Asian consumers are increasingly experience marketing in a multichannel way. They research and purchase products online, receive e-newsletters and offers from their favourite brands, and use text messaging almost as often as they talk on the phone. With plenty of good data on each of these communication channels, marketers need a better way to interact with consumers in a more relevant and meaningful way

Direct digital marketing – digital marketing that addresses a specific consumer through an email address, a mobile phone number, or a web browser cookie – is the method marketers are using to improve customer engagement. This increasingly popular approach, when done well, makes the job of the marketer much easier while simultaneously boosting key brand-customer relationship metrics (e.g., loyalty and sales) in ways a single-channel strategy simply cannot.

Direct digital marketing takes advantage of the data investment many marketers have already made. They are able to dramatically increase the relevance of their marketing communications by combining data from multiple channels into one marketing data database – a foundational element of direct digital marketing.

Statistics show that the more relevant a message is, the more likely the consumer will act on that message. Likewise, the more data a marketer has at his disposal, the more relevant a campaign can be, and in turn, the better it performs.

While improvements in campaign performance and relevance are obvious benefits for marketers, the less visible – but equally important – benefit of direct digital marketing is its ability to enhance process automation. Marketers spend too much time manually tweaking tactics when that time could be better spent on developing new strategies.

While benefits to the marketer are clear, they become even more valuable when consumers respond. Here are three real-world examples of how marketers in any industry can use direct digital marketing tactics to positively impact their customer relationships:

Delivery status notifications
White goods retailers are an example of businesses that sometimes suffer tenuous relationships with their customers (our honorable friends at Fortress please take note).

When customers place an item for home delivery, they often have to rearrange their schedules to ensure they are available to receive the purchases. Customers expect timely delivery, but that is not always the case.

If a delivery is delayed, customers usually have to waste valuable time dialling a customer service hotline to learn a simple piece of information – the status of their delivery. It is possible to avoid forcing customers into an inconvenient situation by allowing them to text a short code and receive the delivery status of their goods. The text service is easy and inexpensive to set-up.

Service installation appointment reminders
Fixed-line telcos and internet service providers have a notoriously unstable relationship with their customers and therefore actively seek opportunities to improve customer relationships. When new customers purchase services, they make an installation appointment and some even receive an email reminder for the appointment several days before it is scheduled to occur.

Although this is a great attempt at to communicate with the customer, the email reminders sometimes arrives too far in advance of the actual appointment and fail to maximise the positive impact being made. Extending installation reminders to cover the mobile channel by sending the customer a text message an day and then hours before an appointment is a more beneficial service through a more precise and personal channel. The improved timing of the message, and flexibility of the mobile channel, changes how the customer perceives the brand, boosting loyalty.

Real-time customer service improvement
While email, and especially mobile, are extremely useful for engaging consumers with direct digital marketing, on site targeting is also a valuable asset. Captured survey information – or any type of direct feedback from the consumer – can be used to understand when customers are dissatisfied and in real time, improve their experience on a website.

Customer service call centers are infamous for forcing new products onto highly dissatisfied customers who are least likely to respond positively. Trying to sell to customers something who are already dissatisfied with a difficult website experience can be just as bad.

On site targeting (through the use of a “cookie”) can tailor the site experience to a specific consumer based on behavior, such as click pattern or keyword searches. Define specific areas on a site, or during the checkout process, and use targeted, personalised, dynamic content to answer commonly asked questions, or include information that can transform a dissatisfied customer into a loyal advocate.

In the modern, ever-innovating world of marketing, it is possible to simultaneously use relevance to better engage consumers and significantly improve the marketing process. Direct digital marketing enables marketers to take full advantage of the multichannel environment consumers already operate in to form stronger and more profitable relationships.

Social CRM has been making the rounds lately, and I think many practitioners are missing the point about social networking and its place within CRM.

Whist it’s always fun to use new tools to connect with others. Accessing the information generated by these online relationships to generate a measurable return is a valid aim. But giving this practice a label and suggesting it’s a new concept that has never before been put into practice devalues our past efforts pre Twitter.

The fact is, “Social CRM” describes nothing more than what CRM vendors and their offerings have been providing users from the get-go: a method for managing and growing profitable business relationships.

Most of us want to have conversations with many people on both business and personal levels, and to manage some separation between the two. Indeed, the plethora of tools and social networks now available allow us to connect in more convenient and, sometimes, more personal ways. It’s vacuous, however, to put a new label on natural human behaviour and call it “cool.”

If the label “Social CRM” somehow helps companies understand that people are people, it should be treated as such. However, please don’t tout it as something new. This has been the intended benefit of CRM all along. Social CRM is about conversations, not technology.

The bazaars of ancient civilisation are an early example of direct vendor and customer communication without a technology solution. These were real, immediate and loud conversations. People gathered and shouted aloud to promote their offerings, or exclaim what they were seeking, and in best-case scenarios a mutual benefit resulted.

Over time, the technologies we now take for granted came about and let vendors believe that spamming customers with more information to encourage them to buy more was the same as communicating. Not surprisingly, consumers grew tired of this and began to clamour for a means to better filter all incoming social and business communication.

But think about it: Our human nature isn’t hardwired to make this separation. We force ourselves to modify our natural communication style in business situations. This adjustment usually causes contention, as is evidenced by the number of customer hang-ups logged by contact canters.

It’s really no surprise that the emergence of social networking finds us gravitating toward companies that use web technologies in interesting ways to engage us as customers.

Successful companies that use social networking to manage conversations and aid their sales efforts exhibit common characteristics. These are…

Monitoring
Successful companies look for and listen to the social networks and online communities that are talking about them. There they find honest, unfiltered comments about their brands. They prioritise which topics to address, problems to fix, and advantages to leverage.

Participating
Once they know who’s talking, where, and what the rules of engagement are within each community, successful companies start conversing online in a transparent fashion. More often than not, this shows customers that the organisation “gets it”, cares, and is approachable.

Creating
When a successful organisation is comfortable with information exchange on social networks it creates meaningful content to share across them; not sales slicks, but helpful content that people will seek out and share. They may even create their own communities and steadily drive conversations there.
Innovating or Imitating – It’s ‘s always more interesting to innovate with the web than imitate what has already been done, but if there’s a best practice out there that fits, a successful company follows it, and saves innovation for another day.

Turning the virtual into reality
Successful organisations come full circle with their Social CRM initiatives. And they do it by turning their online conversations into real ones. This may be in person or by phone.

This last point is the most meaningful. I’ve experienced it firsthand, picking up the phone and calling customers who have voiced a product or support concern within one of our communities. In these instances, I find that customers are so pleased with the personal attention they receive that we not only resolve their concern quickly, we also build a lasting bond. They become customers for life. That’s what Social CRM is really all about.