It certainly can.

I’m not talking about your typical bass or walleye fishing on the great lakes of Ontario, but rather the prized fish of relationship marketing - finding those customers in need at just the right time, and giving them just the right help when needed. 

Trying to predict one’s own future is hard enough (...do I want scrambled eggs for breakfast or sunny side up?).  Being asked to predict customer needs at specific times within an online Mecca of endless options requires some serious noodle power.

The first step is understanding what your customers are doing (their behaviour), and for that you will need data.  Smart data.  Intelligent data.  Meaningful data. (You can see where I’m going with this, right?).

Many marketing companies spend a large portion of their time, money, and effort on visually stunning creative and experience planning.  But over the past few years the latter term has developed into a more tailored practice around customer experience planning, and here’s why.  Having a robust customer profile is the Faberge egg of relationship marketing.  You can’t possibly know what to plan for if you don’t understand what your customers’ behaviours are, what they are doing, and more importantly, when.  If no two customers are alike, why market to everyone the same? Through implementing even the most basic set of business intelligence principles to your marketing practices, you can greatly increase not only the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, but also increase the ROI of your marketing dollars - getting the most bang for your buck!

Analyzing and tracking everything from sign-in/web engagement metrics, online/offline purchasing trends, emails click-throughs, DM response rates, and even overlaying demographic data, customer experience planning can now go to town with your business strategy.  The marriage of these two disciplines creates a compelling and uniquely tailored experience that drives the specific customer behaviours your business needs in order to succeed.  This is relationship marketing.  Getting you in touch with customers at the various stages within the customer life cycle to deliver very relevant, very targeted, very customized marketing strategies that make your customer really feel the 1-to-1 love.

So now that you know what your customers are doing, you can plan meaningful marketing milestones within the customer life cycle to help your customers get to where they need to be within your business model.  This may mean sending them a helpful tutorial when they have called customer support too many  times,  a discount code to help clear out their shopping cart, or even a thank you note if they are an ideal customer (i.e. the 1-to-1 love).

Knowing your customers, when to market to them and with what they need, will help your continually catch the right customers at the right time in your marketing plans.  So yes, catch and release can work in marketing, and if you keep the big fish happy, your marketing feeding grounds will keep them coming back time and time again.

Shawn Moniz, Marketing Solutions Consultant

Ken Wong, one of North America’s leading marketing academics, recently spoke at the CMA’s 2010 National Convention in Toronto.  In his keynote, Ken made an astounding and disconcerting observation:  senior executives today don’t care about marketing.  Simple as that.  He explained that when compared to a host of other levers that contribute to the bottom line performance of their business, executives consistently rank marketing and marketing-related activities at or near the bottom of the list. 

Without mincing words, he said it's our fault.

Ken went on to say that we, as the marketing community, are to blame for the fact that the relationship between marketing expenditures (I prefer to view them as investments) and profit is, on the whole, poorly understood.  It is our fault that the link between business strategy, customer strategy and marketing activity is not clear to everyone, business executives in particular.

My experience leads me to believe that Ken is absolutely right.  As my career transitioned from the realm of corporate strategy to marketing strategy, I was very surprised to observe that the marketing line item on corporate P&Ls didn’t bear the same scrutiny as other line items.  That, often, the decisions to grow or shrink marketing budgets were often made on a whim rather than based on the same rigorous business case analysis used to evaluate manufacturing, operations, staffing and capital investment decisions.  And certainly decisions as to HOW to spend those marketing dollars have been based on fancy rather than ROI calculations more often than not.

Ken then issued a challenge:  he hopes to next year report a reversal of this concerning trend of apathy towards marketing in the Executive suite.  He proposes the creation of a strategy certification for marketers as means to get us to better connect our actions to the business strategy and ultimate financial performance of our clients/our employers.  I think that’s a great start, but we shouldn’t wait for that to happen.

As marketers, it is important we approach this discipline we’re so passionate about as just that:  a discipline.  We should begin to apply more analytical rigour when making decisions as to how we are going to invest in our customers.  Those of us on the agency side should help our clients build business cases and ROI models when we table new ideas.  We should all be able to answer a few simple questions:
1.    For every dollar spent (invested) in marketing to customers, what is the expected financial return?
2.    How will our marketing plan contribute to the overall business objectives of the firm?
3.    Does our current marketing plan optimize ROI? 
4.    If the channel mix were changed or the targeting strategy altered, how would this affect the financial return?
5.    Are my marketing investments creating a lasting customer asset that will yield ongoing returns, or is it simply a passing campaign that stops working when campaign is over?

The tactics we use to engage our customers are certainly where the rubber hits the road.  However, if we don’t ground our plans in business strategy, CFOs and CEOs won’t give us the opportunity to bring great ideas to market.  Without this discipline, I’m afraid what Ken is going to report next year.

On June 4, 2010, the CMA posted the revised definition of Direct Marketing as:

Direct Marketing generates profitable business results by using targeted communications to engage specific audiences through a combination of relevant messaging and offers that can be tracked, measured, analyzed, stored and leveraged to drive future marketing initiatives.

http://www.canadianmarketingblog.com/

As a member of the CMA Direct Marketing Council, I am glad to say that I had the opportunity to be a contributing member of this revised definition.  With that being said, I feel that we landed on a definition that meets the minimum requirements to represent our discipline but there were a few points that myself and a couple of others were trying to champion that didn’t make the cut.

1.    What about channel?  One of the fundamental challenges of direct marketing today is that there is still a strong latent perception that direct marketing equals direct mail.  Without including a definition of channels (email, direct mail, web, mobile, DRTV (or radio), demand generation/social) or stating that direct marketing is absolutely channel agnostic, are we going to re-align marketing’s understanding of direct?

2.    To Digital Cement, we agree that the number one objective of direct is to generate profitable business results for our clients.  But secondary to that, or perhaps the means to that end, in our opinion, is to help our clients create on-going relationships with their customers.  The CMA definition of direct stops short of that, at targeted communications.  Perhaps this is to appease direct mail marketers like banks and telco’s in their targeted mass mailing efforts – but is this really direct?  Without acknowledging and encouraging customers into the marketing cycle, will companies lose out to those companies who find a way to engage conversation?

3.    The impact of new technology also plays a tremendous role in what direct marketing is going to look like in the near future.  Social/community can be defined in the brand/traditional marketing space where a company is looking to use the channels to influence product perception, but maybe there is also a deeper connection with direct.  Data around social monitoring, the ability to directly drive behaviour with demand generation through SEM and the relationships through facebook, twitter, etc. is in fact are actually direct methods.  Without including the role of social as a strategy to affect customer behaviour through direct activities, I also feel that our council definition remains conservative.

To that end, perhaps it is not the role of the CMA to push the boundaries.  Maybe that responsibility falls on us to build up trust with our clients, encourage them to jointly take the risk with us to jump into new channels and technologies and bring these new pilot activities forward to gain recognition at awards shows, marketing magazines create a ton of word of mouth ‘buzz’.  Let’s find ways to use our “New Direct” to do cool stuff and if those ‘Old School’ marketers want to stay with their targeted mass... let them get left behind.