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Succesful brand development utilising Customer Communications Management October 29, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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Brand development utilising customer communications management requires the achievement of a number of objectives.

In looking at process dimensions for brand development under customer communications management, there are a number of key measures that a company must seek to achieve.

Strategic Consistency

If your company does not understand and deliver to its strategy how are your customers to understand what you company is about. Keep messages in line with strategic intent.

Purposeful Interactivity

Don’t blow you client relationship with pointless communication that is irrelevant. Ensure that each individual communication that you send to each individual client is relevant and has a clear objective – both in the clients mind and your own.

Mission Marketing

Get your companies objectives across – to supply the best airline travel, to provide the safest pension investments, to make the nation warmer whatever it is make it clear that you company is there to solve problems for the customer and more.

Zero Based Planning

Identify the communication problems. Examine the marketing communication tools that you have to solve the problem. Identify the gap, additional channels and the tool set that you will use to solve the problem.

To really get the most from your customer communications management infrastructure it is important that your company adopts an organisational approach that will allow success. There are some key drivers that include effective cross-functional management, a focus upon excellence within core competencies, expertise in data driven marketing and, working with media partners who are well integrated and versed in your business.

If your company gets the process and culture aspects right then through effectively leveraging the customer communications management platform, you can expect improvements in key measures such as brand awareness, brand attitude positivity, high brand actions and improved purchase facilitation measures.

Data Management – Types of Data October 23, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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In order to understand how to manage data within an organisation, the first step is to understand the different types of data that exist.

Customer Communications Management processes are heavily reliant upon data and it is vital that organisations have confidence in the quality of their before embarking upon a program of sophisticated customer communications.

I’ll be discussing data much more but first lets start by taking a look at the different types of data that you are likely to find in your company.

Transactional Data – This is data that relates to sales, purchase activity, refunds and other financial transactions.

Unstructured Data – You are currently reading unstructured data. Unstructured data is found in emails, documents, websites, project management tools, graphical tools and so on.

Meta data – Metadata is data about data. Particularly now XML has been embraced, XML documents contain descriptive information about data. It can also be represented within an relational database management system as a column heading.

Hierarchical Data – Describes relationships between various pieces of data. It may exist within systems or may be stored elsewhere to describe networks and relationships. Hierarchical data is based upon a parent child relationship. Thus it might be used to describe the relationship between a data item in one table say ‘customers’ and the data in another table say ‘last order date’.

Master Data – Master Data is the fundamental data that is used to manage the business. It describes customers, products, places, dates and times, concepts (such as a contract, agreement, or purchase order document). Master data is critical to an organisations success. Many larger companies may be formed from acquisition and merger resulting in an individual customer being named James in one database and Jimmy in another. Creating master data involves reducing James and Jimmy to a single data entity.

Both the processes to derive Master Data and, how we use these different types of data in customer communications management processes is critical. I’ll talk more on this subject tomorrow.

Sticking with Email Marketing in 2009 October 22, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
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A study by eMetrics Marketing Optimisation found that 86% of respondents intend to continue or raise their existing levels of expenditure on email Marketing.

The other interesting finding from the report was that email marketing is the least likely marketing method likely to experience a drop in budgets.

What the report doesn’t reveal however whether this is because it is simply a relatively cheap form of marketing or whether the response rates are particularly high.

What this does underscore is the need for companies to have an integrated approach to their customer and prospect communications approach. It is important that communication channels work together in a synchronous way, a manner that supports the messages of each channel, and that establishes your companies brand identity with prospects as well as customers.