpoints, and even potential barriers.” —Chris-tina Shaw

“[Potential customers] use social as a sort-of mid-point in the funnel. They use it to gather more infor-mation or gain awareness before deciding whether to buy. It’s an important mid-step.” —Ashley Kemper

Strategy, content, and customers. Marketing pundits say those will be the three prongs of a successful lead-gen strategy in the coming year. By Natasha D. Smith

LEAD GENERATION IN 2015

As much as marketers may affirm the im-portance of customer loyalty, their focus more often lies on new customer acqui-

sition. In fact, although 94% of the senior ex-ecutives surveyed for the “Customers for Life” study by Forbes Insights and Sitecore say that retaining customers for life is prioritized as some level within their organization, only 38% are primarily focused on repeat customers for revenue growth.

“Attracting new customers is by far the num-ber one priority,” Bruce Rogers, chief insights officer and head of the CMO practice at Forbes,

said during a session at Sitecore’s Symposium 2014. He shared several other key findings during his conference presentation. They include:The top three priorities for marketing organi-zations today are:58% Attracting new customers40% Turning current customers into customers for life25% Developing a single view of each customer

Businesses are currently most focused on the following in terms of revenue growth:49% Acquiring new customers38% Loyal, regular customers who purchase frequently12% Current, recently acquired customers2% Other

More than three quarters (77%) of respon-dents say that average customer lifetime value (CLTV) is a highly or extremely valuable indi-cator of marketing performanceBut…58% Regularly calculate CLTV24% Have no plans to do so or just don’t know its potential18% Have plans to do so

When asked how integrated the various custom-er communications and data gathering systems are in their organization, respondents said:27% Fully integrated58% Partially integrated11% Not integrated

Most marketers say customer loyalty is important, but far more are focused on acquisition, says a Forbes study. Ginger Conlon

CUSTOMERS FOR LIFE?

Not surprisingly, the greater the C-level in-volvement in strategy setting for that integra-tion, the higher the likelihood of it happening:Full integration – 63% of CMOs and 60% of CIOs are involvedPartial integration – 28% CMOs and 34% CIOs are involvedNo integration – 5% CMOs and 2% CIOs are involved

Siloes and a lack of integration among teams pose challenges to the delivery of seamless, personalized customer interactions, Rogers said. But developing a single view of the cus-tomer is a priority for just over half of the executives surveyed:53% Priority31% Neutral16% Not a priority

Technology can be an inhibitor when it compa-ny to developing that single view of the custom-er. The top three technology challenges are:41% Multiple/duplicate records38% Too many systems/difficulty keeping track of where data is stored37% Siloed data

Data analytics, in fact, is an essential compo-nent of respondents’ ability to personalize their customer communications.56% of all respondents say their marketing organization excels at ensuring that customer communications make sense for each customer personally76% of respondents who rate their company’s ability to use analytics as high say the sameAnd,51% of all respondents say their marketing organization excels at anticipating customer needs reather than sending mass communications72% of respondents who rate their company’s ability to use analytics as high say the same

So, which is more important?66% Personalized, relevant communication

34% Staying in regular communications with customers regardless of personalization

Based on these findings, Rogers offered several recommendations:Prioritize your customer-for-life goals: Increase the prominence of customer loyalty as part of your revenue-growth strategies, and implement technologies that help support retention.

Reconnect intention with action and make reg-ular use of CLTV metrics: Simply put, start cal-culating customer lifetime value and use it to assist in measuring marketing effectiveness, set-ting priorities, and directing spending.

Simplify the multiplicity of platforms and programs used to house customer informa-tion: It’s impossible to provide seamless cus-tomer interactions without seamless data access. Integrate the technologies needed to enable that data access, and foster cross-team collaboration.

Implement a single, centralize platform for man-aging data and communications: Data fragmen-tation inhibits not just seamless interactions, but also personalization. Use technology to help break down silos.

Enact systems that allow communicationss to be personalized on content and frequen-cy: Anticipating customers’ needs and send-ing relevant, timely communications in re-sponse to those needs is an essential element of personalization—and customer experience excellence. So is sending the right content in those communications.

Focus on a whole-organization approach to strategy setting: Include C-level executives and cross-functional stakeholders when setting mar-keting and technology integration strategies.“Marketing too important to be left to just mar-keters,” Rogers said. “The whole organization need to be engaged.”

T here’s no rational rea-son why anyone should spend a dime, dollar, or

penny on direct mail and then fail to use a call tracking num-ber on the direct mail piec-es themselves. Call tracking numbers provide incredibly valuable data about which mailers produce calls.

Not only can they tell you which ad copy, colors, size, CTA, geographic target-ing efforts, and offers, pro-duce calls—they can tell you which don’t. Can you say op-timization? They’re also really easy to implement on direct mail pieces. You’re putting a phone number on their any-way, right? You might as well put a phone num-ber that gives you data.

Now let’s talk pros and cons.

POSSIBLE OBJECTION #1: Using call tracking numbers on a direct mail piece will confuse the consumer be-cause the phone number on the mailer will be different from your actual business phone number.Research in The New York Times indicates that about 94% of people in the U.S. can’t remember a single business phone number. They don’t know one business phone number. Not one. No one will even notice that the call tracking number on a mailer is different from the number on your website.

And even if they did, who cares? Are they honestly going to be so con-fused or befuddled that they’ll just throw up their hands and say, “Well, I would’ve called them, but

Objections to call tracking? Here are three ways to overcome them. By McKay Allen, Director of Content and Communications, LogMyCalls

DIRECT MAIL WITHOUT CALL TRACKING IS JUST SILLY

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there’s a different number on here than the one I’m used to seeing.”

Of course not.

POSSIBLE OBJECTION #2: The data I get won’t be that worthwhile.If you’re an advertiser, don’t you want to hold the direct mail firm you hired accountable? Don’t you want to see how many calls that firm is produc-ing for you? And if you’re a direct mail firm, don’t you want to know which tac-tics are working so you can keep your clients happy?

Call tracking can literally save accounts. How? Well, if someone wants to can-cel, the account rep for can simply pull up the call track-ing data. The data generally shows that the DM compa-ny is doing a really good job at generating phone calls for the client. On the other hand, it also shows that the client’s em-ployees are really bad on the phone and/or that the client’s employees are not even answering the phone sometimes.

It’s handy proof that the problem isn’t the di-rect mail company. Thus, the direct mail compa-ny keeps its client.

POSSIBLE OBJECTION #3: Why can’t the consumer just bring in the coupon? This won’t work for three reasons: First, it isn’t 1979. Gathering a stack of coupons brought in by consumers doesn’t qualify as marketing

analytics. Second, our data shows that 85% or more of consumers won’t actually bring in a cou-pon or remember to “mention it” when they call. Your data simply won’t be accurate. And third, it’s simpler to just log in to a call tracking solu-tion and see how many calls your direct mailers are generating.

To sum it upI recently spoke to an executive at a direct mail

company who indicated that using call tracking is actively saving accounts. If clients are ready to drop the company, it simply shows the clients the call tracking data, listens to a few calls, and emails the client the results. The client is generally stunned at how many calls are actually being generated by direct mail. Cli-

ents are also often stunned at how poorly their employees are handling customers on the phone.

“CALL TRACKING CAN LITERALLY SAVE

ACCOUNTS”

L ogMyCalls combines traditional call

tracking with powerful analysis of

phone calls. LogMyCalls Conversa-

tion Analytics tool evaluates the content of

calls by analyzing the words and phrases

that are actually spoken on the call. Log-

MyCalls uses speech recognition technolo-

gy and sophisticated algorithms to gauge

lead quality, measure conversions, analyze

phone performance, and take action with

marketing automation.

LogMyCalls helps advertisers and agencies

make better marketing decisions, improve

close rates on the phone, and generate

more revenue. For more information visit

LogMyCalls.com.