I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Dial It Up! Workshop: Organic Growth" in the Retail track.
Jeff and Mark presented on how the Dial It Up workshop works for retailers. They started by discussing leadership - leadership is about continuously seeking out opportunities for innovation and measuring results so you can improve over time. Followers, on the other hand, do things because everyone else does.
They presented some questions to help the audience rate themselves on various aspects of performance.
The four areas where marketing can help are:
- Improving traffic
What can marketing do to get them to the store - Lots of choices of places to buy
- Noise makes it hard to get traffic
- More and more important to stay engaged
- Leaders use customer data to inform mass marketing (personalizing, 1:1), prospecting directly and combating attrition by predicting attrition at a specific customer level
- One common leadership theme is making micro decisions about this things
- Conversion
What can marketing get to a customer to make them more likely to buy - Hard as once someone comes in tend to lose track of where they go, cannot predict who they will talk to.
- Customers are becoming more sophisticated researchers
- Leaders excel by tracking customers' interests, customizing offers to customers and extend the same personal offer to all possible channels (consistency across channels is key)
- Basket Size
What can marketing do to make customers buy more not just in a single visit but over multiple visits - Confusion about the number of things you sell is rampant
- Leaders use a reward or loyalty program to gather information, align their messages to buying contexts and migrate to new categories in a planned way
- Margin
How can marketing maximize the customer portfolio - Must drive business results.
- Too many offers and too much detail can overwhelm
- Have to watch for counter-productive incentives
- Leaders tend to look at customers from a strategic perspective and think about the sensitivity of customers to marketing and targeting, they track and leverage customer value and coordinate the customer experience across silos and channels.
These areas are connected - for instance, the way you drive traffic might well affect the way you will be able to convert them in the store. If you use a consistent frequency to target customers, manage promotions to broaden range of purchases and make sure the marketing messages connect with the store experience then you will attract people who are likely to buy. Similarly conversion actions, like offers, can drive basket size. Systematically adding categories and cross-category promotions both converts and drives basket size.
You can find the full set of posts from InterACT in this category.
Technorati Tags: customer decisions, customer experience, InterACT, marketing, personalization, precision marketing, predictive analytics, retail
