enrich interactivity

As always, marketing budgets have been the first to take the hit during this downturn. Yet we all know how critical it is to keep a finger on the pulse of the market and seek out those diminishing opportunities before the competition. The environment is ripe to take a fresh look at both emerging and mature digital solutions that could help cut costs. No, I am not for a moment professing to put more into your Adwords budget or bring in an SEO consultant (Even BT is willing to help if you have £6000 to spare!). What is on offer though are 10 low cost, offbeat ideas for customer acquisition, retention and promotion. These will not break your bank, and could give you that slight edge that you need to weather this storm.

Acquisition

• GENERATE PERMISSION LISTS: Adding a subscription list to your website is very easy. Create this at every point you get information from the customer. You can incorporate this into your existing forms with a few lines of script.
• LIST ENHANCEMENT: Double the effectiveness of your telesales team by including an e-mail step before the call is made. There are several services available that can enhance your customer lists with email addresses. You can then use Email Marketing to target a specific offering and then call customers that opened the email within a couple of days.
• ESTABLISH SMS CHANNEL: Create a new channel for your leads. Ideal for print and flyer advertising, creating a SMS based Mobile Marketing easy and cheap. Customers text your keyword to a shortcode (5 digit number) and you can respond with a message (eg. URL), callback from a telesales or geolocate the message and send it to the nearest branch.
• AUTOMATE LEAD GENERATION: Do you have field based employees that interact with customers? This could be the best interface for new opportunity identification. Creating a simple Mobile SMS lead automation scheme can significantly increase effectiveness of conversion. Capturing the initiating employee’s credentials, automatically intimating area sales team and administering lead rewards can all be achieved using an SMS gateway.

Retention

• OBTAIN CUSTOMER REFERENCES: Renewing customer contracts could be a challenging time. Even if you have done a great job, customers are going to push for lower pricing in the light of competitive offers. If you have to discount, ask for references: try audio or video recordings - you can always create a print copy from this. Endorsements send a strong message to customers considering a switch.
• UNDERSTAND YOUR NET PROMOTER: Fred Reichheld proposed a simple test for your customers “On a scale of 0 - 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or a colleague?”. A whole methodology has evolved around this concept called Net Promoter System (NPS). Only the ones that give you a 9 or a 10 are a promoter. What in your service creates promoters? What pains detractors? Aligning the organization to address this is a critical first step. Contact us to find out more.
• GET MOST OUT OF ASSETS: And get it for free. Marketing assets generated by Telesales, Sales, Web team, Corporate and many other self proclaimed pockets of marketing in a company can quickly get out of hand and disjointed. You are lucky if you can invest in a Marketing Asset Management solution, however, for the rest of us its not the end of time. If you have MS 2003 or later Server, you have almost everthing needed to deploy a first class collaboration portal for Marketing Assets using Sharepoint Services. Give some work to those twiddling thumbs in the IT department!

Promotion

• ADD LINKS TO TRANSACTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS: Does your team correspons frequently with customers by email? You need to institute a simple link at the footer of every email offering subscription for specials and information. Get the interested leads to walk in.
• EXPOSE YOUR EXPERTS: More organizations are discovering the benefits of blogging and a vibrant user community. Bring out your disparate experts to create a forum, assign rotating moderation responsibility, and create a forum for the user community.
• TARGET YOUR MESSAGING: Email, mobile and the web give you excellent opportunity to target your messaging. Using free tools such as Google analytics integrated into your email campaign can get you great insights. Use this to target customers more effectively. Remember - Track, Analyse, Target.

The solutions mentioned above broadly fall under the emerging fields of Marketing Automation and Marketing Asset Maximisation. If effectively designed at the outset, these solutions can be self-administering and will return on the effort many times over. At Enria we have implemented several of these solutions with great success. Give us a shout and we will be happy to showcase them for you.