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A full-bodied marketing strategy must minimally contribute to how an organisation "engages" both new customers (capturing mind share toward new account acquisition) and existing customers (mind share around retention and account penetration).
The traditional marketing toolkit includes technologies and techniques for mass marketing (for example: advertising, telemarketing and more recently mass e-mail). However, technology advances in the e-mail world (such as spam filters) and new US state and national "do not call" registries will eventually diminish the effectiveness of both of these mass outbound marketing techniques in engaging new customers (though they may still be applied to existing customers).
Although not intuitively obvious, these do-not-call restrictions and spam filters present an opportunity to leverage an even more effective means of engagement: capturing mind share during an inbound service call or order placement when customers are most receptive to receiving messages (obviously using judgment about which types of interactions are up-sell appropriate).
Although organisations may still telemarket and mass e-mail existing customers (who have opted in), within 36 months customer and context-specific inbound marketing will become a de facto part of the marketing toolkit, supplanting most unsolicited, mass outbound approaches targeting prospects.
At the heart of inbound marketing is cross-sell/up-sell, a strategy geared toward account penetration. Cross-sell/up-sell techniques include inbound recommendations (via the call centre or collaborative chat), contextually relevant Web content (such as personalised Web pages), and private communication channels.
When dealing with pure prospects, rather than using unsolicited mass outbound e-mail, organisations should consider implementing contextually relevant Web advertising. Derivative effects of this change in marketing strategy include the computer telephony integration (CTI) market, where predictive diallers, outsourcers, and outbound telemarketing applications will be negatively impacted, as well as customer interaction centre (CIC) business process, where measurement and quality monitoring will be key to getting agents to cross-sell. Agent scripting can help, but will not replace training.
Bottom line: Organisations should immediately consider replacing existing customer outbound cross-sell/up-sell "engage" activities with inbound marketing, including real-time recommendations, as well as contextually relevant Web content presentation. With privacy policies in place, engage activities involving anonymous prospects must include contextually relevant Web banner ads placed on organisations' Web sites, as well as network partner Web sites, and a continuous focus on the tradeoffs between privacy and profile tracking.
Elizabeth Roche is an analyst with Enterprise Application Strategies, Customer Relationship Management Infusion at META Group
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I did not understand one word of this article ...