Loyalty Builders

The secret to cross-sell

editor — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:19:55 +0000

The secret to cross-sell

Mon, 05/13/2013 - 08:13 - Mark Klein

As more marketers become aware that successful cross-sell requires knowing what products to offer to each individual customer, the question everyone now wants answered is “How do you do that?” If you send out individualized direct marketing campaigns emphasizing cross-sell, how do you determine what products to offer to each customer that they have not previously purchased?

A key part of the answer, the secret to cross-sell, is to build an affinities table similar to the one shown below.

Email’s cheap. But ya gotta love the postman!

editor — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:14:34 +0000

Email’s cheap. But ya gotta love the postman!

Thu, 04/04/2013 - 14:10 - Mark Klein

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When companies choose media for direct marketing campaigns, their knee jerk media choice is usually email. It costs so much less to create and deliver than a letter, brochure, or postcard. The process is painless and usually produces results that make the boss happy. So, what’s not to like?

Mail can outperform email

Email is good. But postal campaigns can be better. At Loyalty Builders, we oversee direct marketing campaigns for our customers every day. As we help both B2B and B2C companies, we often see individualized postcards out-perform email. Of course there’s no “always”. And email is sometimes the better choice.

Escape Information Poverty

editor — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:46:51 +0000

Escape Information Poverty

Fri, 03/01/2013 - 09:46 - Mark Klein

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Too many times I’ve heard marketers complain that “I’m data rich but information poor”. They’ve got transaction data, clickstream data, survey data, demographic data, you name it. There’s no doubt they have many data points for each of their customers.

Despite these troves of data, the most common direct marketing campaigns are what we call “spray and pray,” a ‘one size fits all’ approach where all recipients get the same message. This approach ignores the wealth of available data.

You've Got Mail

editor — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:27:30 +0000

You've Got Mail

Thu, 01/31/2013 - 10:20 - Mark Klein

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When my wife and I recently re-watched Nora Ephron’s 1998 iconic romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, I was struck by how much has changed about email since that movie was released. Back then, receiving an email was a big deal, and the AOL chime notice when it hit your inbox was a recognized part of pop culture.

Attention Must Be Paid

editor — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:07:33 +0000

Attention Must Be Paid

Tue, 12/11/2012 - 14:56 - Mark Klein

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Hearing is to listening as looking is to seeing: the difference within each autonomic-conscious pair is attention. For marketers trying to get customers to listen to their message, to see their offer, to act on their direct marketing communications, the first step is to get that customer to pay attention. In today’s attention economy, that’s not an easy task.

It’s not like attention is something new. My regular readers know I spend time training and competing with our poodle Charley. The key to competition success is getting Charley to pay close attention to my commands, to keep his eyes on my face and ignore the smells on the ground. When I get his full, undivided attention we come home with blue ribbons.

True confessions--the conversion of a non-believer

editor — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:44:33 +0000

True confessions--the conversion of a non-believer

Fri, 10/26/2012 - 18:30 - Mark Klein

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These days I’m a fervent advocate of individualized marketing, where each customer gets a unique message*. We know it works, because week in and week out our customers run individualized campaigns that far outperform their previous ‘spray and pray’ campaigns and even their more sophisticated segmented marketing campaigns.

Yet only a few years ago, while I was vocally riding the ‘1 to 1’ bandwagon, while I was contributing to the Peppers and Rogers Group’s 1to1 Media, while I was mouthing off about ‘right offer to the right customer at the right time’, I didn’t believe that true 1 to 1, true individualized marketing was really feasible.

When attribution becomes guesswork

editor — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:58:27 +0000

When attribution becomes guesswork

Wed, 08/29/2012 - Mark Klein

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At Loyalty Builders we are big believers in the power of direct marketing to generate revenue. We’re not alone. Catalogers, emailers, and multi-channel merchants send huge volumes of all types of communications every day. But the way some of them measure the effectiveness of their campaigns has us scratching our heads.

All companies want to reduce their marketing costs without impacting revenue - especially catalogers facing the escalating costs of postage. Their main tool for measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns is attribution, the process of allocating sales revenue to the various pieces of marketing material sent to the customers who made purchases.

I know your business is different. So what?

editor — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:50:37 +0000

I know your business is different. So what?

Mon, 07/30/2012 - Arthur Einstein

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After 12 years doing customer analytics the phone keeps ringing.

More and more business people are seeking us out because of the growth of behavior based marketing. But even in the face of the good results we’ve gotten for our customers, some are skeptical.

“I don’t know if you can help us,” they’ll say, “because our business is different.”

This drives us crazy!

Of course their business is different. But for marketing purposes who cares?
What matters is that their CUSTOMERS are different. And we’re not talking just about differences in demographics.

The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone

editor — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:00:32 +0000

The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone

Wed, 06/27/2012 - Mark Klein

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These days, I’m a walking contradiction of confidence and frustration.

The confidence comes from the day in / day out, consistently great results we are helping our customers get with their direct marketing. Yesterday one of our customers reported the results of an email campaign to almost a half million of their customers. Half got their business-as-usual, spray-and-pray standard email. The other half got individualized emails, with each customer being offered products that we determined they were ready to buy. The individualized emails produced $0.99 MORE REVENUE PER EMAIL than the one-size-fits-all message. When you multiply by the total number of emails, that’s a very big revenue lift.

The Data Wars

editor — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:53:54 +0000

The Data Wars

Wed, 05/16/2012 - Mark Klein

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The reason we collect data is to answer questions. For marketers, those questions are usually about customer buying behavior—who is ready to buy, what they are likely to buy, which customers might defect. But marketing data is in trouble.

Lately, with Google snatching customer information wirelessly with drive-by mapping cars and companies surreptitiously tracking customer behavior on their web sites more questions are being raised by data than are being answered by data. The war between the data hounds and privacy advocates is heating up.