With today's consumers deluged with new media and messages — on any given day, the average consumer will be exposed to nearly 3,000 media messages, of which they'll pay attention to 52 and remember four — marketing campaigns need to be as close to one-to-one conversations as possible. At last month's
Digital Marketing Days Conference & Expo in New York City,
Christa Carone, chief marketing officer for
Xerox, provided strategies to help retailers shift their marketing efforts from one-way conversations to true dialogs with consumers.
Understand the unique aspects of each customer, then reflect that in your marketing, Carone said. Value for consumers comes from their experiences with your brand, not technology. Technology's role is to enable great experiences. A one-to-one cross-media campaign should contain five elements — data modeling, a compelling offer, great creative, follow-up communications, and tracking and feedback — and follow a logical progression of analyze, refine and repeat, Carone said. Here are some examples of brands she feels are doing this the right way.
Best Friends Pet SuperCentre, an Australian pet supplies retailer, recently launched a loyalty program for its customers. When customers signed up for a VIP card, all of their interactions with the brand — transactions, product and store info, website activity, email activity, etc. — were tracked with the goal of creating an individual marketing program for each card holder. Highly relevant communications were then sent via email to card holders. Communications were localized to each store with targeted offers driven by pet type, for example.
The campaign yielded Best Friends Pet SuperCentre measurable results. Member value, store profitability and program measurability all returned double-digit growth over 12 months.
For health clubs and gyms, customer retention is a major problem, said Carone. It's common for a health club to see a 30 percent member defection rate in a given year. It was no different for
Elixia, a health and wellness group in Central Europe. To help stem the tide of defecting members, the club mobilized its members into a sales force.
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