The other day a colleague and I were discussing closed loop marketing (CLM) and what it really means in the marketplace. In the end, marketing is trying to capitalize on customer to drive more revenue. An interesting thing happened as we were discussing what enables you to do CLM and how to capitalize on customer, Kurt threw out the term ‘customer centricity’ as a component of CLM. My mind raced back to the future to the days of Peppers and Rogers, Managing Customer Relationships, back then our start-up boutique called it ‘customer development, but the former was on the forefront of “how to build long-term relationships with customers and generate increased customer loyalty and higher margins”. Slowly the term customer centricity started to hit our lexicon, but it meant many things to many people. Peter Fader from Wharton Business School put a solid stake in the ground in an interview on his book Customer Centricity as to what it means to be customer centric.
I like that he focused on the potential customer lifetime value (CLV), who is more profitable and understanding the propensity to do something. Also, not all customers are treated equal and you need to recognize those best customers and reward them without leaving your other customers behind entirely. Essentially you are spending your marketing dollars to maximize potential CLV, in essence, capitalize on customer.
To tie it back into context to the discussion of closed loop marketing:
- A 360 degree view of the customer enables you to be customer centric.
- Knowing where a customer is in the lifecycle allows you to better understand their potential CLV.
- Not all customers are treated equal, therefore you must segment them based on cost to acquire, customer behaviors, customer interactions, propensity to stay and potential CLV to list a few.
- Understanding the propensity to take an action provides the means to develop more relevant campaigns with relevant offers.
- To achieve optimal customer centricity, you must track, measure, analyze, predict and optimize around the customer, hence closing the loop.
In a recent marketing technology survey, we executed on closed loop marketing, over 55 percent of the respondents cited their biggest challenge to be, data integration and marketing technology. Which makes sense because marketing technology has exploded in the last 5 years from 350 MarTech solutions in 2012 to 5,381 in 2017, an astounding 1,437% growth. This compounds the data integration challenges even more. What was a simple conversation about CLM solutions has now turned into the daunting task with all this technology. So how do we get marketing back to the basics to capitalize on customer? Here are the simplified components of a closed loop marketing platform that we use to help our clients. It’s, what we call the CTI CustomerUniverse:
- 360 Degree View of the Customer
- Customer Analytics and Insight
- Customer Lifecycle Management
- Segmentation and Persona Driven Campaigns
- Campaign Performance Metrics
Simply put, we help our clients grow their revenue with the use of the CTI CustomerUniverse. By taking a systematic and comprehensive approach we help them solve the tough data and technology challenges inhibiting their ability to glean true insight about their customers. So, it wasn’t the big bang theory that created the CTI CustomerUniverse, but a need to help our client’s close the loop on marketing initiatives to discover how to build long term profitable relationships with customers without being overwhelmed by the marketing technology explosion.
After all, we all know “there is no silver bullet.”
Stayed tuned for future blogs where we will take you on a journey through the CTI CustomerUniverse to explore the business features and the path to achieve this architecture.
Mark Janowicz
@janoman