Correspondence management for interaction marketing
Added on Wednesday February 01, 2012
At its core, marketing is an attempt to engage with specific audiences in order for them to engage in a particular action.
While some of these goals can be quite specific - like a mail-out coupon to drive up sales - others can be aimed at obtaining a more subtle result, such as a change in preference.
However, the range of responses to transaction marketing are only as good as the information used - and how these details are applied can make all the difference.
With the increase in technology adoption and the explosive growth in social media that it has enabled, powerful new channels for interaction are emerging.
With previous efforts in this area of marketing, the available technologies would require organizations to adopt either a niche approach or a mass-production angle to driving interaction.
This is because - while the firms may have had a lot of valuable information on customer habits and market direction - there was no framework in place to apply them to individual documents.
For emails and print runs alike this meant bespoke customer communications was an expensive and time consuming task, with each piece of correspondence requiring individual attention before being passed on to the consumer.
The other option, mass production, meant that most of the market could be covered relatively inexpensively - however this comes at the cost of personalization.
In turn this means that the potential value that could be generated by all the information the business has gleaned from marketing research is not allowed the chance to grow - as generic content takes the place of tailored messages.
With the rise of social channels however comes the opportunity to deliver bespoke customer communications - as the medium itself demand a customized approach.
Simple changes to bills, as an example, can help to make a difference in payment habits - with automatic protocols applying different content and formats based on the amounts owed, frequency of payments and repetition of contact.
More advanced examples could be found in structured e-newsletters - a client communications framework could collate content based on past user preferences and deliver a document populated by information on topics relevant to a specific account.
While the lower costs of this type of transactional marketing practice are easy to see - with less employee intervention requiring less production costs - the real bonus is in the end user experience.
Having documentation drawn up to suit a client's specific requirements is much more likely to produce a powerful response, with a consumer more likely to remember the interaction in a positive manner.