If the details are uncertain the destination is clear. The “recession”, the “global economic slowdown”, the “downturn”, or whatever euphemism you care to use for the current turmoil in world markets, is having a paradigm-shattering effect on the marketing business. “Effectiveness” is in, “brand equity” is out. “Return on Investment” is the watchword, “reporting” the by-line, and “accountability” the first and last slide of every pitch presentation. Digital is up, and everything else is down - so far down, in some cases, that it is questionable if it will get up again once this all blows over. Digital will be the last man standing.
And digital is just so whizzy! The promise of the most responsive, flexible, accountable and personal medium is just about to be realised! Digital channels are the ideal platform on which to make your brand truly personal due to its flexibility, integration capabilities and ability to provide data in real time. Consumers are embracing digital as the key information channel, more so now than ever before. Digital isn’t even that cutting edge anymore – it’s as much a part of everyday life as the car, the TV, nylon, and the wankerish smugitude of Monocle readers. No-one talks about “new media” anymore, because, these days, digital is just not that new.
So digital has enabled a faster, more seamless and more accurate understanding of customer interactions, and heralded a new age of personal, one to one communications, giving us all new and exciting possibilities to work with. Right?
Not so much. At least, not right now. Businesses have learnt how to create digital interactions, and how to measure them afterwards. But too often the information being gathered is often not being properly captured, stored, mined, and exploited. It doesn’t matter which way you slice it, data gathering dust in some warehouse somewhere is useless unless it leads to an actionable insight.
Digital agencies often talk a good game about accountability – they can track your ad campaigns, omniture your website, optimise your search terms, and, if you are lucky, wrap it all up in a nice shiny dashboard which gives you a set of very lovely charts, some of which, you are sure, are really very important. Yet despite that, you probably have no idea how this relates to your offline media – there are no common metrics. But more importantly, all of this data is lacking the one crucial prism through which it should be viewed – the individual customer, and how they are responding to all your marketing activity.
Which is where the new digital dog might avail itself of some old direct marketing tricks. Direct was primarily built out upon a detailed understanding of the journey that we wish to take an individual customer on. Where is the customer on their journey, how do we encourage them to engage with us, share some information about themselves, and let us speak to them in a way that’s most pertinent to them? How, in short, do we make ourselves most measurably relevant to the customer at every point in that journey? The answer to that question was predicated on an in-depth understanding of customer loyalty, a coherent data capture and storage strategy, and the ability to interrogate this data to understand how marketing activity is impacting the customer’s behaviours.
A whole data management capability was created in the 80s and 90s to service the direct marketing industry under the aegis of “customer relationship management”. Now that media themselves are becoming digital, it is somewhat ironic that these data and direct skills have not yet been properly applied to digital activity – the medium that they might have been designed for.
Brands aren’t thinking like their customer, because they aren’t listening to what their customers are saying through their online actions, preferences and behaviours. More often than not this is because they simply can’t connect the dots between their different systems and departments to learn more about their customers. Customer contact data resides in a static database. Static emails are sent one-size-fits-all, with only the simplest tracking in place. Site tracking does not feed back into the customer database. Post-activity tracking shows how successful a promotion or email was, but the database isn’t updated to reflect the lessons learnt, meaning that there is little learning of what an individual is interested in. Brands don’t learn enough about their customers over time, and, as a consequence, don’t tailor any of their communications to their customer’s needs. Digital’s promise of personalised one-to-one communications is not properly realised and the potential of the medium not fully exploited.
So if digital agencies really want to make a difference to their client’s business, if they really want to be “accountable”, and focus on “return on investment”, they need to go back to the direct playbook and tear out a few leaves. Start with the customer, and keep track of what they do on an individual basis. Watch behaviours in multiple dimensions, and then interrogate, cluster, and segment – find the different groups that require different messaging and treatment. And, test, test and test some more – different segments, different creative treatments, different messages, different preferences – all the old school direct marketing tests that used to take an age in the old days, but which can now be digitally instrumented, tracked, reported, and actioned in real time.
Which is just what we have been doing for client’s like EasyJet. Working with them as their “Digital+Data+Direct” agency we put in a place an entirely new E-CRM infrastructure, strategy, creative, testing and reporting platform for them delivering to 17 countries in 18 languages. Flexible and scaleable, the system is provides real time response, reports, tracks learning overtime and enables a rigours testing regime for multiple communications variables and outcomes.
And we have learnt some interesting things. Looking at purchase behaviours for certain of our customers who had subscribed to the Polish newsletter, we determined that they were travelling from UK all the time. We figured they were ex-patriots who were regularly travelling home, so sent them messages about flying from UK airports, and gave them offers in pounds, rather than Euros. That made quite a difference to response rates. Equally we found that people have a preferred airport – if people fly out of Gatwick all the time, they are much more likely to respond to promotions that mention Gatwick over messages regarding other London airports.
Those are just some simple lessons learnt from email activity and a little bit of purchase monitoring. When the customer database is connected up to the web-site analytics, things will get a lot more interesting. And when it is tied up to the offline behaviours – i.e. flying, press response, direct, etc. you can really start to tailor messages in real time. And that’s net even to start on “loyalty” programmes – which, really, every brand online should be running, tracking customer behaviours online and rewarding them appropriately.
So all that good learning that went into the direct and data businesses should really be headed in digital’s direction. Not just because it’s customer-centric, which it is. Or because it’s trendy to talk about reporting and accountability in “The Great Depression II – This Time Its Personal”. And not even because it will give all those paper-pushing direct folks something to do in the digital age. But because digital agencies, despite knowing a lot about technology, and despite being all young and shiny, still have a lot to learn about making brands personal. New School Cool + Old School Rules = The Way Forward™.
Author: Craig Walmsley, Managing Director, Euro RSCG 4D Digital