Marketing Tip: implementing one-to-one marketing

The long established principle of listening carefully to customers might have a new name, but one-to-one marketing is one of the most effective ways of developing profitable relationships with customers.

Relationship marketing is being talked about everywhere. Marketing specialists and owners of small to medium businesses are continually being urged to find more effective ways to develop relationships with their customers.

In an ideal world, every enterprise would be able to emulate the owner of the corner store. He knew all his customers, usually by name, and he stored relevant information about them all in his head. Today, it is not so simple. The world is far more complex.

Essentially, one-to-one marketing involves four separate steps:
1. identifying your customers;
2. differentiating your customers;
3. interacting cost-effectively with your customers; and
4. individualising the treatment that you give your customers.
All marketing requires massive amounts of attention to detail. In the case of one-to-one marketing, all four of these steps have to be implemented carefully before worthwhile results are possible.

Identify your customers

To have a relationship with an individual, your first task is to identify individual customers. In a call centre, on your website, or wherever the first point of contact may be, it is important to make every effort to unfailingly identify people as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. In many situations an investment in caller-ID technology is a sound move. It is important that customer records can be quickly made available to the customer service representatives who answer the phones.

On your website, provide a benefit of one kind or another to people who register themselves. Such a benefit could relate to future purchases or maybe more personalised information.

To identify your customers, you need to use every possible opportunity for winning personal data from otherwise anonymous buyers and inquirers.

Differentiate your customers

A pillar of one-to-one marketing is to acknowledge that different customers have different needs. In the lead-up to developing a relationship you need to get a clear picture of where a customer fits into the overall hierarchy of values and find out what this customer needs that may be different from other customers.
Rudimentary segmentation is essential (eg, do they want a sports car or a 4WD?). Over time, more sophistication can be worked into the segmentation (eg, do they want a large 4WD or a small one, American, Japanese or European?). From the start you must at the very least differentiate on the basis of profitability.

You should always record the source of acquisition. It can be significant in analysis you do down the line that indicates which marketing initiatives are the most effective for attracting new customers who stay with you over the long haul.

Interact cost-effectively with your customers
At this point it is good to drive more and more routine requests into self-service channels, which can significantly free up your call centre, for example. Call centre operators can then spend more time pre-qualifying prospects to ensure personal sales calls are more effective.

Promote your website address to callers on hold when all your service reps are busy. Also, measure critical elements such as the ratio of complaints settled on the first call and the ratio of incoming leads converted to sales calls.

Individualise the treatment that you give your customers
Today, technology empowers you to create a customised product by combining a product or service from dozens, or hundreds, of pre-configured modules. In one way or another, that’s what has to be done. The days of Henry Ford’s “you can paint it any colour, so long as it’s black,” are long gone.

If you can’t individualise the package you are offering, a competitor (somewhere) surely will. And your customers – courtesy of the Internet – will know where to find that competitor.

These are the essential four steps of one-to-one marketing. It must always be a common sense approach. After all, one-to-one marketing is founded on the long established principles of listening carefully to your customers and trying to accommodate them as best you can.

For more information visit: www.unitymanagement.com.au OR call a business professional today on +(612) 9011 5220.