We Need to Talk About Customer Value Marketing

So you have tried everything, right? Outbound was too aggressive, inbound wasn’t expansive at all, green gave a minimal result, and agile consumed too much of your precious time and was hard to automate? Stop right there! You don’t need to try every novelty and hot idea. Sometimes the novelties aren’t the new black! Let’s take a few steps back. You’ve started with the outbound, like everyone else. You leveraged traditional channels, like:

email
website
online advertising
telemarketing
social media
mobile channel

to increase the outreach of your audience and spread your words among as many potential buyers as possible. What you lacked was serving the right content to the right people in the right moment. Correctly used, outbound marketing is pretty efficient. The X factor, in this case, is finding what butters users’ parsnips and what grinds their gears. With a pinch of the marketing automation magic and a slight approach shift – everything becomes possible.

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The Journey

The purchase isn’t an isolated act. Buying something is a whole process for both customer and seller. We learned to perceive it as a journey – from the very first impulse of a need to a call center contact to a recommendation chain.

Your eCommerce’s target audience no longer consists of lost boys from 1994 (the Amazon was launched that year). It isn’t even longer the age of a consumer. They’re prosumers who rule today’s Internet. They are active, educated, independent, and they know their rights (and don’t hesitate to use them). They’re also tired of the marketing noise, so they grew to immunize themselves to spam and other Internet’s pandemics. From a consumer’s point of view, the buyer’s journey starts with the impulse. This point in time is often called the Zero Moment of Truth. It determines the whole incoming purchasing process. ZMOT is the very first moment you grab a mobile device and search through the Internet, looking for the information about the new TV, car, organic kale farm, or Bali hotels. The First Moment of Truth comes after, and it’s identified as the moment of purchase per se. The last touch is Second Moment of Truth. This term refers to using the product and the experience that it brings. It is Marketer’s job to make those moments as extraordinary as possible and to fill the blank spaces between them.

When you track the buyer’s journey from the other side of the mirror – as a marketer, you’ll see that the process can be divided into smaller steps: lead generation, education, awareness raising, building the relation, personal contact, sales, service, recommendation, building loyalty, etc. Each and every single step needs to be carefully designed and connected with others, not as a rigid element, but as a dynamic part of the bigger whole. It’s not only about being on the Internet but about awaiting the customer where (and when), she will look for your service.

As you can see, It’s way much more than a copy-pasted offer with random products sent to a bought database.

Customer Value Driven Approach

What’s most important for a company? Revenue? Customers? Crew? I’d say we should combine it. It’s the oxygen for your business after all. Start with the leads (I assume you already have the overall strategy and at least decent product). Use the lead generation weapon of choice – social media, SEO, AdWords, omnichannel promo – it’s up to you. What will you do next? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to address to individual needs and habits of every single one of them? Start building their profiles then. Take all the necessary measures you can think of to get to know your future customer better. Once you start gathering behavioral data, make sure you have the software that can process it to a 360 degrees customer view. Today’s digital marketing crosses the online-offline border so you can’t restrain yourself to the website actions. People often start their research with mobile phones. If you have an app, that’s great news: 26% of customer start the research with the dedicated brand application. It means that you own a smartphone screen for long enough to display your products; what’s more, you don’t have to share it with the other companies! You can leverage the information about the mobile devices (they sit in customer’s pockets for 24/7, so you can’t afford to ignore this batch of information) while building lead’s profile. Use iBeacons to reach people via their smartphones while in brick-and-mortar stores. Generate as many high-quality leads as possible.

Then segment. You more or less know who appeared on your website – the leads are in your CRM safe, sound, and segmented. Or are they? Remember about the burning need of a proper, dynamic segmentation. You can’t treat all with the same measure. There is always 1-2% of newcomers who are ready to buy, there are leads who seek knowledge instead of product, there are some hesitating ones who need to be carefully educated and prepared for the first human-to-human contact, current and potential buyers, there are trolls and wanderers, millennials and sexagenarians. To adequately address your actions you must divide them into multiple categories and build the dynamic, multi-dimensional, ordered structure. That’s why you should use advanced tools for segmentation. Nowadays you can choose from numerous analytic panels to conduct this process. One of the best is the RFM panel that allows you to distinguish premium customers from those on a budget, loyal clients from the one-timers, and those who bought recently from those who haven’t visited you for a very long time. Moreover, you can combine those variables to build matrixes of customers comparing two out of three variables. Your crew will be provided with the real-time data, and thus will be able to optimize their time and efforts to make the best out of every lead and maximize your revenue as the result.

But wait, there’s more! Remember, that you can (and should) automate some of the processes. The overall idea is definitely to elaborate so a single person or even a team can handle it without making elementary mistakes. Thankfully you can leverage the marketing automation platforms’ possibilities to build the algorithms and processes with multiple conditions and triggers. One can easily create a workflow process that covers every customer’s action, reaction, response, or the lack of it. In short – you create an interactive scenario of any marketing process.

The shopping experience is 70% subjective: it consists of individual’s feelings and impressions on received treatment. It’s about emotions that shopping brings: excitement, boredom, surprise, misunderstanding. Not annoyed, properly nurtured and serviced customers become the loyal brand evangelists. They will give you positive web reviews, so others can read it and use this suggestion while researching, they will come back for more of your products, and willingly recommend your company to friends and family. That’s the real value!

Customer Value Marketing

Customer Value Marketing is a marketing strategy designed for B2C marketers build around the concept of customer value and marketing automation. Customer Value Marketing aims at building the highest value of a customer over time.

Customer Value Marketing is redefining traditional outbound marketing by the deployment of advanced methods of dynamic customer segmentation based on RFM analytics (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), supported by behavioral analytics (Digital Body Language). They can be used to create real-time multichannel structure of marketing automation processes along the whole customer lifecycle, from lead generation to bringing customer to most valuable segment and fostering long-term relationships.

Customer Value Marketing uses traditional outbound channels like email, website, online advertising, telemarketing as well as social media and mobile channel to create nonlinear processes (as opposed to the linear processes present in the B2B context) of personalized, real-time offer delivery to the right person at the right time.

Customer Value Marketing is marketing strategy standing in contradiction to inbound marketing, as designed for B2B marketers and primarily oriented on generating leads and serving to attract and educate customers through different stages of the purchase funnel and driving website traffic utilizing the compelling content.

The primary marketing technique to achieve the objectives of Customer Value Marketing is RFM driven Marketing Automation, based on the dynamic segmentation of customers. It depends on the transactional activity of customer over time and might be supported by the behavioral data gathered about a single customer in marketing automation platform. This new, dynamic, RFM based 360 Degrees Customer View may be then used to create an entirely new structure of marketing automation processes using email, dynamic website content, mobile, social media, advertising networks, POS and direct sales to migrate the customer to the highest value segments of customers.